Subtle Blood

by KJ Charles

  “Come on, get up,” he said, trying for cheerful. “It’s a beautiful day out there. Do you reckon I’ll have my face in the papers yet?”

  “A good question,” Kim said, shoving back the bedclothes. “If not today then tomorrow. Something to look forward to.”

  Breakfast was served in the Breakfast Room. Will kept his thoughts to himself on people who had an entire room just for breakfast, and felt grateful that it was help-yourself from chafing dishes. He wasn’t up to dealing with flunkies in evening dress at this hour.

  “When are we going to talk to your father and Chingford?”

  “This afternoon, I suppose. He won’t be in a hurry to hear me out. And even if he was, it is important that he should do so at his convenience rather than mine, to emphasise our respective importance. We may as well make use of the day until then. Would you care for a tour of the house?”

  Will was pretty sure he wouldn’t, but the feeling battled with morbid curiosity and lost. “Go on, then.”

  He regretted it fairly quickly. It wasn’t just that the place was so big and so lavish and so horribly empty. It was that as they walked through room after room, decorated with trappings Will didn’t know how to appreciate, the tomblike silence of the place descended on them both. Kim’s descriptions were mannered and forced, and when he didn’t speak, it was not in the usual way they were quiet together, but in a nothing-to-say way that made an empty space between them. And how could Will talk when it felt like he was on a Cook’s Tour of a stately home, and everything he said was an advertisement of how little he belonged?

  Your endless bloody class-consciousness, Kim had said. Will would like to know how he was supposed to be oblivious to class while standing in a palace with a man who’d been born there, looking at paintings of his ancestors.

  “The sixth marquess, by Van Dyck,” Kim said. They were in the Portrait Room, a room full of portraits. The unlamented Lord Waring had named his rooms after Napoleonic battles, which was bloody stupid, but the stating-the-obvious names here were getting on Will’s wick just as much. “He was a drinking companion of Charles II; Rochester—the poetical earl, you know—wrote a highly offensive poem about him. We were Royalists, of course. The lady with the saccharine smile and the look in her eyes that could curdle milk is my great-grandmother, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Allegedly she had a brief sojourn as the Prince Regent’s mistress, but who didn’t?”

  He was trying to be funny. Will would have liked to be funny back, or at least give him the laugh he was working for. He couldn’t.

  Footsteps echoing, they went from the Portrait Room into the Long Gallery, which was indeed long and had even more art. Lots and lots of landscapes: a few Constables showing East Anglian countryside, many more of imaginary-looking places with dramatic cliffs, or Italian cities with architecture. Plenty of still lifes too, of the kind that showed dead hares on tables surrounded by lumpy fruit and vegetables. It was probably worth a fortune. Will hated all of them except the Constables, and would have preferred to hate everything.

  Kim was trotting out more names that probably meant something to the initiated: Canaletto, Van Bayeren, Fuseli. This painting had been acquired by the seventh marquess at such-and-such a diplomatic event. That one used to belong to a famous person Will hadn’t heard of. A third was considered the artist’s masterpiece. And so on.

  “Don’t they have any pre-Raphaelites?” Will asked abruptly. He wasn’t sure he liked those much either, but Kim loved them. Kim filled his walls with yearning knights and soulful maidens, pictures full of hope and longing for something beyond the material. That was the romantic streak that Lord Flitby and Lord Chingford and life hadn’t managed to kick out of him, and there was nothing like it here in the procession of grand people, grand architecture, things.

  “I doubt it. My father dislikes sentiment.”

  That wasn’t all he disliked, Will thought, looking round at the acres of oil. He’d bet money that not one single painting here had been bought because someone loved it, and he couldn’t stand this any more. “Can we get out of here? Go outside?”

  Kim nodded. He led the way along, and round, and down the stairs to a corridor where they came face to face with Lord Chingford.

  He was wearing plus fours. Will had always thought they were the stupidest way you could wear trousers short of putting them on your head, and Lord Chingford’s appearance wasn’t changing his mind.

