Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 (17 page)

The murmuring began again inside. Conversations bubbled up from the main hall below, servants moved through the rooms, setting tables and bringing food. He could not stay. He needed time. Time alone to think and prepare what he would say, what questions he would ask that would make Evander give him the right answers. Memory played tricks on him, serving up images of the past weeks that now made sickening sense.

Their heads bent together as Evander guided her through a piece on the pianoforte, blond on blonde.

The two of them cantering ahead when the group had gone riding, returning with mud-splashed hems and secret smiles.

Tossing and turning on the cool sheets, listening out of habit for the sound of breathing that wasn’t there.

He had never once imagined this.

How many nights has he gone to her bed instead of mine?

How many times has he laughed at my ignorance?

How stupid have I been, and how long has this been his plan?

Stephen stumbled back toward his room, catching a passing maid by the arm. “Give my respects to the earl,” he said clumsily, letting go of her arm when she pulled back in surprise, “but I am unwell. I will not be down to dinner.”

Let Evander make love to the earl’s daughter across the dinner table, under it, over every chair and by every fireplace in the house if he wanted to. Tonight, at least, Stephen would not be there to watch.

Chapter Twelve

Ashbrook did not come down to dinner. His seat sat empty, a maid curtsying prettily before Coventry to make his excuses.

Cade was a slow-simmering fire of banked rage in the chair opposite. He played his part well, certainly, chatting with the ladies on either side and keeping the conversation both light and utterly insubstantial, but the darkened blue of his eyes and the set of his jaw suggested another story. Joshua watched him from the corner of his own eye, only half-attentive to Lady Chalcroft’s conversation on his left.

Lady Charlotte spoke less than usual, her hands clasped before her and satisfaction radiating off of her. She cast kittenish eyes at Cade, which was nothing new. More surprising were the intent stares she kept giving her father, as though waiting for something to be said. He, on the other hand, was so busy talking up his hunting dogs to Miss Talbot and her mother that he missed the entire spectacle.

No one brought up London news, for which Joshua could only be grateful. Even Horlock and Lady Horlock kept conversation to the weather (fine), the weather in general at this time of year (not always so fine) and the possibility of a picnic the next day (only if it stayed fine). It was all he could do to sit there, not to glance over at the empty chair between Lady Amelia and Lady Horlock, to imagine the comments that Ashbrook would be making under his breath or the sly grin he would shoot across the table, meant for Joshua’s eyes alone.

The end of the meal came as a surprise and a moment of almost unbearable relief, Charlotte rising to lead the ladies out. He could stay long enough to take brandy with the men, then make his own excuses and slip away. Away from under Lady Horlock’s watchful eye, it would not rouse suspicion. And then?

He faltered. He would look ridiculous if he ran off to check that Ashbrook was well. The man was grown and didn’t need a nursemaid petting him over every headache and ill turn of the stomach. No, he would stay for the hands of whist and the talk of literature, however long into the night it lasted.

Joshua was well done making an idiot of himself over men.

Chapter Thirteen

He found no rest in his room.

Stephen paced, his coat off and his cravat loose around his neck. He flung himself backward onto the bed in a gesture so dramatic that even the actors in the Haymarket would laugh at his overacting. And none of the restless motion helped the itching displeasure under his skin, the anger and the shame commingled, the
humiliation
of it all.

And why should he be feeling any of those things? Men were liars and ruled by their pricks. One only had to look at the number of ladies thronging Covent Garden by night to understand that. Marriage vows meant nothing, even to those who
could
make them.

Sooner or later, there would have had to come a woman who held some sort of fascination for Evander. Perhaps that was it. Stephen stared up at the white ceiling and counted the shadows made by the flickering candle in the window. Lady Charlotte was the angel come to lift Evander from his life of sodomitic lusts, and Stephen would be left behind to feed the fires of hell.

If it were so expected, so natural, why did he feel so hollow? Why did his chest ache and his stomach feel tangled, the image of Evander and Charlotte embracing impressing itself upon the blackness every time he closed his eyes? Man and woman were designed for each other; the Bible said so. Man and man—pleasure in temporary release and companionship, with a side order of sin. And nothing more.

