There Will Be Phlogiston Read online

She tried to smooth her hair into some semblance of order. “I should like you to take me back now.”

  His hands were gentle against hers as he helped her corral her wayward tresses. “Anything you want.”

  It took less time than she would have imagined for them to make themselves respectable again. As if everything they’d done, everything they’d said, was already slipping away from her.

  The journey back was somehow quite different.

  And she rather feared she was too.

  Rosamond was not enjoying anything.

  The visits. The dinners. The balls.

  They whirled around her like a carousel until they were nothing but a moving haze, the colour of the Gaslight smog.

  Lack of enjoyment had somehow developed from a passive state to an active one. And was manifesting in headaches.

  She was on her way to the retiring room—where she had been spending increasing amounts of her time—when voices in the antechamber arrested her retreat. She was not a natural eavesdropper, being insufficiently interested in the lives others, but she hesitated when she recognised the marquess’s southern drawl. It was surely just prejudice for an unfamiliar accent, but it was hard not to perceive an undertone of contempt when one lengthened one’s As so excessively.

  “—return soon,” he was saying. “And thank God for that. I cannot abide this pissant little backwater with its delusions of grandeur.”

  “Ah, but you’ll be a married man.” That was one of his friends, the Viscount of Whatever or Sir Thingamy. “Linked by ties of blood and family to this pissant little backwater.”

  “Hardly. It’s nothing more than money.”

  “And your wife-to-be. She’s a pretty little thing.”

  The marquess gave a less-than-elegant snort. “If your taste runs to shopkeepers and coalminers, certainly. But she’s docile, I’ll grant you. She’ll be comfortable enough at the Hall, and I daresay I’ll do my duty on her.”

  “You can close your eyes and think of England.”

  “I’ll be thinking of the divine Angelique.” The marquess laughed. Rosamond had never heard him do that before, and she didn’t enjoy it now. “Perhaps she’ll consider my protection now since pockets are no longer to let.”

  Rosamond had heard enough. Too much, far too much. She slipped away.

  He had expressed nothing she did not already know. Or, at the very least, suspected. Expected. But now it was all clad in words; it seemed real in ways it hadn’t before. And, she realised, what he’d taken from her was hope.

  It should not have been so devastating.

  Surely it was better to have this certainty now than have to come to terms with it later.

  But God. God.

  She couldn’t face the retiring room. It would be full of women faffing with their flounces and powdering their décolletages. She reeled blindly down the corridor, and barged into . . . oh . . . somewhere.

  What did it matter? It was dark within and quiet. And she was alone. She dropped onto a sofa, covered her face with her hands, and burst into tears.

  Crying was part of her skill set. She did it very beautifully indeed.

  This was not beautiful.

  It was more like hiccoughing, and the tears came not in delicate droplets but in a damp and snotty deluge. And, worse still, having permitted herself this weakness, she could not seem to bring herself back under control. All she could do was sit there, gulping and wailing, and rendering her complexion blotchy and horrific.

  And then, of course, someone opened the door on her, spilling light into the room. She gave a little scream and threw up an arm as if she could protect herself from being seen.

  “Good God. I’m so sorry.” An elegant, masculine figure was outlined in the doorway. “I thought one of the cats had been locked in.”

  Outrage briefly stifled her tears. “I do not sound even remotely like a cat.”

  There was a silence.

  “I do not!”

  “Are you in distress?”

  “No,” she lied. She had nothing to handle the full extent of her tears so she was obliged to use the sleeve of her dress. “Please leave me alone.”

  The damned fellow was still lingering. Worse, he had come a little farther into the room, and was adjusting the wick on an phlogiston lamp, banishing the safe gloom into which Rosamond had fled. In the flare of orange, she recognised Lord Mercury. Poised as ever, far too beautiful, gold glinting in his hair and in the depths of his eyes. And, in that moment, Rosamond hated him. For being so lovely when she felt ugly, and for being invincible when she was weak. Oh, why did she never have any control over anything? Why did she always have to be frightened and ashamed?

