Her Dark Knight's Redemption

As the guards had. Guards who chatted because the sounds of a weeping child near their feet was meaningless to them. For Aliette, Gabriel’s defenceless whimpers called to her.

A few gentle questions his way and he told her of his parents’ imprisonment and their hanging scheduled the next day. How he had no one and no home. He could tell her nothing of why they chopped his ear and not given him a simple flogging. Such an extreme punishment for one so young.

His eyes were so full of grief, so full of fear. Half-starved despite the cleanliness of his clothes. Despite his ear, his hands told her he wasn’t raised on the streets like her. She knew what happened to soft children. To thieve or be used. By the carving of his ear, he had failed at thieving. She refused for anything else to happen to him.

Slowly, coaxingly, she led him to their home under the bridge. His feet were laden down with exhaustion, hunger and loss. His eyes darting from her to every corner, looking for traps.

No matter her soft words, he remained wary until Vernon greeted him and Helewise opened her arms and, crumpling at Helewise’s feet, Gabriel laid his head on her knees and promptly fell asleep.

The longing to belong grew fiercely inside Aliette. The life she led with Helewise and Vernon wasn’t good enough for Gabriel. She could no longer steal a few turnips or potatoes. She needed proper food. They needed more than huddling under a bridge with one blanket. To achieve that she couldn’t only steal, she needed work.

Which wasn’t easy. Everyone needed to work. For an unskilled woman, no one was willing to pay her actual coin, but after a while of going from market stall to shop to farmer, she found people who paid her for work with extra food, day old bread, more threadbare blankets.

So much work, but eventually their supplies were noticed. Gabriel had gained strength, but not enough to defend against thieves or those with weapons. She needed to protect her acquired family.

She had searched abandoned homes, but more than once she returned to the bridge with bruises and cuts made by residents who guarded their territory. It forced her to venture into finer neighbourhoods, until she discovered one that had been once grand, but now lay neglected. Many of the homes were boarded, the owners waiting for years until the area became suitable again.

The house she found was boarded tightly up, secure against those too lazy or desperate to break in.

Over a period of weeks, she watched the property and worked the back boards on the servants’ entrance loose. When she walked through the dank rooms, she knew she’d found what they needed. The roof didn’t leak much, there was a space for a small fire and there was furniture for comfort. Chairs and tables. Beds.

They couldn’t have asked for a better home. With such fine furnishings, she suspected the owners might have left Paris for the winter and she didn’t imagine that they could live here indefinitely. Spring would soon be here, though there was no sign of it. And a few extra months until warmer weather would give them much reprieve and allow Gabriel to gain better health.

But Gabriel had stolen and jeopardised everything.

Without unclenching her eyes, she said, ‘At least tell me you didn’t steal them all from the same baker.’

‘Not at all,’ the boy quipped, not an ounce of guile in his words. To him, the words he said were the honest truth. Yet it was another lie since the remaining untouched loaves bore the same mark from the same bakery. He said the words to make her feel better.

Nothing about this could make her feel better. She had two options. She’d need to return the loaves or pay for them. Neither scenario would end well for them. If she returned the loaves, it was likely he wouldn’t accept them and she had no money to pay.

Easing her hand away from her stinging nose, she let out a breath and opened her eyes. Gabriel’s large brown eyes were more enormous than ever and sheened with tears.

His gangly body shuddered when she embraced him. He did not put his arms around her, but she did not expect him to. Almost three months with him and he was still unused to a kind touch. Who had he been before his parents were sent to the gallows?

‘I was only trying to help.’ Gabriel wiped his nose with his sleeve. ‘Helewise and Vernon’s stomachs are growling and the potatoes are rotten.’

That was because she pinched them out of a hog’s trough and counted herself fortunate that she grabbed them before anyone else since they were only half-rotten. She was working, but it only accounted for some of their needs. More often, she depended on what she could scavenge.

All of them thieves, none of them good. Her, least of all. That was the reason her family left her in Paris when she was five. Fifteen years didn’t make a difference. She was still appalling at it.