Until an hour ago, more or less, he had known intimately what shape his future would take. Now there was nothing there but the uncertain void.

What time was it, and how long had he been up in the room, feeling the shift of the earth upon its axis? If dinner was over he could find Beaufort, perhaps steal some time alone to take counsel, feel the comfort of Beaufort’s arms around him. He had no qualms now about following through on the promises in that gentle forest kiss, even without Evander’s by-your-leave.

And then—

And then he had no idea.

Still, it was the beginning of a plan. Stephen rolled to his feet and headed for the door, not bothering with coat and cravat. He pulled the door open and froze, foot still raised. Evander stood on the other side, one hand raised as though to knock, his face dark as thunder.

Stephen stepped back reflexively. Evander pushed his way inside. The door closed behind him, and Evander turned the key to lock it. His whole body tensed, his movements tight and perfectly controlled, the vein throbbing at his temple.

“Do you do this on purpose to humiliate me?” Evander hissed, his hands balling into fists. He loomed, as much as a man only an inch taller or so could loom, and Stephen fell back another pace.

His heart thrummed, his mouth went dry and his palms wet. Now what, when Stephen was the one with the right to be angry and distraught?

“You’re an embarrassment. They were asking after you and all I could say was ‘I don’t know’.”

Stephen backed up a step farther, his instinct first, as always, to put distance between them, even as he remembered how much Evander hated that. His anger from the afternoon still simmered, a low-banked fire, flaring now in the face of Evander’s fury.

“I?” He sounded incredulous, which would only enrage Evander further, but there was no hope for it now. “I am not the one jeopardizing everything. What would you have me do when I saw you with that snippet of a girl?” The edges of the world started to go red, and Stephen struggled to keep himself from shouting. “What lies are you playing at now? ‘You are my muse’…hah! Have you also told her that she is the first who could ever stir your heart?”

Evander shook his head and sneered at Stephen, his perfect upper lip curling in a hard and unforgiving parody of itself. “You are being ridiculous. Are you trying to play the cuckold now? We’ve never been married, you and I. The sins we commit have been ratified by no sacraments.”

“And that gives you license to break our agreement whenever it suits you?” He wanted to throw things, to punch him, to make a scene of the sort that had never, ever been permitted, to loose the bubbling rage that was only now surfacing from some dark place inside him.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Evander proclaimed, drawing himself up with the full and straight spine of the righteous man. “I know full well what you and
Beaufort
have done without me. And now you accuse
me
of being the one to defile our bed? You’re the worst sort of hypocrite, Ashbrook, and if either of us is to be making apologies, it should be
you
.”

And that was utterly wrong…wasn’t it? Because it had been Evander himself who had said “do what you will” and left the bed, it had been Evander who pointed Joshua out and Evander who had made the first invitation. Surely feeling some measure of affection for the man who had had his cock up Stephen’s arse was an acceptable thing. The two situations were in no way comparable.

Were they?

“You gave us your blessing!” Stephen protested, far less sure of himself than he had been ten minutes ago. “I may well have liked him first, but we agreed together that he should come to our bed. I have in no way deceived you! Unlike what you’re doing, which I still cannot fathom!”

“That much is obvious,” Evander said coldly. His hands unclenched and a cool, appraising smile replaced the hot anger on his face. “Don’t you understand?”

He stepped forward and took Stephen’s face between his hands. It took everything Stephen had not to recoil, his jaw clenching. Evander took a deep breath, his shoulders settling, and when he opened his eyes again there was a glimmer of the man whom Stephen knew.

“I’m doing this for us,” Evander said kindly, steel behind his words. His touch was too much, crawling and uncomfortable. A log popped in the hearth and the fire jumped, casting Evander’s face in shadow.

“For us? How does that make any sense?” Space, air—he needed both.

Evander dropped his hands away but kept talking in the sort of voice used to gentle a wild horse or a dog. “Use your head, Stephen. If I marry Charlotte, we will never have to strive again. I will have money, money to compose and travel, and never have to scratch and scrape and bow to those who hate me.”

