by J. A. Rock
Chant eyed him as he slid the paper open. “What on earth is it?”
“Read it.” Gale looked uncharacteristically… proud?
Chant gazed down at the paper. It was too dim for him to make out the words, and he moved closer to the window. Miranda sighed and flopped down again. On the paper was written an address. In France. A woman’s name—Sylvie Babin. Dates spanning two years… “I don’t understand.”
Gale stepped closer. “I asked Soulden to make some inquiries. He’s very well connected. He was able to ascertain where Reid has been living and for how long. Sylvie, that’s the girl he married. That second address, that is where he teaches. All in all, it sounds as if Reid is safe and well. And quite happy with his life in France.”
The bottom dropped out from Chant’s stomach. He stared at the paper, his hand beginning to shake, and then he stepped away from the window and dropped onto the settee. He let the page fall to the floor. “What have you done?” he asked softly.
Gale stepped into his line of vision, but Chant did not dare look at him. His light-headedness turned to an awful pounding on the inside of his skull. “I found out what became of Reid. You do not have to wonder anymore.”
This couldn’t be happening. That paper—the information on it—that could not be real. It could not be true that Gale was standing before him, having handed him that page as though it were a bottle of poison that he were cheerfully asking Chant to drink.
“I never asked for this!” Chant’s voice came out high and ragged. “When did I ask you to—to spy upon Reid?” It was as though a private corner of his heart had been invaded by gunfire and cannon blasts. He wished to cover himself somehow—physically and psychologically. But there was nothing to do but sit here before Gale and let a thousand old hurts rush back to him at once.
“Good God, man. You said you wanted to know what had become of him!”
“I didn’t mean for you to send one of your spies to find him!”
“I thought to do a good thing for you! I thought…”
Chant took a deep breath. How could the man possibly be so brilliant and so dense at the same time? “Gale… I don’t know how to explain this. How invasive it feels. I am attempting to leave Reid in the past where he belongs. To move forward. Seeing this… it hurts. It rips all those old wounds open again.”
“I do not think they ever healed,” Gale said bluntly. “You have not left Reid in the past. He is with you all the time. I wanted you to have… Chant, I wanted you to have peace.”
Chant almost laughed. Peace?
He glanced down again at the paper on the floor, trying to put his thoughts in some sort of order. Hearing the sincerity in Gale’s voice, he realised this was not quite the betrayal it had first seemed. And yet he wanted to shout. Not at Gale, necessarily. Well, perhaps at Gale. But just… shout until his throat was raw, until the weight on his chest lifted. Reid was married. Reid, who could not make a commitment to Chant, who in fact had gone across the ocean without a word in order to get away from Chant, was happily married. And Gale had thought this would bring Chant peace? He shook his head. If he could just have a few minutes to himself… But Gale was here, and—and it wouldn’t help anything to shout him away. “I understand that you didn’t do this to hurt me.”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“No, it is not that simple, Gale. ‘Of course you didn’t.’ It is not so obvious to me. This feels like it was done to hurt me. That may not be logical on my part, but it is how I feel.”
“I didn’t think. Chant, I am sorry. I do not always understand… Well, it is as you said. I do not always understand people’s feelings. I do have feelings of my own, believe it or not. But I always seem to be walking a path parallel to the one the crowd takes. And it is as if there is only a small stretch of grass separating the two paths, but it might as well be leaping flame for all I can get across it to join everyone else. I am… sorry.”
Chant sighed wearily. Perhaps he was too forgiving. Perhaps he always had been. Perhaps Gale behaved the way he did in part because he was entitled, indulged, and had never been asked to behave any other way. But Chant knew there was at least some truth to the man’s words. This was how he perceived the world—as not having been designed for someone like him. If Gale’s expression was anything to go by, what he had just confessed to Chant was not a bid for sympathy, or an excuse, but a difficult admission and as close to the truth as Gale could come.
Chant ran his hand over his forehead. “I should not have said what I did last night about your inability to comprehend people’s feelings. I was angry and frustrated. Your mind is unusual, Gale, but you are not deficient. We may just need time to learn to understand each other.” He closed his eyes and tugged at his own hair for a moment, then forced his eyes open again. “Reid is happy?”
“It seems so,” Gale said awkwardly.
“That’s good, then.”
Gale approached the settee warily and sat on the other side—as far from Chant as possible.
Chant blew out another breath. “Gale. There are things you don’t know about me. You were right when you said the sharing of ourselves must go both ways. I have never had to tell this story aloud, and I don’t know what it will feel like to tell it.”
“You may tell it to me,” Gale said quietly. “If you trust me with it.”
“I fear you’ll despise me.”
“I will not.” Gale turned to him, looking mildly alarmed. “How could I? I have just hurt you—very badly—and you are letting me sit with you, and you are offering explanations instead of breaking my jaw, and I… If you think I could ever despise you, you are—you are just—very wrong.”
There was a long silence.
“So you may tell me. I wish very much that you would. But only if you want to.”
Chant dug his teeth into his lip. How to start? How to arrange the mess of his past into something presentable to Gale? He realised there was no way to do so. He would have to show Gale the whole disastrous spill of it.
