Chapter 3
Do you like this, he says.
His thrusts shove me forward onto my elbows. It’s all a mess of sweat and skin. Nowhere to go. His fingers will leave bruises on my hips like a chain of dark roses.
I don’t know what he wants me to say.
Do you like this?
I tell him no. The hands of strangers smudge the memories of Isidore that once gleamed upon my skin.
Laughing, he drags me against him. His fingernails leave bloody trails down my chest. A hard hand encloses my cock.
But you want it, he says.
I shake my head. My hair clings to my neck, heavy, damp and itchy.
He frigs me while he fucks me. He makes me gasp for him and cry out.
Then he makes me spend.
Consciousness came back to Micha in jagged pieces. Slowly, in the darkness behind his eyes, he taught himself to recognise anew the borders between dreams and reality, past and present, memories and nightmares.
He felt weak beyond reckoning, to say nothing of ill, but the worst of the pain had departed with the phantasmagoria of delirium and the torments of opium withdrawal.
There was a familiar haze in his mind, a softness to the world.
He tried to remember what had happened or where he was, but he found only fragments.
A night that could have been any other night. Smoke. Shadows. And a name. Thomas?
Slowly, he became aware of a voice. The voice seemed familiar to him, but that was impossible.
Words washed over him.
“‘But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the things it looks upon to bless.’”
He pushed open his eyes and was immediately dazzled.
The voice stopped abruptly. And then there was a cool hand on his.
Micha tried to shake it off, but he was unable to move.
He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a dry croak.
Immediately a glass of water was brought to his lips.
The first few droplets were cool as diamonds and tasted sweeter than anything he could ever have imagined.
He jerked forward, eager for more, and choked almost immediately.
The hand steadied him, and a second gathered the water as it trickled from his mouth.
“Careful.” The strange-familiar voice had a peculiar, pleasing timbre to it, the cut-glass vowels of privilege softened by calm, careful rhythms. It was as unexpectedly lovely as the water.
“Don’t,” Micha rasped. “Don’t touch me.”
There was a swift, clumsy withdrawal. “I’m terribly sorry. But you should drink, if you can.”
“I can do it.”
With an effort that was as much will as physical strength, he tried to enfold his fingers around the glass.
His nails were ragged and rimmed with dirt, his hands inelegant and wasted by illness, a wretched reflection of the white, long-fingered, and gentlemanly hand that supported the other side of the glass.
Micha hardly dared contemplate what had happened to the rest of him.
Without his looks, he had no profession, and with no profession he had no money, and without money, there would be no opium.
And without opium, his world was nothing. He was nothing.
He tugged impatiently away from the stranger who had tried to help him, taking sole possession of the glass, though his perspiring fingertips smeared the clear surface.
His whole arm began shaking. He fastened his spare hand over his forearm to steady himself, raising the glass inch by inch towards his mouth.
The surface of the water seemed to shine from a great distance, and he could have wept for wanting it.
It was almost within reach when his fingers betrayed him.
The glass slid from his grip, and there was nothing he could do to catch it. Water soaked the bedsheets.
“Fuck.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from beside him. And Micha looked up, furious and mortified, only to careen headlong into the forgiving gaze of the deepest eyes he had ever seen. A shudder ran through him, for, across the breadth of human weakness, he could not abide kindness.
The man caught the empty glass before it rolled off the bed and refilled it from a nearby ewer. “Please, permit me to help you. There is no shame in frailty.”
Micha tried to laugh, but the air just scraped harshly across his vocal cords until he began to cough instead.
And then he had no choice but to accept the water that was held to his lips.
He clamped a pathetically feeble hand about the stranger’s wrist, exerting what little control he could.
The man seemed perfectly willing to be guided, his slight movements as smooth as a quiet stream beneath Micha’s fitful directions.
Under his palm, Micha could feel flowing heat and the steady throb of a pulse, pristine skin and slender bones.