  “Christ,” the Earl said in lieu of greeting. “Must you be underfoot all the damned time?”

  “I’d prefer not to be,” Kim said. “Perhaps we could have the conversation that I came here for, and then I can remove myself from your presence.”

  “I’ve nothing to say to you.”

  “You’ll have to speak to someone at some point. This is a murder case: you don’t have the luxury of keeping your affairs private.”

  Chingford’s lip curled. “I can keep them private from you. Mind your own bloody business.”

  “Are you expecting to have a choice about this?” Kim said. “You’ve been charged, Chingford, do you grasp that? I can help—”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “There are some strings Father can’t pull. Murder is one.”

  “What would you know?” Chingford demanded. “He got you off, didn’t he? Pity it was at Henry’s expense. Maybe you should have helped by doing your damned duty like everyone else, you cowardly little shit. Get out of my way.”

  He barrelled forward. Kim stepped aside. Will did not, and found the irate aristocrat right in his face. “I said, get out of my way. Are you deaf?” He put a hand to Will’s shoulder, and shoved.

  Will stepped back. Kim inhaled, but didn’t speak.

  Chingford marched off down the corridor. Will turned to stare after him, then looked back at Kim.

  “Outside,” he said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was a lovely day, if not as warm as the sun might lead you to believe, thanks to a steady salt-tinged wind. Will filled his lungs and exhaled a few times. “Are we near the coast?”

  “About three miles from the North Sea, but we’re between the River Stour and the Orwell. Tidal up here, hence the sea air. We should probably stay within the grounds for the moment, I’m afraid.”

  “As long as we’re out of that madhouse. Jesus wept.”

  Kim’s face twitched. “I did warn you.”

  “You didn’t say the half of it. You couldn’t have. When you said you didn’t want to inherit your brother’s position—”

  “You thought I was being dramatic? Well you might. All that magnificence could be mine, and isn’t that something anyone might aspire to? Kill for, even?”

  “I wouldn’t take it if you threw in a packet of chips,” Will said, with as much sincerity as he’d ever felt in his life. “Christ.”

  “I know that. I know that, Will. You can’t put up with this, and why should you? If Chingford hangs—”

  “He might not, and if he does, there’s still the south of sodding France!” Will said loudly. “You don’t have to be anywhere near this—this morgue!”

  “Mausoleum.”

  “What?”

  “A huge empty building that only serves to glorify the dead is a mausoleum.”

  Will had a strong urge to shake him. He also had a creeping and unpleasant memory of men he’d known in the trenches. Some had broken to varying degrees in the face of the mud and the endless noise and the unspeakable things you saw and smelled and did; some had constructed mental shields, built up of religion or superstition or whatever they could use. Some, like Will, had turned off the parts of the mind that thought about anything but the present, and carried on day after day, doing what needed doing and seeing how it went. And some men had gone away inside their heads because that was the only place they could go, and that was the look in Kim’s eyes now.

  It might not sound like much—a bullying brother, an unfair father. People had far worse all the time. Will couldn’t give a tin
ker’s curse for people: he cared about Kim, and the mental laceration that had led him to take a razor to his arms, and the way he was moving now, like his entire body was a mass of paper-cuts.

  “You’re not going to hurt yourself, right?” he said, unsure if he should, unable not to.

  “Hurt—? Hardly. Why would I need to with so many people ready to do that for me?”

  All right, fuck this, we’re leaving, Will wanted to say. He could lie low somewhere else. But Kim couldn’t go because he needed to talk to Chingford, to find out whatever he could in a last-ditch effort to extricate himself from this mess. Which he might have done from a distance, but he’d thrown away his leverage with the Private Bureau, his best chance at freeing himself, for Will’s sake.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Kim.”

  “What?”

  Will wanted to hold him, except they were walking down a path through a formal garden, with yew clipped into stupid unnatural shapes, and men standing around them, cutting off the bits that didn’t fit. He bit back a curse. “Didn’t we drive past a wood? Can we get to that?”

  “If you like.”