Now this. Four loaves from the same baker meant they’d be noticed. She’d take back two of the loaves immediately while they were still fresh.

First though, she’d observe the baker interact with his customers. If he wasn’t kind or reasonable when she returned them, they’d be hunted the next time they walked the market. It was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. This was the best home they’d had and she knew they wouldn’t find another before the winter ended.

‘I need to go.’

‘Don’t,’ Gabriel begged. ‘Let me do it. I did the wrong.’

Was this how he had lost his parents? They went out, committed some crime and couldn’t return? These questions would never be answered, though she’d tried that first day and the next to see them privately. To this day, Gabriel said nothing of what he was stealing for the punishment of losing his ear. In fact, he didn’t talk about his childhood, ever.

She bent to bring her eyes level with his. ‘You did nothing wrong. Please don’t think that. But I need you to stay with Vernon and Helewise to keep them safe or help them escape. You know this.’

Gabriel clenched his jaw and she glimpsed the man he’d be. One didn’t stay a child long on the streets.

‘I’ll be back for you.’

Gabriel shook, sneezed and shook some more.

She wouldn’t be his parents. She wouldn’t leave any of them. They were a family now. One she’d found, one she protected, one she was giving her life for.

‘No matter what it takes, Gabriel. No matter what, I’ll return.’

Chapter Three

Down the winding pathways Reynold followed the woman carrying the child. She made one more offer for him to hold it, but he refused and she didn’t ask again.

Another turn in the muddied, roughly cobbled streets. This area had once been grand, but now held the musk of ages, the patina brushed away to show instead the mortar underneath.

He had picked this part of neglected Paris to reside in because it contained no lavish homes. No grand balls or people with influence. In every city he stayed in he avoided those parts of town.

It didn’t suit his games to be noticed and ostentatious wealth was always noticed. He made only one exception to the rule of absolute anonymity: his books. He had too many to hide and they were far too precious for him to leave behind. They travelled with him to every home. So, despite the many pains he took to blend into the fabric of every city he visited, his books were always seen. Only an individual with an obscene amount of wealth could own such luxury. But what could he do? They were his family, his sole comfort. At least they were quiet and could be kept at home.

As he should be doing now. Another turn and the woman stopped in front of a door.

This home was more derelict than the rest. Windows were cracked and curtains were scorched from the sun; from this distance, it was clear the silk was thin and frayed. Even the daub was crumbling into the street, forcing the wattle to look more like a skeleton than a house. He glanced down the street. Most of the other houses in this area were boarded up. This was the only one occupied.

If it was occupied.

‘She’s in there,’ the woman said, shifting the child again. It was awake and the angle she held it, with its head on her shoulder, showed the full length. Yes, this was a child who could be his.

His. A burgeoning warmth, hope, bloomed inside his chest and he crushed it. Cursed ever reading Odysseus’s tale and giving him ideas that there could be more for him. Nothing and no one ever was.

There would be no hearth and home at the end of his journey. There would be only death. His only hope was that he took his family down with him.

‘Let’s go in.’

She looked to the child, then him.

He had no intention of taking that child now or later. He was free to block attacks and to make one of his own. Unburdened, he was free to leave and continue his games.

The woman eyed him, surprised he refused the child. ‘One look and you’ll know it’s her you spilled your seed in,’ she said. ‘You’ll know this burden’s yours.’

Even if it was...it didn’t matter. He was too close to what he’d been born to do: to take down his family.

‘Then we shouldn’t tarry much more,’ he said, fully intending for her to enter first. ‘One more look and you’ll be a rich woman. What’s keeping you?’

The indecision in her eyes turned to greed again, to cruelty. Ah, yes, he was familiar with people like her. They were easy to manipulate.

She pushed open the door. The sounds and the smells accosted him immediately.

Sobbing. A woman’s cries as if everything in her world was gone and missing. Deep racks of grief interrupted by coughs and wheezes. By wet gurgles, like a clogged brook.

Like blood that didn’t stay within the body, but came up through the lungs and out of mouths and noses, forced through tiny pores in the skin.

