She had to wonder if this were not his crudest kindness yet.
* * *
Swearing his friends to their best behavior. Nic allowed Sebastian and Eve to escort Mary to the opera. He would have gone along, except he desperately needed the time to think. He could no longer fool himself into believing his feelings for Mary would go away. If anything, they had grown stronger.
This week had proven how well they could get along. Her simple presence made him happy, her quick mind and quicker humor, her fearlessness in exploring. The proprietors adored her, sensing no doubt a spirit as independent as their own.
He was almost sure he should tell her he loved her. In fact, he was seriously wondering if he should
ask her to be his wife.
It was a momentous step, one that sent chills of terror down his spine, though the urge to propose intensified each time he tried to reject it. He wanted her with him, through good times and through bad. He could fear neither with her beside him. She made him feel stronger, kinder, more connected to his better self. With her, he could be redeemed. With her, his role in Bess's death could truly become the past. Once she married him, she'd never want for anything again. He had the means to both cherish and protect.
But asking her was not without risk. If she said no, would that spell the end of what they had? He knew how he felt when a woman turned too serious: as if he couldn't run away fast enough.
If Mary ran from him, he didn't know how he'd stand it. If he said nothing, at least he could hold on to what he had.
Tangled in this dilemma, he wandered absently into the library. It was a large room, as long as the whole palazzo, its corners bristling with stucco cherubs, its painted ceiling a vision of the heaven he hoped to find. The gas was lit, though it could not hold back the weight of Venice's night. That loomed clear and black outside the windows, its velvet backdrop hung with pitiless diamond stars.
A muffled cough drew his attention to the center of the room. A boy of fifteen or sixteen, slim and straight, stood before a lectern on which a book of sailing ships lay open. His face was eerily familiar, though if Nic had met him, he could not remember where. He was staring at Nic with a seriousness beyond his years: a watchful, challenging stare.
"I'm sorry," said Nic, "are you a relative of the countess?"
The boy laughed, harshly, briefly, then stopped. "I'm your kitchen boy, Mr. Craven."
"My kitchen boy." Nic moved closer, squinting in confusion.
"I usually wear a scarf."
Nic's befuddlement cleared for a moment, then quickly closed in again. "Yes. Thomas, isn't it? We thought you had a scar."
When the boy spread his hands, Nic realized how unnaturally still he'd been before. "No scar," he said, his eyes never leaving Nic's. "At least, none that you can see."
"Then why—" Rather than get drawn further into things he didn't understand, Nic changed his question
to one that seemed important. "What are you doing here? Surely Farnham didn't send you."
"I wanted to see Venice. But don't worry. I didn't stow away. I've been saving up. And I'll pay the cook back for that roast."
"That was you then. Sebastian was certain it was the cat." Nic's smile invited the boy to smile back, but his expression never changed. Closing the last few steps between them, Nic put his hand beside the boy's on the edge of the book of ships. This close, he could see a vein ticking at the boy's temple. Inexplicably, his own pulse felt as ragged. "Your parents don't work in the gasworks, do they?"
For some reason, Nic's guess called up a sheen of tears. Beneath it, Thomas's eyes were blue and clear. The flush that stained his cheeks made them glow even brighter.
"No," he conceded, "my parents don't work at the gasworks."
He seemed sadder than any boy his age had a right to be. Nic could only speculate what experiences
had engraved that melancholy on his face.
"It doesn't matter," Nic said. "Whoever your parents are, whatever you did before you came to work
for me, simply doesn't matter."
"I know it doesn't." The boy's mouth pressed together, then lifted wryly at the corners. "Because I know you don't give a damn."
Baffled, Nic pulled his hand back to his side. He did not understand this boy's manner and the mystery was making him uneasy. "Why did you follow us?" he demanded, his voice harder than he intended.
"I told you—"
"No, don't give me that Banbury tale about wanting to see Venice. Why did you follow me and Mary
on the ship?"
The boy faced him, still flushed, though anger appeared to have the upper hand. "I came to see what
the great Nicolas Craven is really like."
"Do you want to be an artist, then? Is that what this is about? Because you don't need my permission
to be one. That's something that comes from inside."
"And you'll sacrifice anything for it, won't you?"
Nic rubbed his forehead. The boy's hostility rolled off him in trembling waves. Nic couldn't imagine
what he was getting at, but he was losing patience fast. As if he knew this, the boy turned away. Both
his hands were pressed to the book now, white around the nails and so tense the lectern shook.
"Look," Nic said more gently, but the boy cut him off.
"Why aren't you with your friends tonight? I hear the Teatro La Fenice is quite a wonder."
By now Nic was certain he'd never had a stranger conversation. Hell, he thought, mentally throwing up his hands. If the boy wanted to know the great Nic Craven, why not answer?
"I needed to think," he said, "to decide if I should ask the woman I love to marry me."
