Once it did, he shook his head, even though that wasn’t an honest answer.
“Would you like to?” the man asked.
Charlie knew what it was to have a photograph taken, of course. His father had had two taken of their family in the past few years. The most recent one sat in a frame in the parlor at home.
Not home now, his parents’ house.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if his father had yanked that photograph from its frame and ripped him out of it, or tarred over his image in black as if he’d never been part of any family to begin with.
“I am a photographer,” the man said when Charlie took too long to react to him. “I take a very specific kind of photograph that I sell to a unique sort of gentleman. I pay five shillings, I’ll feed you and give you a bath, and you never have to pretend to know me if you see me again.”
Five shillings for a photograph? That was more than he’d been paid at the accountancy office in the six months he’d worked there.
“I photograph nudes,” the man went on. “In particular positions.”
Charlie sucked in a sudden breath. Five shillings for photographs of debauchery.
His debauchery.
The idea of it had his skin prickling and his insides fizzing.
Imagine capturing those moments of transcendence forever.
The man smiled. “So you understand?”
Charlie nodded. His pulse raced and some of the memories he was certain he should forget but didn’t want to sparked in his brain. Lovely, heated memories. Wicked memories.
“Are you interested?” the man asked, the same sort of sparks in his eyes.
The man waited for him, studying him as if he were already framing the photographs and hanging them in a prized place. And then gazing at them as he took himself in hand.
Heat spilled through Charlie, guilty and tempting and sharp. He’d followed that heat before, and look where it’d gotten him.
Then again, he was going to die anyhow. Why not die with a taste of heaven before he ended up eternally in hell?
He nodded.
“Good,” the man said, letting go of his jaw.
Charlie felt the loss of the man’s touch immediately.
The man gestured for Charlie to follow him, but turned back and asked, “Are you older than eighteen?”
A shiver passed through Charlie’s gut, coalescing in his balls. The man must have wanted something beyond the ordinary.
Charlie swallowed, knowing full well what his answer would commit him to, and nodded.
The man smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Follow me. I think this will be an arrangement that we’ll both benefit from.”
Charlie followed. At that point, knowing full well the dangers that reached for him from the shadows all around him, he didn’t think he had any choice. It was either die at the hands of the next cutpurse who found him huddled between empty crates behind some dank pub or lose himself to the depravities of a man who had dubious plans for him.
Even though he’d been born and raised in London, Charlie wasn’t familiar with all its streets and corners. Most of his life had been lived in Bermondsey. He could count the number of times he’d ventured north of the Thames in his twenty years on one hand.
He’d crossed over the river deliberately when he’d been discovered and his father had thrown him out. It had seemed poetic and fitting that he should divide his life before being caught with his trousers down and after with an entire river.Even though it’d only been a month, the two parts of his life felt so different as to be unrecognizable to each other.
The London that his savior walked him through on the north side of the river was worlds away from the south. The buildings were older and statelier. Oxford Street was a mad, bustling mess, even compared to the factories that had surrounded Charlie in his childhood. The rows of neat houses and small businesses along Wigmore Street represented an entirely different world to Charlie.
At the same time, he wasn’t at all surprised when they reached a small but neat building with a shingle depicting a camera hanging by its door and thick curtains drawn to conceal its interior. It was far grander than the crowded, stuffy shop his father had bundled his family off to for their portrait. The man unlocked the front door with a key he drew from the same pocket where he’d stashed his baton, then held it, arm extended, for Charlie to walk inside.
