“I do not know why we even try to include you in the bosom of this family anymore,” he raged as they stepped into the hall and the white-faced, gaping maid fetched his coat and hat. “Every time I offer an olive branch, you throw it back in my face.”
“The only reason you offer an olive branch is to beat me with it,” Jonathan snapped right back at him. “You’ve no wish to embrace me as your family, you only wish to pin my neck under your boot so you can castigate me for daring to live as I see fit. In public, if possible, so you can add value to your own sorry reputation.”
“I am trying to save your soul, you monster,” his father seethed, red-faced and quivering. “And I will never stop attempting to grasp your heel so that I might pull you out of the fiery pit as you fling yourself headfirst into it.”
Jonathan was not naïve enough to believe his father really cared about saving his soul. The truth was more akin to his father wishing to preserve his own, carefully constructed public persona. He was an MP, after all. One who’d been elected to his post based on his strict, Christian values and proselytizing from the bench.
Jonathan was an inconvenient blot marring an otherwise perfect picture, like a drop of acid that had burned through one of his photographs as he developed it.
Never mind. It didn’t truly matter. The enmity that existed between Jonathan and his family was mutual. They’d constricted him beyond endurance all through his younger days, telling him that the things he felt and wanted were wrong when they had only ever brought him joy and ecstasy.
He’d claimed his freedom from his family at his earliest convenience, defying his father’s wishes that he study the law at university by taking up photography instead. He’d never truly moved back into his family home after leaving it for Eton at age twelve. Once he’d declared himself done with Cambridge, despite not earning his degree, he’d used the not inconsiderable inheritance from his grandfather to purchase a building in Marylebone, where he’d established his photographic studio and his home.
Seven Dials was not directly in line between his family’s Belgravia house and his own home, but it was where he found himself whenever he was restless and prickly and in need of his next project. He knew the seedy streets leading in and out of the dial as well as he knew his own inclinations. He recognized at least some of the miserable inhabitants of that part of London, though there always seemed to be both more and less of them all the time. New faces arrived to supplant the ones who had disappeared like the changing of the seasons.
Jonathan was on the watch for a new face. He knew what he liked, knew what he wanted, knew what would sell. The right lad would be comely but bedraggled. He would be old enough to know his own mind but with a freshness that would cause imaginations to run wild. He might need a bit of cleaning up before he was ready for the camera, but Jonathan prided himselfon being able to see the truth under the dirt and to know how to frame it.
His wandering took him close to Neal Street, where he’d found a few of his most dazzling subjects in the past lingering outside of The Lion’s Mane pub. The area had a reputation for providing a very specific sort of treat for the same clientele who stumbled all over themselves to purchase his special photographs.
Jonathan took up a spot leaning against the wall in the shadows, brought a thin cigar from his pocket along with matches to light it, then leaned back to wait.
Someday, he would love to bring his camera out to that particular spot. His business thrived on portraiture, but he enjoyed capturing landscapes and moments in the city as well. There was more life teeming within what could be a single composition of that corner of Neal Street than in every one of the stiff and proper ladies, gentlemen, and families who visited his studio to be preserved in their snobbery for all time. If only he could capture the light that spilled from smudged streetlamps, the glow of fires within the pubs, and the bursts of laughter or shouting when the doors to those pubs flung open, spilling their sodden souls out onto the street.
“Oy! Get back here, pretty boy!”
The shout coming from an alley between two dull buildings pulled Jonathan out of his musings. He puffed his cigar and turned to watch as a young man with blond hair and flailing limbs dashed out into the street.
“Get him!” a second voice, another lad, younger than the blond, if Jonathan was any judge of age, which he had to be to avoid the law, sailed through the air.
A total of three adolescents chased after the blond, who might have been twenty, but might also have been twelve. The young man’s eyes were wide enough for Jonathan to see howblue they were in the lamplight. He skidded to a halt and looked up and down Neal Street, panicked and desperate for escape.
His hesitation cost him. The three lads caught up with him, the largest of them tackling him to the dirt and refuse of the street.
Jonathan took a last suck of his cigar, tamped the end against the wall, dropped it, then moved forward to get a better look.
“Get his shoes!” one of the lads shouted as the biggest of them pinned the squirming, fighting blond down. “They’ll fetch a fortune.”
“His cap, too,” another of them said.
Jonathan was not usually one to intervene in trouble on the streets, but the blond had ignited something in him instantly. The way he silently struggled, the twist of misery on his pinched face as he thrashed against boys who were both younger and bigger than him was intriguing. His clothes were a step above what most street rubbish wore, which would explain why the lads wanted his shoes, but he had the same wan, half-starved look of any other urchin.
The man had a story, Jonathan could tell at once, and he wanted to know what it was.
“You there,” he called out, making his voice sound as authoritative as his father’s. “Leave the man alone.”
“Bugger off,” the largest of the boys said.
Jonathan continued to approach them. One of them backed off and turned to run, but the other two kept up their assault of the blond.
“I’ll call the police if you don’t let him go,” Jonathan insisted.
“What do I care?” the largest boy said. “All the coppers here are on the take.”
The other lost his nerve. He glanced up at Jonathan as if assessing whether he really would. After a blink, he made a decision and darted off, snatching the blond’s cap as he went.
Jonathan was out of warnings for the largest lad. He reached into his coat pocket for the policeman’s baton he’d acquired for situations exactly like this and smashed it across the largest boy’s head.
“Oy! Fuck!” the lad shouted, spilling off of the blond, one hand held to the side of his head.
