Chapter 20
Midway through December, Nettlefield was blessed by a few days of snow.
Thomas managed to acquire a sled from somewhere, and he and Hope spent the afternoon careening down the hill that ran from the rectory to the village.
Micha, wearing so many layers he looked like twice the man he was, could not be dragged into such indignities, but he watched them from the garden with Madame Defleur’s daughter.
Thomas’s laughter, heedless as a boy’s, unravelled like a rainbow.
“Oh fuck,” said Micha. “Will you look at him. The idiot. He belongs here.”
Madame Defleur’s daughter shrugged. “He belongs with you.”
“My word.” Thomas leaned over Micha’s shoulder to look at his painting. “That’s quite . . . extraordinary. What is it?”
Micha glared.
“No, wait, don’t tell me, don’t tell me. It is quite self-evidently . . . Is it a cake?”
“What the fuck are you saying? A cake? Where are you getting cake?”
“Well, those ripples there.” Thomas’s fingertip tapped the page. “They look like pastry. And are those not raisins?”
“It’s the village, you prick,” snarled Micha, though on his lips the insult became an endearment, which became a caress, which brought the heat rushing to Thomas’s skin as surely as a touch. “Those are roofs.”
Micha’s finger slid alongside Thomas’s, making his breath catch. “And the raisins?”
“Windows.”
“Of course. My mistake.”
“Damn right it is. You’re misunderstanding my genius.”
And then, suddenly, somehow, they were kissing, hands tangling like their mouths, the sketchbook falling disregarded between them.
“Oh yes.” Micha thrust a triumphant hand into the air. “Will you look at that? I won. I fucking won.”
Thomas sat on the other side of the chessboard, his head thrown back, his face contorted in some unbearable combination of torment and rapture. His breath came in shallow pants. “I think,” he managed, “you . . . cheated.”
Beneath the table, Micha’s stocking-clad foot was nestled between Thomas’s legs. His toes nudged in a rough caress against Thomas’s cock, and Thomas arched his back, thrust his hips, and groaned.
“You could have told me to stop at any time,” said Micha in his most dulcet tones.
“Oh no. D-don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
Micha laughed and withdrew his foot. Thomas gave him a wide-eyed, bewildered look. Pushing back his chair, Micha disappeared beneath the table. He pressed his mouth against the fabric that covered Thomas’s straining erection.
“Oh my,” came Thomas’s breathless voice from above. He made a convulsive movement, and Micha heard the rata-tat-tat of falling chess pieces. “I should lose more often.”
Thomas was labouring over his sermon when he heard the clatter of hooves on the path outside.
He glanced up in time to catch a glimpse of Micha as he flew by on Bucephalus, his hair already tousled by the wind and his cheeks flushed by the chill.
Thomas propped a chin on his hand, all thoughts that were not Micha dissolving like ice in sunlight.
Isidore had taught him well. He had far more natural grace and ease in the saddle than Thomas had ever possessed, and he’d been riding since the age of eight.
At the top of the hill, where Laura was waiting for him, Micha wheeled suddenly round, Bucephalus’s mane and tail streaming behind him like banners.
He was too far away for Thomas to be able to see much of his expression, but he performed an unmistakably knightly bow and then cantered into the distance.
After a moment, Thomas turned back to his sermon. But he was smiling now.
The floor of the library was awash in papers, books, and maps.
Madame Defleur’s daughter’s daughter was sprawled out at the centre of it, her ankles swaying behind her in a manner no lady would have countenanced.
Thomas sat cross-legged beside her, an absurd configuration of angles.
They conversed in low, urgent voices, pausing occasionally to throw a book at each other or gesticulate at one of the maps.
“Uh,” said Micha, uncertain in the doorway. “I made tea.”
The girl had previously paid almost no attention to Micha. He was little more than a fly in her universe of elephants, sword fights, and Thomas. But now she turned her extraordinary eyes in his direction and did not dismiss him. “Thank you. This is thirsty work.”
Madame Defleur’s daughter looked up from her book. “They are planning an expedition to discover the source of the Nile.”
Once this cosy circle would have filled Micha with a bitter, burning envy. It was still not entirely easy for him to witness, for it was just a little too close to a life Thomas could or should have had, one that held no place for Micha.
He put down the tray, still clinging close to the edges of the room. “I thought that was already found.”
“Yes, but not proven.” Hope braced herself on her elbows. “It is not enough,” she explained, “merely to believe a thing.”
“Hope, you heathen.” That was her mother.
“Sometimes it is enough.” Thomas. But his eyes were on Micha.
“There was to be a debate on the matter at the Royal Geographical Society,” Hope went on. “But Mr. Speke happened to die the day before it took place. I think that quite suspicious.”
“He’s dead?” Micha blinked. “I had no idea.”
