“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 somepoint 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 fromThe Gentlemen of Londonwith a shudder. “But do you not think that the men who seeksuch 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 sodomiteseemed 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?”