“My sister,” Chant began, “was… odd. That’s what my parents called it at least. She would have fits where her body would jerk and she would lash out. She might shout obscenities or nonsense. But, Gale, she was sweetness itself when you knew her, you must believe me. My parents called it an affliction. Her doctors too. And I suppose it was. But I also think that, were the world more receptive to the idea that we are all made differently—that it is not really for any of us to say what is normal or right—perhaps her character would not have seemed such a burden to my mother. My father loved her so very dearly. My mother too, in her way. But my father was especially bonded to her. He was a busy man, and I don’t think he fully understood the toll it took on my mother to care for Jenny in a society that thinks those with ‘afflictions’ ought to be locked away and only spoken of in whispers. Jenny’s prospects lay in marriage. But my mother took her to a rout one Season, and it was such a disaster that we attended no more events. Gradually I noticed my parents were keeping Jenny inside more and more. Not even trips to the pie shop or the bookstore were permitted. Jenny became all but a captive within those walls. And I did very little to try to free her.” Chant heard his voice lose its steadiness. He took a breath, then forced himself to continue.
“She was eighteen when she died. I was fifteen. I had never known grief before, and even in my wildest imaginings, I had not realised how terrible it would be. Perhaps my father had not realised either. He took to sitting in his armchair in our parlour, day after day. My mother would cajole him to eat, but soon he would barely do that. He would drink sherry but had little use for food or water and even less use for company. Still, I would sit with him each day and talk to him about… about whatever came to mind. Every once in a while he would respond, and my heart would lift, and I would think surely, any day now, he will come out of his stupor and be my father again.
“And then he stopped speaking altogether.” Chant paused again. He could feel Gale’s gaze on him. “
That was the end of things for my mother. She left, and it was just my father and me, alone in that great house. I… I have older brothers. My father had been married before. But they did not care to see him. We had occasional visitors, but mostly, we were fodder for the rumour mill. I cared for him—if you could call it that. We had some servants who stayed and helped, but most of the household vanished. I forced him to eat. I tried to limit his drink, but you see, he would not eat at all unless I poured him a sherry first. So I watered it down, for his sake.
“I grew… Oh God. Gale, I… I grew unkind to him after the first year. This… anger descended on me, and I could not shake it. At first I let it out in my own room. I would shout and swear, bash my fist against the wall until my knuckles were bloody. I thought maybe that would finally pull him from the fog. That he would be unable to stand the noise and would speak at last, if only to order me beaten. But he remained in his chair, silent, staring at the wall. Even when I began to shout and curse at him. The things I said…”
He could not go on for several long moments. “And then I became silent too. As much a ghost as he. For five long years, I was very quiet. I behaved myself; I really tried. I thought perhaps if his mind was unburdened by my presence, he would… be well.”
Chant tensed as Gale shifted nearer to him. “Do not come closer,” Chant said hoarsely, “until you have heard it all. I cannot bear to see you recoil in disgust.”
Gale ignored that and put his hand on Chant’s hunched back. Chant closed his stinging eyes, his throat too tight to protest. Gale’s voice was low. “I have not recoiled these last three days from corpses, ghastly leg wounds, or severed ears. I shall not recoil from you.”
Chant drew a shuddering breath. He could not deny how good Gale’s touch felt, how much it steadied him. What a desperate, pathetic creature he was.
“Needless to say, my silence did not save him. Things continued much as they had, except now I rarely ate either. And sometimes I drank. The rumour mill had begun to call my father the old mad earl, and I’m sure there were things said about me as well, but I didn’t care. I did not feel like a person at all. I didn’t even really hurt anymore, and perhaps that should have been a mercy, but it was the scariest thing of all. To feel that I had been shrunken down and put in a little box somewhere and that the only safety I would ever know again lay in feeling absolutely nothing. And then I met Reid.” Chant smiled in spite of himself. “I was out one day, and I—I meant to go and buy a new shirt for my father, but I ended up at a stationer’s. I don't know how. And the stationer could not get me to speak, to say where I lived, but Reid was in the shop, and said he’d get me home. I don’t know to this day how he did it. But he stayed with me until I could speak again, and he made sure my father and I had supper. And after that, he visited regularly and helped with my father. He took me out on excursions, drew me from the twisted mess I had made of my own mind.”
Gale’s hand moved gently down his back, then up again. Chant stared straight ahead at the vases.
“I loved him so much. He seemed to love me in return, and at the time, I could not imagine that, Gale. I could not. Someone who could love the ruin of me.
“But he started to talk of how we would travel. How we would go sailing. How we would visit France one day. It was as though he no longer remembered that I had an invalid father to care for. He was so caught up in dreams of our future together. I was caught up too. But one day, I brought up the issue of my father, and he spoke seriously to me, saying I could not devote the whole of my youth to caring for a man who would not ever lift a finger to help himself. He said I had a choice to make.” Chant paused again, wondering how his ribs had suddenly become iron bands. “I chose Reid. I left my father in the care of a live-in nurse, and I found this place, this house with the churchyard view. For the first time in my life, I felt like a whole person. Reid visited nearly every day. I have never known such lightness. Such freedom. If Reid could sometimes be difficult—prone to brooding and silence, I overlooked it. Even though at times it filled me with terror—as though Reid might become a ghost like my father. Eventually, Reid and I began making plans in earnest to travel. But then a letter came from my father’s house. He was growing worse. He was having fits and outbursts of violence. The nurse could no longer manage him alone. I was devastated and planned to go to him at once.
