Read A Private Gentleman Online
Authors: Heidi Cullinan
A Private Gentleman (34 page)
“Sweet,” he murmured. “And…tart.” But he was still shaking.
“Let me g-give you a bit m-more in w-water.”
Michael did not respond, but neither did he cringe as Wes rose to fetch a
glass from the top of a cabinet. He startled slightly when Wes turned on a tap,
but when Wes returned to his side, bringing the glass to his lips, Michael only
stared down at it in a daze.
“Opium.” He looked uneasy.
“It w-w-will help you,” Wes promised.
Michael blinked at the glass. His eyes shifted to Wes, then filled with tears.
“You know.” There was no question.
Wes affirmed the statement with a curt nod.
Michael reached for the glass and tossed the liquid down. He did not look at
Wes again, and Wes waited patiently for the drug to take effect—both the drug
he had given Michael and the extra nip he had taken himself before returning to
Michael’s side.
Eventually Michael lifted a hand in front of himself, watching it oddly. “Feel
so strange. Everything…floats.”
“L-Let it calm you,” Wes urged. “L-let it take your fear.”
Michael looked up at him blearily. “Daventry.”
My father.
Wes swallowed and replied, with some effort, “Y-Yes.”
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Tears leaked from the corners of Michael’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Wes made a strange, strangled sound. He’d apologized?
He
? The opium tried
to carry him away, but this was too terrible. Michael.
Michael.
My father raped Michael.
While I was hiding at home, too terrified to go to school.
Gentle hands touched his face. “Albert—Albert, please don’t cry.”
Wes opened his mouth to deny this, but stopped as he found with no small
amount of surprise that he was indeed weeping. Tears were streaming down his
face, and he couldn’t stop them. But still he couldn’t speak.
Michael kissed him softly on the cheek. “Albert, don’t cry. It’s all right.”
“S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S—” Wes choked, coughed and tried again, but everything
caught at his teeth. “S-S-S-S-S-S—”
Both Michael’s hands gripped his face now—clumsily, and when he spoke,
Michael’s words were slurred too. “No.
No
, Albert—I won’t let him hurt you
too.”
That statement of protection only made Wes weep harder. His chest hurt,
and his body ached as if it were splitting in half. When Michael kissed the bridge
of his nose, he choked on a sob and reached up to grip his shoulders.
You must be very, very careful.
“S-S-S-S-S-S-S-Sorry,” he choked out. “S-S-S-S-So s-s-s-s-s-orry, s-s-s-s-s-s-s-
s—”
“Shh.” Michael kissed one of Wes’s eyes, then the other, then his lips. “Hush,
love.”
The pain tore Wes to pieces inside. Not pain—sorrow, shame and guilt like
he had never known. His father—
his father!
After all the names he had called Wes, all the accusations—and he had done this?
This?
And to
Michael
?
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The sob that had been choking the back of his throat broke free.
Michael caught it with his mouth. “Don’t hate me,” Michael whispered
against Wes’s lips. He was crying too. “I could bear him using me again,
anything in the world but that you would hate me.”
Wes held him fast. “N-N-No.”
Michael clutched at him. “I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t go, Albert—
please, please don’t leave me because it was him.” He kissed Wes’s cheek, his
ear. “Just don’t leave me, Albert, please.”
Wes could not answer. He could barely think. He needed more opium. He
needed an entire bottle of brandy.
He needed a knife to carve this horrible truth from his head.
This time when the knock came on the door, they both yelped, but when Wes
heard Rawlins’s familiar voice, he calmed at once. “B-B-Butler. It’s m-m-my b-
butler.” He dragged a kiss across his cheek. “I’ll be r-right back.”
He rose carefully, listing back and forth as he made his way to the door.
When he opened it, the butler was standing there holding a lumpy burlap bag.
“This was just delivered for you, my lord.” Rawlins’s nose curled slightly.
“The…gentleman gave it to me, and his companion said they would ‘settle up’
with you later.” He handed over the bag, made a proper bow and left.
Wes shut the door, opened the bag and looked down at a slightly ragged but
otherwise perfect orchid, an exact copy of the one he’d seen at Mrs. Gordon’s
house.
He didn’t know how long he stared at it. He only knew that eventually he
heard a soft voice down the hall, and he turned to see Michael standing there,
swaying on his feet, looking as if he had just climbed through and were poised at
the portal to hell.
“Albert?” he whispered, his entire world in the word.
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Wes put down the orchid and its bag on the table, not even bothering to
rewrap it. He stumbled down the hall toward Michael.
On the way he picked up the bottle of wine he’d opened earlier. After a brief,
reassuring kiss to Michael, he picked up the laudanum and put a liberal amount
in the bottle.
He took a deep, deep drink directly from the mouth.
As the now-dangerous amount of opium swirled inside him, he stumbled
back into the hall. Wrapping his arm around Michael, he led him back into his
bedroom.
Michael sagged against him. “I’m sorry.”
Wes kissed him, gently, then took another swig from the bottle, deeply. “F-
Forget.” He kissed him again.
Forget.
Forget everything.
Everything.
He laid Michael down on the bed. He kissed him. He made slow, sweet,
opiate-laced love to him. He let Michael cry, and he cried too. He held Michael
close as he quieted and drifted fitfully to sleep.
Then Wes rose. He penned several notes at his desk. He paused at the orchid,
closed his eyes and turned away.
He slipped out of his apartments and out of his house, out of Mayfair and
into the night, not knowing where he was going, not caring. He wandered on
and on, trying to outrun the feeling of despair no opium could hide, the despair
that as the drug wore off would only get worse.