If he had possessed the strength, he would have left his thumbprints behind like footsteps upon fresh snow, anything to ruin the serenity of such uncomprehending, careless beauty.
But the effort of trying to drink, then drinking, had apparently exhausted him. He fell back against the pillows, his eyes closing of their own volition. His last conscious thought, which was really little more than a blurred sensation, was of an endless, unchanging warmth beneath his hand.
73
There is a pale shadow of Isidore in this youth.
In his golden hair and his apple green eyes, rose leaf lips and sun-touched skin.
But he is not Isidore. He is uncertain. Rapt, he undresses me, touches my well-touched skin.
His breath is warm, his tongue is light.
He is the explorer of a land with no secrets left.
He says he wants to watch my face. I try to give him a performance of pleasure but, as he sinks into me, his eyes look through me to some private paradise I have long since forgotten how to find.
He squanders care on me as though I am precious.
Afterwards, he asks, was it all right, was he pleasing, did I like him.
I tell him, get the fuck away from me. Before he sees me weep.
“Isidore?”
Micha tumbled into wakefulness, roused by his own cry.
For a moment, he was utterly disorientated, wrapped in unfamiliar sheets, surrounded by unfamiliar walls.
An oil lamp, turned low, wove about him a net of shadows.
Then he remembered. He lay in a stranger’s bed, in a stranger’s house, under a stranger’s care.
He struggled to sit up and just about managed to prop himself on his elbows. The man was still at his bedside, as if he had not moved all the time Micha slept.
“You were dreaming,” he murmured.
Micha glared. “I noticed.”
The man lowered his eyes apologetically. Such soft eyes, with lashes so thick and dark Micha could have counted them. Not that he would have wanted to. “May I have him brought to you?”
“What? Who?”
“The man for whom you call. Isidore.”
It was strange to hear Isidore’s name on another’s lips, as though he were some private ghost summoned suddenly into reality by a spiritualist. Micha’s fingers curled into his palms, little pricks of superficial pain against a deeper one.
“He is a friend? A brother?”
Micha shook his head. “Not a brother.” His lips curled into a sneer. “Nor a friend.” He was seized by a sudden, savage impulse to tell the truth. Just to split this man’s compassion open like rotten fruit. Shatter his calm into pieces. Show him he had a heart just as capable of hate.
“Oh yes,” said the stranger, with a look Micha could not read, “you did tell me you had no need of friends.”
He had a vague memory of saying something like that before he fainted right into the man’s arms. “I suppose,” he snapped, “you expect my gratitude for this?”
“Of course not. One does not give aid to make others feel beholden.”
“Right.”
The man tilted his head curiously. “Do you think I want something from you?”
“I’ve nothing to give you, so you’re doomed to disappointment regardless. But I don’t believe something for nothing exists in this world.”
“I hope only for your well-being.”
“Then you’re deluding yourself.”
To Micha’s surprise, the man flushed. He had a stern, angular face, not handsome but expressive somehow, full of subtleties. “What may I call you?” he asked, after a moment of flustered silence.
“Michael. Dashwood. Most call me Micha.”
The man smiled shyly, as though he’d been given a gift. “Micha then. My name is—”
“Thomas.”
His smile turned radiant. “Yes. Thomas Mandeville.” He seemed to hesitate. “The Reverend Thomas Mandeville.”
Micha threw back his head and laughed himself breathless. “A priest. I should have fucking known. Oh, does my language offend you, Father? I am to call you ‘Father,’ yes?”
The man—Thomas, Father Thomas—was folding and unfolding his fingers. “I am not accustomed to such forthright speech,” he admitted, before adding earnestly, “Though I will grow accustomed. And I do not usually go by ‘Father.’ Thomas is fine, or Mr. Mandeville if you must grant me a title.”
“I think I can probably bear not to.”
“I did not mean . . . that is . . . some people are uncomfortable to address a priest as they would any other man.”