  It took a while. They walked in silence, under the June sun cooled by sea air, well-kept paths and lawn under their feet. It ought to have been more of a pleasure than it was. The grounds turned from manicured to artificially natural to something that looked like it might have grown by itself, and finally Kim led the way along a path till they found themselves surrounded by, unexpectedly, pine. Will doubted that was native to East Anglia either, but it was clearly an established plantation, and the forest floor was thick with ferns, standing a good four or five feet high.

  So he grabbed Kim’s hand and dragged him into the undergrowth.

  “The path is back there,” Kim pointed out

  “Sod the path.” Will shoved his way forward. Ferns were pretty scratchy when you got up close, it turned out. “I need you to be with me. Not in that house, or the grounds. With me.” There was a patch of sunlight ahead of them, filtering through the trees. He stamped a stand of bracken flat, tossed his coat on top of it, and lay down. “Come here. Put your coat down.”

  Kim didn’t even complain that it would get dirty. He took it off with precise, unenthusiastic movements, put it on the bracken, and sat down next to Will. Will tugged him backwards, got his arm under Kim’s shoulders, then shifted around so that they finally ended up with Kim’s head on his chest. Just lying there in silence. Just them.

  He didn’t know how long they stayed there, sun on their faces, breeze rippling over skin. It didn’t matter: he had nowhere else to be. He’d stay here forever, if that was what Kim needed, until the horrible barrier that had stood between them in that horrible house ebbed away in the clean air.

  He watched the sway of the trees, the clouds scudding across the pale blue sky. He listened to Kim breathing, mostly quietly, with the occasional quick, sharp inhalation as something nasty passed through his mind. He felt the painfully slow relaxation of his lover’s tense shoulders, and then, after a very long time, Kim put up a hand, and Will held it.

  A few more minutes passed, and finally Kim spoke. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “But I am. Sorry and also intolerable, I realise that. I thought I wouldn’t care. It’s been years. I don’t care, damn it, and yet—”

  “Coming here knocked the scabs off?”

  Kim’s shoulders heaved. “I had an idea that if you were with me it wouldn’t matter. Instead it’s so much worse because I’m seeing it all through your eyes. Christ knows what you must think.”

  “I think your family are arseholes.”

  “Apart from that.”

  “No, that’s pretty much it. Absolute arseholes.” He hesitated, but it had to be faced. “And I think I don’t belong here.”

  Kim let his hand go. Will could feel the rigidity return to his lover’s shoulders. “I’d like to argue that. I wish I could.”

  “But you can’t, because I don’t belong here, and nor do you. They’ve made that clear.”

  “Yet here we are, and if Chingford swings, the noose goes round my neck too.”

  “Jesus,” Will said. “I’m not having you feel like this.”

  “I’m fairly sure my feelings are mine to handle.”

  “Not when some bastard’s making you miserable and I can do something about it. In fairness, the bastard making you miserable is usually you—”

  Kim gave the ghost of a laugh. “Harsh, if true.”

  “But not right now, so this has got to stop. Today. I’m not waiting on your father’s convenience. I want to get done and get out of here quick smart.”

  “Sounds marvellous. How do you propose we go about it?”

  Will shrugged, feeling Kim’s head shift on his chest. “We go back in and I beat the shit out of Chingford until he tells us the truth.”

  “Right,” Kim said. “Not your most subtle plan, I have to say.”

  “I didn’t promise subtlety.”

  “For which much thanks. It’s tempting, but no. Or, at least, let’s save it for a last resort.”

  “Then what’s your alternative? Because staying here watching you shrivel up from the inside isn’t an option. I can’t have you hurt like this.”

  “That is an irony,” Kim said. It sounded painful. “Because if we’re talking about hurting me, we both know who can do it in a way that makes my father’s efforts look like a child’s tantrum. Who could destroy me.”

  Will’s skin prickled. “Who?”

