Chapter 26
Micha had found a white rock close to the tide line, rising from amidst the brown-grey pebbles like the back of a whale.
Perched on the edge of it, he watched the waves as they rolled, blue-green and silver-capped, beneath those familiar ghost-pale cliffs.
In his hands he held a brown glass bottle, purchased that afternoon from a druggist he had passed in Dover.
He had paid for it, not with George’s money, but with coins passersby had offered in return for quick portraits he had sketched of them.
Sailors mostly, only too happy to have some memento they could send back home or offer to a sweetheart in the hope that a sweetheart she would remain after long months at sea.
While Micha had started drawing mostly to distract himself, he had in the end almost come to enjoy it.
He had certainly not intended to ply any sort of trade.
But better this one, he thought, than the alternative.
As for the laudanum, he wasn’t sure if it was weakness, desolation, or even a kind of sick defiance that had impelled him.
Maybe it was simply habit. Closing his eyes, he turned his face into the sharp edge of the wind.
It was easier, infinitely easier, to ache for laudanum than it was to ache for Thomas.
After a moment or two, he stood and hurled the bottle out to sea. Hard enough that he heard it smash before the tide swept over it.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck.”
Sitting back down, he curled his fingers into his hair and wrenched at it, wanting to feel anything—anything—that was not this loss. This emptiness. This endless fucking pain.
It was then that he heard the crunch of footsteps behind him.
“Forgive me but . . .”
The voice was refined but wrong. Not the one he’d dreamed of and wept for. Micha whirled around to see a man, well dressed and stately, some twenty years or more his senior. “What?”
“Are you—do you need some assistance?”
“I’m not for sale.”
The stranger flushed. The fact he did not recoil or retreat, however, was an answer all of its own. “That was not the proposition I intended.”
“So there is a proposition?” Micha leaned back on his hands, caught somewhere between hostility and intrigue, wanting to be left alone and also terrified to be.
“No.” The man’s flush deepened. “I’m sorry. I’m not in the habit of—I saw you this morning.”
“You better not be following me.”
Wisely, the stranger made no answer, seeming to recognise that any he could make would be damning.
Micha thought about walking away. There was nothing to stop him. Instead, he said, “Scant few reasons for a gentleman to be hanging around the docks.”
“I was bidding farewell to my youngest son. He’s spending the spring and summer travelling with his tutor before he goes to university. Not quite the grand tour. But he’s ready enough to have his own life, I think. As . . .” There was the slightest of hesitations. “As am I.”
“And what does that have to do with me?” asked Micha.
The man offered a self-deprecating smile. “Very little.”
“Yet here you are.”
This was a familiar conversation to Micha.
Not the words exactly. But the cadence of it.
The dance that was not a dance. The fencing match where nobody knew if the foils were tipped.
If they would come away bleeding. Except Micha wasn’t sure if his companion was quite so familiar.
Despite his air of elegance, there was something unexpectedly open about him.
Or Micha was himself too open—had been left that way, defenceless in the wake of love—when he should have been wary.
“Well I . . .” Another hesitation. “I thought you were . . .”
“What?”
The man glanced away. “Beautiful.”
“You should probably be careful,” Micha said finally. “Going around telling strange men you think they’re beautiful.”
The gentleman turned back to him. There were threads of green in the gold of his eyes. Threads of grey in the brown of his hair. “Do I need to be careful with you?”
It was not a question Micha knew how to address. “I’ve been a whore, you know.”
“Haven’t we all,” returned the stranger, with a lemon twist of irony in his refined voice.
“Some of us more literally than others.”
“Perhaps that just makes you more honest.”
“I suppose”—Micha stirred the pebbles beneath his feet—“you’d like to fuck.”
“I think I’d like to know your name first.”
“Oh, you’re one of those.”
“What does that mean?”
It had been old bitterness that had spoken on Micha’s behalf. “Ignore me,” he muttered. “My name is Michael. Michael Dashwood.”
“Mine is . . . well.” Once again, the man blushed very slightly. “It’s Galahad, but in my defence my mother is Welsh. My friends call me Gale.”
“Are we to be friends then?” asked Micha, half-curious, half-wary.
“I would not care for us to pursue further intimacy, if we were not.”
“Doesn’t that rather limit your opportunities?”
Gale shrugged. “I haven’t touched another man since I was at university. That was twenty-seven years ago.”
“Then you must be bad at making friends.”
“I had a wife. For that matter, I still do. But she has her own lovers, and all our children are grown.”
“Was it worth it?”
“My wife is a good woman. And I love my family with all my heart.”
“And now you’re . . . what? Trawling the streets of Dover looking for . . . ?”
“I wouldn’t say I was either trawling or looking.
” Reaching out a gloved hand, Gale gently pushed a lock of hair back from Micha’s brow.
It wasn’t how a client would have touched him.
And it wasn’t like Thomas. But he felt warmth nonetheless from that promise of skin.
“Then again, one never knows what the tide brings in.”
“Or washes out.”
Gale made a sound so soft and lost it was almost lost beneath the rustle of the waves.
“It’s probably not fair on those I care for, and who care for me, to say I’m lonely, Michael.
I can’t make a mockery of the life we built together by claiming to be unhappy.
But the years keep passing and I . . . there are so many pieces of me I have put aside.
For safety. For convenience. Sometimes out of sorrow. Sometimes in shame.”
Impulsively, Micha caught Gale by the wrist and drew his hand back, folding their fingers together. “The thing is, I’m only fucking pieces. But”—and here he smirked—“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
It’s been a very long time, he tells me, gazing up at me with such trust in those green-gold eyes. And then he asks, can you . . . can you be gentle with me?
I can be anything you want, I promise.
And, to my surprise, I can. It’s easy to take care of him, the way I might want to have been taken care of myself, in a different life. And it feels good, not the best it’s ever felt, but good enough, my body belonging to nobody but me.
Afterwards, though, I cry, and he shushes away my apologies, and holds me, and I let him. He doesn’t press me for more than that. For an explanation I’m not ready to give and wouldn’t know how to even if I was.
The truth is, love has taken so much from me. I’m just relieved it’s finally given something back. Even if it’s only myself.