“Us?”

Evander blinked. “Eh?”

“You said you were doing this for ‘us’, but all you say now is ‘I’.”

Evander shook his head in annoyance, blond hair falling into one eye. He pushed it back, Stephen’s golden idol, and frowned petulantly. “You know I meant ‘us’—don’t try and get out of this with distractions and semantics. You have been cruel to me, Stephen, when all I want is to make our lives easier.”

“And now you say ‘our’,” Stephen said, emboldened enough to take a step forward and point a finger at Evander, risk his wrath and ruin, “when I know you mean ‘your’. Anger is like wine, Evander—it brings out the truth in the words we try to hide behind. You are a small and petty man, interested only in your own advancement.”

He regretted the words as soon as they were out, not for what he had said—which was true, frankly—but for what it would lead to. The surge of power, though, that sudden notion of indestructibility, of feeling ten feet tall and broader than the mountains—that, he could cling to for protection.

Evander’s tune changed, and the hands that had been balled into fists now reached out to Stephen in palms-up supplication. “Stephen,” he wheedled, “you’re angry, I know. Don’t you know the truth?
You
are my muse. Everything I write, I write for you.

“I forgive you,” Evander declared magnanimously, “even though you’re being unreasonable. Get some rest, and in the morning all will be well again. You’ll see that I’m right. I need you, you know that. I cannot write my masterworks without my muse beside me.”

“So write for Charlotte,” Stephen said, his “unreasonable” anger still the one thing fueling him. “I am sure she will appreciate it better than I at the moment.”

The firelight played ugly tricks on the lines of Evander’s face, his sneer cutting deep into his brow and cheeks. “She’s a silly girl who wants her father’s attention. If I can use that to make our lives easier, who could blame me for trying? All three of us will have what we want. Money, security, connections—”

“You are insane.” Charlotte’s only purpose in life was to make a good match and advance her family. For that, she needed someone titled and wealthy, not a rogue of a composer with all the lusts of a grim Greek god. “Even if you ruin her—a girl whose only crime is being silly and rebellious and a little bit in love with you—even if you make her shame so paramount that she has no
choice
but to marry, the gentry always have options. Coventry will marry her to the King of
Spain
before he gives her to you!”

Evander went completely still, then his head moved forward, his eyes intense and dark, blazing like the sun. When he spoke his voice was a hiss, all the more dangerous for his tight control. “You are ungrateful and have always been ungrateful. Nothing I do ever suits your moods. So be it!” he exclaimed, and despite himself, a bubble of cold dread formed in the pit of Stephen’s stomach. “If I am so terrible to you, then I no longer want
you
. Run to your precious
Beaufort
…” he spat the name out as a curse, “…and let your new lover attempt to make you happy. Because apparently I cannot ever do so.”

That— No. That was the opposite of what he wanted, was it not? The evening was supposed to end in reconciliation, in Evander’s reassurance that he still had a place at his side.

So then why was the word “finally” echoing in the back of his mind? Ungrateful wretch indeed!

The memories came next, Evander’s voice, his father’s, all of it blending into a cacophony of reminders.

“We are partners, you and I—I will write the music and you shall play my tunes, and the world shall love us both.”

“You’re hapless, boy, and the army’s the best place for you. You’ll spend your whole life searching for a leader to take charge of you because you haven’t the stones to rule yourself.”

“They come to hear
my
music, you know. It is
my
voice that sings to them from your strings.”

“Evander!” Stephen could get out no more, the weight of what he had just done crashing down upon him.

Evander shook his head, his lip curling, and he unlocked Stephen’s bedroom door. “I will hear no more. As of now, and thanks to you, our partnership is at an end.”

Chapter Fourteen

Joshua should have known better. He had been a fool to follow Ashbrook into the woods, had known the loss of control it would lead to. And yet. The afternoon had been a scene of perfection, down to the last detail. The breeze had tossed Ashbrook’s curls around his face, dark on cream, and his lips had tasted of summer rain.

