Chapter 22 #2
Thomas could read no further. The little book slipped from between his cold, shaking fingers and landed on the floor at his feet, splayed wide like a broken dragonfly.
“So,” said George.
Thomas stared blankly at the thing on the floor. “There are men who . . . sell themselves . . . to men? As women do?”
“Well, of course there are. Don’t be a fool, Thom.”
“I’m sorry. It had simply never occurred to me.” He was silent a moment. “That must mean there are a great many men who desire to lie with men.”
“For God’s sake, yes, there are a lot of sinners in the world. As a priest, this should not surprise you. But you see what this means?”
“I’m not sure—”
“Edward, our brother, this was his. He was a frequenter of such creatures.”
“He loved men?”
“He committed sodomitical acts with them, yes.”
“Oh God.” Thomas put his head in his hands.
All those terrible words were buzzing like wasps behind his eyes.
He could not think. And he felt nothing but a kind of sullen despair.
George, who had at some point risen, shoved a glass of brandy at him, and Thomas took it, and drank it, and it burned and did not help.
“Sorry,” George said brusquely. “But better to know, eh? Better to know what he was.”
What he was? “He was our brother,” Thomas whispered.
“He was a liar, a pervert, and a coward. And I’m done wasting grief on him.”
Thomas glanced up, dismayed. “George, how can you say that? This changes nothing.”
“It changes everything. All this time, wondering and . . . and hurting, feeling less than him, less without him, and the marquess was right all along. He was no fit heir. No fit man.” Some of the savagery faded from George’s voice, and he dropped his hand heavily to Thomas’s shoulder. “Come, brother. No more tears for him.”
Thomas scrubbed the moisture from his eyes with the back of his wrist. In truth, he was weeping as much for himself as Edward. “He must have felt so unbearably alone. To take his own life like that.”
“Best thing for him. Filthy beast.”
“Oh no.” The brandy roiled in Thomas’s stomach, and for a moment he thought he might be sick. “I can’t believe that anyone truly deserves death.”
“Unrepentant criminals. Vicious murderers. Those who fornicate with children.”
“It’s . . . it’s not the same,” Thomas protested, weakly. But there was no understanding, no mercy, in his brother’s eyes. He pressed on. “You would conflate tendencies that harm others with tendencies that harm no one. You would equate acts of violence with acts of love.”
George passed a hand across his brow. “Christ, you’re such an innocent. Do you even know the unnatural deeds you’re trying to defend? There’s no love in”—he pointed at the publication that still lay at Thomas’s feet—“that.”
“Not in that, no.” Thomas glanced away from The Gentlemen of London with a shudder.
“But do you not think that the men who seek such consolations are forced to it because they are denied everything else? All hope of home and family and companionship? The needs of their hearts and souls reduced solely to the needs of their bodies?”
George made a noise of frustration and contempt. “No, I do not. I think they’re criminals, I think what they do is disgusting, and it shames me to know our brother was like them.”
“But he loved you.” How lacking those words seemed just then.
“Of what use to me is the so-called love of a sodomite who lacked even the strength to control his depravities?”
A kind of bleak and unyielding cold had settled over Thomas, cutting through his skin, turning his blood to ice and water. Silence, he knew, would serve him far better than truth. But at what cost? What betrayal of self? Of Edward. Of Micha. Of everything he had come to believe.
He closed his eyes for a moment, full of a deep and extraordinary pain. Having lost one brother, he did not know how he would bear the loss of another.
He tried to remind himself of his old doctrine: “God never afflicts us with more than we can endure.” But his desperate thoughts—his prayers—contained little of reason. Instead, he begged for an impossible boon. Please. Don’t demand this choice. Don’t take him from me.
“I don’t know,” he said, at last. “But I am . . . the same.”
For the moment, George’s only reaction was bewilderment. “You what?”
Oh, why did it have to be so difficult. “I am like Edward. I . . .” How was he to explain it? I am a sodomite seemed an entirely inadequate description of something that was at once complex and simple and ordinary. “I love men. Well. A man.”
There was a long, awful moment of something deeper than silence. A profound stillness. And then George jerked away from him, all bewilderment banished. “Of course. Why didn’t I see. Michael whoever he is . . . he’s your”—his lip curled in revulsion—“catamite.”
“Friend. Lover. Husband.”
