All of them had different ways of coping with the change in circumstances. Frakes took great delight in testing his aim on the rose bushes, bursts of blooms exploding into the air as the shots rang through the gardens. Lambert appeared to have designated himself an unofficial secretary to Maurice, brewing endless cups of tea and leaving them outside his office as Bryce and Caroline looked on, bewildered. Hartley, his shoes off and cravat untied in one of the drawing rooms, surrounded himself with glowing candles as he wrote a startling number of letters—accompanied by Buttons, who followed the movement of the quill with the enormous eyes of a budding hunter.
“Well goodness me. The Reverend himself.” Hartley looked Gabriel up and down as he entered the room. He turned back to his paper with a smile. “Lovers. They worry, you know.” He smirked as Gabriel blinked, unsure of the best reply. “Or they don’t worry enough, and require a little torture.”
Gabriel coughed. “I... I do hope you are not including any sensitive information. No one can know where we are.”
“Sensitive? Only my soul, sweetling. The most sensitive of all the organs.” Hartley raised an eyebrow. “Although I’m open to alternative suggestions.”
Gabriel merely bowed, hoping against hope that he wasn’t blushing, and walked out of the morning room as quickly as possible. Hartley’s faint snicker of laughter followed him to the gardens, where Frakes had begun to decimate a rhododendron.
As he walked towards the soldier, hand raised in greeting, Gabriel struggled with a small seed of doubt. He had no reason not to trust Hartley; the man clearly had a great many paramours who would need to be informed of his disappearance from London. The letters would definitely contain some excuse, along with flowery sentiments...they certainly wouldn’t reveal Edward’s whereabouts.
Leo Ridens. All of the Society members had been the Laughing Lion. Could one of these men, could Hartley, have destroyed the Madingley diamonds on the orders of the Duke of Sussex? Could Hartley be writing to the Duke even now, making his offer clear?
I know where Caddonfell is. If you want this information, here is what I require...and remember what I did for you before.
No. They knew nothing yet. Best to keep one’s suspicions to oneself—or speak privately to Maurice, who hadn’t been seen since the meeting in the kitchen.
“Reverend! Do you shoot?” Frakes aimed at another blameless flower head, smiling with grim satisfaction as it exploded into a shower of petals.
“No. And we are meant to be lying low.” Gabriel looked at the half-destroyed plant, mentally counting all the wasted minutes he had spent tending to the grounds.
“I’ve yet to meet a villager who runs towards the sound of pistol fire. Unless my old regiment is camped somewhere nearby, but I doubt it.” Frakes, looking at Gabriel’s pained expression, tucked the pistol away. “I’ll hold my fire for now. Don’t want to accidentally shoot that damned cat.”
As if aware he was being talked about, Buttons ran through the half-open drawing room door. Leaping neatly through the grass, he waited patiently as Edward followed behind him.
God forgive me. Gabriel couldn’t help the yearning, the pleasurable pain, that came whenever he looked at Edward. He shifted uncomfortably, watching his distant figure, unable to conceal his stare.
“There’s the animal—and his master. You know, our Caddonfell looks content.” Frakes bit off the end of his cigar and spit it onto the ground with obvious relish at Gabriel’s discomfort. “I never imagined him enjoying country life.”
“He’s hardly enjoying himself,” Gabriel said, secretly pleased at the use of our. “Forced to hide here, while his name in London gets trodden into the mud. Surrounded by enemies, whose faces we do not know. He...he left here as soon as he could, you know. Coming back here must feel like—like a sort of defeat.”
“Defeat isn’t always disaster.” Frakes lit his cigar; the garden filled with its powerful, musky odour. “Take it from someone who’s experienced both. And Caddonfell...well, I’d hardly say he looks defeated here. If anything, he looked considerably more haunted in London.”
Gabriel tried not to show his surprise. “I...well...the scandal sheets would have us believe...”
“Filth-peddlers.” Frakes scowled. “They want the show. And make no mistake, Caddonfell loves to take the stage...but we see him with the curtains shut. We see him when he’s grey as a ghost, thin, trying to lose himself in any pleasure he can pay for... London was eating him alive. And worse—he was jumping into its mouth.”