  “If you utter one word of this, to anyone, I will make sure the whole world knows of your relationship with Anstruther Jones.”

  He started and paled visibly, slender fingers fluttering on the stem of the lamp. “I . . . have no notion what you may be implying. We . . . we were friends awhile.”

  “You think me that naïve? I know . . .” What did she know? Just some vague intimation of acts considered immoral. “I know he used you as a man with a woman. You are hardly discreet, my lord. The way you gaze upon him. Your long-standing disinterest in members of my sex.”

  She tried to ignore the heaviness of her eyes, the drip she could feel trembling on the tip of her nose, and glared at him with all the conviction and disgust she could muster.

  And the man just broke. For a moment, she thought he might actually swoon, but then he was on his knees beside her, clutching for her hand. “Oh God. You mustn’t . . . Please don’t. . . You will ruin me. Please.”

  It was the very last thing she had expected, and it brought her no consolation at all. Power, yes, of a kind, but it was joyless. Leaving her hollow and sickened. She looked down at his bowed head, his shaking shoulders. “I—”

  “Don’t,” he whispered. “Please don’t. I know it’s wrong. I’m sorry, I try, I try so hard but sometimes . . . I . . . can’t, and I . . . I’m sorry.”

  It was not supposed to be like this. She had, after all, operated quite successfully in this manner previously, having deployed it upon her half sibling to ensure his friendship. So more effective than confessing the pathetic loneliness that had driven her to seek him out. And, in this case, she had simply wanted to be left alone. To bury her own vulnerability safely beneath someone else’s. Not to make Lord Mercury as entirely wretched and helpless as she was.

  She felt like crying again, but she managed to steady her voice. “No, it is I who am sorry. I should never have said such a thing. It was reprehensible of me.”

  He lifted those extraordinary eyes to hers, and she had never seen a look so despairing and so empty. “But it’s true. I am exactly what you say. You would be right to despise me.”

  She was ill equipped to offer comfort. She had never been close enough to anyone who required it. “Nonsense,” she said bracingly. “If I wanted to despise you, I could find a far better reason than sodomy.”

  He cringed from the word as though it hurt him. But otherwise he was silent, pressed against her skirts. She had always believed him to be unassailable, a man with everything—beauty, birth, fortune. She had envied him, even hated him a little bit. When, in truth, he was just as hurt and lost and alone as she was.

  She slid her fingers lightly into his hair. It was so soft, and full of colours, like the forest where she had lain with Jones. “Please forgive me,” she whispered. “I was embarrassed that you saw me like this, and I wanted to embarrass you back. That was all. It was cruel of me. Childish.”

  For a long time, he did not answer. And then, “I’m so tired. I’m so tired of being frightened.”

  Rosamond was far more shocked by that than by any understanding of what Lord Mercury might have done with Anstruther Jones. She did not know men even had the capacity to be frightened. But now she realised just how foolish it was to believe such a thing. Her father feared anything that challenged his understanding of t
he world. Jones feared being alone. And Lord Mercury feared himself. Feared love.

  “I’m frightened too,” she said. “I’m frightened of being powerless. I’m frightened of marrying a man who has no interest in me at all. I’m frightened of nobody ever having any interest in me.”

  Lord Mercury sat back on his heels, oily light sliding over the arch of his cheekbones and gilding his eyelashes. “You should marry Jones.”

  Another thought made suddenly real and cast into the world.

  She nodded. “I know. But . . . but I am not like him. I am too afraid of what people will think and say. And, before you chastise me for my cowardice, you are not with him either, though you could be, and far more easily than I.”

  He brushed the last traces of moisture from his eyes. “Do you really think society looks so kindly upon catamites?”

  “I can see—” she tried to smile, but it felt cracked at the edges “—there is little to be gained from comparing our lots. I suppose what I can’t understand is why . . . why we care so much.”