Which explained the smells. The dank smell of mould, a leaking roof allowing mildew to move along the walls. That smell fought for dominance over the acrid smell of piss and human waste.

But it was a deep cloying scent that permeated the entire house and settled against his very soul. Death. Human decay, as if they walked straight into a desecrated tomb of newly buried bodies.

It stopped him in his tracks.

‘Told you to stay at your fancy home, didn’t I?’ the woman sneered at his side. ‘I told you to stay and take the babe, but you had to come. Suits me fine, but I was only trying to be nice, to do you a favour. Had to make it difficult for me. Wasn’t as though I wanted to come back to this either. I’ve had to suffer enough these last months, waiting for you to return. Should make you pay me more for coming back when I thought I didn’t have to.’

What was wrong with him this evening? Why did he stop? He didn’t let boredom overcome his safety and allow strangers in his home, especially those he was soon to kill.

‘Cilla? Cilla, is that you?’ A woman’s thinned voice wafted from another room. Cultured and reedy with sickness. ‘Do you have her, Cilla? Did you bring her back to me?’

The wretch, Cilla, glanced his way, her eyes narrowing. He shook his head once which was enough for her to understand she needed to stay quiet about his presence. It didn’t hurt that it suited her purposes as well.

With a shrug, she swept into the other room. ‘I’m here with your bastard, my lady.’

‘Oh!’ Fresh tears, the sound of joy and gratefulness. ‘I thought you’d left. I thought you took her.’

Reynold held back. He needed a bit more exchange between these two to satisfy his purposes.

‘I merely took her for a walk,’ Cilla said. ‘She needed a bit of air.’

‘What would I do without you, Cilla? You’re so...good for her and me. Staying with me when everyone else left. Keeping her well, keeping her away from the sickness. Of course, she needed air. But...she needs me more. Bring her here, please.’

The tone of her voice, a cadence broken by hacking coughs, he did not recognise, and Reynold waited longer in the shadows. He liked waiting in the shadows.

A snapping of blankets, grunts from Cilla and wheezes from her mistress. Reynold envisioned Cilla giving the child back to its mother.

‘But you were wrong to take her without letting me know,’ the woman’s thin voice now containing some superiority. ‘You made me worry. You know how I cannot have any worry in my condition. Once I recover, your deeds will have to have some consequences.’

‘Of course, mistress,’ Cilla said. No doubting she had heard this argument before. The words held no threat. The woman in the other room was dying.

Dying, but cultured with a ring of privilege. Perhaps she was the noblewoman he had lain with those many months ago. There was only one way to discover that, by stepping into the other room.

Silently, a few paltry steps and everything was revealed to him. The room held scant pieces of furniture, no tables or niceties. The wooden floors highly polished where a rug once had been. The colours of rose and yellow in the broken bench hinting at what the room once must have been. A grand parlour.

Now it was a sick bed with a full chamber pot underneath, and various small linens flung around it like bloodied halos.

A few more moments lost as the woman spoke to Cilla, but kept her eyes on the child like a lifeline. The sickness had made harsh lines fan from her eyes, but as she gazed at the child, they softened.

Privileged. Entitled. But that gaze was of a mother to her child. Whether she was a fallen noble or whore, she loved the child who was trying to sit in her arms.

‘Did you bring any...?’ The woman’s voice drifted as her travelling gaze fell on Reynold and held there.

He didn’t recognise the house or the room because he had never been here before. But he did recognise the woman lying on the bench with blankets draped over her thin frame. The sickness had ravaged that frame and sucked the glow from her cheeks.

He didn’t remember her name, her station, or the night he found temporary relief within her body.

He didn’t remember the thick gold of her hair because every woman he’d lain with had a similar colour. However, he did remember the colour of her eyes. He remembered that all too well, for when he first saw her he calculated that colour against his own dark grey and wondered whether the dark blue was too close to his own. That if there was a babe, it would be mistaken for his.

No woman was worth any unnecessary risk. But he remembered her false haughtiness and her weakness. Traits that suited his purpose as well as the feminine parts of her body. So they shared a bed for an hour or two and he paid her well. He always paid them well.

