Chapter 18 #2
She frowned but in thought, not in distaste. It might have been comical, had it not been his life she was trying desperately to understand. “Well, it cannot be comfortable for you to entertain such feelings for another man.”
“It’s just the same,” he said. “Just the same as loving anybody. Uncomfortable and terrible and, you know, wonderful.”
She nodded, something of her customary manner creeping back into her tone. “Yes, that does sound like love.”
The bitter-edged wind swept between the trees, making the bare branches twitch like severed fingers.
“Can something not be done?” Esther asked, into the silence.
Micha glanced up, startled. “What?”
“Can it be put right?”
“Oh, you mean me. Can I be put right.”
“I didn’t quite—”
“Right or wrong, I don’t think I can change it.” He paused. “I’m not sure I would, even if I could.”
“Even for a wife and a home and a family of your own? Even for a normal life?”
“I want those things desperately. But not at the cost of”—he had no other word for it—“my soul.”
Assuming he had any soul left. He had bartered it piece by piece, year by year.
He looked up at Esther, half-wishing he had not spoken but knowing he would not have been able to hold his silence any longer.
The worst of it was liking her. She had been kind to him, when he had only just begun to remember what kindness was.
She had reminded him what it was like to be human.
And to have a friend. One he had thrown away in a single moment of excessive honesty.
“Say something.” His voice rang harshly, even in his own ears.
“Call me unnatural. Scorn me. Turn away in revulsion. Tell the village.”
“Oh, Michael, I’m an old woman, my back would play up something chronic. I can’t turn away in revulsion like I used to.”
He stared at her, too disbelieving to yet dare to be hopeful.
“I confess, I cannot begin to understand,” she went on. “And perhaps it is best I don’t try, but if you truly believe this is who you are and what you wish, then so be it.”
“‘So be it’?” he repeated, incredulously.
She shrugged. “So be it.”
The breath rushed out of him, bringing with it, to his mortified horror, another flood of tears. He tried to hide them in the dog, but the whole experience was far too reminiscent of a bath for even Ruff’s loyalty to withstand, and he pulled out of Micha’s arms with a betrayed whine.
“Fuck,” said Micha, shielding himself with his hands. “Fuck. Sorry. Fuck.”
“Um.” Esther patted his shoulder. “There there?”
He half-laughed, half-hiccoughed. “‘There there’? Is that the best you can do?”
“I suppose I could give you a hug, if you’ll stop crying.”
“I’m not crying. I’m just . . . I’m not crying.”
Micha stood, and Esther enfolded him in an embrace that was far warmer than he would have expected.
“I’m sorry I imposed on you,” he muttered. “And made you listen to that.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Michael.”
“Sorry.”
“And stop apologising.”
“Sorry.”
When they stepped away from each other, Micha was almost composed.
“Come.” Esther shook out her skirts briskly. “We must be getting back. It gets dark quickly these days.”
“I can find my own way. You don’t have—”
“For heaven’s sake. I will not have an apoplexy.
You have given me something of a shock, I cannot deny it.
I had no idea such things were even possible.
But I have always been a strong-minded woman, and I fully intend to come to terms with this.
” She put two fingers into her mouth and gave a short, sharp whistle, and Ruff came bounding out from between the trees.
“And I will expect to see you at book group next week.”
He gave her a sharp look. “You will, will you?”
“Yes. You and Thomas both.”
“This sounds like blackmail.”
If he had been attempting to discourage her, the attempt was not sincere, and doomed to failure regardless.
“Precisely,” she said. “Really, my dear, you have no idea how dangerous it is to share your secrets with me. I will be quite merciless. Before you know it, you’ll be holding my yarn and carrying my shopping. ”
“Don’t count on it.”
She smirked at him.
“But I might consider it if you ask me nicely.”
She slipped her arm into the crook of his. “Whatever others may think, or you may believe, you’re a fine young man, Michael. Now, let me fill you in on what you missed in The Woman in White . . .”
They walked at Esther’s pace back towards Nettlefield as the temperature dropped and the sky darkened.
The conversation was mostly dominated by Wilkie Collins, which Micha appreciated because it meant he did not have to concentrate.