“You all watch over him. The Society.” Gabriel looked at the gruff, unshaven man with a new measure of respect. “You protect him.”
“Of course we damn well do. We’re the only men in London who don’t want to ruin him, duel him or shag him.” Frakes grinned as Gabriel looked away, fighting his blushes. “He’s our brother-in-arms. In many ways, our general.”
“If anyone is a general, sir...” Gabriel bowed slightly.
“Oh, in a pitched battle, I’m your man.” Frakes nodded. “But life isn’t a pitched battle—the borders shift, the enemy always changes...and more often than not, with inclinations such as ours, we are our own worst enemies. We think we have to be tremendous, inhuman, successful...all to hide what the ton considers lacking in us.”
Gabriel thought about his tireless efforts in Hardcote, his increasingly desperate prayers. Perhaps there was something to Frakes’s assessment of his life. Of all their lives.
“Caddonfell sees beneath the surface, always. Perhaps because he’s always dancing on it. He sees all of you, every part, and doesn’t run. That’s a rare gift in any man—and the only thing in a friend that’s worth a damn.” Frakes shrugged. “That’s why we follow him. Why we protect him. He has never, even for a moment, been fooled by us. Which makes it even more of a damn pity that he manages to fool himself.”
Doesn’t run. Gabriel fought the urge to laugh. Edward had run from this place, from this life...from him. He was running still.
He watched Edward’s approaching figure. “Do you think he fools himself?”
“Of course he does.” Frakes shook his head, cigar ash dropping onto the paving stones. “He pretends he likes going to party after party, full of people who don’t know him—or worse, only know the stories. He pretends he’d die if he ever set foot outside of London, even if I’ve never seen a man more in need of an empty horizon...and he pretends he needs a laundry list of men in his bed, when what he really needs is the opposite.”
“The opposite?” The air seemed to still. Gabriel stared at Edward’s figure, illuminated by the setting sun.
“Just one. The right one.” Frakes’s voice grew a little quieter. “What all of us need, really. Someone who won’t let him lie to himself—who can show him there’s another way.”
“A difficult task, no doubt.” A task Gabriel knew full well shouldn’t fill him with longing. “It would take someone used to hard work.”
“But not thankless.” Frakes’s eyes twinkled as he held Gabriel’s gaze. “They would have to remember that.”
The two men stood in companionable silence for some minutes, Frakes smoking his cigar as Gabriel took in the evening air. Hardcote’s flowers, the rose and jasmine and stocks, sent up great scented clouds that mingled with the smoke of Frakes’s cigar until in Gabriel’s mind the image of Edward was inextricably twinned with flowers. His shoulders, his face, ringed with evening light...he was a gift. An impossible, abundant gift.
It would take someone used to hard work. But he was more than used to hard work by now, wasn’t he? Used to breaking his back, wearing his fingers to the bone...and how wonderful it would be if that work meant Edward, a happy Edward, a content one. Edward riding alongside him, the sun on his face... Edward in his bed, smiling.
But it could never be. Edward would never accept such an offer, one full of so much compromise, such relative poverty, such comp
lete secrecy. Who would choose to leave luxury for a simple existence in Hardcote? Who would choose, after a life lived largely in the spotlight, to conceal himself?
Not for him, the simple country vicar who lived like a monk. Not for Gabriel Winters, the boy Edward had left without looking back. It would mean compromise—not just compromise, sacrifice, for both of them.
Hadn’t he sacrificed enough? Did love have to mean this—giving all of yourself, even if there was nothing left to give?
It couldn’t mean that. There had to be a balance, a giving and taking from both parties. And Edward, as charming as he was when taking, didn’t seem particularly inclined to give any part of himself away except his body.
“I think I’m tired of hard work.” It felt shocking, admitting it to himself—let alone Frakes.
“We’re all tired of hard work.” Frakes blew a reflective cloud of smoke over the destroyed rhododendron. “Often, hard work isn’t tired of us.”