How long he wandered, he didn’t know. He had vague, distant memories of
strange rooms full of smoke and naked women who tried to entice him, but all
Wes wanted of them was the pipes they held in their hands. He remembered a
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great deal of vomiting. That was the way of life, with opium, but there was so
much more vomiting now, it seemed. And then there was the other problem. His
gut twisted in knots so tight he wanted to drive a knife into them to loosen his
stool. Another curse of opium. Wes wanted oblivion, but opium now only gave
him hell. All he knew now was despair, the yawning portal of deep terror that
chased him, growing ever closer.
In the bowels of the darkest alley in London it found him, and he knew he
could run no more. He let go, ready now for the end.
It did not come.
He had tried. He had found a knife, or a piece of glass—he couldn’t tell
which in his delirium—but whatever it was, it was sharp, and it would work.
Even here he failed. A vision stopped him, a sad, beautiful vision of a man who
reached out and stayed his hand. When Wes shut his eyes, the man began to
weep, and Wes ran, stumbling, nearly fainting, but running on and on, trying to
get away from that terrible sound.
Michael’s head and mouth felt as if they were full of cotton. Only the top of
his head, though, because his ears felt far, far too open, and every sound was
magnified, and the barest scrape of a fingernail seemed likely to make him cast
up his accounts.
“The bastard drugged him.
Drugged Michael.
”
The words sounded funny, echoing as if they were being spoken through a
speaking tube, but Michael knew the voice even so. He lifted his head.
“Rodger?”
He opened his eyes, but everything was blurry. His stomach threatened to
heave.
“Rodger?” he called with more panic. “Rodger, I don’t feel w—”
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A hand thrust him forward as a disgusting torrent came out of his mouth.
Michael had just enough time to whimper and smack his lips against the foul
acid of his stomach when it happened again. One time more, and then strong
hands were lowering him back down as a cool cloth rested upon his sweaty
brow.
“Good God in heaven,” Michael slurred, letting his suddenly very heavy
eyelids close.
“Hush.” This was Rodger again. The cool cloth slid gently down his cheek.
“You hush, love. I’ve got you.”
“What happened?” Michael couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember
anything at all.
“Lord George drugged you is what happened,” Rodger said tightly. “And
I’ll kill the bastard when I find him.”
Lord George.
Albert.
Michael’s eyes flew open, and he tried to sit up. Then moaned and sank back
down.
“I have to—” His stomach heaved in protest of his attempts to move, and he
held his breath a moment, trying to recover. “Albert. I must—”
“He’s gone, love.” The anger in Rodger’s voice was acute. “He fucking up
and left. Left you here. Sent a runner for me, so he gets some credit for that, but
he left you here in the meantime and run off like the snake he is.”
Michael’s eyes opened again. “Ran off?”
Rodger’s bleary face suggested a grimace. Michael needed to see him.
“Where are my—?”
Rodger handed him his spectacles without a word.
Michael slipped the glasses onto his face. Rodger was scowling.
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And sad.
“Where is Albert?” Michael repeated. “Where has he gone?”
The tic in Rodger’s cheek grew deeper. “I don’t know.”
Michael’s blood ran cold. “No.” He looked up in despair and desperation at
Rodger. “Why—?”
But then he began to remember.
I have something to tell you.
Michael’s hands trembled. “Daventry. Daventry was here.”
All sorrow evaporated into anger as Rodger’s hand seized his shoulder. “If
that bastard harmed you—”
Michael shook his head. “No. No, he was…” He shut his eyes, remembering.
“He was at the door. He came to the door—I don’t know if he came in. I
think….” He ran a hand over his face. “I think I went into some kind of hysterics.
I don’t remember. I only know that I was terrified and that Albert tried to
comfort me.” The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place. “And that was why
he gave me the opiates, I would imagine.”
“He could bloody well have sent for me then.”
Michael ignored Rodger. He could remember all of it now. The cold fear, the
old terror rising inside him, choking him.
“I hope he is rotting in some alley, damn him,” Rodger swore.
“
No.
” Michael didn’t know if he was speaking to Rodger or the terrible swirl
of memory. He’d told him. Told Albert. Albert knew. Albert knew, and he’d
given Michael opium.
And gone. Left in the middle of the night and disappeared.
To kill himself,
a dark part of Michael’s mind whispered.
When he cried out this time, Rodger drew him into a gruff embrace. “It’s all
right, love.”
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Michael’s throat was almost too thick to speak. “He means to be dead. He
will drug himself until he is dead.”
“He isn’t worthy of you,” Rodger shot back, but Michael shook his head. “He
might as well be dead.”
“I love him. I am in love with him. If you wish him ill, you wish me ill as
well.”
“He’s a coward who descends into drugs and runs when confronted with the
truth.”
“
No!
” Michael cried.
Rodger didn’t yield. “He ran, love. You need him right now more than ever,
and he ran.”
Tears had been brimming in Michael’s eyes for some time, but at this, he
gave in and let them flow. Yes. That cut. It cut like a saber across his chest, that
Albert had run. It was worse than a rejection, somehow. But it still didn’t matter.
“I love him. I don’t want him to die.”
Rodger sighed and kissed Michael’s cheek. “I already have the boys out
looking for him. I want to kill him myself for leaving you, but if you want him,
Michael, you shall have him.”
Michael leaned forward and kissed Rodger softly on the cheek.
Rodger grunted and rose from the bed, calling for the men who were with
him. They tried to carry Michael, but he refused them, insisting on standing on
his own feet. He made it all the way to the sitting room. There he saw what could
only be an orchid, exotic and frail, roots exposed and drying as it lay helpless
and half-broken on the floor.
That was when it hit him, not fear, not panic, just sorrow, and he fell to the