Chapter 17
LAURIE
Chary slept all Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday—excepting his usual morning mass.
Laurie played his part of devoted lover, since there was nobody else to do so, making sure Chary rested and ate.
Otherwise, he availed himself of the house’s turret library and also of Mrs. Simon’s excellent cooking.
Cowboy butler Brasher gave away nothing and, so far as Laurie could tell, suspected nothing of Laurie, though he was certainly watchful. Ever-present.
August Wright was nowhere to be seen, apparently risking nothing, not even to check on his recovering brother.
Laurie didn’t go looking. He didn’t want to blow his cover and spook the man from his hidey-hole cabin, so, except for a brief visit to the Berryfield post office, Laurie stayed at the house.
By Monday, he felt more restless, and Chary was awake by eleven, so under the guise of more tour, they took the wagon out to the barrens.
Chary’s mansion stood a mile or so north of Berryfield, but the blueberry fields were detached from the estate proper and stretched even farther north where the road turned into nothing but sandy earth.
Laurie recognized the boulder patch where he’d first sat and considered the potential of blueberries, and realized he hadn’t appreciated just how far he’d walked that day in March.
It seemed farther now. Justified Chary’s concern he’d freeze himself in getting back.
Of course, now it was July and hot under the deep blue sky; Chary was getting a sunburn over his bruising.
The job, he mused, would’ve been far easier if the man weren’t genuinely nice.
Due to the heat, the harvest was already done for the day, so the fields were mostly abandoned.
A lone foreman in bib overalls and a Stetson wide-brim lingered in the distance, marking the lines for tomorrow’s harvest. Rows of purple-green blueberry bushes were delineated with twine and sticks, and footprints were everywhere in the sand, and wheel-marks too.
Chary left the horse to stand in the shade, and they laid out a picnic luncheon on a weedy patch by the evergreens’ edge.
“Who’s that walking the fields?” Laurie asked.
Chary squinted against the sun. Thanks to the comfrey, his bruise had flattened, the blood draining down as purplish-yellow sponge-paint into the hollow of his right eye.
“Oh, Mr. Herbert. The foreman.” He waved, and the man returned the greeting, more curtly.
“My brother hired him last year, straight off. This is his first harvest.”
Laurie’s focus sharpened. Chary was willing to talk about August.
“What did a party-boy Lothario know about hiring farmers?”
“Well, precisely.” Chary laughed ruefully. “But Mr. Herbert’s done all right. The yields vary, year by year, I suppose. It is a wild crop. Rhizomic. It fruits only biennially.”
“You don’t like him,” Laurie deduced. “Too provincial?”
To some, it had been as though Laurie had initially come to Gotham with straw in his teeth. His own accent served him well now when he had to deploy it, but it’d been a shock to realize just how much it had influenced even street brats against him.
“No,” Chary said carefully, lashes lowered. “He doesn’t like… me. As an embodiment. I told you, I’m out to the staff.”
Ah. That sort of provincial. Damn it, Chary, just be predictable and mean. “I won’t kiss you, then.”
Chary flushed tellingly. Pickable and ripe. “He’ll leave us be.”
“Else I’ll give ’im,” Laurie said, a little too earnestly.
Chary gasped. “You will not. You are not that kind of man.”
“No? Aren’t I?”
“I pulled a pistol on you and you reassured me, Laurie Tulley.”
“Filled with blanks! And I yanked you outta the way of a hansom cab, didn’t I?”
“But let go at once when I asked.”
Laurie harrumphed. He didn’t like to be seen so easily. He was supposed to be doing the seeing.
Chary seemed to know it. He turned away and pulled out a velvet-lined case of wine flutes. He teetered two of them on their bases upon the blanket, resetting them once, until Laurie held them still for him.
“Champagne?” Laurie raised eyebrows.
“Mrs. Simon does like me. Against all odds. You don’t have to drink it, though I think I must bring it back empty one way or another.” He leaned back to wrench the cork.
“Is it on ice? Don’t waste it.” Laurie held the shimmering filled flute in the edge of the light. “I feel like I’ve seen these before. It’s yours? Wright glass?”