“Come to bed tonight,”
he had asked—begged!
“I will speak to Evander.”
And Joshua had believed him.

Why should he not? The universe had seen fit to give Joshua a gift in the shape of a ridiculous musician who hated to kill animals and rescued serving girls from farm boys. (Who had a mouth made of heated silk and fine brandy—smooth, soft and burning like fire.)

Joshua had believed him.

And now the clocks had long since struck the hour of two, the world outside dark and still.

Cade had not looked his way the rest of the evening, not even to glower, and no message had been waiting beneath Joshua’s door when he retired.

He had been far better off, Joshua mused, staring into the glowing red embers of the fire, when he had restricted his activities to tension release and nothing more. Caring this way for someone brought only dashed expectations and disappointment.

And if he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up a character in an opera, all brooding and no spine.

He had been invited to Ashbrook’s room. He would at the very least go and find out more.

The suite was empty. No one answered his quiet knock and so, on impulse, he tried the door. It opened for him, unlocked, the sitting room tidy and the fire banked low in the hearth.

Ashbrook’s room was in disarray, his jacket from the afternoon and his muddy-bottomed boots tossed over a wooden chair, and his bedclothes rumpled as though he had flung himself upon them and lain for a while. They were cool when Joshua smoothed his hand over them, so he had been gone for some time.

Joshua left as softly as he had arrived, closing the doors carefully behind him.

Where is the first place I go when I am upset? The studio and my charcoals. Why should he do anything different?

The doors to the conservatory were closed, the faint strains of music from the other side low and melancholy. The doors swung open at his touch, neither locked nor barred. For a moment he regretted intruding. He froze; even breathing too loudly might break the enchantment.

Ashbrook had indeed turned to his music. The dirge poured from his violin, cradled gently beneath his chin. His eyes were closed, his head bowed, his dark hair pulled back into a ribbon with a few tendrils escaping to frame his face. He stood at the side of the room, as far away as possible from the chairs upon which Joshua had once watched him fucking. The memory was no longer one which could set him to blushing—it had been the beginning of something both dear and dire and, even so, he would not change it.

No embers glowed in the fireplace, only a handful of candle ends burning in a stand set on top of the sideboard. The shadows in the room leapt and jumped with the movement of the air, the flames guttering as Joshua softly closed the door. The golden light caught every movement and sweep of Ashbrook’s arms as he played, the discordant minor key not something Joshua had ever heard before. He played out his heart and soul in something wholly original, and Joshua would bet money that he would never be able to repeat it.

He seemed not to have heard the opening of the door. Joshua could only stand and watch, Ashbrook’s movements so desperately intimate. He could never capture it in paint, the agony on Ashbrook’s face, the introspection, the bow and sweep of his body as the music flowed through and out of him.
A series of sketches, then, pencil studies of movement and line, overlapping in sequence.
Then perhaps he could hold on to some miniscule portion of this visceral beauty.

His chest clenched and he swallowed hard against the lump that seemed to suddenly appear in the center of it. Breathing became difficult, the air in the room thin and insufficient.

Ashbrook drew his bow down along the strings in one last long, solemn cry of pain, the fingers on his left hand trembling more than the vibrato called for as they pressed against the strings.

That pain echoed in his eyes when he opened them, lifted his head up from the base of the violin and let it slide down from its perch on his shoulder. He saw Joshua then, put the instrument and bow in the case at his feet.

There was red in the picture that didn’t belong there, a discordant note in the harmony of the palette, spotted crimson on the cuff of Ashbrook’s white sleeve. That broke Joshua’s paralysis and he crossed the room in three long strides.

Ashbrook seemed half in a daze himself, his cheeks rough with stubble growing in, and darkening circles beneath his eyes. Ashbrook closed and opened his fingers reflexively, looked down as Joshua took his hand and smoothed out the tense and strained tendons. He had played through his callouses, the skin cracked and broken on already worn fingertips. Red blood seeped between the splits in his skin, pooling under his close-trimmed nails.