“But Reid told me I should not. That if I did, that house should have me in its grip again, and this time I would never get free. I believed him. He said to let him take care of the situation. Of me. It had been so long since anyone had… had taken care of me. I am ashamed, but I let him do what he felt we ought. And after a week, he came to me with the name of a hospital. It was a fine place, he said. Not one of those dreadful institutions you read about in Gothic novels. My father would be well cared for. All I had to do was sign a form.”
He gave Gale space to speak. To draw back. To condemn him. For surely Gale knew the end of the story by now. But Gale said nothing, just kept his hand, warm and solid, on the back of Chant’s dressing gown.
“I did.” Chant was weeping quite suddenly, but did not have the energy to be ashamed of himself. He put his face in his hands, hoping to at least muffle the terrible sounds coming from him. “I signed it.”
“And Reid left,” Gale said softly.
Chant nodded into his hands. He forced his head up slightly so he could be heard. “He left not two months later. My father died the year after that. And then I had no one. You see, even after I’d left my father’s home, I… I was so very wrapped up in Reid I made no friends to speak of.”
Gale’s hand continued moving slowly up and down Chant’s back.
Chant let out a bitter laugh turned at once to a sob. “I did not believe at first that Reid had left. I thought something must have happened to him. Drowned, murdered. Kidnapped. Eventually I did locate the man who had arranged Reid’s passage to France. So I knew he had gone willingly. But even years later, I would still think, maybe a body will turn up. Maybe there will be some clue showing how he was coerced onto that ship. And then I will know it was not me who drove him away.”
Gale made a soft sound of sympathy.
Chant was afraid to breathe, afraid he’d choke on the air.
“So when I told you he was happily married in France…”
Chant attempted a few ragged breaths. “I suppose I am glad to know. How could I have wanted him to stay, me being what I am? If I’d truly cared for him, I would have sent him to France myself.”
“What are you?” Gale sounded confused.
Chant swallowed hard. “Have you not heard anything I’ve said? I put my father in an asylum so that I might travel to the Continent with a fellow I liked.”
“There is far more to it than that,” Gale said firmly.
Chant wished he had a handkerchief. Was surprised when Gale handed him one. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “You must think me astonishingly soft. Which I am. But I assure you, I have not wept in many years.”
“I think no less of you for weeping.”
“I should have stayed with him. My father. And been the son he needed.”
“No. Chant, listen to me.” Gale’s voice was impossibly calm, and Chant quieted somewhat in response. “You did the very best you could.”
Chant wept harder then, fool that he was, and Gale tightened his arm around his shoulders, drawing Chant into him.
Chant could not have resisted if he’d wanted to. He leaned against Gale, sobbing brokenly until the rhythm of it took him over and blocked out all thought.
Gale did not have time to reflect on what a bloody fool he’d been. His only priority right now was Chant. He held the other man as the weak grey light grew stronger, and dawn came.
“I’m right here,” he whispered at one point. Which seemed, perhaps, the least comforting thing he could say. For what good did it do anyone to have Gale there? More often than not, Gale’s presence did outright harm.
But, he reflected, Reid h
ad disappeared on Chant. As had Chant’s sister. And for all intents and purposes, Chant’s parents. So perhaps Chant would like to know that Gale was not going anywhere. That the whole knobby, useless, uncomforting bulk of him would remain right here with Chant for as long as Chant needed.
He rubbed Chant’s back in slow, steady strokes, relieved and a bit awed at how Chant calmed for him.
“You are a good man,” he said, hardly aware of what he was saying, “who was put in a very difficult situation. It’s all right now. I promise. It’s all right.”
Chant let out another breath in a rush and leaned hard against him. “I am not kind. I am not good.”
“You are both. I know many things. You must believe me on this.”
“You said I feel what I feel with good reason. And so you don’t begrudge me an expression of those feelings. But what if I don’t have good reason? What if I want to punch and kick and tear this whole bloody place apart for no other reason than that I imagine it would be satisfying?”
Gale glanced down at him, his chin resting on the top of Chant’s head. “Then I shall assist you in any way I can. I shall spectate silently, cheer you on, help you tear things apart. Or leave if you should rather commit this act of destruction on your own.”
Chant snorted through his tears. “I shall not commit such an act.”
“Why not?”
“It does no good.” Chant straightened, looking at Gale. “I should know that by now.”
Gale did not know if what he was about to propose would be of any use to Chant at all. But he supposed it was worth a try. “I’ll tell you what. In my private apartment in Russell Street, I have a decorative jug, given to me by the Earl of Someplace or Other. Several weeks ago, something quite terrible was done to it—not by me, mind you. By a friend. I am loath to disclose names, but it was Lord Hartwell. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say I have not been able to look at this jug the same way since. And I never will.” He paused. “Should you like to break it?”