“The life of a priest is full of hard work.” Gabriel paused, patiently trying to articulate his thoughts. “At first I could feel it. Every backbreaking moment. But over time, well...either the work has become easier, or I have become stronger.”
Frakes tapped his cigar ash onto the lawn. “The life of a soldier is much the same. At the very moment when you feel on the edge of madness—that’s where the strength is.”
“Does that point of strength exist outside of battlefields, or prayers?”
“I wouldn’t know, Reverend.” Frakes smiled, softly shaking his head. “I’ve had no way of finding out.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Edward, as evening gradually dwindled into night, knew that the conversation with Gabriel would have to continue. He couldn’t simply let it die, however tempting it was to pretend that nothing had ever been said. He had always managed it in London, simply forgetting declarations of intent, or appeals for constancy, in ways that made his life slightly more convenient and infinitely more lonely.
But this was different. This was Gabriel. Gabriel was always different, had always been different, in a way that was slowly becoming undeniable. And talking with him, piecing together the strange muddle of what they had done to each other, was becoming as necessary as breathing.
“Bloody hellfire.” He stared out of his bedroom window, faint traces of Frakes’s cigar smoke still clinging to his clothes. The bandage for his shoulder lay unused on the desk; Caroline had insisted upon it, but the blood had already dried. In truth, he had barely even felt the wound, just Gabriel’s arms, holding him. “The threat of death simply wasn’t enough, eh?”
No. It hadn’t been enough. Good people had become tangled up in his stupidity. Including Gabriel, a person far too good to be within a hundred miles of this.
He had to leave him. He had to push him away as violently as possible, had to forget how he made him feel. But Gabriel, by some power Edward couldn’t imagine possessing, had resisted every attempt thus far.
He wishes to stay. Why?
How on earth can he want to stay with me?
When the knock came at the door, he jumped. He knew who it had to be; only one person knocked as apologetically as Gabriel did. “Come.”
He couldn’t help being struck by Gabriel’s beauty as he entered the room. Now that the Beasts were here, sharing the same house, his unique splendour was even more apparent, the solid power of him, the poetry of his manner, so different to Frakes’s brute efficiency or Lambert’s and Hartley’s louche elegance. Their stupid animal personas, conjured up in an atmosphere of youthful excess, seemed pathetic when compared to Gabriel’s humanity. The sculptural quality of the way he moved, the darkness of his curls, the brightness of his eyes.
You never should have left. The thought shocked him; leaving Hardcote had never seemed like a choice. Now, looking at Gabriel, even the past seemed changed.
He forced himself to concentrate on the present. “Well?”
Gabriel’s humourless laughter made his curls shake. “Well.”
That was the unusual thing about Gabriel, the aspect that always gave Edward pause. Whatever they spoke about, he and Gabriel, whatever they discussed—it was as if they had been talking about it for their entire lives, with only brief intervals of silence.
“I hardly even know why I’m here.” Gabriel looked down at his fingernails, then up at Edward with an expression torn between anger and apology. “You were clear enough in the record room of the Society. You have decided that cruelty is more fun than being kind.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know a damned thing.” Edward spoke sharply, hoping that Gabriel couldn’t see the fear in his eyes. “You know just enough to judge me.”
“And you can tell me, honestly, that you’re not judging me now? That you’re not treating me like a foolish, lovesick pup who searches desperately for a home after the slightest bit of attention?” Gabriel looked down. “My...my deep feelings, my sentiments are few, but they are real. Deep, and constant. They can’t be dismissed with a snap of the fingers, or laughed at.”
“Do I look as if I’m laughing? Do you think I’d laugh at you? At this?” Edward ran his hand through his hair. “I... Why now? Why now, when you know why I’m here, and what happened, and the danger I’m in?”
