Chapter 12 #2
There was another long silence. Laura had gone pale, then pink.
And Micha, against his better judgement and all the bulwarks he had constructed against the world, felt for her.
He had known this kind of love well, once upon a time, a universal thing made specific, and enacted hastily, shamefully in the corners of other people’s lives.
Making thieves of those who did not steal.
“And this Fred is a shy gentleman?” he asked.
She nodded vigorously.
“And you have no idea how he might feel about you?”
“Not at all. I mean, let us just say I am aware that I would be an unconventional choice for . . . for . . . Fred.”
“I see your dilemma.”
“Sticky, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps you should try to be honest with Fred and see where that leads you?”
“What if he’s disgusted?”
“That’s always the risk.”
She sighed. “But then I’ll have lost even the friendship of someone I care about.”
“That, too, is the risk.”
She thought about it. “What a bugger,” she concluded.
Micha nodded.
They rode on in subdued silence.
“Maybe I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who was disgusted with me,” Laura muttered. “I mean, if someone cares for you, even if it’s only as a friend, it shouldn’t matter who you love.”
Micha could remember, with the sort of clarity that only ever preserves the most painful of memories, saying the same sort of thing to his parents.
His weeping mother, the father who would no longer look at him.
They probably remembered the day he left with Isidore as the day he stopped being their son, but he knew it as the day he realised he never had been. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
She mustered a smile. “Not one for false hope, are you, old chap?”
“I’ve lost track of what’s hope and what’s falsehood. But if Fred has any sense at all, he’ll at least listen to what you have to say.”
She nodded. “He’s the most wonderful . .
. man . . . I’ve ever met. It’s all inside, you know.
Like those caves you read about with lakes and crystals in them that nobody would know about if they didn’t go looking.
And properly accomplished too. Not like me.
” Her voice had gone soft and dreamy. “Such delicate hands on the harpsichord.”
Micha coughed.
“I mean—oh dash it all.” She turned pink again. “Anyway, I should get off home. Thanks for talking to me, Michael. I really do appreciate it. Come over for tea, won’t you?”
“Oh, right, thank you.”
“Enormous house on the hill, can’t miss it.” She smirked at him. He gave her a sour look in response, and she laughed. “And if you like riding, you should see the white horse.”
“The what?”
“The white horse.”
“I’ve already got a horse.”
“Not like this one. Ask Thomas.” And with that, she urged Gulliver into a trot and struck out across the fields. Soon, she was galloping. He heard her curse as her hat went flying. And her hair unfurled behind her like the rays of the sun.
Micha went home at a more measured pace.
Of course he had no intention of asking Thomas about the white horse, whatever that was.
But when he came through the door, he found him sitting on the bottom of the stairs, his arms folded across the top of his knees.
The position made him seem more than usually rangy, like some scrawny, black-feathered bird.
“Something the matter?” Micha lounged against the doorframe.
Thomas looked up, tried to smile, and shook his head. “No . . . I . . . Forgive me, this must look quite peculiar.”
“Well, yes, a bit.”
“Mrs. Greenlie passed away this afternoon.”
After a moment, Micha pushed himself away from the wall and went to sit beside Thomas. His upper arm, from elbow to shoulder, fit against Micha’s. “Oh, sorry.”
“It was very peaceful. The family are sad, of course, but it was a shock to no one.”
Micha realised he had heedlessly mirrored Thomas’s pose, so he turned his head so he could watch the other man’s profile.
There was something a little forbidding about Thomas from this angle.
Although he was not handsome, there was a degree of hauteur to his features, a gift of his lineage rather than his character.
“If it was all angels and hallelujahs, why are you sitting on the stairs?”
Thomas visibly crumpled. “Because I lied to you.”
“Everybody lies.”
“I know.” Thomas closed his eyes. “But I hate this lie. I hate it more than anything. And I have to tell it, over and over and over again.”
Micha shifted uncomfortably, accidentally banging his arm into Thomas.
He had, after all, already plundered Thomas’s secrets and only yesterday used what little he knew of them to torment him.
It had been the pettiest of impulses, but Micha had indulged it anyway, all because Thomas had tried to give him something that had the power to make him happy.
“You don’t owe me anything.” He shrugged. “Truth or lie, it makes no difference to me.”
Thomas leaned a little, just a little, into his shoulder. “I don’t want to burden you with this.”
Micha wondered if he would still have touched the journal if he had understood the context of those four carefully written words. Probably. But now he knew the extent of his trespass. “I’ll manage. Tell me, if you want to tell me, or don’t.”
“My brother Edward,” said Thomas, his voice cutting strangely through the silence, precise as a razor blade, “did not die by accident. He shot himself.”
Micha suddenly realised his acting skills were largely sex-based and he had no idea how to plausibly sound surprised. “He must have been very unhappy.”
“Yes.” Thomas’s voice wavered. “He must have been. But Micha, I had no idea.”
Micha tried desperately to think of something comforting. “Well, how much can we know about each other? I mean, really.”
Thomas sat up, his fingers twisting together. “He was my brother. How long and how deeply he must have suffered. And I am still no closer to understanding than I was the day the marquess summoned me to help him cover up the scandal.”
