Thomas’s eyes were upon him, a gleam of hope through the gloom.
Micha met his gaze, gave up thinking, and simply spoke. “The railway bridge had been rebuilt after the Revolution, so that was how I first saw it, a city rising from the mirror of the water. It wasn’t what it once was, silenced somehow, to the heart of itself, but still beautiful. A dimly dreaming city, of azure and dusty gold.”
And so Micha talked, and Thomas listened, and time—ever the thief—slipped slowly away from them.
Chapter 19
Had Thomas allowed Micha to extract the promise he’d wanted, it would have been broken within two days. The next week cast them both into a hell the like of which he could not have imagined, and nothing on heaven or earth would have induced him to let Micha face it alone. Even though Micha had become a demonic creature—one who hated Thomas, cursed at him, and sometimes came at him in violence—he was too weak and delirious to be able to cause any real harm. But holding at bay the man he had previously held in his arms was its own particular pain.
That first morning, Micha surrendered to Thomas’s hands two bottles of laudanum, one from London and one purchased from the village druggist. The next day, crying and shaking, he had offered up a third bottle, and then flown into a fury when Thomas had refused to return it. Rage, at last, had exhausted him, and Micha had huddled on the floor like a broken bird, his hands curled painfully tight into his hair, and his body streaming with sweat. By then he’d been close to incoherent, choking out a tangle of apologies, self-hatred, and bile. Thomas had sat at Micha’s side trying, without success, to calm him or aid him, until—in a fresh bout of frenzied despair—Micha had banished him from the room. So Thomas had crouched in the hall outside, head in his hands, listening helplessly as the man he loved wept and suffered on the other side of the wall. Then, he prayed, at first without much thought, just forming words made smooth as seashells from long habit.
It got no easier.
Micha’s health deteriorated. His body seemed to take violent antipathy to itself, tearing apart in a manner as painful as it was undignified, and his mind offered little refuge from the physical torment. Within a mere handful of days, Micha no longer seemed able to recognise, or remember, who Thomas was. He saw only nightmares, phantasmal monsters from his past, and Thomas could neither understand nor vanquish them. Sometimes he caught Isidore’s name through the tumult, but even that brought Micha no comfort. Lost to the cruel chimeras of his affliction, Micha cowered and wept, shook uncontrollably and clawed at his own skin. He had become unreachable, untouchable.
When Thomas tried to comfort him, Micha would cringe away, as mindlessly fearful as a beast. When he became so great a danger to himself that it was necessary to physically restrain him, he would struggle wildly, and then plead with Thomas and the ghosts who lay beyond Thomas’s reach,Don’t touch me, please, please don’t touch me. At last, he would fall utterly quiescent, and Thomas, close to tears himself, would search his blank eyes desperately for a trace of Michael Dashwood, and find nothing but an empty darkness.
In these moments, Thomas would pray again, but not to his God.
I love you. I am waiting for you. I love you. Come back to me.
Thomas had told Mrs. Allen that he had fallen afoul of some slight indisposition and needed to rest. The possibility of contagion had not been enough to keep her away—and soup was accumulating in the kitchen at an alarming rate—but he had managed to persuade her to moderate her hours, at least, and Ellen, the maid of all work, had gone to stay with her family in the next village. So the days and nights passed indistinguishably in a blur of anguish. A mere handful of months ago, Thomas knew he could not have borne it. He would have exhausted himself in futile questioning. His soul would have shivered in the cold vastness of the universe, and he would have believed himself alone.
But he knew now what it was to love, and be loved, and he was not afraid. He was not forsaken. And he knew this pain would pass.
At last, Micha began to have patches of lucidity, but all he wanted was laudanum. He demanded, he bargained, he begged. His damp, trembling hands would curl around Thomas’s as if in mockery of every touch they shared:Help me, Thomas, please help me; if you loved me, you would help me.
If Thomas could have lashed himself to the mast and stopped his ears with wax, he would have done it.
No matter how gentle his refusals, the demon would return, his words an excoriating tangle of truth and lies. This Micha knew terms so obscene that Thomas barely understood them, and they fell upon his heart like drops of acid. There were many such scenes, each a little more unbearable than the last.
Bowed but not broken, at least not quite, Thomas was sitting on the stairs, where he had once sat with Micha and grieved for his brother, when there came a knocking at his door. Such was his weariness that it took him a moment to recognise the unfamiliar sound. The hour had grown late and the shadows long, but the dregs of his lamp offered a faint, butter-yellow light that would have rendered unconvincing a pretence of absence. Thomas put a hand to his unshaven cheek and then tried to smooth his tousled hair. He had not washed in days. He was not fit to be seen.
On the other side of the door, there surely waited a parishioner in need.
And Thomas could do nothing. He would not leave Micha’s side. He would, instead, betray his calling, betray himself, for love and for Micha, and the deepest, darkest truth was this: It was no choice at all.
It was why he could not be a priest, if he had ever truly been one. Once a dutiful servant, he was now not even that. He was a man, wholly and imperfectly a man.
Another flurry of knocking. “Thomas? Are you there? It’s Sheba.”
Thomas lifted his head. Her voice was so unexpected, so utterly welcome, that he had staggered to his feet and flung wide the door before he had even articulated the wish to do so.
She was a grey shadow against the grey evening, her eyes touched by the colour of the fading sky. She took one look at him and held out her arms with instinctive warmth. “Oh Thomas.”
And he tumbled heedlessly into an embrace. It was not like holding Micha, for she was slight, and soft in ways a man was not soft, but there was no frailty in her either. Her body pressed to his was as strong and subtle as a flame. Thomas had little experience of being touched in compassion, and it quite undid him. It was as though it healed a hurt he had not even known was there.
After a moment, Sheba gave him a little shake, the swift transition from tenderness to pragmatism reminding him strangely of Micha. “You should have asked for help.”
He pulled back in sudden awkwardness. “How did you know ... that is ... I don’t think Micha—”
“For yourself. Damn Micha’s ridiculous pride.”
“It’s all he has.”
Her callused fingers lightly traced the scratch marks that crisscrossed the backs of his hands. “And what of you?”
Thomas gazed at her, too exhausted for deceptions and too unravelled by her kindness. “He is everything to me.”
