“I’m not your fucking jester,” he snarled, but the words lacked conviction.
“Your friend should have taught you better,” replied Thomas, gravity finally returning.
A flash of pain quenched the brightness of Micha’s eyes, and Thomas wished he could have cut his tongue out rather than have spoken so carelessly. But before he could apologise, Micha went on, his voice very soft, “I was not attentive. And he was ... he was a master at it. He knew my every move before I made it. An astonishing mind, really. Fuck knows what he saw in me—I mean, why he would have sought my friendship.”
Thomas put the box aside and folded his hands on the tabletop. This flicker of uncertainty was unusual. Even in his physical frailty, there was something invincible about Micha, but Thomas suddenly realised how young he was. Perhaps not even three and twenty. Yet he spoke, and acted, as though centuries hung on his shoulders. A lot of the time, he made Thomas—who had passed his thirtieth year—feel callow and ignorant.
“Are you truly in doubt?” he asked.
A strange shadow crossed Micha’s face, his lips twisting cynically. But whatever had inspired the thought, he did not utter it. “Well.” He shrugged. “I’m not clever, I’m not learned, I’m not rich, I’m not anything, really. No wonder he tired of me.”
Once, when Thomas was quite young, he had been walking with Edward somewhere in the lands beyond Montrose, past the ordered loveliness of its widely admired gardens. Edward’s idea, he seemed to recall. There had been wild lavender tangled among the hedgerows, and then a storm of sunshine-yellow butterflies. One had alighted, in the confusion, on Thomas’s nose. “It has mistaken you for a flower,” Edward had said, laughing. And Thomas had stood there, barely daring to breathe, afraid for the transience of the moment, yet knowing the transience was part of it. He felt rather like that now. “Any man would be honoured to have your friendship.”
“Right.”
Thomas was learning to hate that word. Never had he heard it imbued with such utter scepticism and such utter despair. He leaned across the table, trying to catch Micha’s eye, though Micha was rather practised at looking anywhere but at Thomas except when he chose. “You have a ... lustre,” he said, earnestly.
“A what?”
“I don’t know. Something remarkable. It draws the eye and fixes the attention, as though you bring light to a room just by being in it.” Micha’s expression had grown, if possible, even more scornful, so Thomas went on, in a more playful tone: “And, besides, there is more to merit than wealth and more to cleverness than being able to play chess.”
Micha’s whole cuff had practically unravelled, and he was still not looking at Thomas. “Rubbish,” he muttered. “Also, between having merit and having money, I’d rather have money.”
“Surely merit can readily produce money.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Micha glanced up, frowning, a flash of anger in his eyes as though Thomas had somehow tricked him into confidences against his will. Thomas was, however, tolerably accustomed to this too and quickly sought for a way to turn the conversation to something frivolous. As much as he pretended not to, Micha seemed to genuinely enjoy it when Thomas amused him. And that dreamy, shyly tender mouth of his seemed made more naturally for laughter than for scowls and sneers. “So much for merit then. And you said yourself that chess was a stupid game.”
“It is. Who rides their horses in an L shape?”
“For . . . flanking?”
“And why do bishops barge up and down, diagonally, always stuck on their starting colour?”
“Ah, now that, I think you must agree, is a startlingly accurate portrayal of an English bishop in action.”
Micha raised his eyes slowly, and the corners of his lips twitched as though he was trying to suppress a smile.
And Thomas gazed at him, smiling too, enchanted. “You can laugh,” he whispered. “I won’t tell a soul.”
“I’m not giving you the satisfaction.” But Micha’s face betrayed him. He smiled with everything except his mouth. “You’ve already won at chess. Twice. What more can you want?”
“I think ... I think I’d like this better.”
“All the more reason not to give it to you.”
“‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’”
Micha spluttered, his expression a wonderful tangle of surprise, amusement, and outrage. For someone who hid behind scowls and indifference, he could be very animated when caught unawares. “You said that when ... when you found me. The way you use scripture, I sometimes think”—he drew in a slow breath—“that beneath your façade of virtue you might be a very wicked man.”
“I sometimes think,” returned Thomas, “that beneath your façade of wickedness, you are a good one.”
Micha pulled back, and the moment shattered like a mirror. “I wouldn’t count on it.”
There was what Thomas thought must have been a mutually bewildered silence, and then the door burst open, and George came striding in. He looked better than he had the last time Thomas had seen him, though not by much and, once again, travel-stained. Stripping off his overcoat and tossing his hat aside, he threw himself down in a nearby chair.
“Please.” Thomas smiled. “Don’t stand on ceremony on our account.”