‘You,’ the woman whispered.

‘Me,’ he answered.

Weak and dying, but at his appearance, she attempted some dignity. While holding her lips together didn’t cease the coughs from racking her body, she daintily held a blood-crusted cloth to her mouth instead. When they eased, she shifted her eyes from Reynold back to Cilla. ‘You brought him.’

‘You’re sick, mistress,’ Cilla said with oily concern. ‘The babe needs her father.’

A widening of blue eyes, a flash of fear that no tainted cloth could cover. ‘That’s not her father. I told you who her father was. I told you.’

Despite the mother clutching the child close to lay down with her, it sat up fully and crammed its mouth with its fist. A girl, but only because the mother had called it such. Black hair, but in this dim light and his distance he could not tell the colour of her eyes.

‘We both know you didn’t mean it,’ Cilla said. ‘This child has hair like her father’s, not that dandy you pointed out with his balding pate.’

The woman kept her eyes and her conversation solely with Cilla, as if ignoring him or pretending he wasn’t there would make him disappear.

He wouldn’t leave now that he heard her terrified protestations. This dying woman was frightened by his presence.

His family connection, and their ruthlessness, was enough for her to worry, but wasn’t enough for her horror, or the sense of helplessness in her gaze and the vulnerability straining her frail body.

He saw it all though she refused to look at him. Her body convulsed again, worse than before. Great racking contortions as her knees drew up and she curled around herself and the babe.

Reynold did not move, nor did the child. Whatever illness was taking its mother, it had been doing so for a long time. Long enough that it didn’t concern the child. To the babe, the stench, the decay, the coughing was what a mother smelled and sounded like.

‘I told you,’ the woman said, her voice gasping, the coughing, the illness too much for her. ‘I trusted you.’

‘You’re alive, you are, and so is your babe,’ Cilla said.

The woman tried to draw breath. Too weak to protect her child from the servant who could easily pluck her away again. Too ill to protect the child from him. But he watched her push the child across her stomach until it rolled behind her so that it was wedged between her and the bench’s back. As if her prone wasted body could be any sort of a shield against him.

It was possible this child was his. ‘Is it mine?’

The woman never opened her eyes. Her pretending he didn’t exist was her last and only defence against him.

‘Is it mine?’ he repeated.

‘Of course it’s yours,’ Cilla retorted. ‘Little demon’s a year if it’s a day. A year of me waiting in this filth and waiting on this corpse for you to return.’

‘How could you...?’ the noblewoman said.

‘I did what you wanted,’ Cilla said. ‘What you begged so prettily for. What was it again? Not to let anyone know you were sick. Mustn’t let anyone know such common illness affected your noble blood.’

The woman opened her eyes again, not to look at Reynold, but to the servant. ‘I beg you... Save her.’

With hot certainty, Reynold knew it was no longer a possibility. The child was his... For this mother asked not to save the babe from poverty or sickness, but to save the child. From him.

‘Why would I do that?’ Cilla said. ‘He’s here to collect.’

The child... All his life women claimed pregnancy. None of them were true. The noblewoman ignored him, but he needed his answers.

‘How did you know who I was?’

All eyes went to him.

‘You don’t...remember me?’ she said.

No rejection in her reedy voice, only the slight sound of victory.

‘Your man...a carriage.’

He always hired a man. A temporary hire, for a temporary solution. He found a woman who would suit his needs, found a man for hire to procure her and bring her to an awaiting carriage.

All his women were done this way. A protection for him, a protection for them. This significant memory of hers provided no more information for him.

‘You couldn’t have known who I was,’ he said. ‘Who told you? Who—?’

‘It stinks and I don’t need to stay,’ Cilla interrupted. ‘It’s her, you know that now. You know that’s your babe—I want what’s my due.’ She laughed a cruel greed. Gleeful that her plan for great wealth had paid off. ‘I brought the happy family together. Don’t I deserve something?’

He’d forgotten the wretch was in the room. With his spare hand, Reynold brought his purse to the front. Let the full weight of it sound as he jangled the coins. It was heavy. He’d purposefully filled it to the brim.