  “Because this is what we know. And, without it, there is nothing.” He rose gracefully, composed once more, all that careful refinement snapping back into place like armour. Plucking a handkerchief from an interior pocket, he dropped it into her lap. “Your secrets are safe with me. Do what you will with mine.”

  And, with that, he was gone. And she was alone.

  Lord Mercury was sleepless that night. Full of longings that pierced him like arrows. He told himself it was physical, merely physical, easily conquered with forbearance and resolve. And perhaps a vulgar release bestowed by his own hand. But he might as well have been composed of air, so little satisfaction could he derive from the touch of self to self.

  He abandoned all hope of rest. Rose, dressed in his plainest clothes. Found his way through the servant’s quarters, down the back stairs, and into the night. The fog crept out of the shadows, an old friend to conceal his sins. He took a horseless carriage to the docks. To a tavern he knew, where men sought each other and came together in the greasy darkness of the surrounding alleyways.

  He caught the eye of a young soldier. Ended up outside, on his knees. A stranger’s hands and a stranger’s voice—“I say, do you mind awfully?”—and a stranger’s prick in his mouth.

  It was everything it should have been—there would have been a time, not so very long ago, when Lord Mercury would have remembered it with shame-struck pleasure—but tonight it could not even touch the hollow places inside him.

  He walked slowly away, looking for another carriage to bear him home. The fog was deeper here, dust-thickened from the factories. It had swallowed both the sky and the horizon, leaving only a handful of the world behind, but he knew his way well enough.

  And then he heard footsteps behind him.

  Most likely it was nothing. There was little in his garb or demeanour to tempt an opportunistic thief. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed the shapes of two men.

  He quickened his pace, and their pace quickened also.

  His heart jumped, fear warring with something like embarrassment. How foolish he was going to feel when he looked back on this later, allowing two strangers whose path had briefly accorded with his own, to alarm him so.

  He thought about running. Away from the waterfront and the warehouses, he would be more likely to find a cab. There might even be people around, although he knew well enough, given his own proclivities, it was hardly a respectable hour to be abroad. But, then again, if he ran, they might chase him simply because his behaviour suggested he was worth pursuing.

  He walked a little faster still, sweat gathering under his collar and his arms. He had just resolved to damn his pride and this uncertainty and flee, whatever the consequences, when a man in a red coat stepped directly into his path. A solider, he thought dazedly, from the same regiment as the fellow he had just—

  A fist slammed into his stomach.

  Shock. Then pain. It felt like he was dying. As if he might never breathe again.

  A shove, and he was on his hands and knees on the ground.

  A kick and he was down again, his mouth sour with spit and iron, his eyes full of smearing stars.

  “Please, I don’t—”

  Perhaps there were three of them now. More. Less. It didn’t matter. Everything was dissolving into a haze of hurt. He had no idea how to fight back, how to defend himself, how to make it stop. He might have begged. He knew he wept. But his tears were abstract, somehow, like the blood he could feel running down his skin, disconnected from a world that had become nothing more but the spaces between blows.

  When the edges of the darkness frayed—had he been unconscious?—there was a hot weight on his back, pinning him down. Hands, impersonal now, stripped him. He was dull with fear, beyond even the effort of struggling. But this latest horror, and the recognition of further violation, stirred him slightly.

  “No . . . don’t . . . not . . .”

  The snick of a blade. To Lord Mercury, the loudest noise in Gaslight.

  He wished he possessed strength enough to fight. And, failing that, the courage to die. His honour should have demanded it.

  But he wanted to live. Above all else, he wanted to live.

  So he fell silent. Lay still.

  Pleaded with the God who had fashioned him and condemned him, denied him and punished him: Let these men use me, but let them spare me. Please.

  The knife was for his hair.

  They left him in the gutter, beaten and shorn, tattered and shamed. They spat on him before they departed, pissed on him, but they did not touch him.

  And when they were gone, Lord Mercury laughed to the lost sky, thinking how strange it was, this definition of mercy.

