Chapter Four
The
great house had several portals, each appropriate to the class of
person who might be expected to come and go through them. Gibson
and Charlie, as long-term family staff, had their own quarters and
their own route to the street. Day staff—Lady Fitzroy’s floating
population of au pairs, companions, personal shoppers, and music
tutors—used a lowlier doorway from the garden at the side. Best of
all for Laurie—always had been, on occasions when he needed to
escape the cage without the grand parade through hallway and down
steps—was a seldom-used door around the back, once the method
previous Baronet Fitzroys had used to conceal the comings and
goings of coal men, maids, and other such personnel as did not fit
well with the mansion’s magnificent facade. An old stone stairwell
led all the way down to it from the garret where Laurie and Clara
now kept their roost. Back then, an underpaid Victorian workforce
could do their work and retire to their sleeping quarters without
being seen by the family at all.
Reflecting on the ironic beauty of this, Laurie parked the
Daimler in the alleyway that led to it. Only the first stretch of
the alley was visible to surrounding houses. Once he’d negotiated
the corner, he was invisible, safe in a refuge he knew he was
outgrowing but could not work out how to abandon.
Tonight
at least it served a purpose for somebody else. He went around to
the passenger door and half lifted Sasha out into his
arms.
* *
*
His room
was filled with firelit shadows. Similarities suddenly hit him
between this sparsely furnished garret and the place beneath the
bridge—uncertain light making odd shapes flicker on the walls, a
sense of hiding away.
Enormous
differences too. The most significant: the bright gas fire designed
to look like an open one, convincing enough but for its
inexhaustibility. Effortless heat at the touch of a switch. Feeling
as if he were seeing it for the first time himself, Laurie guided
Sasha to kneel by it. “There. Not too close. I think you’re meant
to warm up slowly. Here, let me take your coat.” Their hands met as
he reached for the damp parka, warm skin brushing on cold, and
Sasha looked up at him, expression hard to interpret. Gratitude,
certainly. Some kind of frightened promise.
Laurie
gave up trying to read him in favour of practical concerns.
“Right,” he said. “You stay there. I’m going to get you some
food.”
He ran
downstairs. A cracking good short-order chef, Laurie was. Between
his parents, for whom each meal turned into a long, turgid ritual,
and a kitchen full of staff determined to wait on him hand and
foot, he had learned the art of the lightning raid. He knew where
Mrs. Gibson kept the frozen-ready meals she and Charlie would serve
up for themselves after a late-night Fitzroy party, knew which
cooked fastest and tasted best out of the microwave. That was the
extent of his culinary talents, but it would do for tonight. He
made a mug of instant coffee, put it on a tray, then added a
pitcher of fresh orange juice. Hot food and vitamins, those were
what he should provide. He picked out the best-looking apples and
grapes from the fruit dish. Would that do? He had no idea, but it
would be academic if Sasha starved to death upstairs in the
meantime. Balancing the tray with unconscious grace on the flat of
one hand, he let himself back out onto the servants’
stairs.
In
Laurie’s room, Sasha was waiting for him. He had taken off every
stitch of his clothing and was lying on the hearthrug in a posture
even Laurie’s total inexperience told him was meant to be
seductive. “Christ!” Laurie said and dropped the tray, then caught
it before it had fallen an inch, with the reflexes that made him
such a valuable backstage props handler. China and glass clattered
but remained upright. “What are you doing?”
“It’s what you want, isn’t it? Nothing’s for
nothing.”
Laurie
came to the fireside and carefully set the tray down. Then he
strode over to his bed and grabbed the warm dressing gown he’d
discarded there that morning. This was convenient, in a way, he
told himself through the racing thud of his own heart. All his
visitor’s clothes were soaked and filthy; he’d been looking for
some way to part Sasha from them. He took the dressing gown,
crouched behind Sasha, and said, “Here. Arm. Arm,” just as he did
for Clara on those school mornings when unwillingness to go made
her forget the basics of putting on her coat. “Yes. Some things are
for nothing. This is. God, Sasha. How could you think
that?”
“Why would I think anything else?”
Sasha’s
voice was unsteady, cracked with shivers. Laurie shook his head.
“Because…we met. Twice. Did I look like I was trying to”—he didn’t
even know the right word—“price you up?”
“No. But just so you know, this is the price.”
“What?”
“This room. Heat. Food. I’ve done it for a lot less.” He
shuddered, and on impulse Laurie wrapped his arms around him from
behind. “I’d give you change if I could.”
