Chapter 8
It took them two days, at an easy pace and stopping often to change horses, to travel from London to Oxfordshire.
Micha had not known the luxury of a private carriage since his time with Isidore, but his strength was not what it had been and he spent most of the journey sleeping fitfully.
Sometimes he would rouse to find himself braced against Thomas, tucked against his arm, or—on one particularly unfortunate occasion—half in his lap, while one of Thomas’s pale gentleman’s hands had moved almost absently through Micha’s tousled hair.
Micha had seen very little of Thomas in the handful of days preceding their journey.
Not enough to miss him—because why would he?
—but enough to feel his absence, in spite of what he had read in the journal.
And that made no sense at all. Micha half-suspected Thomas had to be a servant of the devil, rather than the Lord, since knowing what he did of Thomas’s intentions and distinctly profane desires had made less of a difference than Micha would have hoped.
Some part of him still wanted to respond to Thomas’s warmth, the mischief in his smile, the concern in his voice.
In short, to the lies. But then, who knew better than an opium addict just how worthless truth could be?
Maintaining his supply of laudanum had, in fact, been Micha’s dominating concern.
There would likely be a druggist in, or near to, Nettlefield, but getting through the journey was a problem in and of itself.
He used laudanum more than he had ever smoked opium, but previously his intake had always been controlled by his finances.
Now, tucked safely away inside his coat was more money than he had ever held before in his life.
The idea of using it nauseated him, but the idea of going without laudanum hurt him still more.
It was no longer even a matter of pleasure.
He was merely staving off the misery of going without.
But, like so many other things, it mattered little.
Micha had no reason to think life would be any better without laudanum than with it.
And, if nothing else, it deadened pain and kept the tigers of memory at bay.
For travelling made him think too easily of Isidore.
How wide the world had seemed at Isidore’s side.
And now its horizon was Micha’s own flesh.
He dosed himself heavily each morning and let the two days slip away in a dull haze of drifting thoughts and bodily weakness.
“Micha?” Thomas’s voice stirred him at last.
“Mm?”
“We’re here.”
“Oh. Right. Right.” Micha shook himself and tried to ease the stiffness from his limbs as the carriage door was opened by the coachman. Darkness washed in from outside, and silence as deep and thick as a blanket.
Shaking off Thomas’s assisting hand, Micha stepped down, the crunch of his boots on gravel resounding in his ears.
Shadowy gardens lay all round him and, in the distance, the inky silhouette of a church tower.
He could just about make out the curve of a hill, leading into a speckle of golden light from the village below.
Thomas had disembarked behind him and was giving quiet instructions for the unloading of their meagre luggage.
Micha, meanwhile, turned a slow circle. Thomas’s home, what little he could see of it, suggested Georgian symmetry, all canted bay windows and gabled parapets.
It felt suddenly quite impossible that he was here.
He drew in a breath of the crisp, cold air, and it felt like the first breath he had ever taken.
His heart was thudding hard, as if the cage of his chest had expanded to let it truly beat.
He took a few steps into the darkness, and it embraced him like silk.
His soul expanded into the vast and beautiful emptiness of the universe like it did after a pipe of opium, but here there were no urban geometries to shape and limit him.
He tipped back his head to see a sky infinitely black and full of stars. Silver burned his eyes like tears.
He lost track of how long he stood there.
Then came a light touch on his arm, just below his elbow.
“Micha? Would you like to come inside?” In this softer, wider, more lovely world, Thomas’s voice was honey-sweet.
“Look at the sky.”
“Pardon? Oh . . . er. The sky?” Thomas, obliging as ever, glanced up.
“The stars look like someone spilled them.”
“I have never stopped to think about it but—yes, yes they do.”
“I had forgotten there existed so many.”
There was a line of broken heat running the line of Micha’s body where the edges of Thomas met the edges of him.
“There is a generosity to it, isn’t there?” offered Thomas, finally.
“Or carelessness.”
“I know very little about beauty, Micha, but I think to be heedless is not necessarily to be careless. It seems, I don’t know, free somehow.”
Micha extended his arm, his gaze following his finger into the sky. “They look so close. As if I could reach them if I only stretched a little further.”