The woman’s eyes bulged. For him, this wasn’t but convenient coin. The enamel gold box at his home was worth more than his purse, but she wasn’t a smart villain. Not smart at all, because she had threatened him.

‘I said I’d reward you amply. I came prepared.’

‘’Cause I spoke the truth,’ she said, her eyes remaining on the purse, not on the blade he hid in the folds of his cloak.

He walked slowly to her, raised the purse so it raised her eyes and exposed her neck. Her hands reached—and then...something that he had never done before. Something he was unprepared for: he hesitated.

The servant registered the blade and attacked with outstretched claws across his cheek. Feeling the sting, he turned the hilt and struck her across the head.

She collapsed to the floor like another bloodied rag. He stared at her incredulously as her chest rose and fell, as blood trickled from her temple. He hadn’t killed her. He always killed them.

The woman on the bench gasped. Another flinch, another prostrating of her body, this time towards the child propped up between the bench and her. She truly was trying to protect the child.

‘Please,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t.

He turned the hilt, aimed the dagger towards the deceitful servant. Willed his hand to complete the deed. For his own survival, he shouldn’t leave witnesses. But he couldn’t do it. Angry, he whirled on the other woman, but his eyes went to the babe.

Was it because of this child he held his hand?

‘Don’t take the child?’ he bit out. ‘You think I want her?’ At some point, they all begged and pleaded with him for mercy. He never gave it. He shouldn’t be giving it now.

Walking away was still an option. He could tie the servant up, drag her to some more disreputable area of town with coin in her lap. Let the vultures there complete what he should have done.

The noblewoman looked soon for the grave and the child, far too young to escape this tomb of a house, would die, too. He should leave. Instead he asked questions.

‘What can I tie her with?’

Her brows drew in. ‘There might be...tassels, by the curtains.’

Did she not see the condition of the house? No tassels were left. But the worn curtains he ripped clear across, the fraying silk tearing easily. Used correctly, it would suffice to immobilise the servant.

Pointing at the servant, he said, ‘Does she know who I am?’

The woman gave a small shake.

‘Does. She. Know?’

‘I don’t know how she found you. I never wanted her to find you. I never wanted my child to be yours. You don’t deserve—’ She gasped for breath. Slumped. Her eyes closed. He watched her chest still for a moment before beginning again. When she opened her eyes, they were mere slits.

She couldn’t finish her words, but he understood all the same. That she didn’t want him to discover the child, that he didn’t deserve her.

How would she know he deserved no one? Who told her who his family was? Whoever it was had to die as well. ‘Who are you?’

‘Handmaiden,’ she whispered.

To the Queen. She was as high born as possible without being a ruler herself. He knew she must have some noble blood, had figured her for an unwanted bastard. But she had been more. She had been one of the influential ones and she had fallen to this?

More importantly, if she was close to the Queen, she knew his family. Knew his wealth, his power, knew everything.

He grabbed the gown of the servant, who jerked awake. Her eyes, registering his presence, widened before she fought him. ‘Cease!’ he ordered.

She clawed at his hands, kicked. Laughed. ‘Hit me, did you? You’ll pay for that.’

He dragged her to the iron railing. ‘I’ll pay for nothing.’

‘Cilla,’ the noblewoman whispered.

He grasped her hands to tie the ripped silk curtain around her wrists.

‘You’ll pay,’ Cilla sneered. ‘You’ll pay or your daughter will never be safe from—’

The slice across the servant’s neck was clean, precise. A mere splattering of her blood and it was over. His hand holding the dagger remained steady as he wiped the blood off with the servant’s gown.

The woman on the bench was silent, but Reynold felt her shocked eyes on him. Knew the child was awake and watching him as well.

‘You knew all along who I was,’ he said, sheathing the dagger and standing to his full height. His eyes stayed only on the corpse at his feet as a familiar weariness overtook him. He was so tired of killing.

‘I...’ she said. He swung his gaze to hers. They widened in fear as they should. He didn’t care what she saw in his eyes. She wouldn’t live long enough to tell.