There was a long silence. Micha saw himself, two years ago on the docks at Dover, those monstrous cliffs standing at his back like sentries, while Isidore left him.
Stopped Micha’s life like a finger upon a compass and disappeared into his own.
It should not have been unexpected. Had Micha been Isidore, he would not have chosen differently.
“Sometimes knowing something doesn’t make it any easier to understand. ”
Thomas turned his lips up into something like a smile. “I suppose you must be right,” he murmured. “But I feel so very far from any understanding.”
“What was he like?”
“Edward? Oh, he was the best of us, and I do not say that simply because it’s convention that the deceased must be sanctified in memory.
He had George’s looks and spirit, but he was kind, so very kind.
It was as though nothing was ever beneath his notice.
And when he spoke to you, or looked at you, he could make you the centre of the world.
I always felt less dull when I was with him. ”
Micha lowered his head onto his hands. “I don’t think you’re dull,” he muttered, resenting the admission even as he offered it.
But Thomas went on as though he had not heard.
“The marquess is, well, he is who he is. We Mandevilles can trace our line back to 1066, you know. This seems to mean something to him. But I think he truly loved Edward. George was simply insurance. And I, of course, was unforeseen, inadvertent, and unnecessary. At least to His Lordship.” He paused and then added, in a rather brittle tone, “Let us hope this wayward course is part of some greater plan, its intricacies both unseen and unknown.”
Micha had long ago abandoned all belief that life was anything but utterly, and carelessly, arbitrary, so he had little comfort to offer.
There might have been a time when he would have offered touch instead, but that was no longer a simple thing, nor an innocent one.
He knew incalculable ways to make a man shudder and spend, but he had forgotten how to ease loneliness or pain.
Suddenly Thomas stood. He paced across the hall, his steps ringing loud across the flags, his coat a blur of shadow.
“But how can it be?” Rage and sorrow were thick in his voice.
“How can it be part of a divine plan that my brother die alone and afraid and damned? Self-murder? A sin?” His hands came up, long fingers twisting through his hair.
“No, no, He is not supposed to burden us with more than we can bear. But if we buckle, then we are forever cast out? If our lives are truly His, then our deaths must be too, even the ones we believe we choose for ourselves. Or does He abandon us, then? In our deepest need? Why should we trust in a God so cruel? Why should we venerate Him?”
“Thomas,” said Micha helplessly from where he still sat, frozen, on the stairs. “Thomas.”
“Even His own son despaired of Him. His own son. What kind of father—” Whatever Thomas had been about to say was lost in a rush of tears, and he sank slowly to the floor. “Oh God, forgive me. What am I saying?”
“Just words.”
Thomas raised his head. Pale face, drowned eyes. He might as well have been miles away, he was so far beyond Micha’s reach.
“It’s just words,” Micha said, again. And then, “I’m sure Edward’s fine. Sitting on a little cloud with little golden wings. Or something.”
Thomas made an odd sound that was not quite a laugh. “Oh Micha. I know you’re trying to help but—”
“What? It’s no less plausible than a great fiery pit where you burn for all eternity.”
“Hell isn’t a place. It’s simply the absence of God.”
Despite Micha’s carefully nurtured apathy, the words were chilling. Or perhaps it was the certainty in Thomas’s voice. Too much loss, tangled up like fraying yarn. “Then maybe we’re already in it.”
“Please don’t say that.” Thomas shuddered. “I can’t bear the thought of it.”
“Sorry.”
“No, I should be the one to apologise. What a dreadful scene for you to witness. I don’t know what . . . what happened to me.”
“It’s fine.” Micha could hear his own harshness as it echoed in the stairwell. “Don’t worry about it. Really. I’m not one of your parishioners, and I don’t have much love for this God of yours, so you don’t have to put on a show for me.”
“No but . . .” Thomas covered his face with his hands. “What must you think of me?”
“I think you’re grieving. That’s not a crime.”
Thomas was silent.
Micha tried to think of something he could say. “Th-Thomas,” he tried at last, stumbling when he realised how rarely he used the man’s name and how much he had said it during this single conversation.
“Yes?”
“What’s the white horse?”
Thomas looked briefly startled by the question. “It’s . . . well . . . you sort of have to see it, really.”
“Oh.” Micha swallowed. All he had to do was ask.
But it was utterly beyond him, the words caught in his throat like a fragment of bone.
He had what he had told himself he wanted: Thomas, as frail and flawed and lost and human as everyone else.
And yet, it brought Micha no satisfaction.
He could not feed his own pride on the dust of someone else’s.
He wanted to say something, or do something, that would ease the pain and shame he could see etched across Thomas’s features. Yet the price was too high.
Thomas rose slowly to his feet, dashing the moisture from his eyes with the heel of a hand. “I could take you,” he offered hesitantly, “if you wish. It isn’t far. Perhaps tomorrow afternoon?”
Micha shrugged, as though it didn’t matter to him that, even in weakness, Thomas was still the stronger man. The better man. “Yes. Yes, all right.”