He rolled painfully onto his side, retching on the aftermath of too much opium.
It was a long time before he was capable of washing himself and changing his clothes. His hands almost shook too much to allow him to shave. Where was Thomas? He surely knew by now.
Whore, liar, thief, opium eater, blackmailer.
Thomas had told Mrs. Clark that the past did not matter. But he would surely feel differently about his lover. About the man he had given his trust and his body and his heart to. Besides, unlike that damn woman, Micha had not changed. It was all he knew how to be.
Three times, Thomas had said “I love you.” Like the childhood trinkets of a seaside holiday, pebbles and glass made shiny by the tide, turning dull in daylight.
Somewhere, it had all gone wrong. Micha had gone wrong. Necessity had become preference, preference partiality. He had slipped between love and laudanum, and now he was nowhere. He could not feel, and he could not stop himself feeling.
If only Madame Defleur’s daughter had not come. If only Micha’s shameless whoring had held Thomas’s attention a moment longer. And now he would lose it all, these last shreds of a thing called happiness.
Maybe he could plead his case. But what could he say?See all that I am, all this ugliness, all this shame, and love me anyway.
Unthinkable. Unaskable.
But by the time Micha had mustered the scraps of his courage and crept from his room, the house was silent. In the hall, the light was warm as butter, gleaming thickly upon the polished wood, and on the letter Thomas had left for him.
He had gone to London to see his brother.
Which meant Micha had a little time.
He traced his fingertips over the paper, following the precise curves and angles of Thomas’s words. It was not an elegant script. But.
I love you,he’d written.
Four.
A scant handful of years ago, he could have been hanged for everything that implied. The man was such a fool.
Micha should have kept the letter. For blackmail. Or for warmth. For something to hold in the empty places of his heart. But there, in the golden afternoon, he lit a candle and burned the page to ashes. He held it so long that he nearly scorched his fingers, watching the words disappear one by one into a curl of black and orange.
Then he went outside to think. The sun pressed hard against his eyes, burning red when he tried to close them. The sky glared. A faint breeze scraped against his skin. His stomach, empty of anything but bile and the remembrance of laudanum, twisted sharply, and a bubble of sour breath caught at the back of his throat until he gagged. He slumped down on the doorstep, put his head between his knees, and waited until he felt less like dying.
Finally, the light stopped splintering, and his heart stopped squeezing, and he was able to breathe again. He groaned softly into his hands—pure physical misery—and seriously considered going back inside for another draught of laudanum. It would ease the aching and the tightness of his skin, at least. If he only took a little, it would be enough, just enough to soften the sharp places and stop them hurting.
But the world smelled damp and fresh and new. He hugged his knees and peeled open an eye. Puddles shimmered along the path to the village, as though the little road was suddenly made of silver. And Micha remembered the taste of Thomas in the rain.
He pulled himself back to his feet and began to walk. The autumn borders, wine and gold and indigo, glittered with transient diamonds. He turned off the path, as he had before, and followed the trails of flattened grass through the meadows. But there was no peace today. The storm hadbrought a last reckless rush of something like summer, and everywhere he looked was brightness, like the scarlet dregs of revelry before dawn. Micha’s eyes ached a little, and so did his heart.
He came to the stile where he had sketched his disastrous landscape, and there upon it was a slight figure in a grey dress and a shabby bonnet. In the field beyond, a girl and a sunrise-coloured dog chased each other in giddy circles at the centre of a pastoral idyll.
Mrs. Clark—Miss Abbett—Madame Defleur’s daughter—turned her head.
“Oh fuck,” said Micha.
She nodded but offered nothing more.
He stumbled back a few steps. Then he stopped. He had not fallen quite so low that he was about to run away from a woman.
“Did you want something from me?” she asked. Beneath the wings of the bonnet, he could see only the pale, cold curve of her profile.
And before he could stop them, the words came rushing out, raw and frantic: “You’re going to tell him?”
She turned away and watched the girl and the dog playing in the meadow. Her neatly gloved hands gripped the edges of the stile.
Micha swallowed, and it felt like swallowing bile. “Please don’t tell him.”
