“Harsh punishments? What could you have done that was so awful when you were so little?”
His gaze snapped to the crackling fire.
“Being a bad host.” His jaw set in what looked like a painful clench, and he stared into the fire in silence for so long, she wondered if she’d lost him entirely.
“Severin?”
Nothing.
She pushed herself to her feet and went to the drink cart, and poured him a tumbler of whiskey. When she pressed it into his hand, he drank it in one long swallow.
Push or back off? She was so close, but did he need her to know, or did she just want to know? It was so hard to know what to do. Whatever had happened still ate at him twenty-five years later. She took back the glass and set it aside, then knelt at his feet. His hand wound into her hair again, as if it comforted him.
“Monsieur Charles was the one who visited the most, but there were three or four. I didn’t like Monsieur Charles, but he liked me. Mother would leave us alone to play in my room.” There was no whispering and no anger. Just fact.
Minnow’s bones felt cold and hollow, and she suddenly wanted to beg him to stop telling her, but she’d wanted to know – had guessed maybe something like this had happened, but now that he was saying the words she didn’t know if she was strong enough to hear them.
“He liked to play...games. His hands were clammy. His breath stank and he had big yellow teeth.” Severin shuddered. “I told Maman I didn’t like him. I told her about the games, and she told me to quit being a baby and be a good host – to do what Monsieur Charles wanted. The next time he visited, she stayed in my room with us, and I remember thinking this time she would see and stop him. He forced too far in my mouth. I choked and fought. I couldn’t breathe. She kept yelling at me to be polite. I wasn’t trying to be rude, I thought he was trying to suffocate me and she didn’t care.”
“Oh, God.”
“I bit him. There was blood in my mouth. I had a big fit. I couldn’t stop screaming. I scratched Maman’s face and called her all the bad words I knew. I screamed and broke thi
ngs for hours – all night I think – until the tall man came to our house and put me in the car. I begged him not to let Monsieur Charles do the same thing to the babies. My sisters were so small.”
Minnow sobbed quietly, not wanting to interrupt him, but clinging to his leg as tightly as he was hanging onto her hair.
“Then I was here and there were strangers everywhere, jabbering at me. They didn’t speak French. No Maman, no sisters. No servants I knew. But I also didn’t have to be a host here. I stayed outside a lot. I didn’t talk to the servants. I think the nanny was afraid of me. I used to growl and snap like the dogs outside our house in Marseilles. I ate out of a bowl with my hands or with my face and threw cutlery at people if they tried to tell me to use my manners.” He shrugged. “I think that’s why she never sent for me again. She knew I was too fucked up to use anymore.”
“Then Church and his mother came?”
He nodded, smiling crookedly. “The first time Church tried to get me to play with him, I bit him. I remember plain as day thinking I had to get rid of these people fast. They were too nice. Church called me a bad dog and hit me with a newspaper. It became a game, and the next thing I knew he was my brother.”
“It didn’t matter that he missed the beginning of your life.”
“I’m so glad he wasn’t there. He doesn’t feel like he’s suffocating sometimes for no reason. He doesn’t feel like people are touching him even when he’s alone. There are no sisters he failed to save.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, as though he felt like he needed a toothbrush. “If the girls had been crazy enough to bite, they would have ended up here with me, I guess. Or maybe it was just me that drew the men. Maybe because I was a boy. Or maybe there was something about me that encouraged that sort of thing.”
“Severin, no.”
“If I’d been a good boy and let it happen – did my best even though I didn’t like it – then I would have been raised there with my family. Like a normal kid. Maybe I wouldn’t be so fucked up.”
“I can’t imagine how staying would have been better.” She squeezed his knee and he drew her up into his lap. “It would have been worse.”
“I didn’t want to tell you,” he admitted. “I must disgust you. Knowing I was used as a whore.”
She kissed the tick in his jaw, smoothing it away.
“Nothing about you disgusts me. I’m only disgusted that the person who was supposed to protect you let people abuse you.”
He paused for a long time, and she could tell he was working up the nerve to tell her something. His mouth opened, closed. Opened again.
“Sometimes I cooperated.” His expression was guarded, and she could feel him trying to shield himself from her judgment.
Fuck. She could tell he hadn’t admitted that to anyone before.
“You’d been taught to cooperate. Groomed for it. You were so young.” Such a strange way of thinking, for him to assume any of what had happened was his fault – to persist in thinking that even though he was an adult and he knew better. “If that had happened to me. Would you think it was my fault?”
He fell silent, then finally admitted, “No.”