“Who are you?” Charlie asked in a shaky whisper.
“Fabian,” the man said, clutching at Charlie and grabbing his shirt and waistcoat like he didn’t know what they were.
And then Charlie saw it. Everything flashed together in his mind with a blast of pure pity. The young man, Fabian’s, eyes were glassy and bloodshot. His skin was flushed and he couldn’t stand still.
“Have you been given laudanum?” he asked hoarsely.
Fabian sobbed and nodded, unsteady on his feet. “I don’t want it,” he wept. “Make it stop. I can’t?—”
It wasn’t just laudanum. The inside of Fabian’s elbows were bruised and dotted with pinpricks as well. Charlie remembered similar marks on the arms of a school friend’s older brother who had become addicted to morphine after an injury while serving abroad in the army.
“I know someone who can help you,” Charlie said, voice shaking. “I’ll fetch him.”
“Don’t leave me!” Fabian cried, grabbing Charlie through the window and clinging to him.
Charlie hugged him back. He didn’t know who Fabian was or why he was there. He couldn’t imagine how or why Fabian had come to be treated as he was. The man inspired him with deep, deep fear, but he hugged him through the window as if they were brothers.
Until the sound of a key being inserted in a lock on the other side of the door rattled both of them.
“Hide!” Fabian gasped, pushing away from Charlie and shoving him all the way out the window with a surprising burst of strength.
Charlie stumbled back, falling over completely when Fabian reached up to slam the window shut. The curtains fell back into place, hiding the interior of the cottage.
They couldn’t block out the sound, though.
A man’s voice called out something from the doorway. Charlie couldn’t make out the words or recognize the voice. He heard Fabian pleading with the man, though. Pleading loudly as the man spoke in a way that seemed cajoling.
Then came the sound of a struggle. Fabian and the man were fighting, though Charlie couldn’t tell how much of a struggle was going on.
A few seconds later, Fabian’s voice grew loud enough for Charlie to hear his shouts of, “No! No!”
And then he was quiet.
Charlie huddled where he was under the window, hugging himself and trembling so hard he couldn’t stand. Tears poured down his face as he strained to hear more, prayed to hear Fabian fighting back and winning.
There was nothing but muffled movement from the cottage, and then no sound at all. At least, none that could penetrate the window.
It wasn’t safe. Charlie was certain the man was still in the cottage with Fabian, doing God only knew what. There was nothing he could do about it, though. The only thing he could do was to crawl unsteadily through the grass away from the cottage, and then, once he was far enough away, to stand and run back toward the house, fighting not to sob as he went.
Chapter Eleven
If Jonathan could have stayed in his rooms and taken his supper with Charlie, he would have. Charlie wasn’t the only one intimidated by Fairford House. He kept telling himself it was nothing, that being away from London and his own environments had unsettled him. But Jonathan knew what Charlie meant when he said something was wrong with the house.
Pointing out the wrongs of the world and calling on his peers to do something about them had never ended well for Jonathan, though. So he did the only thing he could. He put on his most affable smile, pretended that all was well with the world, and walked into the dining room to take a seat at Lord Frome’s long, well-appointed table as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Even though his nerves bristled so hard just from being in company with his father and men who were his father’s friends that he couldn’t taste any of the meal presented to him.
“I trust you made good progress with your photographic endeavors today,” Lord Frome addressed him from the head of the table. “It was a lovely day for it.”
“Yes, the light was particularly pleasing,” Jonathan said, aware that most of the guests around the table had interrupted their conversations to watch him.
His father watched him with a darkened brow, clutching his soup spoon as though he would have to use it to beat manners into Jonathan at any moment.
“I am curious as to how you are able to capture an image without the need to rush into some sort of tent of chemicals to affix it to paper,” one of the guests Jonathan didn’t know said.
Perhaps that man was one of the ones Brutus and Titus needed documented. Perhaps this first supper of his time at Fairford would be the ideal time to learn more about the men he’d been sent to document.
“The art and science of photography have advanced quite a bit in the past several years,” he said, welcoming the attention that turned to him instead of shrinking from it. “We’ve long past the days of wet plates that required immediate development with noxious chemicals. Ever since Dr. Maddox’s invention of photographic plates that have already been treated with photosensitive chemicals seventeen years ago, and since those plates are currently produced in factories and available for purchase, photography has become a much more portable endeavor.”
