call back the woman who had left before he had a memory of her to call his own. His mother.
“Where did you get this?”
“I had it taken to celebrate the end of the war.” Madam’s fat finger edged over the top of the picture, pointing at her. His mother. “She was barely three months pregnant with you here.”
His heart sped up, pounding in his head as vile anger pierced his veins. “And you still had her as a whore? A pregnant woman?”
“The day she found out she was carrying you was the day she quit. She cooked, cleaned, mended the girls’ clothes, anything she could do to earn a few coin. She put it all away for you.” Her face hardened as the memory spewed out. “It was her dying wish to see you safely to your closest kin, so I used the money and bought your passage to Scotland with a sister from the House of Mercy as your caretaker for the voyage. You didn’t belong here, but you sure didn’t deserve belonging to the likes of him.” She spat on the dry ground.
The need to defend his father clashed with the burning memory of the hunched-over weeping man after a long night of drinking. Barrett swallowed back his anger. “My da was many things, a father not being one of them, but he wasn’t low enough to spit on.”
Red flared on Madam’s fleshy cheeks. “He left her here. Knowing how she loved him, he left her here. You’re probably not the only bastard he left behind.”
“My father was a shell of a man after the war. He turned to drink and never recovered. At night I could hear him crying for her.” His tongue faltered on the name he’d tried so hard to repress. “For Marie. The letters she wrote never got to him until it was too late, and soon after I showed up on his doorstep. Unannounced. He was too buried in grief for my mother to give a second thought to me.”
Though flung with as much venom as he could, the words seemed to assuage the woman’s own. She looked back to the forlorn cross. Her face softened. “You look just like him. That’s how I knew who you were when you showed up at my door. Like a ghost from a distant time. Everything except the eyes. You got that color from Marie.”
For the first time in oh so many long years, sadness crept in. He’d shoved it away, barring it from his existence, but the picture in his trembling hand broke the barrier of his resistance. Longing slashed his soul. Longing to know the woman who smiled so sweetly up at him, who had scrubbed the stains from a whorehouse floor to keep him fed, to once remember a mother’s touch and gentle kiss good night, to find joy in her smile when she looked at him. The ache swelled to unimaginable pain. He held the picture out to Madam before it consumed him.
“Non. You keep it. I don’t need the picture to remember anymore.”
Not trusting his voice, he nodded his thanks and carefully tucked the photo into the breast pocket of his shirt, just over his heart. He’d never again see the one he’d kept of her in his carved box back in Paris, but this . . . This he would never let go of.
“This is yours too.” Fishing again in her ample bosom, she pulled out a pale-yellow handkerchief wrapped around something round. “Your grand-mère’s. It was the only thing left after the fire that consumed your mama’s family. She was all alone after that.”
“Did she ever speak of them? Where they lived?”
“I know what you are thinking, but it is useless to cling to that. She only spoke of them once before locking away her memories forever. I know nothing more about them that may bring you peace. I am sorry.”
The brief hope of finding living relatives flared like a firework and burned out just as quickly with only the smell of momentary brilliance smoking in the air.
Barrett took the handkerchief and peeled back the corners. Nestled inside was a brooch with a single large blue stone surrounded by tiny dark-green ones. He quickly covered it back up to prevent seeing his reflection, filled with angst, in the stone’s shiny surface. “Thank you.”
He turned around, putting his back to his mother’s grave and the incredible sorrow it weighed on his soul. The brothel stood before him. Worn, with the