The boy's lips whitened to match his nails. "The woman you love."
"Can't recommend it," Nic added, trying to be jovial. "Turns a man inside out, love does. Not that I have much right to complain, since I've never fallen in love before."
The boy's head came up, his eyes gone wide with shock. "Never ... you've never ... ?"
"Well, damn," said Nic with an awkward laugh, "you'd think I'd told you I just escaped from an asylum."
Like a shade being pulled down a window, the boy's expression closed. "Forgive me," he said stiffly.
"I shouldn't have intruded. I'll leave you to your decision."
Nic could only gape as he strode away.
Kitchen boys were not what they used to be.
Seventeen
The opera was miraculous. Exquisitely sung, grandly staged, it portrayed a tragic romance that struck Merry's heart a little too close to home. Loathe to cry in front of her companions, she told herself what she'd seen wasn't truly love. True love, the sort that happened in real life, was rarely that dramatic and doomed.
Nonetheless, she could not go directly upstairs to Nic, not with her feelings stripped to the bone.
Bidding Eve and Sebastian good night, she crossed the canal floor hallway toward the door to the high-walled garden in the back. Her steps quickened in anticipation. The air had been crisp tonight but
not chill, and the stars had hung like jewels on an ebony cloth. As amusing as Eve and Sebastian were, she was looking forward to enjoying the heavens on her own. The stars would calm her, she thought,
and then she'd be ready to go to Nic.
The last thing she wanted was to show him how she felt before he could face it.
The heavy garden door resisted her efforts to heave it open. Only when she threw all her weight against
it did it surrender. Fearing she might not get back in, she wedged a Guardi shipping crate between the wood and its pilastered marble frame.
To her disappointment, she did not have the courtyard to herself. Someone sat hunched on the bottom step beneath the door, someone young and male. She began to back away, then realized whoever it was was weeping. The sobs were choked but unmistakable, as was the resentment with which they wrenched from the youthful chest.
Merry could not walk away. Whatever their cause, she knew those feelings well herself. What's more,
she thought she recognized the young man's coat, a battered corduroy sack that stretched across the growing shoulders it contained.
What on earth, she wondered, was Nic's kitchen boy doing here?
Questions could wait, however, until she found out what was wrong.
She lowered herself to the bottom step and slung her arm around the weeping boy, just as her older brothers had done for her. The boy covered his face but was too miserable to move away.
"There," she said, her breast warming with humor and pity. "Thomas, isn't it? Whatever it is can't be worth drowning Venice over."
"My name is Cristopher," he snapped with an anger she didn't understand until he lifted his face to catch the light shining through the open door.
The air rushed from Merry's lungs. Free now of its scarf, the face he revealed was a younger twin of Nic's. The color of his eyes and hair were different, but he had the same jaw, same nose, even the same ironic lift to his brows. "My God," she said, hardly able to take it in. "My God, you're his spitting image."
Cristopher's tears spilled down anew. "He didn't know me. He looked straight at me and didn't know me."
"Who didn't know you?" she asked, but in the pit of her stomach, she knew.
"My father. The bloody darling of the art world. Couldn't recognize his own son."
"Did he know he had a son?"
Cristopher laughed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Too right, he did. He's been sending me a tenner every quarter since I went away to school. That's how I ran away, how I paid for a berth on the ship
with you."
The story he told came out garbled, but Merry managed to sort it out. Though not a legitimate son, Cris had been raised by Nic's mother who, according to Cris, was something of a tyrant. Nic hadn't been
home since Cris was four and, naturally enough, the boy had developed a yen to know his father. In
order to get around Nic's aversion to seeing him, he'd disguised himself as a servant.
"I just wanted to understand him," he said. "Why he left. Who he was. Grandmother never said anything precisely bad about him, but I could tell he'd disappointed her. I had to judge for myself. When I saw how good he was to the others, and that they weren't perfect either, I thought maybe if he got to know me, he might see that having me around wouldn't be so bad."
Her own eyes burning, Merry stroked his tear-wet cheek. "No," she said, "it wouldn't be bad at all. You're clever and resourceful and very brave. If you were my son, I think I'd burst with pride."
He couldn't have been much younger than she was, but when he flung his arms around her waist, she
did feel like a mother. She sensed he hadn't heard this kind of praise before, maybe hadn't known how much he needed it. All thoughts of scolding him for running away flew from her head. After all, twenty years old or not, she was in no position to throw stones.
She patted his back until he settled, until he finally drew an easy breath. Then, with a dignity much like his father's, he pushed back and dried his tears.
"He good as told me he didn't love my mother," he said, enunciating each word as if to prove he could face the truth.
"All this time, I thought that was why he'd never married: because he loved her too much to give his
heart to someone else. I thought he couldn't bear to see me because I reminded him of what he'd lost.