Chapter 10
Micha woke to a golden haze, rolled over, and reached for his bottle of laudanum.
It would send him, if not back to sleep, at least into a state that was almost the same.
The bottle felt slick and familiar beneath his fingers, but he hesitated, wanting out of the habit of wanting but also not wanting, which was an entirely new sensation.
It was not, however, any sort of choice.
He mixed up the laudanum and took enough to make the wanting fade, though it never really stopped.
He lay there for a while, feeling nothing but a painless, thoughtless calm, not quite floating, not quite dreaming, just cushioned by a softer world.
It was tempting to take more, make the world softer still and fall into it, like angel feathers.
But Thomas kept scratching at the edges of his peace.
You should do something, Micha. You need occupation, Micha.
Damn Thomas. Damn him.
And Micha didn’t need anything. Well. Nearly anything. The bottle slid from his slackened grasp and rolled across the covers.
Would nothing rid him of this turbulent priest?
Finally, he crawled out of bed, tugged on a dressing gown, and staggered across the room.
The light came gentled through the window and embraced him, stroking warm fingers over his face and throat.
The world outside was deeply green, tipped with scarlet and yellow, curled around the blue-grey horizon.
Perhaps . . . perhaps he would go out. Fade into a fall of autumn leaves.
Or he could take that damn sketchbook. Try to draw the world as it was, rather than drug-fuelled phantasms of what it could be. Except he preferred the latter. At least there was a place for him in it.
Half an hour later, dressed, with the sketchbook (the damn sketchbook) under his arm, Micha was standing at the edge of the rectory gardens, wondering where to go and feeling like a man at the edge of a precipice, though this part of England rolled away smoothly in all directions, as serene as the surface of a lake.
After a moment, he turned away from the village and began to walk.
His steps were slow, and he rested often, but, for once, it did not trouble him.
The world kept pace with him, speckling him with slow-dropping sunlight and sending little eddies of red-edged leaves to dance around his feet as he walked.
He came to a meadow, mingled with wildflowers, and sat awhile upon a stile to sketch.
It turned out rather poorly. He had misjudged the perspective, and the whole thing ended up looking like a strange, multicoloured sandwich.
So, he flipped the page and worked a little on his drawing of Thomas, deepening the eyes, adding detail to those expressive, perfect hands.
How would they feel when they took possession of Micha’s body?
Would his touch be gentle? He could not easily imagine violence from such smooth palms or cruelty from such tender fingers.
But perhaps he was only deceiving himself.
Sex was power, desire was shame, and Isidore had been the illusion all along.
Though his lips faintly remembered Isidore’s kisses—and perhaps, somewhere beneath the noise of other hands, his body still bore the imprint of his touches—such things were for another time, another world.
Micha put his pencil away and closed the book.
He had lost interest in drawing. He climbed down into the meadow and kept walking.
The tall grasses bowed like mocking courtiers as he passed through them.
Then came another stile, another meadow, this one studded with bloodred and tiger-black butterflies that flickered from flower to flower like pieces of flame.
He was the serpent in paradise, and the loveliness sliced his heart to ribbons.
A small stream cut a swathe of silver through the green, here and there overhung by the branches of a weeping willow, spun Rumpelstiltskin-gold by the season.
Two ducks paddled along placidly, the undersides of their wings flashing emerald.
It was a scene far beyond Micha’s paltry watercolours.
The world had decked itself in brilliant gemstone hues until it was almost luminous beneath the sun-bright sky.
Unable to bear the beauty of it, Micha was turning to leave when something enormous, red-brown and quite extraordinarily hairy, went barrelling past him, almost knocking him over.
He had a jumbled impression of a joyously lolling tongue and streaming ears, and then came a voice, far too genteel for the words it uttered: “Ruff, get your arse back here, right now. I said ‘Heel,’ you mongrel son of a bitch.”
Micha spun. Climbing over the stile was perhaps the tiniest woman he had ever seen.
Ruff, halfway across the meadow, hesitated.
One paw still raised, he cast a guilty look over his shoulder.
Then his nose twitched. Then he went rigid, even to the furthest flying feathers of his tail.
