still stuns me,” he added, turning back to her. “How much is wasted when men decide that certain babies are worth nothing because of their birth or class or sex or skin? How much do we all lose, as a nation, as humans, by dismissing people simply because they are not like us?”
“Like what happened to you.”
“What the blazes are you on about now?”
“I mean, you were a lord and then overnight the world decided you were worth nothing, but you proved them wrong. You could have given up, or become bitter. But you learned and now you want to make the world a fairer place for others too.”
“You think that I…But I’m just…” He made a frustrated sound and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I’d better go.”
“Will you…” She paused. “I suppose I shall have to cancel my evening plans, spend the evening with Lucy and Emily and figure out what to do about them. Will you join us for dinner? I mean…”
“I don’t know about dinner,” he said. “But I’ll come to you tonight. If you’ll have me. Once is not enough.”
Joshua went about the rest of his day with renewed vigor, until finally it was night, and time to go to her. He made love to her properly, with no fabric between them—with nothing between them but the candlelight.
And when the candles were out and he held her against him, their skin so close he could not find the edges, he listened to her breathe and stared into the darkness and said, “Rachel and I had a son.”
She jerked out of his arms. It was too dark to see her expression, which is why he’d told her in the night.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “Papa never said. You never said.”
“It never came up in the conversation.”
“Oh, maybe when I expressed my desire to have a child? You might have said, ‘I already had a child and I lost him’.”
He pulled her back against him. She gave him her weight and did not argue anymore.
“He was barely five when…” He closed his eyes in the darkness. “One day he was fine, then he was sick, and then he was gone. There was nothing we could have done differently. Just one of those things. One of the ways the world likes to laugh at us, to remind us that we are never in control.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want your sympathy.”
“Too bad. You have it anyway.”
His heart beat too fast, and he was too hot, suddenly, but if she noticed, she didn’t say a word. She stroked his chest, soothing him, and soon he calmed.
“What was his name?” she asked softly.
“Samuel.”
He focused on her hand, the warm pressure skating over his ribcage, resting familiarly on his belly.
“What was he like?”
He had pictures, no words. She moved, her hair feathering him, her mouth finding a spot just above his collarbone.
“He was a little whirlwind,” he said. “He wouldn’t walk if he could run or jump or skip. He wanted to know everything about everything. I never realized how much I didn’t know, until I had to answer his questions.” He stared at the dark, seeing those images of the past, fearing he would lose them. “Bram sent this tiger-skin rug from India: his idea of a joke. Rachel thought it was horrific, so of course I used to put it out on the floor to annoy her. Samuel loved it. He’d have long conversations with it, and we’d find him asleep on it, hugging the tiger’s head. We called him our little tiger.”
When he stopped, she did not ask him anything more, but waited patiently for him to speak again.
“After he died, Rachel…She needed something to do. We had housing for all our workers—following Robert Owen, you see—but she became obsessed with providing decent housing for everyone in Birmingham, fixing up derelict buildings. One of those buildings collapsed.”
“Oh heavens. Joshua.”
“I razed them all. Built them anew. It didn’t bring either of them back.”
Here in the dark, with her, the world receded and he felt he could tell her anything at all. She stroked his hair, and he let her comfort him.
And as he drifted off to sleep, he had the odd thought that maybe the void inside him had nothing to do with the loved ones he had lost.
Chapter 19
Joshua came to her the next three nights too, sliding naked under the sheets with wicked words and teasing hands. She marveled at his passionate response to her, and her fevered