Chapter 18
CHARY
The whisper came disembodied through the hush of swaying willows, across the stream.
“You kissed him!”
Chary’s startle was so severe, he dropped his book—nearly into the water—and yelped. “What— August.” He picked up the book and brushed it off, peering anxiously at the spine for crushed green stain. “You can’t be here.”
It was later in the evening, nearing dusk; Laurie had not been in the northwest balcony room when he’d knocked for an early nightcap.
Chary had taken himself out to the bench by the willow stream in order to take his mind off worry.
Laurie could not feasibly snoop in the dark.
If August stayed away, he’d be safe. Chary would remain at the house a couple more days in recovery, then head back to New York, bringing Laurie with him, and the man would likely never know.
But there his brother was.
August cackled. “Don’t look like that. Your journalist’s gone to the telegraph office. Got a wire just now and went.”
“Oh.” That was more ominous. Did reporters send expensive telegrams to inform their editors of breaking news and scandal? Scandal such as brothers who were supposed to be dead but weren’t? “It’s late for a telegram. I hope everything’s all right.”
“It must be important if he is risking his kissing cover to run answer.” He waded into the stream, making smacking noises as he went.
“Please cease.”
August flopped onto the bank nearest and lounged, ankles crossed.
“If he comes back early, I’ll run. Just say I’m a bear.
” The beard, long hair, cut-off blue jeans, and bare feet did make him look vagabond-like, a disguise enough for anybody less observant than Laurie Tulley.
“Maybe since that kiss, he’s breaking it off with another beau posthaste. ’S’only polite.”
Chary sighed. “Why are you halfway to the nude? You will be eaten by the mosquitoes.”
August grunted. “I forget which of us is eldest sometimes. Do you?”
“Frequently.”
“You’ve been old since birth. Since I stood over your crib and hated you.
” August settled back into his elbow and closed his eyes, as though he had not just spat decades-old vitriol.
It didn’t matter; it held no venom. Chary had heard it before, from lips less—and more—sober than tonight’s.
“Imagine if I’d killed you,” August murmured, “then I’d have been out two mothers. ”
“I don’t remember much mothering from the original.”
August paused, then said softly, “I do.” He rolled onto his side and grinned. “More from the copy, granted.”
Chary almost risked the book a second time. Luckily for August, it was a William Morris.
August lay there a while, until the light faded completely, and Chary could no longer see the words to read and wouldn’t risk a lantern for drawing in biting insects and moths. Or Laurie Tulley.
Then August said, “Did you tell him yet, now it’s kissing official?”
“Of course not.”
“I heard you fake it pretty good. That is commitment, there. Even with a man so pretty.”
Fake it? As with his sobriety, his accents, and his sincerity, it was sometimes hard to tell when August was joking.
Not so at the moment. He wasn’t.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Chary said slowly. “Commitment to what?”
“I’m dead, Chary. It’s been months. You don’t need to keep up that you’re the queer one anymore.”
Behind this bizarre statement, there was so much wrongness and meaning and sheer assumption, so much potential answer to it, that Chary couldn’t choose what to say. He simply sat for a moment on the bench, stunned.
He’d once witnessed a reenactment of a Civil War battlefield, the booms of repeated cannon fire and Gatling guns leaving the innards of his ears tingling and dulled afterward; this was much the same.
Keep up that you’re the queer one. His brother didn’t think— He didn’t know? Three years, and he didn’t—
“You’ll get yourself in hot water in a small town like this, kissing handsome men in fields. I thought you liked it here.”
Perhaps August was joking after all. Maybe if he refused to react, his brother would cease in it.
But he didn’t. “You can leave it, really. You’re not bad at it”—still closed-eyed, August raised a hand and waved it, wrist yielding a flop so exaggerated, Chary wanted, somewhat hysterically, to laugh—“but you don’t need to martyr yourself to convince some wolf journalist you’re me.
For God’s sake, haven’t you done enough penance? ”
The shell-shocked feeling gave way to sinking river muck and cold current.
August didn’t know. Somehow, he thought three years of honesty and brotherhood had been a ruse. A taking-on of identity that he thought wasn’t Chary’s in truth. But how could he not know?
Eventually, Chary managed, “How… on earth… is that the s-simplest answer to arrive upon? Of all of them? Falsehood and penance?”
“Because I know you.” August sat up. “Stop trying to protect me unto death, Chary. I don’t need it. You’ve done enough.”
Somehow, this was the final straw. The most offensive of all.
“Stop? No. I won’t. You’re my only brother.
I’d been curious about you throughout my whole boyhood.
That we found each other again is a miracle; do you understand?
You’re not allowed to tell me to stop caring for you.
That is absurd, and I shan’t obey. Nor could I.
As for penance—sincere sorrow and amendment of sin are lifelong.
Even were I to discard what you’re calling a ruse, those things wouldn’t end. ”
August looked as surprised by the outburst as Chary felt. Part of it was that Chary had stood up sometime during in blood-pounding indignation; August, in contrast, had curled back, knees beginning to pull up close to his chest.
“But it isn’t a ruse,” Chary went on, sinking back to the bench. “How could you think that it is? I found you outside a brothel, for the love of Pete! You didn’t realize what that might have meant? What it did mean?”
“That has nothing doing with— I never saw you with any man, nor ever flirted, and how many times did I drag you to the theatre? I was not so incapacitated by the bottle.”
“Well, now you have seen it.” So to speak.
