Read A Private Gentleman Online
Authors: Heidi Cullinan
A Private Gentleman (35 page)
floor, took the orchid carefully in his hands and cried.
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Chapter Fourteen
They could not find Albert anywhere.
Rodger pointed out, almost hourly, that they had found no sign of his body,
either, and that a man of his birth would not be lost for too long even in death.
But with each passing day, Michael grew more and more frantic. Because he
could, he took it out on Rodger.
“You always brag that you can find anyone in London.” Michael stood over
Rodger’s desk in his dressing gown, doing his best to loom. “You say no one can
slip away from you, that this is your city.” He folded his arms over his chest.
“Where is he, then?”
“I don’t know.” Rodger tightened his lips into a thin line. “He went out the
back door and down the alley. He got into a cab somewhere around Grosvenor.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “And that’s where I lose him. I interviewed the
man who picked him up myself. He says he let him out on a street, but there was
no one on that street who saw him get into another cab. I know where every cab
that ran down that street went. I’ve investigated every route, every destination.
Everything runs cold.”
Michael sat down and wrapped his gown closer to his body. He stared at
Rodger’s desk for a long, terrible moment.
Rodger shook his head, reading his mind. “He’s not dead, lad. I’ve been
watching the corpses too. The only thing I can think of is that he isn’t in town. All his usual places I have eyes on. Even some of his unusual. But I don’t get
anywhere checking non-London options either. The only thing that confounds
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me is that his family isn’t looking. Even a bastard like the marquess would want
this handled delicately. Either they’re accustomed to this, or someone has
warned them off, that he’s invisible but fine. Something is odd here. He can’t go
missing this long, not this easily. Not by accident.”
This pinched at Michael. “You’re saying he’s hiding from me deliberately?”
Rodger snorted. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, ducks.”
“But why? I understand his being upset, but—hiding?”
Rodger leveled a look at him.
“I don’t believe you,” Michael said. “I don’t think he’s hiding from me. I
think something’s wrong.”
“And now you’re being a ninny.” He waved in irritation at Michael. “Go on
with you. I have other things to do in addition to hunting down your idiot of a
lover, and your nagging helps none of it.”
Michael left Rodger, reluctantly, and returned to his room.
He tried to read, but he couldn’t keep his attention on anything. He tried a
bath and some lunch in the kitchen.
As the days turned into a week, he even tried working.
Not sex. Not even hand jobs—they didn’t frighten him, but it felt like a
betrayal, so he didn’t allow them. He flirted and danced and teased, working the
customers into such a state they could barely make it to a booth to relieve
themselves. Every night he took a shift at the ballroom, trying to distract himself
from the fact that he was dying inside.
But it didn’t work. He still pined for Albert, and on top of it all he didn’t feel
the thrill in working anymore. He didn’t hate it, didn’t feel sick doing it, and
didn’t panic. It only felt…strange to smile and tease men who were not Albert. It
didn’t feel wrong, either. It just didn’t feel…satisfying.
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Which was a revelation in and of itself. Was that why he had been a whore?
Because it was satisfying? He would have laughed at the idea before, but now
the question loomed in his mind. Why
was
he a whore?
He found Rodger late one evening and asked him.
Rodger gave him a very strange look, one that seemed to question Michael’s
sanity in earnest. “Are you ill, love? Or simply tired?”
“Neither.” Michael rested his elbows on Rodger’s desk. “Honestly, why am I
doing this? Because it seems something I should be able to answer, and I can’t. I
don’t even remember precisely how it started. It just seemed to happen.”
Rodger leaned back and threaded his fingers over his chest. “You asked me
to let you try. A man had been eyeing you, and I commented on it, and you went
still and quiet. I thought you would be upset, but you just said, ‘Is he still
looking?’ and he was, so I said so. You told me you were going to go up to him
and offer to jerk him off, and how much should you ask for? Could have
knocked me over with a feather. I told you to go on ahead, and I’d keep an eye
out for you. After that night, you never looked back.”
Michael remembered now. He smiled absently as he stared unseeing at the
wall, letting the old scene pass through his vision. “Yes. I remember now as well.
There was something about him I liked. He was hungry, but not domineering
like Daventry. And handsome. I liked the idea of watching his face while he
came—and getting paid for it.”
Rodger nodded. “It’s always been about power for you. About pleasure too,
but mostly power. Which I thought was a proper attitude for a prostitute, so I
encouraged you. And here we are.”
Power. Michael frowned, still staring off at nothing. “Then why don’t I care
about it anymore?”
“We been over this, ducks. Lord George reminded you of Daventry—”
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“No, that’s not what I mean.” Michael gestured vaguely toward the front
room. “I’ve been flirting with the men all week. I even went into the booths a few
times—I didn’t let them touch me, but even if they had, I could tell it wouldn’t
have mattered. It was almost boring. I felt nothing at all. Not disgust, not
aversion. Just…disinterest.”
Now he had Rodger’s attention. He sat forward, looking hard at Michael.
“No panic?”
Michael shook his head. “None.”
“Hmm,” Rodger said, and returned to his ledgers.
Three days after that Michael was called into Rodger’s office to find his
friend looking angry and grim.
“I have had word,” he spat out, “of Lord George.”
Michael’s stomach became abruptly hollow. “You have?”
Rodger nodded tersely. “He is on the east side, down by the docks.” His fist
tightened on the desk. “With that damned woman.”
The pit in Michael’s abdomen widened. “Pardon?”
“He’s with Brannigan. It took me a week to confirm it, and that’s all I can get.