Thomas’s fingers closed lightly around Micha’s wrist and turned his palm upwards. “There. Now it looks as if you hold them.”
The starlight spilled over his hand and down his wrist like pure, bright water. Unexpectedly, Micha shuddered. He dropped his arm, breaking the contact, and Thomas did nothing to prolong it. “That constellation”—he gestured half-heartedly—“the one right above us, is called Cygnus.”
“I can’t see anything that looks much like a swan.”
Micha traced the lines between the stars. “There . . . those are the wings, see, outstretched, and there’s the neck.”
Thomas tilted his head. “If you say so.”
“Well,” drawled Micha, “what happened to your sense of romance? Would you rather they called it ‘the one with the pointy downwards bit and the two pointy sideways bits’?”
He caught the glimmer of Thomas’s smile in the darkness. “I fear I’m a poor stargazer. Nobody has ever named them for me before.”
“Isidore knew them all.” From nowhere, a piece of memory: lying with his head against Isidore’s shoulder on one of Oxford’s glass-smooth lawns, gold and silver spun into a tapestry of light for their pleasure.
Micha swallowed. “And that one . . . the long one with the square tip, that one is Draco.”
“That is not, by any means, a dragon. It’s a wiggly line with a dot on the end. If anything, it is a kite.”
“For fuck’s sake, that’s its tail. And that’s the curve of its neck. Are you laughing at me?”
“I am certainly not laughing at you. I think it’s lovely that you know these things, and I’m touched you would share them with me.”
“Oh shut up. That one there, with the three lines radiating outwards from the square, that’s the Bowl of Peonies.”
“What?”
“And that one, just next to it, with the three small stars and the cluster, is known as the Cheese Board and Fish Knife.”
“Now you’re just making it up.”
“Yes.”
Thomas’s laughter rang out, as clear and joyous as bells on a summer morning. “You wretch.”
And, for a moment, Micha forgot to care that Thomas had only brought him here to fuck him.
He almost wanted him to do it, here and now, amid the silence and the beauty.
It seemed almost like a price worth paying.
Thomas’s body would cover him like moonlight and Micha would live amongst the stars, in the distant depths of the sky, far away from everything below.
He turned, quite deliberately, pressing himself to Thomas, and the line of heat became a lake of fire.
It should have been enough. But Thomas made no further move to touch him.
“Portly Man with a Cigar,” he said, instead.
Which was really not what Micha had expected. “Uh?”
Thomas’s smile was close now, close enough to kiss. He pointed. “There, look. Those three bright stars close together. And there’s the man, holding the cigar.”
“That’s the Warrior, you stupid man. Those three stars are Orion’s Belt.”
Thomas shook his head. “I don’t see it.”
“Then take it up with Ptolemy.”
For a little while, they said nothing more.
Micha edged a step closer. Thomas’s head turned ever so slightly, his breath cresting, warm and sinuous, against Micha’s lips.
Micha’s pulse was fluttering as frantically as the wings of a captive lark.
He felt confused and sick and wanting all at once.
Just do it, he thought. Get it over with.
While it may not feel like too great a debasement.
While I am so close to something like happiness.
But Thomas did not respond. His attention was fixed on the heavens.
“The bright star in Cygnus,” said Micha, finally, desperately, “that’s Bessel’s Star. It’s actually two stars close together, the primary star and its companion, but when we look at it from here, we only see one.”
“What a lot of things you know.”
The admiration in Thomas’s voice seemed genuine, and it threw Micha into confusion and resentment.
Why did it matter what he knew or didn’t know—it made no difference to what Thomas wanted.
“I don’t really. I just picked it up from Isidore.
He told me that Bessel’s Star is ten and a bit light-years away from us—they measured it using parallax or something, but I have no idea what that actually is—which means we’re looking at something out of time. ”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what we see is not what’s there. It’s what was there ten years ago. It could be changed or gone or anything.”
“How very remarkable.”
Again, that burgeoning sense of wonder, while Micha had only scorn to cast into the dark. “Remarkable? Really? We could be standing here, admiring the beauty of a dead thing.”