“Well, can’t have the wheat muddled with the chaff, the righteous with unrighteous, is that not so, Thomas?”
“No. Not at all. I would simply not wish any to confuse the man with the message. There is already a Father in Heaven who guides and loves us.”
“Oh, yes, Him.” Micha fell back against the pillows, dizzy, tired, and, as he was beginning to notice, laudanum-deprived. There was no pleasure in tormenting this man. He took everything so seriously and seemed disposed to give even Micha’s weakest, most unjust barbs fair consideration.
“My brother,” offered Thomas weakly, “calls me Thom. Or, you know, ‘prig’ or ‘arse’ or things along similar lines, as brothers are wont to do.”
“And what do you call him?”
“Er . . . George.”
Micha turned his head. His voice was little more than a whisper now. “That’s the best you can manage? Pathetic.”
The Reverend Thomas Mandeville smiled suddenly, a wicked, gleaming smile. “On the contrary. George absolutely hates it when I turn the other cheek.”
“Does Our Lord and Saviour mind you using His teachings to piss off your brother?”
“Our Lord and Saviour had brothers too.”
Micha gave a sputter of weak but genuine laughter.
“You need to rest.” Thomas’s hand moved as if to touch Micha’s, but then he clearly thought better of it. “You are far from well.”
Micha closed his eyes. “I was an only child. Still am, I suppose.”
His body wanted rest, but his mind would not lie still. Images of entwined bodies and twisted flesh swirled sickeningly through the darkness until he had half-convinced himself he was seeing visions of hell. And Isidore, like a revenant angel who would not leave him alone.
A hand touched his brow, and he knocked it away.
“I’m sorry.” Thomas. Of course. “I thought you were feverish.”
“Talk to me.” The words escaped Micha’s lips before he could seal them in.
“Of course.” He heard the hint of a smile in Thomas’s voice. “I will lull you to sleep with my tedious reminiscences of childhood.”
There was a brief pause.
“Get on with it, then. Start lulling.”
“I was gathering my thoughts,” returned Thomas, calmly. “Perhaps I could tell you something of my brothers?”
“Don’t ask,” Micha growled. “Just talk.” Please.
“Well, um, my eldest brother—Edward—used to call George ‘Topper’ because he said he was like a spinning top. I can remember once, rather cruelly, explaining to Nurse that it was because George was always running in circles, but Edward meant it kindly. George never stopped moving, you see. He had endless energy and was—as I am sure you can imagine—endlessly in trouble.”
“What,” slurred Micha, “did Edward call you?”
“‘Skittle.’ Because George was always pushing me over, one way or another. We were born just minutes apart, you see. Edward said it was probably because I waited politely for George to go first.”
Thomas’s words seemed to come more easily the more he spoke, and it was frighteningly easy to listen to him.
To let another man’s remembrances serve as distraction from his own.
And how sweetly they were offered up, these gifts of the self.
Then again, Micha reflected bitterly, it was easy enough to be generous when you knew nothing of lack.
“I don’t think the marquess ever forgave our mother,” Thomas was saying.
“He had ordered two sons, you see, not three, and she died before she could give him a daughter.” The gas lamp was turned too low to reveal much of his expression, and Micha was too weary to try, but the shadows seemed to soften him.
Sadness and secrets revealed by the dark.
“I don’t remember her very well at all. I think I only saw her once or twice.
I remember having to wear my very best clothes and recite the Lord’s Prayer to her, so I was naturally quite resentful.
And—this may seem a peculiar confession for a priest—but when I was very young, I found it almost impossible to memorise the Lord’s Prayer correctly.
Nobody had ever tried to explain it to me, so it was nothing but obscure and meaningless sounds.
Once I think I said, ‘Give us this day our daily trespasses,’ and His Lordship thought I was being wilful and had the butler beat me for it. ”
Thomas’s voice rolled over him like velvet until, at last, Micha slept.