Sans Souci
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"I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful."
~ from "The Happy Prince", by Oscar Wilde
Sometimes, in his darker moments, Cain thinks of what might have been.
In this imagining, everything is very different. His mother really is his mother, and his father loves them both devotedly, and his Aunt Augusta visits sometimes with her husband and three bright-eyed children.
There is no Merryweather, and no Riff, and no lacework of scars on his back; his eyes are blue, not devil's gold.
He knows nothing of poisons.
The Cain of these moments is no longer the dark count, but the golden prince, safe and smiling behind the unassailable walls of privilege and his parents' tender love. He is the apple of their indulgent eye.
He has many friends, elegant young noblemen like himself, pretty as a flock of peacocks in their embroidered silk waistcoats and soft, kid-skin gloves. The ladies are prettier still, smiling winsomely from behind their ever-fluttering fans; with them he flirts outrageously, teasing out a delicate blush or an appreciative giggle with all the intent energy for which he has no other real use. He's not certain who he'll eventually marry, but he knows she will be well-bred, and beautiful, and refined - an altogether suitable wife.
No doubt it will be a most agreeable match.
This Cain is ignorant of the rotten, bloody secrets held by the crooked streets of London. He has never killed, nor seen someone die, nor had his own life held in the balance. He has never grimly tracked the path of a killer, doggedly seeking the truth before another innocent life is stripped away. People die - are murdered, he knows; he reads the papers - but it is no concern of his; how could he help them, after all?
He has never been beaten or rejected. Nobody has ever had cause to call him a child of the Devil. He has never lost; he has never sacrificed; he has never felt pain or sorrow so deep in his soul that it must surely leave a scar. He has never felt anything strongly enough to scratch beneath the glossy surface of his existence.
He is safe, and secure, and oblivious; he knows nothing about the world, and is blissful in his ignorance.
In his darker moments, Cain sometimes imagines how things might have been - somewhere else, in another life.
It helps to remind him why he clings to this one.