There Will Be Phlogiston Page 19

  He remembered his father’s funeral. The silver apathy of the rain and the moment he realised that now he could never earn Lord Iron’s approval. Like most of his youthful ambitions, it had always been something he believed he could do tomorrow.

  “Ruben, have you heard of the crime prince of Gaslight?”

  He glanced up in some bemusement. He was not the sort of man to concern himself with fables. “I’ve heard the stories, but they’re just stories.”

  “They’re not stories. They caught the man.”

  “They caught a man.”

  The bishop’s tawny eyes held Ruben’s steadily. “The reality hardly matters any more. It’s what he represents.” There was a pause. “He burns in less than a week.”

  Under the laws of England, a condemned criminal would die by fire in order that they might repent in the last moments of their life and thereby save their soul eternal torment. However, if the condemned made a full confession and showed penitence, he would merely be hanged. The state called this mercy. Ruben was not so certain. “You must send someone to him,” he said.

  Dr. Forrest stared at his own interlaced fingers. “I did.”

  “And? Wouldn’t he repent?”

  “He killed the man.”

  An eerie chime sounded through the room as Ruben’s fingers slipped on his teacup.

  “You see my quandary,” murmured the bishop.

  Ruben wouldn’t precisely have called it a quandary, but he nodded.

  “I cannot in good conscience send a criminal to the stake who has not received every opportunity to confess. But, equally, I cannot send another man into danger.”

  Ruben’s lips quirked wryly. “But you seem to be sending me?”

  Dr. Forrest had the grace to blush. “I’m asking you.”

  “You may recall,” said Ruben mildly, “that you revoked my licence. Even if I was willing, I would be unable.”

  “I could provide a dispensation.”

  “Could you now?”

  The bishop pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. “Ruben, I—”

  “Of course I’ll do it.”

  “I feared you might,” sighed Jaedrian, looking suddenly both older and younger than his years.

  “You knew I would.”

  “Yes.” Another pause, and then with a touch of pleading: “But you will be careful, won’t you?”

  Ruben did not answer, but across the gleaming table, their hands met and roughly, tightly entangled, as if they were still lovers.

  Ruben had come to the Spire prepared with many warnings. He had read all the newspaper articles and several penny dreadfuls, and he believed he harboured no illusions about the man who stood before him. He knew him for a criminal, a recidivist, a thief, and a murderer. In short: an unrepentant villain of unimaginable depravity.

  He had not, however, expected the man to have the face of a feral angel. Nor that he might want to discuss aesthetics.

  “What?”

  “The sky,” repeated the most dangerous man in Gaslight, somewhat impatiently. “Do you think it beautiful?” Since he could not gesture with his hands, he jerked his chin in the direction of the window set high into the granite wall.

  Beyond its bars, Ruben could just about see a handspan of the waiting world—a piece of dark, speckled by a few irresolute stars.

  “Well,” he said, at last. “Yes.”

  “Curious.” The man frowned. “I wondered if I should.”

  “Should what?”

  “Find it beautiful.”

  The man’s ice-shard eyes did not waver from Ruben’s, and Ruben knew better than to look away. “Don’t you?”

  “I have never had occasion to ask myself. Until now.”

  “And what do you answer?”

  “I believe—” his mouth turned up at the corners, tugged slightly lopsided by the silver scar that crossed his upper lip “—the stars are merely distant light and the sky a roof like any other.”

  Ruben couldn’t quite help himself. He shivered. In the gloom, the man’s pale suit and pale hair gleamed softly, as though he was already the ghost of himself. But he was utterly calm. It seemed almost impossible to believe that he was waiting to die. Only the manacles betrayed him, hanging heavy from his fragile wrists, like some terrible insult.

  “Forgive me,” added the prisoner, in his soft, too-careful voice, “but I have been remiss with introductions. I am Milord.”

  Ruben swallowed something that might have been the most ill-advised laugh of his life. The man’s attention dropped swiftly to his mouth and then away again. The faintest of lines creased the smooth white skin of his brow. But Ruben pressed on regardless: “That’s not your name.”