  A constable found him a little after dawn.

  The circumstances and nature of the attack were such that it was felt it would be in the best interests of public decency to exercise discretion over the details.

  Which, of course, meant that very soon everybody knew everything. And all of Lord Mercury’s secrets became nothing but trinkets to be passed round and picked over.

  His injuries—cuts, bruises, a couple of cracked ribs—would fade and fade swiftly, but how was he to bear this? Knowing that the worst of him belonged to those who whispered of it: his soul, his heart, his needs, helpless in the hands of people who would shake their heads and laugh, or shudder in revulsion, decry his weakness and perversion, or titter gleefully at the scandal. People who would never—could never—understand.

  It made him almost wish to be on the ground again, at the mercy of strangers, where pain was simple: a string of brutal moments. Not this savage and unceasing grief for something at once as fundamental and ephemeral as his public self. Perhaps he was mourning something that had never been little more than a phantasm, but now he had lost even the hope of being a different man, a better one, worthy of his name. Everyone knew him for who he truly was: a sodomite, a fool, someone with no place among decent people. Though even in the depths of his despair, he recognised the absurdity of such a thought. Gaslight cared little for decency, only discretion.

  The only truly decent person he knew was Anstruther Jones.

  This house, this bed, was full of memories of him. Attempts to tutor and civilise the man, all of them ridiculous, hopeless, because Lord Mercury had wanted him just as he was—untamed and free, entirely himself. Even if he did prefer coffee to tea, smoke cheroots instead of cigars, laugh too loudly, stand with his hands in his pockets and sit with his foot on his knee and . . . fuck, oh God, the way he fucked.

  That first time particularly. Hands claiming every part of him, whispering things Lord Mercury should not have needed to hear.

  Yet dreamed of still.

  God, he needed Jones. Not sexually. That was the last thing his body, or his mind, was ready for. But thinking of him had brought the longing out of the corners, scratching him raw. He just wanted to be held, not in passion or possession, but in comfort, until he felt strong a
nd whole and worthy again.

  The first few days, he stayed in bed, numbed by laudanum and humiliation. He was not at home to visitors but, of course, none came. There were no enquiries either, no calling cards or invitations. Some of the servants left.

  So this was disgrace: a slowly deepening silence.

  One afternoon, he was roused from a restless half-sleep by a commotion from the hallway. His bedroom door flew open with a crash and there, flanked by two harried-looking footmen, was Anstruther Jones.

  “I’m sorry, my lord, he—”

  “Arkady.”

  Oh, that rough, so familiar voice. It was as though Lord Mercury—bent on his own torment—had summoned the man through pure force of yearning, and, in that moment, it was impossible to separate joy from pain, the sweetness of memory tangling with the shock of recognition and the bitter sting of reality. It was similarly difficult to muster much dignity from the centre of a huddle of blankets, but he tried and nodded a hasty dismissal to the servants. At the very least he could spare himself an audience.

  Although, of course, that left him alone with Jones. Who looked appallingly desirable, all hard strength framed by exquisite tailoring, the sort of man one wanted to savour and slowly unwrap, until he was nothing but heat and skin and hunger . . . and, oh God, why hadn’t he touched him more when there had been opportunity? Jones had given himself like a gift, and Lord Mercury had been too afraid to do anything but yield.

  He should have revelled.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. And then, panicking, “Wait, don’t . . . It’s not—” Because Jones was coming into the room. Throwing off his hat, shrugging his coat from his shoulders.

  “I heard what happened. I came to see you.” The bed creaked under Jones’s weight. He sat on the edge of it, rather as Lord Mercury’s nurse had done when he had been very young and suffering from some trifling childhood complaint that had rendered him an exile from his mother.

  It could have almost been amusing—as if Jones was about to pat his hair and tuck him in—but all Lord Mercury could think was how painful it was to accept the compassion of a man who had once groaned with the pleasure of their connected bodies. Told him how beautiful he was, whispered of all the things they could do together.