Chapter One #2
humanity who inconvenienced him by huddling in the doorways of his
city at night. Beggar, scrounger, tinker,
gyppo. “Mangy little pikey,” Laurie heard,
staring out into the darkness beyond the glass, watching his own
pale reflection. He’d never even heard that last one. He’d have to
look it up.
“Here! Are you damn well listening to me?”
Laurie
blinked. He’d started to fade out. “Yes, sir,” he said
automatically. He looked at his mother, sitting across from him
beside her irate husband. She, too, was taking an intense interest
in the streets outside. For once, irritation stirred in Laurie. She
had chosen the old sod, hadn’t she? Whereas her children were
merely stuck. The old man had drawn breath for another salvo.
Laurie, to his own surprise, sat up a little, leaned forward, and
met his eyes. “Wait a bit. Do you honestly think that anybody would
choose to be out there tonight? That anyone would be freezing to
the pavement if it wasn’t their last bloody option?”
A bad
idea, of course. Now Laurie had to sit through a familiar rant on
the subject of thankless little bastards who never lifted a finger
to earn a penny of their own but had the cheek to sit in Sir
William’s car, in the clothes Sir William had put on their back,
and give him their lip. It wasn’t a logical argument, but it was an
effective one. The worst of it was that Laurie was in partial
agreement.
His
mother, for once, shifted in her seat and turned her deep sapphire
gaze on Laurie. Laurie could read compassion there, sorrow, and a
bitter amusement. She used to defend him a lot, he remembered,
perhaps while he was still young enough to be defensible.
“William,” she said in her pretty French accent, laying a hand on
her husband’s arm, “leave him be.” Her face lit up with a
half-sardonic, half-appeasing smile Laurie seldom saw nowadays.
“It’s only the moral absolutism of youth. Not worth your time. It
will wear off soon enough.”
Sir
William glanced from one to the other of them. For a moment, he
looked almost bewildered. Laurie wondered if it was hard for him,
to see nothing of his own face and everything of hers whenever he
laid eyes on his son. He gave a kind of snarl. “Don’t get into his
corner, my lady Marielle. Not unless you’re willing to fight
there.”
Her eyes
went blank. After a moment, she returned her attention to the night
outside. Sir William, without looking, banged his fist against the
glass divider behind him. Laurie saw Charlie reach obediently to
open the intercom. “Get your bloody foot down, Wilson. I need a
drink.”
* *
*
Back at
the enormous six-floored Mayfair house, where the family rattled
around like peas in a barrel and the staff outnumbered their
employers, Laurie did his best to creep to bed. But he and his
eight-year-old sister shared the same far-flung corridor on the top
floor, and she knew every creak of the boards.
“Laurie!”
He
froze, then let the shoes he was carrying drop to the floor with a
thump since the jig was up. Reluctantly he pushed open her bedroom
door. She was bolt upright in the bed, a shawl arranged primly
around her shoulders like a little old woman expecting grand
company. “God,” he said tiredly, “are you undead? Do you never
sleep? It’s nearly one in the morning.”
“I know. You’re much later than you promised.”
Laurie
looked at her. Like him, she was a carbon copy of her mother, and
he wondered at the weird genetic selectivity that seemed to have
winnowed out the old man’s contribution to the way his offspring
looked, moved, functioned. She was quite composed, but there were
shadows in her eyes, and when he stopped to listen, he understood
why. Muffled yelling rose up from the floor below, sometimes bass,
occasionally a brief, high-pitched response. It turned the air in
the child’s room static with unease. Carefully Laurie shut the door
behind him. He sat on the bed. “There was traffic,” he said. “I’m
sorry. Did you have a good day?”
“No. Eleanor Browne’s boring party was bad enough. Then you get
taken to the opera and I’m left here with Mrs. Gibson. And opera’s
wasted on you, Laurie. You know it is.”
“Yes, I do,” Laurie agreed. “You’d be much better at it.” He
paused, long enough to hear continued sounds of conflict from
below, a hiss and a vibration that had made his heart contract with
fear at Clara’s age. “Do you want to know what happened? I think I
took some of it in.”