  “You.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “You made me fall in love,” Kim said. “You made me want to be a better man, even if I had to claw my way to that conclusion through thickets and thorns. You made me wake wanting you there and sleep in the knowledge that you were, and believe that I had you by my side, with that glorious, stubborn, unshakeable Will Darling obstinacy. And I am terrified, I am sick with fear, that I will lose you to the walking ancestral curse that is my family—not just the painted trappings and gilded vainglory, but the hollowed-out decaying heart of it. That’s my magnificent inheritance: a family rotten to the core, a blighted tree that will fall in the next storm. And you’re strong and clean, and I don’t deserve you at my best, so how can I ask you to put up with this?”

  “Jesus,” Will said. “You don’t half talk bollocks. I know you, Kim Secretan. I know how you scoured England to find me when I was locked in a room, and how you lied up hill and down dale to get your hands on a paper and then handed it over anyway because it was the right thing to do. You ripped yourself apart for fear of hurting Phoebe, you gave up your ticket out of this mess for me, and you think you’re rotten? You stupid bastard, you’re true as steel.”

  Kim made a noise in his throat. Will grabbed for him, and Kim scrambled around, and then he was over Will, kissing him frantically through sobs, shuddering in his grip. Will kissed him back while he could, and held on tight to his heaving shoulders when Kim collapsed on his chest.

  Maybe all he could do was be the port in Kim’s storm, but that was what he’d do, for as long as it took.

  The storm blew itself out in the end. Kim buried his face in Will’s now-wet shirt; Will took his weight and stroked his hair while his breathing evened out.

  At last, Kim lifted his head a little. “Ugh. Once again, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Will said. “Stop apologising for things that aren’t your fault. And stop thinking I’m about to walk away, because I’m not. I—”

  “No, no, no,” Kim said over him. “Don’t say it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I need you to be able to walk away. I know what you’re like. If you made me any promises, you’d feel bound to keep them, come hell or high water.”

  “I thought you wanted that.”

  “I don’t want you bound by words you later regret because you think I need to hear them now. It isn’t fair. When we have a degree of certainty about what my position
will be, you’ll have the information to decide yours.”

  “Any reason I can’t take my own decisions for myself, when I want to?”

  “Because I’m not the only one having a rotten time here,” Kim said. “Please, Will. If you can’t stand this, I don’t want you to force yourself through it.”

  “Fine,” Will said. “I promise. I promise I’ll just bugger off whenever it seems like the easy way out for me, and leave you in this hundred-room hellhole with your family rubbing cheese-graters on your nerve endings. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I detect a note of sarcasm.”

  “Take a step back, Kim. I’m a big boy now and I can look after myself. You concentrate on what we’re going to do if I’m not allowed to beat your brother to a pulp.”

  “I didn’t say not allowed. I said last resort.” Kim adjusted his position, returning to lying with his head on Will’s stomach. Will found his hand and held it, and they watched the clouds move in silence some more.

  “Question,” he said after a while. “Your brother, Henry. He was, what, five years younger than you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I was reading about your family in the Mail the other day, and it said your brother joined up in 1917. He must have been eighteen by then, right?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Will propped his head on his other arm. “Your family all seem to think your brother had to join up because you didn’t. But the Military Service Act had been around for a year or more. Everyone aged eighteen was meant to go. So how is it your fault?”

  “Because ‘meant to’ is a flexible concept to people like my father,” Kim said. “He got Chingford a back-room job in the War Department as soon as he realised that it wouldn’t be over by Christmas. He intended me to be the family contribution to the war effort, but I declined, and worse, did so in public. Speaking at anti-war meetings and being aggressively Bolshevik and so on. I was brought to a tribunal in late 1916, where I refused to either fight or do war work, and more or less invited them to gaol me. God, my father was furious. Even a conscientious objector carrying stretchers at the Front would have been better, but I wouldn’t. I wanted to be a martyr to my cause. Well, I wasn’t permitted that. If I was to be disgraced, it should be on Father’s terms. He pulled strings by the handful, and the board was given a private medical report that convinced them of my mental and moral unfitness to serve in any capacity. I don’t know exactly what it said, but I can guess.”