Chapter Fourteen #2
But they had things to do, so Nico pulled back, just a fraction, not letting go. They were both breathing hard.
“Mon ami,” he said. “Mon ami, mon coeur, I beg you, let me make that enflure go away. Your lover, yes?”
Titus twitched, as though trying to jerk away. Nico held on, and after a tense second Titus slumped, resting his forehead against Nico’s. “Yes. Lover, landlord. I ended it when I couldn’t bear any more. He was furious. He raised my rent—”
“Cafard de merde.”
“And now he wants to be together again, which—which—I offered him five hundred pounds to go away and he said no. He said it was miserly and contemptible and I have to treat him as he deserves.”
“Oh, let us do that by all means,” Nico said. “What is his threat?”
“He says he’ll lodge a complaint against me. Sodomy,” Titus said in a whisper.
“Has he letters?”
“No. I never wrote anything.”
“Then he can only accuse. That would endanger himself as much as you.”
“He won’t care,” Titus said with dreary certainty.
“When he gets angry enough, he breaks things, and he won’t care if it gets him into trouble too.
Or he will later, but then it will be my fault for pushing him to it.
And it is my fault because he’s been writing to me and I’ve been ignoring the letters, so he’s been stewing and getting angrier and now he needs to be begged and placated and praised into a better mood and he wants money and he wants to be in my life again and I can’t—”
“And will not,” Nico said over his rising, accelerating voice. “Stop. I will deal with this.”
“There’s nothing you can do!” Titus said desperately. “You don’t understand. He’s worked himself into such a rage, and if I tell him no, he’ll do something awful. He simply can’t control himself when he’s like this. I’ve seen it.”
So had Nico. “He broke things in anger?”
“All the time.”
“His own things? Things he cared for?”
“Yes, he—” Titus stopped. “Well, mostly mine, now you mention it. He slashed a painting with a knife, but it was one I had given him. And tore up a book, but again … No. No, he didn’t break his own things.”
“You astonish me. Go back in, mon coeur. Tell him enough is enough. You have parted ways already, you do not choose to continue his acquaintance, and you ask him to take his leave with grace.”
“But he won’t!”
“I’m sure he will not, but you should give him the chance. I will join you in one moment. Oh, and tell me his direction first.”
He ran upstairs and down as fast as he could, but by the time he was at the parlour door, Morris was already well into a hectoring speech, ranting over Titus’s lower, pleading tones.
Nico strode into the room without ceremony and kicked the door shut with his heel. “Monsieur Jean-Foutre. Still here?”
Morris swung round, his red face as ugly as his waistcoat. “I don’t know who you think you are. I suppose he’s paying you to warm his bed?”
“Henry—” Titus began.
“If you’re going to betray me for some pretty Frog, I’ll see you get what you deserve,” Morris snarled. “You think you can just toss me away like soiled rags when you have done with me? I will tell the world what sort of man you are!”
“You don’t know what sort of man he is,” Nico said. “You have not the capacity. But I know what sort of man you are, and so I make you an offer.”
“I don’t want your offer,” Morris said, “I want you— Hey! What are you doing?”
That was because Nico had walked up to him, and kept walking, forcing him to step back. He tried to stand his ground; Nico shoved him hard in the chest. “Hey! Stop this!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Nico said, and pulled his knife.
It was a Spanish folding knife, a navaja de muelles with an engraved steel handle.
It opened with a distinctive, menacing set of ratcheting clicks that Nico always thought of as the sound of a fight starting.
His father had given it to him on his tenth birthday, which was entirely typical of his father.
Morris’s shoulders hit the wall. Nico settled the point at his belly, pressing hard enough for him to feel the sharp steel. Titus made a noise of protest, which Nico chose not to hear.
“Right,” he told Morris. “The offer is, you piss off and you don’t come back.
You do not see him again, you do not speak to him again, you do not write to him or talk about him or think about him again.
If he’s coming down the road, you turn round and walk away.
