Volume I
London
Chapter 1
1
Please darling, he says, give yourself to me.
He says, there is no sin in this.
He says, I will always love you. I will never leave you.
And I believe him. I believe him, and there is only beauty beneath his touch. Love and desire, paradise in prefiguring miniature, all the ecstasies of faith transubstantiated into skin until we are stars.
“Micha,” snapped Madame Defleur, as he stumbled over the threshold, “you look about as fuckable as a hole in the wall.” She ran a modest house on Church Lane, at which Michael Dashwood—when he was so inclined—made a modest living. “Mary’s tits, what’s wrong with your eye? Are you bleeding? And on my new carpet.”
“There are some clients,” he slurred, “who would likely pay extra because of it.” But he let himself be hustled downstairs into the kitchen, where none of the customers would see him.
“Well, I don’t trade in damaged goods.”
A laugh, harsh as blue ruin and utterly mirthless, rolled out of him. “Of course you do, dear Madame.”
“Are you drunk?” Madame Defleur glared at him through her paint-thick eyes.
“No, I am not drunk.” He had a surprisingly refined voice, and the diction of an educated man. It was incongruous with his general manner, his threadbare clothes, and the tawdry cosmetics that defined his eyes and darkened his lips.
She snorted. “Poppy-addled?”
He smiled at her, all sudden charm and blank eyes.
“Oh, clean yourself up,” she growled. “And then piss off.”
His lashes swept down in a look of practised submission. “Yes, Madame.”
She swept out in a rustle of scarlet skirts.
The room was shabby. But it was familiar and warm. Better than outside, where it was raining. Or so Micha thought. It was hard to tell through the drug haze. He put a hand to his coat sleeve and pressed it against his skin until he felt the damp and the cold seep through the fabric. Yes, it must have been raining. Then he touched his fingers to his mouth. They came away bloody. The pain would be later, if at all.
In the middle of the kitchen was a rough wooden table, flanked on either side by long benches. It was a style of furnishing better described as “cheap” than “rustic.” Sometimes he waited here with the other whores, listening to their laughter, swapping stories filthy and ridiculous. As much performance as everything he did upstairs, among the velvet and gilt, promises and lies.
Micha swung his legs over the nearest bench and sat down. A cough took him by surprise, erupting from a red centre of agony in the middle of his chest, stealing breath and thought alike as he fought to subdue it. He was left gasping and trembling, the weakness of his body cutting sharply through the opiates that usually shielded him. He hunched his shoulders, curling in on himself, dragging in painful breath after painful breath until, at last, the instinctive physical fear was gone. He thought it strange the way the body struggled on, when all else was lostand gone. He watched the shadows dancing in the corners of the room. They made the shapes of monsters.
Then he folded one of his elbows on the table, cushioned his head on it, and fell asleep.
In his dreams, the shadows kept dancing, drifting sometimes into men who had known his body, the one who had known his soul.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Madame Defleur shook him roughly awake. “This isn’t a fucking church.”
Micha blinked phantasms from his eyes, trying to remember where he was. He ached. He was tired. Shivers chased each other across his flesh like ripples across a fetid pond. He put fingertips to his lips and winced as the skin cracked, flakes of dried blood falling in rust-coloured petals onto the tabletop.
Madame Defleur dragged him to his feet. He was tall but far too thin, and she had the build of a prizefighter. He stumbled, his knee catching sharply against the bench. The pain troubled him less than the realisation that he’d felt it in the first place. He thought he had long dispensed with feelings of any kind.
This hazy awareness brought with it other realisations. He had no money and, as of tonight, no lodgings. How had that come about? Ah yes. The money, put aside for rent, he had instead given to the proprietor of a particular house in Tiger Bay, a gentleman who arrayed himself in robes of gold-embroidered silk and styled himself Johnny Wu, though he was as Chinese as Madame Defleur was French. Nevertheless, his skill in the toasting of opium was such that his customers were rumoured to include dukes and marquesses. And, on this occasion (as on many others), Micha had fully intended to replace the money. But time and opportunity had somehow got away from him. And he had made similar promises before.
Until this last incident, he had shared a miserable set of rooms in Raven Row with another whore called Nettie. He had known her for a year or so, a long time by the standards of a life which rendered fleeting everything it did not soil. She thought herself his friend, but Michahad little use for friendship. He could, however, be winning enough when he chose, though increasingly the effort of it (when he was not being paid for it and sometimes even then) wearied him. Nettie was softhearted enough that she would have forgiven this lapse, as she had all the ones preceding it. Unfortunately, her fancy man, upon whom she had prevailed to cover the shortfall, had been less tolerant. The black eye and the split lip were his parting gifts, along with the avowal that Micha had got off lightly.
Micha had no opinion on the subject. Mere brutishness touched his flesh as transiently as water.