“Well, it’s just a house. And a grocery-store lasagna. And…I
prefer girls, so you’re all right.” Laurie squeezed him, let him
go, and went to pour juice for him. “I tell you what, though—while
you’ve got your clothes off anyway…”
* *
*
Laurie
sat by the fire, knees drawn up to his chest, arms encircling them.
In the next room, he could hear gentle splashing sounds that he
hoped meant Sasha was enjoying the hot bath Laurie had run for him.
He surveyed with amusement the tray, which, if it had been a
chicken, would now be a neat pile of clean-picked bones. They
hadn’t talked while Sasha had quietly taken the lasagna down to the
plate pattern and the fruit to its core.
Laurie
welcomed the silence. He was trying hard to assimilate the idea of
poor Sasha’s price. That Sasha would think he’d been rescued,
warmed, fed, just so that Laurie could…
God. The
idea was repellent to him, and yet he could not shake the vision of
that naked, firelit frame laid out and waiting on the rug. He’d
been on his side, hadn’t he, with his back to the fire, so the
painful hollows of his ribs and hips were not apparent and you
could only see his shape—wide shoulders, the elegant curve of his
torso down to slender hips. I prefer girls, Laurie repeated
silently, this time almost making himself laugh. He hadn’t really
had enough of either to know, but based on the evidence so far,
what he preferred at this stage of his life was Sasha.
Who had
arrived in England among the corpses of his friends and lived rough
ever since, selling sex to strangers until he could no longer
accept or believe in human kindness. Laurie leaned to turn up the
fire. No matter what he felt, he mustn’t show it, or…
The
bathroom door creaked gently open. Sasha appeared, safely wrapped
in Laurie’s dressing gown, subtly transfigured. Laurie had had no
idea how he would look when clean, fed, and thoroughly warm. His
black hair was damped down in short feathers: raven’s-wing hair.
For the first time, his skin was softly flushed, rose under olive.
When his eyes met Laurie’s, they seemed to have a light of their
own, independent of the firelight, making the flames suddenly
tawdry and dim.
“Thank you,” Sasha said, with an intensity to match their
blaze.
Laurie
smiled. “Good bath?”
“Religious experience.”
“Ah.” Aware that he was staring, Laurie turned his attention
back to the gas flames and did not watch while Sasha came to kneel
beside him on the rug. He could smell him now—nothing but the tang
of Laurie’s own citrus soap and shampoo, somehow intoxicating when
underlain by this particular skin. Awkwardly reaching for
distraction, he said, “You speak really good English, for an
immigrant.” Then, afraid he had been rude, added, “Better than me,
I mean. And…even that doesn’t sound right.”
“It’s not,” Sasha told him, settling comfortably on the
hearthside. He was so close that Laurie couldn’t help but meet his
gaze. “Do you know why?”
“Oh, God… I did for about five minutes in fourth-year grammar.
Something about subjects and predicates and intransitive
Christ-knows-whats. It’s all gone now.”
“No, it hasn’t. You wouldn’t say ‘better than me do,’ would
you?”
“No, I wouldn’t. Oh. I see.” Laurie did, for the first time. It
was crystal clear. He fought the sensation that a big cartoon
lightbulb had just popped on over his head. “Why did nobody explain
it to me like that before?”
“Blinding kids with science helps a teacher keep his mystical
authority over them. ‘Better than me’ is fine in everyday speech.
Everyone knows what you mean, and ‘better than I’ sounds pompous.
But you can just add the do, to work out which one is correct.
I think I told you my mother was English. She…ran away to join the
gypsies, I suppose you would say.”
Laurie stared at him. I can see how
she came to do that, was in his mouth, on
his tongue. A slow wave of warmth passed through him.
She looked into a pair of eyes like yours, and
the rest of the world faded to nothing.
Remembering himself—his resolution, his obligations—he tried to
make a sensible reply. “Oh. Is she—”
But
Sasha leaned toward him. For a moment his hand clasped and
unclasped in the wool of Laurie’s sweater as if he could not decide
whether to seize him or push him away. Laurie, astonished, sat
still, and a moment later felt the swift, warm-velvet press of
Sasha’s mouth against his own. It was tentative, exploratory. As
Sasha backed off, Laurie saw him clouded with anxiety, trying to
work out the effects of what he had done, his smile contradicting
but not hiding the fear in his eyes. Sasha said faintly, “I’m
sorry.”
“Don’t,” Laurie said, his own voice a strange, dry rasp to him.
“I mean…don’t be sorry. It’s okay. But I told you, you don’t have
to—”
“Oh, I know.”
“You don’t have to do anything at all,” Laurie finished
awkwardly, reaching helplessly forward to kiss him back.