  “It’s what I am called.”

  “I think,” said Ruben coaxingly, “I’d rather know your name.”

  “Then you had better accustom yourself to disappointment, Lord Iron.”

  Ruben tried to conceal his surprise and failed. Dissembling had never been among his talents. “H-how do you know who I am?”

  “I have long made it my business to know things.” Milord’s gaze swept over him, assessing and impersonal, but with a weight behind it, somehow, like chill hands upon his skin. “They sent you to me like a lamb to the slaughter, Ruben Crowe.”

  Well, Ruben thought, I’ve just been personally insulted by the crime prince of Gaslight. How many people can make that boast? And this time, his amusement slipped out before he could stifle it, and he felt again the knife-edge of Milord’s gaze upon his lips. “You think me a lamb do you?” Ruben asked, smiling faintly.

  “You all are.” The man turned, or he would have done had his bonds allowed it. Instead he stumbled, chains clashing, and it was as though a spell had been broken. Milord stood before him, neither prince nor monster. He was a prisoner, and that was all.

  Milord steadied himself, but it was too late, and they both knew it. For a moment after, his face was open, maskless. Furious. His eyes wild and glittering, like the eyes of a wolf. Colour seeped across his cheekbones, a dull stain like old blood on marble. He drew in a harsh breath, but before he could speak, a violent tremor ran through him, and he began to cough.

  Ruben was startled, but he did not dare look away, in case it was some sort of—admittedly highly imaginative and obscure—trap. Although, as the attack persisted, it seemed far more likely that the man was just ill. Terribly ill.

  That cough was a familiar sound down in the Stews. It was a sign of the complaint that was known simply as dustlung, and as far as Ruben knew there was no cure. Some claimed gin alleviated the symptoms, but Ruben, who had dabbled in the sciences as he had dabbled in most things, thought it a questionable treatment. It probably just made you die more quietly.

  He stood there, utterly helpless and fighting down pity, as Milord choked and coughed and struggled to breathe. He could not have been aware of much beyond pain, but there was another rattling of metal as he pulled clumsily away from Ruben. Seeking privacy in a cell less than two meters across.

  Ruben’s burgeoning pity warmed and deepened into something like genuine sympathy. It was simply beyond him to behold suffering—however, some might claim, deserved—with indifference. And he had just witnessed an almost unbearably human act: strength amidst all that weakness, the futile fight for pride in a moment of humiliation.

  At last the fit abated, and Milord crumpled into a crouch on the floor, knotted in his chains like some desperate animal. Black fluid clung to his lips, and he pressed his mouth into the crook of his elbow, smothering the last of his coughs. When he lifted his head again, his skin was dead white in the moonlight, the sweat standing out sharp as diamonds. And when he spoke, his voice was shreds and tatters: “C-can you believe they were so uncouth as to arrest me without a pocket handkerchief?” He dragged a trembling hand to his lips, the links that held him stirring like snakes.

  “For God’s sake, you need a doctor.” Unthinking, heedless, helplessly moved, Ruben crossed the space between them and droppe
d to one knee on the rough, cold flagstones.

  Milord flinched back as though anticipating pain, an instinct that—in the strangeness of that moment—struck unexpectedly against Ruben’s heart.

  He drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket and offered it.

  The other man stared at it blankly. Then very slowly reached out a hand. Icy fingers slid lightly against Ruben’s, raising, almost one by one, like the ripple of wind through a cornfield, all the hairs on Ruben’s forearm. He caught his breath.

  Which was when Milord lunged.

  There would have been no warning at all except for the drag of the chains. His hand closed over the hilt of Ruben’s sword and yanked it free.

  In some vague, timeless otherworld, insulated from the concerns of his body and its imminent danger, Ruben felt foolish. He was accounted an intelligent fellow. He had been warned. And he had thought he had understood those warnings. But it had taken Milord less than five minutes to prise him open like an oyster shell. It should not have felt like a betrayal, but it still, somehow, did, as though Milord had twisted into weakness everything Ruben held deepest, believed truest.