He felt as though his footsteps barely landed on the ground.
As if he had stepped off a cliff and not fallen.
“Michael,” said Esther, as the first thatched rooftops appeared in the distance, “may I ask a question?”
Micha eyed her warily. “You can ask.”
“Does Thomas reciprocate your feelings?”
Yes. Yes. He loves me. And it is the only worthwhile thing in my worthless, wasted life. “No.”
Esther nodded. “Forgive me. I should not have pried. I was wondering if it was a common thing.”
“Not uncommon. But he does not know, and he is not like me.”
“It seems to me a difficult thing to love as you love and even more so to love unrequitedly.”
“My love may not always be unrequited.” He gave a half-smile, half-lost in the shadows of dusk. “And I used to dream it would not always be difficult.”
He walked Esther to her door and then hurried up the hill to the rectory.
Thomas was not there. Micha wandered restlessly through the empty rooms. A faint itching buzzed beneath his skin.
The world was starting to grate against his eyes.
A little laudanum would help. He could reduce the dosage tomorrow.
No. Now. He would reduce the dosage now.
He pressed his fingernails into the palms of his hands.
His heart was beating too fast. Unspecific anxieties gathered inside him like carrion birds.
He paced. He trembled. He paced some more.
He started weaving a pattern between rooms, counting his footsteps as they resounded against the floorboards.
The walls pressed in around him, like a crowd, like an unwanted lover, squeezing the air from his lungs. Sweat broke out across his skin. He reeled to one of the windows in the garden room and tried to yank it open. There was not enough air in the world to let him breathe.
And then he saw.
Thomas outside. In the last of the light.
A man caught between twilight and starlight, delineated in the deepest silver and the faintest gold.
He was in his shirtsleeves, armed with a wooden sword, teaching Hope to fence.
They danced back and forth across the grass.
Madame Defleur’s daughter sat curled on a nearby bench, watching them with amusement.
Though Micha had lost the will to struggle with it, the window perversely swung open, and the room filled up with the clack of swords and distant voices.
“En garde, varlet.”
“Hope, please do not call Mr. Mandeville a varlet.”
But Thomas was laughing. “A challenge. On my life.”
“And I will answer it!”
They met again in a clash of blades, Hope coming at him with far more aggression than technique, and Thomas falling back, Micha thought, because he was the sort of generous idiot who would do that.
He caught for the window and slammed it shut again.
Then he went to his room and took some laudanum.
Took more than he had intended because when next he stirred from his dull, dreamless stupor it was full dark.
He pulled himself upright on the bed and tried to shake off the aches and the lethargy.
There was just enough opium still in his system that Edward Mandeville’s paintings glowed through the gloom like gemstones.
It was too late, and Micha’s mind was too disordered for it to be remotely sensible for him to seek out Thomas. But he went anyway, stumbling his way through the dark towards the faint gleam beneath Thomas’s bedroom door.
Thomas answered his knock swiftly. He was clad in a startling multicoloured cotton print dressing gown. His expression was somewhat guarded, but hope flashed in his eyes, as bright as spring.
“A present from George,” he explained, gesturing at himself in response to an expression Micha had not quite been swift enough to conceal.
“It’s ghastly. And now I really do know all your secrets.”
There was an uncertain pause.
“Did you want something, Micha?”
“Yes.” He stepped forward and Thomas stepped back and it was just like in their forest except this time everything was different. Micha kicked the door closed behind him. “Yes.” He caught Thomas’s face between his palms and claimed his mouth. “Yes.”
Thomas put his hands on Micha’s shoulders, as though he was not sure whether he wanted to push him away or pull him closer.
But then Micha kissed him, as he had once been kissed a lifetime ago on a golden afternoon in Oxford.
All the dreams of youth and hopes of age, promises spilling from his silent tongue, worlds and lifetimes spun on a thread of breath.
Since leaving London, Micha had seen Isidore in only half-dreamed fragments.
But he felt a trace of him now, an echo in the kiss that connected them—Micha, Isidore, Thomas—like a gift, or a curse, or a whisper rippling across the years.