“You were quite ill at the time,” said Thomas. “I did not realise you would be interested.”
Micha frowned, momentarily lost in the cracks between his fractured selves. “I wouldn’t have been, but . . . once I think I might have. I don’t know.”
“Will you join us, Mr. Dashwood?” asked Hope. “It is a most perplexing problem. Mr. Speke claims to have solved it but leaves us little scientific evidence. And Mr. Burton talks an awful lot but has never even examined the lake or the falls that Mr. Speke discovered.”
“So, as you can see”—Thomas’s smile was for Micha, only for Micha—“it is up to us.”
Thomas woke to an empty space beside him. He wrapped himself in his dressing gown and found Micha huddled on the floor of the garden room, his nails gouging the skin of his bare, shivering arms. He looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and hollow.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Thomas went to him, catching at his hands. Micha was freezing cold and clammy with drying sweat.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t think. Everything hurts.”
“It’s all right.” Thomas drew him into the garish folds of the dressing gown.
“It’s not all right. I want some fucking laudanum. I really do.” He pressed himself against Thomas, trembling. “I just wish I could sleep.”
“It takes time.”
“It’s the waiting. The night lasts forever. I hate it. Fuck.”
“Then,” said Thomas, smoothing the curls back from Micha’s brow, “we shall defy the night.”
“How?”
“If you cannot sleep, we shall not sleep. Let’s do something else.”
“Like what? Play chess? Dance the waltz?”
“Whatever you wish, but, I warn you, dancing is not one of my talents.”
Micha was silent a moment. Then, almost shyly, he asked, “Can we go out? Away from the walls?”
“Of course.”
They dressed in the half-light, struggling into whatever garments they could most easily find, and stumbled outside together.
The world was only just beginning to stir, the sky a pale mirror reflecting the fog-drenched fields.
Everything was frost-limned, brittle and silver, and the breath left Micha’s parting lips in a coil of smoke.
“It’s like it’s just for us,” he whispered.
Unthinking, Thomas took his hand.
And Micha did not pull away.
They walked in silence through the meadows.
The nascent light gleamed gently on the grass that crunched beneath their footsteps, and the mist curled the bare trees in gowns and garlands that formed themselves anew with the passing moments.
The pond had become a cast-down moon, as still as an unblinking eye, staring back at the heavens.
Micha went carefully down to meet it. He tapped the frozen surface with his boot and then edged out onto the ice.
“Micha,” Thomas murmured. “Think how foolish you will feel if you fall into the water twice.”
He looked up, grinning, his eyes shining like pieces of polished onyx. “But how can you resist?”
“I confess I do seem able to find that power.”
Micha glided a few steps, his arms flung wide for balance. “But look. It’s fine.”
Thomas covered his eyes, peering between the slats of his fingers. “The ice will break. I know it will.”
Micha swooped into the middle of the pond, twirled, slipped, righted himself, and spun in a giddy circle, breathless and laughing. “Thomas, Thomas, I’m walking on water!”
Thomas spluttered.
And Micha came flying back to him, hair streaming, hands outstretched. “Come on.”
“Oh no. Certainly not.”
“It’s safe, I promise.”
“‘O’er ice the rapid skater flies, with sport above and death below, where mischief lurks in gay disguise, thus lightly touch and quickly go.’”
“It’s a very small pond. There’s absolutely no danger of death.”
“I’m not reassured.” But, somehow, Thomas was taking Micha’s hand again and he was being drawn, step by reluctant step, towards the ice.
As soon as his foot touched the glassy surface, he flinched.
“Oh God.” As soon as his other foot landed, “Oh God.” He tried to move, slipped, and clutched at Micha. “Oh God.”
“Are you taking the Lord’s name in vain? A lot?”
“No, I’m genuinely praying.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you. I just—”
There was a cracking as loud as gunfire, and they plunged straight through the ice into cold, brackish, ankle-deep water.
There was a long silence.
“Whoops,” said Micha.
And Thomas began to laugh.
On a bright, cold Sunday, Micha sat on a tree stump in the churchyard, his sketchbook open but untouched.
The service had finished some time ago, but Thomas had, as ever, been waylaid by his parishioners.
At last, he managed to detach himself, and Micha rose to greet him, smiling because he simply couldn’t help himself.
“There’s no need for you to wait, you know,” said Thomas.
Micha shrugged. “I like to.”
“You could come inside next time.”
“Hah. No thanks.”
Thomas’s hand brushed the sleeve of Micha’s coat. “Do you expect to be struck down? Turned into a pillar of salt?”
“No, I just don’t like God very much. And I can’t imagine He thinks much of me for stealing one of His ministers.”
A shadow of something that was not quite sadness darkened Thomas’s eyes. “You can’t steal something already given.”