  Internal hesitation did not, however, dull Ruben’s reactions. He possessed, in spite of everything, a certain facility for taking care of himself, something a year in the Stews had only improved. He caught Milord by the wrist—skin, metal, and bones as thin as a bird—and twisted. He would have preferred not to hurt him, but Milord—devil take him—would not yield. The sword was too unwieldy a weapon to be used effectively in the narrow space between their struggling bodies, but still Ruben felt the edge of the blade scrape a shallow cut beneath his ribs.

  He forced Milord’s hand to the floor, and his fingers at last twitched open. The sword hit the floor with a dull clatter. Milord’s other hand came up, weakly, then his knee with a most uncouth intent. It was not a time for Ruben to concern himself with dignity; he got his leg across Milord’s, pressed him flat to the floor, and pinned him there with the weight of his body.

  His captive writhed and hissed like a feral cat, but Ruben simply held him down until Milord exhausted himself and—finally—lay quiescent. His head was turned away, his ash-blond curls plastered to his brow with sweat. It was not a thought Ruben wished to entertain at such a juncture, but there it was regardless: Milord was beautiful. Like a pre-Raphaelite angel, his lips—even with the scar that marred them—as pale and soft as rose petals.

  “If you carried a knife instead of that gentlemen’s toy, I would have killed you.” The texture of Milord’s voice had changed again, roughened somehow.

  “And what good would that have done you?”

  “Perhaps I enjoy it.”

  “Is that why you do it? Because you enjoy it?” It seemed somehow too simple, too base an answer.

  “I do what is necessary.” He met Ruben’s gaze. So close, the silver-blue purity of his eyes was almost unbearable. As was their coldness. Ruben searched, with something that might have been desperation, for remorse, for feeling, for some shadow of humanity. And found nothing.

  There was a long silence.

  Milord stirred restlessly, his body pressing sharply into Ruben’s. His throat rippled as he swallowed. “Release me.”

  It was not quite command, not quite plea, but there was a strange softness to it. And, at last, in his eyes—something, something that might almost have been fear. Another trick? It had to be. “I’m not sure I trust you.”

  “Of course you should not trust me.” That sounded more like Milord. Sharp and impatient. “But—” again that anxious, twisting motion “—you must release me.”

  He had a point. Ruben could hardly keep sitting on him. But, in a strange way, it felt safest. Like holding a tiger by the tail. He shifted slightly, strengthening his hold on the man, and Milord . . . Milord gasped.

  His eyes closed, and the sudden stillness in him was like the moment before glass shatters. But there was no resistance there. None at all.

  That was when Ruben knew: he could make the crime prince of Gaslight beg, and it required nothing but this rough collision of their bodies and souls, two magnets spinning between the twin impossibilities of attraction and repulsion.

  And he wanted to do it. He wanted to hear words of desperation shaped in that voice of silk and shadows. He wanted to punish Milord, not for any of the atrocities he had committed, but for making Ruben too aware of his own follies and failures. It was the most sordid and contemptible of impulses, tangled up in something that was almost worse, something that was somehow sensuous and cared nothing for morality, retribution, or wounded pride. It simply, achingly wanted. This man. Like this. Powerless. For Ruben.

  He jerked away from Milord as if he held fire between his hands, stooping clumsily to retrieve his sword, in full retreat from the other man, and from himself.

  He banged his elbow against the cell door to summon a gaoler.

  After a moment, Milord sat up, curling his legs primly beneath him, like a maiden aunt at a picnic, his manacled hands folded as best as he could manage across an utterly undeniable erection.

  They did not look at each other. They did not speak.

  Ruben paced the length of the Mirrored Gallery. Lost amidst silver echoes of himself, he sometimes thought he saw the reflection of his father.

  He would have to tell Jaedrian he could not do it.

  The man—Milord—was irredeemable.

  And so, in a different way, was Ruben.

  The mirrors passed the bloodstain on his white shirt back and forth between them like a rust-red kiss.