“Mm.” Chary sipped. “Lead crystal.” He inspected his own glass. “Rotary cut, not pressed. This design—the Tartan—is from 1897. John Jacob Astor commissioned these for the Waldorf-Astoria.” He leveled a knowing look.
Oops. “You got me. Look, the food there’s great.”
“You know… I’ve never been?”
Laurie laughed. More lies. “No! Absolutely not. You have, too.”
“Earnestly, I haven’t.”
Huh. The truth? Accompanied by a true smile, a happy one. So much rest had done him good.
They ate and then stretched out with full, effervescent bellies to read (in Chary’s case) and write (in Laurie’s).
It was… surprisingly peaceful. Laurie, inspecting himself ruthlessly, found he couldn’t begrudge this particular rich man his leisure.
Work wasn’t a man’s virtue, but Chary was doing it to death with seemingly no need.
And Chary’s leisure wasn’t the conspicuous kind.
It was done out of necessity, not out of boredom or for social status.
And everyone—everyone—was due some leisure, and respite, and play.
He underlined the word play twice, heavily; the nib spread warningly.
It drew Chary’s attention.
“What do you write so passionately? Nothing of me, I hope.”
Gotcha. Laurie unfolded from his sideways hunch over his notebook, wincing.
“Nope. Frank Doubleday wants my novel by the end of oh-six.”
Chary curled into a sit, his arm slung over his knee, book butterflied between his long fingers. “A novel. Doubleday under-the-knee, belted knickerbocker trousers.
A tweed vest cinched to impossibility, even after a morning nap, while sitting folded on a picnic blanket.
How did he get a waist like that? Did he corset it?
No, this job was not going to be difficult at all.
“I’m glad you lived, Chary Wright.”
Chary looked up. Laurie watched as he took in the words as flattery toward an end—and dismissed them. But—victory—he put the book back down.
“What is it about?”
“What?”
“Your nonexistent novel.”
Laurie hesitated. Not even Sam had heard details about his scribbling, but Chary had a nose for his lies.
“Uh, it’s to be called Jack. About a boy-urchin of Gotham, put to work in the factories, who has no time for adventures, not even to read about them.
It’s not especially didactic,” he emphasized, “nor Victor Hugo. It’s just… ” He trailed off.
Chary stared for a long while, waiting for him to finish. When Laurie didn’t, because he was incapable of doing so—at least doing the idea proper justice—Chary said, “It sounds like the sort of thing I loved as a boy. Ragged Dick—Horatio Alger?”
That was so absurd, Laurie laughed. “You would think so, wouldn’t you, capitalist? Those Cinderella stories?”
Chary looked down to the picnic blanket, pretty lashes feathery and curled, his bottom lip sucked beneath the other, like he regretted speaking.
“No, all right,” Laurie admitted hastily. “I see your comparison; it’s fair. Sorry. I read those too, years ago. It’s just the book’s not a bildungsroman, nor for boys. It’s only different.”
There were some parallels, weren’t there, in Cinderella stories and what had happened to Chary? The makings of a fairy-tale villain.
The book came back up. “Then I will leave you to it.”
Laurie, regretful and hopeful for all the wrong reasons, kept his pen capped.
Yes: the book sank again. Laurie had to hide his smile. He reclined onto his back, put his hands behind his head against the tree.
“What?” he asked, unable to bear it.
“You really don’t think I killed anyone?”
Victory, la seconde partie.
Laurie snorted. “I’m alone with you in a blueberry field—a barren. Miles from anywhere. Pretty stupid of me if I think you’re capable of murder. Real good opportunity here for ya.” He exposed his neck.
Chary’s eyes followed the line of it; he swallowed. He clearly wasn’t thinking of murder. “Mr. Herbert is just there—”
Laurie leaned in on an elbow. Close. “No,” he said.
“I don’t think you killed those men. I haven’t thought that since you collapsed into my arms.” Chary’s eyes widened.
His pupils were black and huge. “I do think you’re hiding something.
” Like a brother. “You might have a good reason, though.” One could hope.
Chary lifted his chin, looking down over his nose. The pretty flush was back. “I wish I could be honest with you. I do wish I could. But…”
Laurie kept some distance. Not much. He waited.
“But you can’t, because I’m a journalist.”
“Yes,” Chary whispered.