Shadows in Death (In Death #51) - J.D. Robb Page 0,46

I’m thinking, he came knocking on the door.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven or eight, I suppose. I remember it was time for supper, such as it was, and I’d just earned a backhand, as I didn’t want to go out again until I’d had something to eat. The old man had likely had a pint or two by then, and he’d decided I hadn’t brought home enough that day to earn whatever Meg put on the table.

“Then Cobbe was at the door, and pushed by Meg when she opened it. Not an easy task, as she wasn’t a delicate sort. He walked straight to the old man. Strutted,” Roarke recalled now, as looking back, he saw it clearly. “ ‘I’m Lorcan,’ he said. ‘I’m your son, first born. I’ll be living here now and working for you.’ The old man laughed, picked him up by the scruff of the neck, the back of the trousers, and tossed him out of the house.”

“Tossed him?” Mira repeated.

“Oh aye, heaved him out. I heard him tumble down the stairs. And the old man said to me if I didn’t want the same, I’d get my lazy arse out and earn my keep. So out I went. Cobbe was lying at the bottom of the stairs. I made to give him a hand up, as I’d taken that tumble myself a time or two. He pulled a knife, took a jab at me, but there was blood in his eyes, and I was quick. He was camped on the doorstep when I came back, so I went around the back, climbed in the window. He was still there in the morning.”

Roarke took a drink. “You could say our relationship never improved from that initial meeting.”

“Did he try to hurt you again?”

“He tried, succeeded a time or two, but never got the blade in me.” Roarke shrugged, a slow lift and fall of shoulders. “The old man warned him off that when he saw how it was. As I did earn my keep.”

“Patrick Roarke never took him in, so to speak, or acknowledged him as his son?”

“Gave him work, but as for the rest, no. And I think the old man had the right of that.”

“Why?”

“Ah, genetics, I suppose. He looked nothing like the old man. Had light hair rather than dark, eyes of what you call hazel, not blue. Shorter and stockier of build.”

“His mother?”

“Brown hair, though she often dyed it red, blue eyes that leaned toward gray. We’ll say voluptuous. I made a point back then to travel to their neighborhood, get a look at her. They had rooms over the pub where she worked. I grew up in a hovel,” he added, “but their circumstances made mine near to a palace. And still …”

“Still?”

“I think the woman loved him. He had that. Knowing your enemies is a vital part of surviving, so I made it a point to know him. She never raised a hand to him, it was said, and praised him to the skies. He was a young prince in her eyes.”

Mira nodded as the picture formed. “But he wanted what you had.”

Because that wasn’t the whole of it, Roarke shook his head. “He wanted me not to exist, and to have what I had. The first I can see if I look through his eyes. I was in his way. But why he wanted a life with the old man and Meg—who had a hand like a brick, I’ll add, and used it liberally—I can’t see. He had a mother’s love in his hands, but coveted a place at the table of a man who’d beat him for sport.”

“A child—” Dennis blinked. “Sorry, interrupting. Thinking out loud.”

“Think out loud,” his wife invited.

“I’d say it’s a natural, an innate need for a child to long for a father, a mother if he lacks one. He might look for substitutes, surrogates, replacements. In this case, the boy Cobbe was told by his mother, this is your father. It may be he was born with his own cruelty, a bent toward violence. And what I know of that time and place, it could be cruel and violent, so nature, nurture, environment combined. He would have, it occurs to me, not just striven to emulate the man he believed was his father, but to outdo him, and so earn his respect and pride.”

He paused, so obviously thinking through the rest Roarke said nothing.

“A mother’s love, to such a personality, is weak, isn’t it? It’s