  Ruben was not, and had never been, troubled by his inclinations, nor by the mode of their expression—the sweet-dark things that made his heart quicken and his cock rise. On the other hand, he had never felt them so thoroughly and comprehensibly exploited. Milord had worn his weaknesses like trinkets. They had glistened like fallen stars on his long, pale fingers.

  He paced and he paced, and he tried not to remember wolf’s eyes and a catamite’s mouth, and the too-sharp, too-thin, too-surrendered body under his. He broke several of the probably irreplaceable mirrors. But neither his thoughts nor his blood would settle.

  Later, he tended the cuts on his hands and the gash in his side. The pain was hot and soft as tongues, and stirred him. When he was respectable again—a man who did not think too much on chains and those they held—he left the town house in the Golden Quarter for the Gilded Crescent and a discreet, inordinately expensive establishment where a honey-haired courtesan promised, and would likely have delivered, all the pleasures, dark and light, that Ruben might have desired. But there was no hidden harshness in the man’s voice. No frailty in his wrists. And the eyes that held Ruben’s from beneath a sweep of pale lashes were the wrong blue, and too gentle.

  Ruben pressed coins into pampered hands, murmured his apologies, and left.

  Back at Lord Iron’s mansion, he tried to read, then to rest, but for the first time in his life, the nature of his thoughts and the desires of his body shamed him.

  The next day, he resolved to speak to the bishop.

  But he didn’t do that either.

  He descended instead to the Stews, the twisting paths that had grown familiar to him. The darkness deepened, thickened, until it swallowed the night and congealed into an impenetrable smog of tar and shadow: an artificial sky, as unforgiving as a coffin lid, intermittently smeared oily orange from the gas lamps. Dust coated the backs of his hands and the back of his throat. His mouth filled up with the taste of filth and metal. But he had grown accustomed to it.

  Somewhere in the depths, down some wretched alley, three ragged ruffians came at him with fists and flashing blades. Having grown accustomed to this also, he disarmed them swiftly, and saw them off. Milord might have sneered at Ruben’s sword, but down here the weapons were knives and knuckles, desperation and brute cunning, and Ruben’s sabre had far better reach.

  He did not walk the Stews entirely without purpose, though he hesitated to own it, even to himse
lf. Crime was as much a part of the undercity as the smog, and just as all-pervading and ephemeral. But the newspapers had mentioned a place, an alehouse known sometimes as the Chicken, for its sign had long since rotted away beyond any hope of recognition.

  Ruben found it at last, a mean little building at the far end of a mean little street, sagging between an opium den and a bawdy house. There appeared to be a corpse on the doorstep, but Ruben was relieved to discover the man was merely unconscious. He possessed nothing worth stealing, so he was probably not in any immediate danger. Ruben moved him carefully into what little shelter the slop alley could provide and left him there, his head propped on his elbow so he would not choke on his own vomit during the night.

  This too was something Ruben had learned: kindness had no place here. So he tried instead to make usefulness its own virtue. It was not what he might have imagined. On those dreamy afternoons at Cambridge in Jaedrin’s arms, goodness had seemed as certain as skin, a grand and golden thing. And now it was little more than a succession of acts, too random and too individualised to acquire any great meaning. Too petty to effect or motivate change.

  His faith in God had not wavered. His faith in people, though, that had become its own problem. For Ruben, the two were inextricable, the Creator and His creation. One saw the watchmaker in the watch, though more than mere reflection. A kind of prefiguration, he had called it once to Jaedrian, in a moment of intense bodily unity. And later, more dangerously, in the pulpit. “If you want to see God,” he had told his congregation, “look at each other. If you want to feel God’s love, love each other. If you want a glimpse of Heaven, see the world. If you want to understand what—for lack of a better word—we have called Hell, simply close your eyes, and turn away.”

  Later, Jaedrian had tried to protest. “It’s not biblical,” was what he’d said.

  “Damn the Bible,” Ruben had cried. “It’s just words. Truth isn’t words.”

  That had been in 1859, about six months before the publication of two books that would change Ruben’s life forever.