Chapter 16
Micha watched the three figures until the darkness claimed them. The house seemed suddenly very silent, very empty.
What had she said again? Truth always got you in the end.
And what of his truths? Would Madame Defleur’s daughter spit them at Thomas like maggots?
She could have vanquished him tonight with a few simple words.
Why had she not? Because she wished to hold them over him?
Because she wanted to torture him? Because she wanted Thomas?
He rested his head against the cold glass, but he still felt as though he burned like Icarus.
How easily they’d touched each other. How easily they’d laughed together. And what could Micha give but bitterness and mistrust? Even his body was pledged to a different sovereign. And Thomas had turned from him anyway when Micha had tried to keep him.
Some whore. All his wiles overthrown by a virgin priest.
He twisted his fingers through his hair, wanting the flickers of pain, as faint as the storm-lost stars.
He would not wait like a dog for scraps.
He groped his way to his room in the dark and mixed himself a careless measure of laudanum, followed by another, and then another. He lay on the floor, staring at the prickle of lights inside his eyelids, waiting not to think, waiting not to feel.
He dreamed of Isidore, and of Thomas, of ghosts and angels, the unreachable past and the impossible future.
It was mid-afternoon by the time he clawed his way back to wakefulness, to cold skin and bodily aches.
The storm had left the world crystal-bright, the sky stripped back to the barest cloudless blue.
The light that flooded his room was the cleanest light he had ever seen, and he had never felt so soiled nor so wretched.
He rolled painfully onto his side, retching on the aftermath of too much opium.
It was a long time before he was capable of washing himself and changing his clothes. His hands almost shook too much to allow him to shave. Where was Thomas? He surely knew by now.
Whore, liar, thief, opium eater, blackmailer.
Thomas had told Mrs. Clark that the past did not matter. But he would surely feel differently about his lover. About the man he had given his trust and his body and his heart to. Besides, unlike that damn woman, Micha had not changed. It was all he knew how to be.
Three times, Thomas had said “I love you.” Like the childhood trinkets of a seaside holiday, pebbles and glass made shiny by the tide, turning dull in daylight.
Somewhere, it had all gone wrong. Micha had gone wrong. Necessity had become preference, preference partiality. He had slipped between love and laudanum, and now he was nowhere. He could not feel, and he could not stop himself feeling.
If only Madame Defleur’s daughter had not come. If only Micha’s shameless whoring had held Thomas’s attention a moment longer. And now he would lose it all, these last shreds of a thing called happiness.
Maybe he could plead his case. But what could he say? See all that I am, all this ugliness, all this shame, and love me anyway.
Unthinkable. Unaskable.
But by the time Micha had mustered the scraps of his courage and crept from his room, the house was silent. In the hall, the light was warm as butter, gleaming thickly upon the polished wood, and on the letter Thomas had left for him.
He had gone to London to see his brother.
Which meant Micha had a little time.
He traced his fingertips over the paper, following the precise curves and angles of Thomas’s words. It was not an elegant script. But.
I love you, he’d written.
Four.
A scant handful of years ago, he could have been hanged for everything that implied. The man was such a fool.
Micha should have kept the letter. For blackmail.
Or for warmth. For something to hold in the empty places of his heart.
But there, in the golden afternoon, he lit a candle and burned the page to ashes.
He held it so long that he nearly scorched his fingers, watching the words disappear one by one into a curl of black and orange.
Then he went outside to think. The sun pressed hard against his eyes, burning red when he tried to close them.
The sky glared. A faint breeze scraped against his skin.
His stomach, empty of anything but bile and the remembrance of laudanum, twisted sharply, and a bubble of sour breath caught at the back of his throat until he gagged.
He slumped down on the doorstep, put his head between his knees, and waited until he felt less like dying.
Finally, the light stopped splintering, and his heart stopped squeezing, and he was able to breathe again.
He groaned softly into his hands—pure physical misery—and seriously considered going back inside for another draught of laudanum.
It would ease the aching and the tightness of his skin, at least. If he only took a little, it would be enough, just enough to soften the sharp places and stop them hurting.
But the world smelled damp and fresh and new. He hugged his knees and peeled open an eye. Puddles shimmered along the path to the village, as though the little road was suddenly made of silver. And Micha remembered the taste of Thomas in the rain.
He pulled himself back to his feet and began to walk.
The autumn borders, wine and gold and indigo, glittered with transient diamonds.
He turned off the path, as he had before, and followed the trails of flattened grass through the meadows.
But there was no peace today. The storm had brought a last reckless rush of something like summer, and everywhere he looked was brightness, like the scarlet dregs of revelry before dawn.
Micha’s eyes ached a little, and so did his heart.