Not without creating a royal fracas, and I won’t do such for the likes of that
bastard.”
With a woman.
Michael tried to shove his doubts aside. “But—did you
explain? Did you tell him—her—I was looking for Albert? Me, Michael?”
There was a horrible pause. Eventually Rodger nodded again. “Aye.”
Michael stood there a long time, until the silence pressed on him and he
turned away without speaking.
“Michael, love,” Rodger called out, but Michael spoke over him.
“I need to go for a walk,” he said, heading for the door. Blessedly, Rodger let
him go.
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He didn’t go outside, however, but to his room. For several minutes he sat on
his bed, staring at the floor, thinking. Then he rose and rifled through his closet.
As he dressed, his eyes fell on the space beneath his window, and out of
habit, he crossed to the shelf and stroked the glass jar.
With the help of some books, Albert’s notes and advice Rodger had hunted
down for him, the orchid was still alive. In a very narrow sort of way Michael
fancied he was one of London’s top orchid experts now. Whenever possible, he
took the jar—carefully, so carefully—to the bath with him, steaming up the room
as much as he dared. He kept a pot of boiling water atop his stove, making the
attic as humid as possible. Likely he had ruined scores of books. He cared for
none of them now. Only Albert’s orchid mattered.
Only Albert mattered.
If only I mattered to him.
He knew without question Albert would never hurt him deliberately, that he
ignored him not to wound, not to mock. Yet Michael found that didn’t change
the fact that he did hurt. In a strange way the idea that Albert simply didn’t think
of him now, too wrapped up in his pain to notice, hurt worse than any deliberate
slight.
Turning away from the orchid, he caught a look at himself in the mirror, at
his long hair. He thought of all the men who had stroked it. He thought of how
Rodger called them his golden locks, rubbing his fingers together to indicate
coin.
He thought of how he had lain in bed with Albert at Oxford, safe and loved
as Albert held him and methodically stroked the long, silken strands, calling him
beautiful.
He thought of Albert with the unknown woman even Rodger couldn’t reach.
Michael touched his hair sadly.
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Gathering the rest of his things, he headed down the stairs. He found Clary
in the ready room, drew a breath, and said, “Darling, do you have time to cut my
hair?”
Every nightmare Wes had ever had in his life was haunting him at once, and
as days turned into weeks and the weeks into a month, he very, very sincerely
wanted to die.
He didn’t even remember coming to Penny. As the opium left his system, his
memory began to scramble, and he could recall both her finding him in an alley
and falling through her door in a faint. He also thought sometimes he was with
his father, or underwater. But his faulty memories came and went. Penny herself
was always there when they receded.
She took the opium from him slowly. To do otherwise might kill him, she
said, though as the withdrawal set its teeth into Wes he wished he were dead.
The road back was full of nightmares, literal and metaphorical both. Shakes,
fevers, retching, tortured visions—his body and mind were melting away, and
there was nowhere for him to hide.
Penny stayed by him through it all. No matter how he wept, no matter how
he shouted, no matter that he vomited or soiled himself, she remained. She
listened to him plead. She heard his bargains with God and with the devil. She
witnessed his hallucinations, most of them about his father.
His father and Michael.
Over and over again he watched his father rape his lover. Over and over
again Michael called to him, but Albert could never move. He could barely
speak.
“You’re worthless,” his father told him. “You’re pathetic and worthless. How
could you ever save him? You cannot even save yourself.”
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His father became the burglar. The burglar became the nasty boys at school.
The nasty boys at school became the superior members of the Botanical Society,
all of them sneering at him as they raped Michael over and over and over. Night
and day, waking or sleeping, the visions never stopped, and they were worse
than the chills, or the fevers, or the sick or the spiders and lizards and monsters
that erupted from the walls. None of them held a candle to his failure, his
worthlessness, played like a bad, endless opera before the backs of his eyes.
He would have run mad, he was sure of it, had it not been for Penny.
“You are not worthless,” she told him every time he repeated the
nightmare’s accusations aloud. “You are not pathetic. You are not weak. You are
strong, George Albert Westin. You are strong and capable, and you are alive.”
“No,” he would weep. “No, I’m not,” he would insist, but she held fast to his
hands and whispered in his ear.
“Yes you are. And your Michael thinks so too.”
On and on this went, torture that seemed like years, that seemed it would
never end. Yet end it did. Not at once. But the nightmares began to get weaker,
and wonder of wonders, Wes grew stronger. One day he found himself shouting
back at his father, at the burglar, at all the boys and men who mocked him,
parroting Penny’s words.
“I am n-not worthless. I am n-n-not w-w-weak.”
Whenever he defended himself, Michael would look up at Wes, his beautiful
eyes cutting right to Albert’s soul, and he would whisper, “I love you.”
He was still very sick. He threw up on Penny as often as not, but now there
was no blood. It took him over a month to stand. Walking seemed years away.
But he was getting better.
“Rest,” Penny urged him when the panic tried to drown him. “Think only of
getting better. Don’t dwell on troubling things.”
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“M-M-Michael,” he rasped. “M-M-M-M—”
Penny rubbed his back, the same soothing strokes his mother had once given
him. “Michael can wait. You’re no good to him until you’re better. Rest, Wes.
Rest.”
In the end Wes had no choice. He was so weak he could barely sit, let alone
compose sentences enough to explain. But he could still think. And though the
monsters were slain, this duty was far worse, far more terrible an outcome left
untended, and unlike the hallucinations, this one was real.