Page 69 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
He looked out of the window at their dismal surroundings, hardening his heart against every over-thin waif or shifty-eyed reprobate. “I don’t know that I am,” he said honestly. “But others believe with such confounding fervency, don’t they? I attend to observe them, I think. To learn what they love. Or what they fear. To watch the rapture on their faces and wonder what it must be like. To believe in something so vast. So absolute. To trust…” He broke off for a moment, returning his entire attentions on her. “To trust…in anything.”
He found no condemnation in her, but an infinite sadness. “You do not go there to find grace? To find God?”
He made a caustic noise. “I’ve never understood the words. But, I think, I go there in case He might find me. If I’m standing in the right place. Maybe an answer to all this madness will fall on my head.” He gestured to the city and the world beyond it.
To his surprise, a laugh bubbled from her, warming the moment. “Considering how much sinning we’ve been doing lately, you might do to fear a bolt of lightning instead.”
In spite of himself, he chuckled along with her. “I’m not familiar with all credences and commandments but I’m fairly certain we’ve not been sinning since we married.”
“I don’t know,” she said from beneath coy lashes. “It feels rather wicked to me.”
If this had been his coach, he’d have gathered her to him and shown her the meaning of the word wicked.
“St. Dismas.” She tested the name. “The penitent thief.”
He shifted in his seat.
Smoothing at her skirts, she smiled to herself. “I confess I’d initially assumed you took me to this church so no one would recognize us, but now…I think I understand.”
He shook his head, wishing he’d never taken her there at all. What had he been thinking? That he’d wanted to reveal the part of himself he blamed for her debauchment? Had he wanted to see if she’d hold a handkerchief to shield her nose against the stench of the wells and pumps he used to draw his drinking water from? If she’d shy away from the hard-working class and earnest people that lived in poverty alongside the criminal element?
If so, it was an unfair test. Although, one she’d passed with perfect marks.
“There’s nothing to understand,” he informed her with as much dispassion as he could. “I attend St. Dismas monthly. I’m their patron, you see. Applewhite shelters and tends to many of the hungry and naked children in this part of the city. One of the few true Christians I’ve ever known. I finance his mission to take some of Whitechapel’s unwanted boys and help them find a direction. A trade. A means of survival.”
“Because—”
“Because crime and violence are born of poverty and cruelty,” he explained. “The more means a man has to provide survival for himself and his kin, the less likely he is to succumb to vice or villainy.”
“And because the Vicar once did the same for you?” Her gaze, as her assessment, was frank and open, and Morley wanted to shrink from it.
This was what he’d come here to tell her. Whom he’d come to introduce her to.
So why now did he hesitate?
Because he’d always had the upper hand in this relationship, he realized. It wasn’t comfortable to give her something she could wield against him.
Across from him, the daylight slanted into slick iridescent blues glimmering from the absolute darkness of her hair. “You told me once that you’d grown up with the accent you used as the Knight of Shadows,” she said. “The same accent the Vicar has, and everyone here.”
“So I did.”
“Farah mentioned you had secrets…and the Vicar, he called you Cutter.”
His heart erupted into chaos as he watched her braid the strings of his past together without him saying a word.
“Is that your name? Cutter. Are you the penitent thief?”
He retreated back toward the window, watching as the years fell away between that time and this. A blond boy stood on a corner with his black-haired friend, assessing which pockets would be full. Which punters would be easily fleeced.
“It’s who I was,” he admitted reluctantly, staring into the hard, hard eyes of that boy in his past. Eyes that’d seen nothing but oppression and desperation, set into a face that only knew the touch of another human being as a quick box to the ears or a heavy punch to the face. A body thinned with ever-present hunger and strengthened by hardship and labor.
Deadeye.
“I was a pickpocket and thief bound for a prison cell until one night…” He hesitated as the boy on the street corner lifted his finger to his cracked lips to hush him.
Don’t tell her. Don’t trust her.
But…what if she could understand where he’d come from? What he’d lost.