“Have you no shame?” George was staring at him as though he no longer recognised what he saw. “How can you talk this way?”
“I suppose because I believe I’ve done nothing that shames me.”
“But you’re a man of God—”
The words were exploding out of George. Yet Thomas, discovering a reserve of conviction he hardly knew he possessed, cut over him. “No. I was never a man of God. Only a man of duty. And now, thanks to Micha, I’m simply a man.”
“You’re sick or mad or both.”
Thomas shook his head. “Please. Can’t you try to understand?”
“I don’t want to understand.” George pulled in a shuddery breath and took a few restless turns about the room.
That was when Thomas realised, beneath all the rage and scorn lay sorrow. And that hurt most of all.
“Don’t do it.” George sounded close to pleading. “You don’t have to . . . be like this.”
Thomas’s eyelashes were clogged with tears. “It’s not a choice. Or if it is, I would not choose differently.”
“Why did you tell me this? What purpose does it serve but to ruin us both?”
“I suppose I was tired of lies. I’ve been lying for Edward at our father’s behest for so long. Now you ask me to lie for myself. Is who I am really enough to make you hate me, George?”
George said nothing for what felt like a very long time, his eyes moving back and forth over Thomas’s face, searching for something that must have eluded him. “You’re no brother of mine,” he said, and walked out.
The door closed behind him with the softest imaginable click.
Thomas sat, staring at an empty room, stunned with anguish.
After a moment, perhaps from a habit of tidiness or simply for something to do, he leaned down and picked up The Gentlemen of London.
His eye passed over the page without curiosity, then snagged on a familiar configuration of letters.
Mr. M. D-shw-d, No. 12 Church Lane, Whitechapel.
And he read on instinctively, almost without understanding what he saw:
And such as knew he was a man would say / Leander, thou art made for amorous play.
Here a connoisseur of classical temperament may satisfy his most ardent longings.
Mr. D is a fine, tall gentleman vigorous and well formed, with a captivating countenance and striking dark eyes that inflame the senses.
A genteel companion, clearly of some breeding and education, his nature is not spirited but he is quite obliging and submits himself to all pleasures requested of him.
Oh Micha, he thought, Micha.
He let the book fall into his lap. Then he picked it up again, ripped away the meagre binding, and began methodically to shred the pages until they littered the floor at his feet like corrupt petals.
Finally, he gathered up the pieces and fed them, one by one, to the fire until there was nothing left.
It was sometime later that Thomas climbed the stairs to the room he no longer thought of as being solely his.
Micha was curled up on his side on the bed, Thomas’s dressing gown spread over him like a blanket.
Thomas tugged off his boots and his coat, and joined his lover, sliding a hand over his waist and pressing his face into the familiar place between Micha’s jutting shoulder blades.
Micha stirred and eased his body closer to Thomas, engulfing him in warmth.
Thomas parted the soft curls that gathered at the nape of the other man’s neck and kissed him there.
Micha gave a deep, luxurious shiver, and Thomas tried not to think of the words of strangers.
He let them go, letter by letter, until they were nothing but the memory of a shadow, fragments of a fading past, as insubstantial as withering leaves.
Powerless in the face of the future they would have together.
“For an arse,” Micha murmured, “your brother can sometimes be almost endearing.”
Where once that might have made him smile, now it recalled Thomas to everything that had just transpired, and he uttered a soft sound of pain.
Micha tensed against him. “What’s the matter?”
“I . . . I . . . told him. About me. About us.”
“Fuck, why?” Micha rolled onto his back, hands tangling into his hair, a low groan escaping him. “He could see us imprisoned.”
Accustomed always to the protections of wealth and privilege, Thomas had given very little consideration to the legal reality of their transgressions.
But now understanding settled over him like cold mist. He had endangered Micha—threatened what was already a precarious life—with nothing but a handful of careless words and misplaced hopes.
“Do you have any idea what they do to men like us?” Micha was saying, all the old ferocity in his voice. “Even before they send you to the wheel.”
“Don’t—”
“They’d make you a public and medical spectacle, the property of any learned doctor summoned to examine you for signs of sin. Dilation of the fundament. Elongation of the penis. Details, naturally, to be published in the scandal sheets the very next fucking day. Is that what you want?”
“Micha,” Thomas whispered, “please stop.”