You don’t even consider going to the law.
And in return—” Nico dragged the blade up his torso, rucking the linen of his shirt, and rested the point at the hollow of his throat. Morris made a noise.
“In return, I won’t cut you open,” Nico said softly. “I won’t unseam you from the balls to the throat, watch your guts spill out, and kick you into a ditch to die. If you stay away. That’s my offer. I think it’s generous.”
Morris’s noises were unseemly. Titus was frozen in the corner of Nico’s eye. He might be overdoing it a bit, but subtlety was overrated.
“I don’t like you,” he informed Morris, in case it wasn’t clear. “Just give me an excuse to come round number eleven Lamb’s Conduit Street: I won’t be as friendly next time. Do you understand?”
Morris blubbered something. Nico leaned in. “I didn’t hear you. Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes! Titus—”
“Don’t speak to him!” Nico shouted, loud and close enough to make Morris jerk back and bang his head on the wall. “I told you, you piece of shit!”
“Please! I’m sorry!”
“You should be,” Nico said, leaning back and switching to a pleasant, relaxed speaking voice.
“You’re a prick, Morris. You’re a miserable turd, and nobody will care when you die.
Be a better person. Or jump in the Thames, whichever seems easier.
” He stepped back, snapped the navaja shut, dropped it into his pocket. “Off you go. Don’t come back.”
Henry Morris departed, trembling and with the stiff-legged gait of a man trying to control his bladder.
He kept his head angled away from Titus, Nico was pleased to see.
Still, he strolled after the fellow, and watched him take his hat and coat from Mr. Thorpe in silence, before the door shut definitively behind him.
Mr. Thorpe gave Nico a questioning look. Nico winked at him, and after a second, the butler’s face relaxed.
Nico went back into the parlour, to find Titus exactly where he’d left him, eyes wide.
“Bon,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Uh. You—”
He looked terrified. Nico went over, reaching for him, and saw him flinch.
Shit. “Ah, mon ami, do not fear! It was only a performance, acting a part. I play the villain as well as your brother, you see? The Paris stage likes stronger meat than London, and the gambling hell positively demanded it. When one is not large, one must learn to be intimidating in other ways.”
“You had a knife!”
Nico felt in his pocket for the smooth-handled knife, took it out, held up his other hand demonstratively, and jabbed the blade into his palm. Titus cried out in alarm, and then said, “What the—?!”
“An actor’s prop, no more. The blade goes back into the handle, you see?” He demonstrated with the stage knife again. The navaja’s very real and razor-sharp blade could be his and Morris’s little secret. “It has a reservoir for blood too. For the dramatic effect.”
“Oh good God,” Titus said, and sat down abruptly, just about managing to hit the chair.
Nico came over and squatted down in front of him, a gentle hand on his knee.
“You cannot appeal to reason or kindness with that type. All he thinks of is how wronged he is. Well, now his wrongs include a violent man threatening to kill him, and I expect that will occupy his thoughts to the exclusion of all else.”
Titus took that in. “I suppose—but what if he makes a complaint against you? Or if he stews on it and makes a complaint against me anyway?”
“The first is my problem. The second—well, if he still moves against you, nothing would have stopped him. But what was your alternative? Take him back as your lover? Let him move in here? Hand him money, and see how often and how greedily he came back for more?”
“No. No, I couldn’t. Oh God. You were really just acting then? You’re very good because I was terrified. Why were you doing an English accent?”
“What?”
“Your accent. You didn’t sound French at all.”
Christ Jesus, had he dropped it? Nico couldn’t even remember: he must have been angrier than he knew.
He gave his airiest shrug. “I often put it on in the gaming hell: All Paris knows the English are dangerous brutes. And it unnerved him. Change the voice, change the stance, be fierce, be calm, always change. The audience is unsettled; they are kept on their toes, as you say, and they believe more easily for it.”
