A stranger’s voice, refined, impatient: “For God’s sake, Thomas, come away.”
Micha was lying on the ground. A man in evening dress was leaning over him, apparently heedless of the mud and filth upon which he knelt. He was peering down at Micha, and his face was neither beautiful nor kind.
Micha tried to sit up, tried to say something. It took all his strength just to open his mouth, and when he did, he felt like he might vomit. He collapsed onto his side, struggling to breathe. And suddenly he was choking, coughing, painfully and helplessly, blood, spit, and mucus spattering the ground and the backs of his hands. The protective haze of opium was faltering. The world closing in again. He felt wretched and mortified, locked into a body he hated and a world that despised him.
“Come away. This could be any manner of contagion.”
But the one who knelt would not be moved. “This man is ill. He needs help.”
“Then he may go to a workhouse.”
“I-I ... am quite well,” interrupted Micha, dragging his voice from his raw throat. He made another attempt to stand, which brought him to his knees in short order. Dark smudges filled his vision, like the burned-out afterimages of suns.
“You are not.” An arm caught him about the waist. Micha tried to pull away, but the man first addressed as Thomas was too strong for him. “Who are your friends?” he was asking, with consideration rather than warmth. “Your family? May I see you to them?”
Micha realised that his accent had misrepresented him. They must have believed him respectable. “I have none.” And before the stranger who held him could react, he added with a sneer, “Nor do I wish any.”
There was a moment of silence at the heart of a busy street. Pressed as he was in the crook of his arm, it was hard for Micha to avoidThomas’s eyes. They were brown, plainly brown, but arresting in their warmth, and all the more so in his austere, patrician face.
“You heard the fellow.” Thomas’s companion shifted from one foot to the other. “I’m due at the club.”
“Then you must go to your club.”
The man made a sound of ill-repressed frustration. “Must you make Christianity an affliction, brother?”
The stern mouth quirked into what seemed its more natural shape, a smile touched by a hint of whimsy. “‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, but the greatest of these—’”
“Oh be quiet.” His brother turned up the collar of his greatcoat and strode into the mist.
Micha shoved Thomas—with his deep eyes and gentle mouth—away from him. Oxford had been lifetimes ago. He had nothing but pieces of Greek, fragments of Latin, and a thousand memories of Isidore. But his tutor had been a patient, learned man who had not laboured entirely in vain. The words tangled around his tongue as he tried to speak them. “‘The righteous is more excellent than his neighbour: but the way of the wicked seduceth them.’”
Micha delivered his rejection and did not look back. He took a few faltering steps, away from Thomas, away from the theatre, back towards the East End. And then weakness overtook him, darkness snatched at him, and he discovered he was on the brink of fainting for the second time that evening.
Thomas caught him before he fell. “Whether you are wicked or not, I think I must insist that you bear me company.”
Micha struggled on some combination of principle and instinct. “I won’t go to the workhouse.”
“No, of course not. Come with me, and I will see you safe.”
Safe? Micha tried to laugh, tried to push the man away, but shards of glass were breaking in his chest and his mouth was thick with blood and all he did was fall into the stranger’s arms.
64
The usual mechanics, body to body, skin to skin, in and out, in and out, making the noises he wants me to make. Behind my eyes, nothing but blank darkness, sour and solid as a wall.
The man called Thomas had access to a carriage. Micha drifted in and out of awareness as he half-sat, half-lay in the velvet gloom.
He was cold, then hot, then cold again.
He shivered and sweated.
When he coughed, it felt like he was dying, as though it was the remains of his own heart’s blood he was bringing up.
Occasionally, moonlight would fall hazily through the window across the stranger’s face. Strong features, cold lines, like something from the portrait of a bygone age, a living testament to English breeding: centuries of pride and privilege rendered in cold stone.
512
Wanting coins for the dragon, I let a sailor have me against a wall for a shilling. I scrape my palms raw while he ruts and I shake with need, though not for this. Never anymore for this.