“Because I’ve touched you, and you’ve touched me. And do not try to tell me that what we’ve been doing is a—is a release of tension, or exploration, or any other damned foolish excuse. I can’t think of a thing, a single thing that feels like having you under my hands.” Gabriel took a long, deep breath that seemed to steady them both. “And if you can really, honestly say you’ve felt this with someone else—the passion, the need—then tell me now. Please. Because it will kill the part of me that’s been plaguing me for years.”
Edward stood in silence. His mouth opened; he could practically see Gabriel’s heart jumping, his legs weakening...
But nothing came. Something flashed brightly, then died, in the depths of Gabriel’s eyes.
“I said it...” Gabriel continued, more slowly than before. As if he knew it were a lost cause. “I said it because I had a right to. I’m not a toy, some paper man to be discarded at will. I’m not a port in a storm. I know that your future is unclear, as is mine. But the present rests in our hands. And unless it’s a present that we share, as equals, then we can’t continue.” He stopped, as if surprised at the anguish in his voice. “I can’t continue. Be clear, and tell me the truth, or I can’t continue. Or if the truth is really so very difficult for you to tell—Lord knows it might be—then at least tell me what I’ve done, or not done, to deserve your lack of constancy.”
He paused. Edward realised, to his horror, that Gabriel’s hands were trembling.
“What was so wrong with me?” Gabriel spoke more softly. “What is still so wrong with me—flawed beyond hope of constancy, or rescue?”
Edward stood still for a moment, utterly blindsided. He gritted his teeth; he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help it, however much he wanted to.
He was going to laugh.
“What’s—what’s wrong with you?” He laughed, long and bitter; it was so, ridiculously perfect. “My God. Only someone as good as you could believe that you’ve done something wrong. That you are something wrong.” He shrugged out of his jacket, letting it fall carelessly to the floor. “Believe me. On that score, you’re entirely blameless.” He angrily brought his hands to his chest, removed his shirt, and threw it onto the floor as Gabriel looked on in confusion.
Then, with only the slightest hesitation, he removed the second shirt.
The thin linen shirt. The second shirt he always wore, except when he was alone in bed. The shirt that concealed the scars.
Deliberately turning away from him, fighting the urge to run, Edward heard Gabriel’s intake of breath.
“This is my father’s work.” He stood shirtless,
his eyes closed, the cool air of the room oddly intimate as it moved over his toughened, twisted flesh. “Under two shirts, I can almost forget they’re there—almost. I’m sure he left similar marks on my mother, although I was always too cowardly to ask. Maurice was spared, because I always took his punishments—or acted outrageously enough to make him forget my brother’s sins.”
“Edward.” Gabriel’s low, pain-choked voice washed over him like balm. “I—I didn’t—”
“You did. You wanted the truth, all of it, and by God, you’ll have it. Every bruise and welt of it.” Edward’s voice shook; he paused, gritting his teeth, before continuing. “No one else has ever seen this, you know. Not a single soul—not the men I’ve brought to bed, not Maurice, not even my physician. Do you know how hard it is to be carefree, and cold, and dancing from person to person like some sort of idiot creature, laughing all the while? Oh, I could mope and glower all day like Maurice, but I know I’m nowhere near clever enough to attract people to my darkness. So I am always light, and I am exhausted. This idea you have of me, the carefree bastard—it’s true. I am a bastard, a complete bastard, but I’m certainly not carefree. And if you keep caring, I...” He stopped again, sure that he would weep, trying desperately not to do so. “I will have to be more of a bastard than ever. Because no one, no one at all, deserves to be close to someone as—as grotesque as I am inside. Feel them.” He braced himself, closing his eyes. “Go on.”
“I—”
“No. I need you to. If—if you touch them, then you know. And I’ll know you know, and...and I’ll know it happened. That it wasn’t some horrific fever dream.” Edward sighed. “So touch them. Please.”
He waited, holding his breath, for what felt like an eternity. Waited for the inevitable awkward touch that would only succeed in increasing his overwhelming shame. The too gentle stroke of his flesh, avoiding his scars—or worse, the lightest stroke along the scars themselves, as if honouring the very thing he wanted so desperately to forget existed.
The Vicar and the Rake (Society of Beasts) Page 18