“You don’t. I give myself to you.”
“And how do you think He feels about that?”
“My choices hurt no one, nor do they take me from Him.”
“Fuck,” whispered Micha, burying his face in Thomas’s tangled hair. “Your faith is fucking unshakeable.”
“On the contrary, I have been assailed by doubt my whole life.”
“What changed?”
“I understood love, Micha. Simply that.”
They were silent for long moments. The intricate traceries of frost that had crystallised upon the windowpanes during the night were weeping silver tears.
“You know what I don’t get?” said Micha, at last. “Why does all the good stuff get dumped on the doorstep of the Lord, but the bad stuff is always our own bloody fault. I mean, you look at the stars or the sky and it’s always”—he mimicked Thomas, rather cruelly—“‘Oh look, how lovely, there must be a loving God.’ But you don’t see a dying child or a family starving in a tenement and say the same thing.”
“Human misery is caused by humans.”
Micha waved a hand in the vague direction of the outside world and the pearl-pink dawn. “And that is caused by the rotation of the earth.” He took a breath. “And if you say the rotation of the earth is caused by God, I’ll ... I don’t know ... fuck you senseless.”
“Are you trying to persuade me to accept your position, or to refute it?” But the playfulness faded from Thomas’s voice as Micha made no reply. “I can’t explain the workings of the universe to you. A sunrise isn’t a piece of rhetoric. The mind is only one part of faith, just as it’s only one part of love.”
“I’m not just going to believe something because I need the consolation or because I’m too scared not to.”
“Of course not, my love.”
Micha tightened his arms around Thomas. “I’m taking you away from everything you care about.”
“It was you who taught me how to value it. I came here for duty, and I shall leave for love. Because I belong to God, and I belong with you.”
“If He loves you as you say, He wouldn’t make you choose.”
“He didn’t. I chose.”
“And I’m still your choice?” Micha touched his lips to the tender nape of Thomas’s neck, making him shiver. “Even with so much to lose?”
“We don’t have to lose anything yet,” said Thomas. “You need to recover your strength. And my parishioners—”
“Will never not need you, Thomas. Surely you can see that.”
“Nonsense.” Thomas’s tone was brisk and certain. “Another priest will serve them just as well.”
Micha could never quite tell if Thomas was humble or naive—possibly he was both—but, in this, he wanted to be reassured. Convinced. So he simply nodded and settled back into the recesses of the window. Thomas snuggled a little closer, turning his face once more into the sunrise, which touched his hair and the tips of his eyelashes with the promise of gold. Looking down at his lover, Micha felt something terrifyingly close to happiness sweep through his heart like the light across the sky.
Chapter 22
One bright, cold afternoon, a few days into the New Year, George arrived. As ever, he burst into the room without ceremony, the scent of mud and horse clinging to his clothes, and frost gilding the edges of his overcoat.
“Thom, I need to talk—” He paused, gazing about the room, his expression disdainful. “Well, isn’t this domestic.”
Thomas half-rose, his eyes darting in some alarm from George, to Micha, to Sheba.
But then Hope looked up from the map she was studying and said sternly: “It is not domestic. It is the Isla Tortuga, a den of iniquity.”
There was a long silence, filled with far too many tensions, and, surprisingly, George was the first to break it, some hint of a man Thomas had not seen since Edward’s death stirring in the shadows of his eyes. “Is it now?” He unbuttoned his coat and tossed it aside. “And who might you be, to frequent such a place?”
“Nancy Blood. Captain Nancy Blood.”