He
shoved a pillow down his shirt and morphed into the luckless
heroine, bouncing back and forth across the room with hands
clutched to his makeshift bosom, belting out an aria whose Italian
libretto consisted of improvised English with an extra vowel tacked
on to every noun. The villain of the piece arrived, pulling him
offstage from behind Clara’s wardrobe by his own hair, whence he
emerged basso profundo and hunchbacked, prowling around the
squealing child’s bed with dire, mostly culinary threats concerning
his intentions for poor Helga. At the climactic moment, Helga
emerged once again, feminine attributes enhanced this time with a
second pillow, which provided useful cushioning when she plunged to
her death over the cliff between the two beds. By this time Clara
was doubled up and threatening to wet the bed with a sincerity
Laurie knew was real, so he laid off, resurrected himself, gave her
back her pillows, and kissed her good night. The sounds from
downstairs had ceased. With a kindly firmness he had learned in the
years since he’d become more of a father to her than an elder
brother, he directed Clara to lie down and sleep, switched her
light off, and padded down the corridor to his own room.
* *
*
The
trouble with Sir William’s outbursts was that they always contained
enough of a grain of truth that his son could not dismiss them
outright. The poison grain would find its soil in Laurie’s mind and
put out shoots, always holding Laurie back from outright rebellion
against him. In the morning’s bleakest early hours, Laurie sat up
in the bed that had been his since he’d outgrown his nursery cot,
in the big, shabby room he had always occupied. He laced his arms
around his knees. He thought about the grand bedrooms on the floor
below, any of which were his for the asking. But, putting aside his
need to keep distance from parental rows, Laurie knew he did not
feel enough like the young heir to the place to take on even that
much of the trappings of the role.
In which
case, what was he doing here at all? If he shared his parents’
ideals for his future, it would have been fine—acceptable,
anyway—for him to get sent down from Oxford in disgrace after
failing his midterm exams, to agree to the month of tutoring and
cramming his father had paid for, to creep back under the parental
roof and work for the second chance he suspected Sir William had
more or less bought for him.
But the
truth was that he scarcely cared. He couldn’t imagine making the
effort it would take to focus his wandering, dream-filled brain on
the maths and politics that his father, more fancifully still, was
convinced would carve out a respectable career for him. He couldn’t
even manage trig, and the political world seemed a swamp to him, a
miasma, a chamber of horrors where unimaginable superpowers played
out apocalyptic games beyond the reach of any normal human
influence. He knew he had no real intention to try, and on those
terms, it was wrong of him to stay. He should stand up to his
father and tell him the deal was off. That he would make his own
way, as hundreds of thousands of young men so much less privileged
than he managed to do.
Christ,
as even a homeless kid on the Strand was doing, after his
fashion.
Laurie
envisaged the scene in which he had this conversation with his
father and ran a hand into his hair, shivering. If the old man had
been an unrelenting brute to him, it would have been easy. His
powers would have evaporated along with Laurie’s childhood, leaving
him free. But, until his only son had developed a mind of his own,
Sir William had been a decent dad. Domineering, intolerant of
infantile vagaries—always ready though with rough fun, a leg up
onto the horse he’d bought, way too big for his ten-year-old, but
Laurie had known better by then than to show fear and had mastered
the animal on a do-or-die basis that the old man plainly still
hoped for and expected from him now. It was only since Laurie had
begun to question the gold-plated world in which he lived that
their ways had diverged violently. At every confrontation,
something inside Laurie would tangle up in memories of love and
authority, and his strength would dissolve. The old man was much
worse now, his temper heating up in proportion with his
disappointments, but even the worst, most vituperative rants Laurie
could not quite bring himself to dismiss. What if he had simply put
money into a lost soul’s hands tonight for him to go and hurt
himself some more?
Well, if
he had, Laurie hoped his toxin of choice was keeping Sasha warm.
Laurie got out of bed, suddenly sure that sleep would evade him
tonight. He grabbed a quilt off the bed and went to huddle on the
attic’s broad window ledge, where he could look out over the
ice-glimmered rooftops. His own sole experience of hard drugs was
that they could indeed pull down the night into a starry blanket
that would wrap around him and drive off cold and pain
forever—which was why, after that, he had touched nothing stronger
than the occasional snitched handful of his mother’s ample sedative
prescriptions. Which was bad enough, he supposed, but did the trick
on the warfare nights, when the roar of his parents’ disputes crept
through every floorboard and there was no one to drown them out
with amateur theatricals for him. Drawing up his knees, inhaling
the quilt’s faint scent of cedar chests and dust, Laurie hoped
Sasha was warm—or believed himself so—and free.
* *
*