“Oh. Goodness. But if you can do an English accent so well, and English speech too, why don’t you always—”
“We digress,” Nico said firmly. “You need a glass of wine to settle your nerves. What a remarkably unpleasant man.”
“You have no idea,” Titus said. “Or perhaps you do, I don’t know. Have you ever seen leather prepared?”
“I avoid tanneries.”
“No, well, they are foul, but I meant after the hide is soaked. The leather-worker uses a long blade and he scrapes at the inside of the hide to cut away whatever’s left of the flesh or fat.
Scrapes and scrapes, till the skin is so thin and flexible it will bend to whatever he wants.
That was me, by the end. He scraped at me till I was hollow and pliable and doing whatever he wanted—”
“No, he did not. You gave him his congé, no?”
“I told him we would not be together anymore. It was ghastly. He shouted, and he cried, and he told me all the ways in which I was wrong and bad and worthless. And then he raised my rent. And then he wrote and I ignored his letters—”
“You told him no and you stuck to that no,” Nico said. “It shows admirable decision.”
“If I had that, I shouldn’t have let him behave as he did for so long.”
“Nonsense. At first you liked him, yes? You wanted him to be happy, and to repair matters when you feared you had offended him. If he took advantage of your goodwill, that is not your fault.”
“I don’t even know what he wanted, except for both of us to be as miserable as he could manage. He made everything into an affront, as though he enjoyed being outraged and upset.” Titus’s mouth turned down in a spasm of unhappiness. “I don’t understand why.”
“Nor I, and I do not care to,” Nico said. “I have met many people of that wretched type, and they may make one another unhappy a long way from me. Congratulate yourself that you dug him out of your life. It is hard to do with that sort.”
“Well, I didn’t, given he came back to blackmail me!”
Nico squeezed his knee. “If you tell these people to go away a hundred times, they come back a hundred and one. Generally, it only ends when they find a new victim. Or if you offer to murder them. That speeds matters up considerably.”
Titus attempted a laugh. “I don’t think I could do that.”
“But of a certainty you could! Not with a knife, perhaps, but with the poison. Think. You ask the good Thorpe to bring you both wine. You drink. Then you inform him that the wine was adulterated with some vileness of colour. What was it called, the yellow arsenic?”
“Orpiment, but—”
“You tell him he has drunk orpiment—for best effect, you would put some yellow colour in the wine first—and rehearse the terrible death that awaits him. The cramping guts, the froth at the mouth, the failing sight. You tell him stage by stage until he can taste the poison in his mouth and he is weeping for mercy—”
“Yes, but would he not point out I had drunk it too?” Titus objected, to Nico’s immense satisfaction. “And I’m sure one would taste orpiment, even in wine.”
“But he doesn’t know that. And naturally you drank it, because you possess the antidote.”
“There isn’t an—”
“Quiet. You possess the antidote, which you propose to take now while you leave him to die. He begs for mercy. You offer him a dose of the antidote in exchange for his written admission he is a lying slanderer. Et voilà, done.”
“You ought to write plays, not act in them,” Titus said. “Good heavens, Nico. Did you come up with all that on the spot?”
“I have seen many bad melodramas.”
Titus started laughing, in the helpless sort of way of a man who might cry. “Oh God. It’s a marvellous idea, though I’m very glad I didn’t have to do it, and—thank you, Nico. Thank you again. I don’t know why you do so much for me.”
Nico’s chest clenched viciously. “It is nothing.”
“It is everything. And I should have told you about him, because of course you would know what to do. I just—I didn’t want him here. I was afraid you wouldn’t understand.” He swallowed, watching Nico as he knelt by the chair with so much yearning in his eyes. “Nico, about earlier—”
“Mon coeur?” Please say the kiss was a mistake, Nico thought, a misjudgement, one you would rather not repeat. Please say that, because if you don’t, I can’t.
Titus was watching his face. He moved his mouth silently, trying out words, then simply reached out, his stained hand turning palm up in appeal, invitation, an offer Nico couldn’t refuse.
He took Titus’s hand.