Page 50 of By Any Means

16

CHARY

Chary’s supposedly dead brother chose that Sunday, amongst all the other Sundays that had passed since he’d been staying in Berryfield, to attend St. Michael’s morning mass. Chary was so startled to see him, he gasped; heads turned in almost every pew. Chary clutched at his calf as if charlie-horsed and waved. Heads turned politely back. Most of them.

August sat, snickering—in plain sight, in chauffeur’s livery!—at the aisle edge of a middle pew, right next to Brasher and Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Leonard, the housekeeper.

Chary hissed at him in passing. “Have you lost your mind?”

August didn’t look over, but the golden mustache couldn’t hide a smirk. “Didn’t see me in the cab?” he murmured. “Your new stained glass looks a beauty, Mr. Wright,” he said, louder.

There were parishioners behind Chary in the aisle, pending, impatient, and his face was burning; he couldn’t stop. He swept on.

August had sat in the cab? The Caddy’s front driver’s seat wasn’t enclosed at all. What if Laurie Tulley hadn’t been an atheist and had decided to accompany him to mass this morning instead of staying behind? What if he had seen August from a window as they left? Chary should’ve walked to church. The Cadillac wasn’t even his. It had been purchased at August’s insistence, eight months earlier.

He couldn’t focus on the service for catastrophizing, unto the point he almost felt he had to apologize to Father Newcomb, with whatever goodwill he’d wrought with the new stained-glass windows and the Church Ladies’ society evaporating fast.

In his imagination, anyway. Nobody treated him any differently, even with the state of his beaten-up face. (“Perils of a New York City carriage,” he explained it away.)

After the service, August awaited him, smoking, in the old part of the cemetery that stretched into the shade beneath huge, hundred-year elms and towering native pines. The August leaning against one shrouded obelisk was a soberer version of the man he had been three years before—the man Chary had seen when first putting eyes on his long-lost brother: sleek, assured, sly.

Laurie might like him, he thought suddenly. It was strange to wish that Lawrence Tulley would like his brother when they could never meet. When there was no reason for Chary to wish they’d get along.

“I told you that everything is fine,” Chary said, reaching him. “Imagine he had come along to service and spotted you straightaway!”

“He who?” August said. “Chary, you told me everything was ‘fine’ as I was dyin’ and Sidney was rollin’ me into a shroud. Screamed it. Your barometer’s leaky. I can’t trust it.” He sipped smoke, then let it curl out diabolical beneath incisors.

“Well, it was true, wasn’t it? In the end? You were fine. You are. And so am I.”

August looked doubtful. “Enh. Your face, Chary. You look… awful.”

Chary scowled.

August snorted. “Yes, all right, everything is fine. Business is great, Dow’s at seventy-nine and S&P at one-oh-seven. Panic’s over. Father would be ecstatic. What’s your socialist reporter of a lover think of that?”

Chary slid down to a sit at the base of the obelisk—upwind from the smoke, out of sight from the road—and sighed. “He isn’t my lover. You know who he is?”

“You know who Sidney Brasher is,” August said patiently, flicking ash. “You think Roosevelt doesn’t keep files on infamous socialist anarchists if he can help it?”

Sidney Brasher had ten years’ service with the federal Marshals beneath his belt before he’d entered domestic service. Chary wasn’t precisely supposed to know that, but August did, Lord knew how, and he had once confided to him what kind of man he’d hired for a butler.

“Anarchists? Laurie isn’t… Theorizing government conspiracy isn’t his specialty, I don’t think. How was I to know he’s on some kind of list?”

“Laurie,” August taunted, significantly, without looking over. Chary flushed anyway. “Question for you, little brother. Did you forget you’re an inherited millionaire? Twice over?”

“It wasn’t meant for me. And I never wanted it. I tried to give it to you!”

“You did try,” August admitted. “Sorry,” he said, insincerely. “Your rescue of me didn’t work out as planned.”

Rescue. Did August think of it that way?

Chary didn’t.

August—baptized Charles Edward Wright, Jr., called Charles Edward as a young boy—was cut from the same cloth as their father, only gilt-threaded, queerer, and a little frayed. Golden-haired and beautiful and vicious.

But at the word of an older boy from the carriage house, Charles Edward had been thrown out of the townhouse. Disinherited, disgraced, hidden away in Paris and London and eventually—years later—tossed to the streets of New York.

Then the Wrights had another son. Chary was born.