“Also,” Chary added, “Laurie isn’t a wolf, I am almost sure.” Modus operandi or not. “And I rather feel he would resent your assumption.” After he’d laughed until he was weak, that was. August hadn’t seen the kiss firsthand. It seemed a lot had been lost along the wire that was Mr. Herbert.
And when had he felt confident enough about Laurie Tulley’s character—to say nothing of preferences in bed he hadn’t experienced, and never would—to speak for him so? When had that begun?
“I like kissing men,” he said primly. “So, there you have it from my very mouth.”
August’s defensive disdain had apparently been broken by shock. He laughed, a little weakly. “Yes, so do I. And women, too. Anybody, really. Since we are being revelatory.”
“Well,” Chary said awkwardly. He hadn’t known that, and it deflated most of his indignance. It was true, wasn’t it, that they’d only known each other a few years? It had to show somewhere. “Well, good.”
“I thought it was disgust,” August blurted. “That you’d come to find me on the Bowery, miring yourself through the filth of Gotham to rescue me because you had to, and that it was the worst thing you’d ever had to lower yourself to. Meanwhile I… Well. I didn’t mind the work, most of the time.”
Chary shook his head. “No. At the brothel? I was shocked to see you where I least expected it. I didn’t know you were even in New York.
I’d tried to find you, and nothing, for months.
And that night, I was… honestly, I was stumbling fresh off an experience that left me wondering if I was truly bent or just insane. ”
August laughed, creaky and wheezing.
In fact, that particular instance had been the first encounter Chary had attempted since he had come of age. But he hadn’t managed an erection through his anxious nausea, nor even to be able to be touched by anyone; he’d had to leave, had to dash out the front steps back out to Bowery.
“Rafael,” August said, mock-seriously, “would be real offended to hear he wasn’t for you.”
“Was that his real name?”
“Mais non. ’Course not.”
“It had nothing to do with him or his person… Oh, wait a moment. If you knew I had—and you still didn’t think—?”
“Normal men came all the time. A hole’s a hole.”
“Ergh,” Chary said heartily, and then regretted it. “I mean—”
August waved. “I’m prettier than a housemaid in drag. So too were half of the boys there. It didn’t have significance to me that you’d come out of the brothel.”
“And I never told you one way or the other. Nor hinted. Not in three years.”
“It isn’t obligatory to disclose,” August said, rolling his eyes. “And I wasn’t entitled.” He reached over, plucked at some grass, and fiddled with it, clearing his throat. “You waited all that time—until your majority? To try and… find it out?”
“Yes. With you as the track-layer? As the example? I waited until I had a will made, the ink was dry, and our father was seven years rotted.”
August chuckled, though he looked a little pale yet. “Right. You were smarter than I was. You kept safe an’ all.” He stared down at the grass. “As long as it was worth something.”
“I’d much rather have had a brother,” Chary said softly, “than any amount of inheritance. You know that, yes?”
August raised his head, worked his jaw. Their father’s eyes—almost the only physical trait the two of them shared—gleamed, whiskey-brown.
“And I earnestly… thought you knew that about me,” Chary said. “That it was quite obvious.”
“Should’ve been, I guess. To hear you talk of wolves… I’m not drunk enough for this.”
“No, and thank goodness. It makes you even more reckless than usual. And cruel.”
“Cruel?” August scrambled to his feet. It was well past dusk now, and the dark blurred even his fairness into shadow against the near-black of the stream. “How cruel? Because I don’t want my brother to be strung up by libel and worse for something he didn’t ask to happen?”
“Ask to happen? When it is a choice? Put into the plainest language, it would never be libel.” Chary paused to breathe, because he seemed to need it. “And it was never farce. I was always… queer. How could you not know it, August?” Some indignance remained.
“You just said amendment of sin is lifelong, you Catholic, sainted—” August let out a frustrated scream. “Martyrdom is not a large logical leap—”
“And simply liking men is?”
“—if you feel you owe a lifelong repentance toward me, then how the hell d’you think I might feel? Huh? You gave me your perfectly normal life to do what I wanted with, and I wasted it. Didn’t I.”
The lights clicked on in the windows behind them, throwing yellow glare; Mrs. Leonard with her workday’s last acts. August jerked away from the light.
“I don’t see it like that,” Chary said. “Not at all. Even if I were doing this for the sake of you—and I am not—have I not acted under my own power? As an adult? I was of age. You needed help, and I helped you. Can’t I take my own damned risks?”
“No!” August spat. “Not for me. Dammit, Chary.” The electric glow sliding down from the house’s windows still lit him in profile; despite the dark and the beard, Chary recognized his expression, though he’d never seen it before on him, not even when speaking what little he had of Tjofabier Raberding. Damp, raw-eyed fear.
August was scared? Why? Not for him, surely.
A backlit shadow came down from the front entrance, large and silent: Sidney Brasher.
“Can hear y’all clear down into the kitchens,” he said, in his quiet, non-butler-like drawl.
“No shit,” August muttered.
“And Mikhail sent his signal,” Brasher added. “Tulley’s on the mile back.”
“Jesus.” August put palms over his eyes. “I’ll go. God knows what Chary will sacrifice next if the world finds out about me.”
“I don’t care about the world; I care about Rab—”
“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” August interrupted. “But the point’s the same. Stop sticking your neck out for me, Chary. I mean it.”
He didn’t wait for a response before melting back into the forest. Brasher stepped over his footprints with his own, methodically, diverting the path up toward the house.
He looked away as Chary swiped at his face.