He came to the stile where he had sketched his disastrous landscape, and there upon it was a slight figure in a grey dress and a shabby bonnet. In the field beyond, a girl and a sunrise-coloured dog chased each other in giddy circles at the centre of a pastoral idyll.
Mrs. Clark—Miss Abbett—Madame Defleur’s daughter—turned her head.
“Oh fuck,” said Micha.
She nodded but offered nothing more.
He stumbled back a few steps. Then he stopped. He had not fallen quite so low that he was about to run away from a woman.
“Did you want something from me?” she asked. Beneath the wings of the bonnet, he could see only the pale, cold curve of her profile.
And before he could stop them, the words came rushing out, raw and frantic: “You’re going to tell him?”
She turned away and watched the girl and the dog playing in the meadow. Her neatly gloved hands gripped the edges of the stile.
Micha swallowed, and it felt like swallowing bile. “Please don’t tell him.”
She said nothing.
“What do you want me to do? Beg?”
“I thought,” she said at last, “you just did.”
“Is that what you want?” His voice rose and cracked. “I don’t care. I’ll say whatever you want to hear. I’m sorry, all right, I’m sorry for what I did to you. Just don’t take him away from me. I can’t . . . just don’t, please don’t.” His hand slammed down next to hers.
Her head turned sharply, and he caught the shock in her eyes. “You’re in love with him.” Her lips twisted. “You mean less than half of what you say, but you do love him.”
“I . . .” He clung to the stile. If he let go, he thought he might fall. “I have forgotten what love is.”
She nodded. “Perhaps you have. I don’t think it’s a kind thing, this love of yours.”
“Don’t pity me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I have no interest in you, Micha, for good or ill. And I was not the one to break my promise.”
“I wish you hadn’t come,” he said, with sudden fury.
“I didn’t come to ruin you,” she replied.
“But you still can.” He couldn’t stop trembling. “Will you?”
Again, she was silent. Across the fields, detached, drifted the laughter of the girl. Then, “No.”
It was what he needed to hear. What he had pleaded for. But it felt too easy. Far, far too easy. “Why?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I’ve seen enough of ruin. I’d like to be done with it.”
“But . . .” he protested, against his own interests, hardly knowing what words were going to fall from his lips. “But I would deserve it,” he finished wretchedly, hating her and hating himself still more ferociously.
“Indeed.” Her look was cool and wry. “Fortunately, I’m a better person than you.”
His lip curled bleakly. “The whole fucking world is a better person than me.”
To that, she offered no answer.
“Do you mean it?” he ended up asking.
“That I’m a better person than you?”
“About . . .” Micha stumbled over Thomas’s name. It was like he had lost whatever right he’d ever possessed to utter it. “You really won’t say anything?”
“No.”
“How can I trust you?” His voice cracked. He had intended to be firm with her. But he just sounded . . . desperate.
She shrugged. “That is not my problem.” She looked at him with cold eyes. “And if the uncertainty torments you, I’m afraid I’m not quite enough of a better person to lament it.”
If he had believed for a moment he could get away with it, Micha would have thought nothing, right then, of murdering her. Anything that would return things to the way they had been a day ago: a closed world of nothing but Thomas. Thomas and laudanum, usurper and king.
“Micha,” Mrs. Clark said, softly. “You know there are things you should tell him for yourself. Things you must.”
“That I’m a whore?”
“That you take laudanum.”
He shook his head. The colours of the meadow smeared in his vision, so he closed his eyes. He tangled his fingers through his hair. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t get out. I try but I can’t.”
And there it was. The truth he had barely dared admit to himself, spoken instead to a stranger who had every reason to hate him.
“Enough of that.” Mrs. Clark pulled his hands out of his hair.
“I try to stop.” Still, he was speaking. Against his judgement. Against his will. Poison flowing out of him. “Every day, I try to stop.”
“You must reduce the dosage gradually.”
“I try that too. But I don’t. And . . . and the moment I feel anything I just take more anyway.”
Mrs. Clark rose from the stile and lowered herself into the meadow. “This isn’t my problem either.”
“You’re the one who fucking brought it up.”
“For Thomas’s sake.” She shook some clinging clematis blossoms from her skirts. “Now I’m going to join Hope. Stay away from us, Micha. It’s the least you owe me.”
She gathered up her skirts and, with a step as light as a girl’s, ran through the flowers towards her daughter.
Micha watched them only for a moment and then turned for home, Mrs. Clark’s words echoing unwanted in his mind. He tried to imagine the future she had half-suggested could be his. If only he were strong enough to take it.
A few weeks of hell. And then a lifetime. A lifetime without opium, with Thomas.
It felt, in the last balmy evening of autumn, possible.
Though, of course, his resolution faltered in the silence of the house, when the first shivery cravings crept upon him. A little more, a little more, what could it hurt? Reduce gradually. He could start tomorrow.
He would start tomorrow.