His head snapped forward. In those fleeting seconds, he was quite the pointiest dog Micha had ever seen, a long, lean canine arrow.
“Oh no you don’t,” bellowed his owner. “Leave those fucking ducks alone.”
Ruff was practically vibrating with indecision.
Then one of the ducks rose up from the water, its wings fluttering, bright as banners.
And Ruff was off.
“Fuck,” said the woman, who had to be sixty if she was a day. “Fucking fuck.”
“Er . . .” Despite his time on the streets of the London slums, Micha was still enough a child of the middle classes to instinctively respect his elders. Even if his elders were swearing like a sailor on shore leave. “Don’t worry, I’ll get him.”
He put down the sketchbook and ran off after the dog.
He thought he heard the woman call something after him, but he could hear very little beyond his own laboured breathing and pounding heart.
Maybe Thomas had been right. He did need to do something to regain his strength, because this was ridiculous.
A week-old kitten would have outpaced him, let alone a vigorous dog the size of a small elephant.
By the time Micha caught up with him, Ruff seemed more interested in chasing the ducks in circles than hurting them, and Micha joining the fray only contributed to the excitement.
Such was Ruff’s joy in this new and thoroughly entertaining game that all remonstrations went unheeded, and Micha was obliged to make a wild grab for Ruff’s collar instead.
His fingers closed around it, but he had considerably overestimated his own strength.
Ruff—assuming this was all part of the fun—bounded onwards.
Micha lost both his footing and his hold on the dog and went arse over apex, face-first into the stream.
The squelch of mud and the shock of cold water.
Coupled with mortified dignity and searing personal outrage.
Spluttering and swearing, Micha pushed himself to his hands and knees, just in time to see the ducks flapping lazily off into the sky. Ruff plonked himself down on the bank and tilted his head curiously at the foolish human who had unaccountably jumped straight into the water.
“You—” began Micha. But then his hands, inadequately braced on silt and pebbles, slid out from under him, and after a second or two of unseemly flailing, he went down again.
When he resurfaced, it was to the sound of someone laughing and an arm extended to help him.
“If you weren’t old enough to be my grandmother,” he grumbled, while the woman steadied him and got him back onto his feet, “you’d be in here with me.”
“I tried to warn you.” She dabbed at her eyes with her free hand. “Dear me, that was the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.”
Micha scrambled onto dry land and collapsed onto the grass in a sodden heap. “Dull year?”
“Rather a sublime downfall, dear.”
“Nice to know I’m good for something.”
She eyed him, not unkindly. “You poor boy. You could catch your death of cold.”
Micha could already feel the chill seeping into his skin. “I’ll be all right.” It was typical really. This was what you got for trying to do a good deed. Thrown into streams and laughed at by old women with monstrous dogs. He crawled to his feet and lurched off to retrieve his sketchbook.
“That will never do,” said the old woman, keeping pace with him easily. “You’d better come along with me.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.” She clicked her fingers, and the dratted animal—miraculously obedient all of a sudden—came bouncing over.
“Come, Ruff, come.” He pushed his nose apologetically into Micha’s hand, nearly knocking him off his feet again.
Micha glared at him and then, somehow, found himself scratching the dog behind his silly flyaway ears.
Ruff made a deep happy noise and drooled on Micha’s boots.
“Is this some kind of convoluted kidnapping racket?” he asked. “Using your dog to lure helpless young men into streams and then you whisk them off to who knows where?”
The woman’s eyes, which were very blue, twinkled at him rather charmingly. “Do stop making a fuss and come along, dear.”
Micha gave an aggrieved sigh but, not knowing quite what else to do, he fell into step beside her. Finding his way back to the rectory in wet clothes was not a pleasant prospect, and besides, she was . . . she was . . . nice?
“It’s Michael,” he offered, “Michael Dashwood. But—” He had been about to say that most people called him Micha, but then he stopped.
Micha was a name that had once glittered gold upon Isidore’s tongue, before it became a common thing, passed between the mouths of strangers, spit-tarnished.
It had been many years since he had been merely Michael. His mother’s son.
“Esther Dawes,” she told him, with a smile. “And I believe you’ve already had the pleasure of Reginald Ruffington’s acquaintance.”
“I . . . what?”