“I have chosen you.”
But Micha just shook his head. “You choose goodness every time. No matter what I offer. Even if I beg.”
“Why do you place yourself in opposition to what is right?”
“Because that’s what the world does to people like me.”
“People likeus,” Thomas reminded him gently.
“We’re not alike.”
The words were a wall. Unbreachable. The Micha who had opened himself, surrendered himself, there with Thomas in the firelight seemed suddenly a dream. An impossibility. A moment too fragile to survive beyond its instant. Thomas didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to make Micha his lover again. And Mrs. Clark and her daughter were waiting for him.
“I’ll be back soon,” Thomas tried, half-pleading with Micha’s rigid back.
But Micha only shrugged.
In the hallway, Mrs. Clark was helping Hope back into her travelling cloak.
“Are we having another adventure?” asked the girl.
“Only a very small one.” Thomas buttoned his overcoat all the way to his chin.
“There is no such thing as a small adventure. If there was, it would not be an adventure.”
“Then, I suppose,” he agreed, “we are having an adventure.”
He shoved the door into the face of the wind, stepped into the storm, and tried to put up the umbrella. Within seconds, it was inside out.
“Not one of my better ideas.” He dropped it onto the doorstep.
Hope came up beside him and, to his surprise, slipped her hand into his. “We cannot all be men of genius.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
And then, almost lost to the weather, came a soft, shy laugh.
Chapter 16
Micha watched the three figures until the darkness claimed them. The house seemed suddenly very silent, very empty.
What had she said again? Truth always got you in the end. And what of his truths? Would Madame Defleur’s daughter spit them at Thomas like maggots? She could have vanquished him tonight with a few simple words. Why had she not? Because she wished to hold them over him? Because she wanted to torture him? Because she wanted Thomas?
He rested his head against the cold glass, but he still felt as though he burned like Icarus.
How easily they’d touched each other. How easily they’d laughed together. And what could Micha give but bitterness and mistrust? Even his body was pledged to a different sovereign. And Thomas had turned from him anyway when Micha had tried to keep him.
Some whore. All his wiles overthrown by a virgin priest.
He twisted his fingers through his hair, wanting the flickers of pain, as faint as the storm-lost stars.
He would not wait like a dog for scraps.
He groped his way to his room in the dark and mixed himself a careless measure of laudanum, followed by another, and then another. He lay on the floor, staring at the prickle of lights inside his eyelids, waiting not to think, waiting not to feel.
He dreamed of Isidore, and of Thomas, of ghosts and angels, the unreachable past and the impossible future.
It was mid-afternoon by the time he clawed his way back to wakefulness, to cold skin and bodily aches. The storm had left the world crystal-bright, the sky stripped back to the barest cloudless blue. The light that flooded his room was the cleanest light he had ever seen, and he had never felt so soiled nor so wretched.