“What are you doing here?” Ashbrook asked, distant and dazed, as Joshua patted down his pockets in search of his handkerchief.

“Looking for you,” Joshua replied, too sharp with concern. Ashbrook flinched as Joshua began to clean his fingertips, and he pressed more lightly against the broken skin. “You were not at dinner,” he began again. There was not as much bleeding as it had first seemed, but he could not be left unattended to, either way. “Nor in your room. I was concerned.”

“You went to my room?”

The dispassion in Ashbrook’s tone made Joshua look up, and his face was as closed off as the rest of him.
Waiting for a blow to fall,
Joshua imagined, apropos of nothing.

“I did. Neither you nor Cade was abed, and the hour is late. I wondered, perhaps, if something had happened between you.” It was a leading question; the answer was obvious. But now was his chance to find out the truth.

The story he got, though, was told quietly and with little emotion, as Ashbrook’s eyes focused on Joshua’s hands moving and the wreck he had made of his own fingers—that, he had not expected.

“What does he imagine?” Joshua ground out between gritted teeth, letting go Ashbrook’s hand and folding his handkerchief to keep the smears of blood concealed. “That he will simply go on as he has been, find someone new to kowtow and grovel before his
greatness
? He has used you shamefully,” he stated firmly. “You are not to blame here.”

Ashbrook rubbed the tips of his injured fingers with his thumb, wincing. He shook his head, still not meeting Joshua’s eyes. He sat on the floor, his back against the pianoforte. He tipped back his head and rested his wrists on his bent knees, a statue of a man in contemplation.

Joshua joined him without invitation, settled on the floor beside him and tucked his banyan around his own legs to better ward off the nighttime chill.

“I said things I should not have.” Ashbrook broke the silence and scruffed the fingers of his good hand through the stubble on his chin. “Accused him without thinking things through. In one short argument, I destroyed everything I have been working for, everything I walked away from my family for. I wanted to be a musician, more than anything, to make my living and my fortune through my song. And now—”

“And now you still have that chance, only without that albatross of a man weighing you down.”

Ashbrook barked out a short, discordant laugh. “You don’t understand. Without him I am nothing.”

How could a man capable of so much artistic vision be so unrelentingly blind? “Without him,” Joshua said, resting his hand on Ashbrook’s knee, “you have a chance to be a man of your own making. Cade has shown you his true colors. Believe him. And,” he added vehemently, “he is not the only composer in England, nor is Coventry the only patron.”

“Who, then, do you recommend?” Ashbrook said sharply. “With Evander a favorite of the earl, they will do damage if I walk away. I must beg for forgiveness and a return to grace.” He scrubbed his hands up his face and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. He sagged, and it would be so easy to lean over and draw Ashbrook into Joshua’s arms, but he gave off an aura of
“touch me not”
that even a blind man could see.

“They know too many of my secrets,” he said, defeated. “If they expose me, I am a dead man.”

Joshua bit his tongue.
Good Lord, the man was defeatist.
He seemed unwilling even to
try
. “Cade cannot expose you without exposing himself—what would he do? Accuse you of buggery with someone
else
? That he just happened to hear about?”

“I’ll have to apologize,” Ashbrook said, “and pray he forgives me. There are better musicians who would give anything to play for him. If I am not his lover, he will have no reason to keep me. Then I am a dead man.”

“Listen to what you’re saying,” Joshua protested. “Think about the compromise you’re considering. If he would have you beg and grovel for his favor when he is so clearly in the wrong, that is not affection, or love. That is mutually assured destruction.”

Ashbrook looked up at him with eyes glazed over in anger and in self-loathing. Joshua needed to control his tongue or he would lose whatever tenuous connection was making Ashbrook listen to him now.

“If he did not have power over you,” Joshua continued, softer now, reaching out to take Ashbrook’s hand, “tell me. Would you return to him or not? As lover or as player?”

The silence dragged out as Ashbrook considered the question. When he finally spoke, his answer was cryptic and his voice hushed, “Do you have to ask that question, after today?”

Which part of “today” did he mean? Tender and loving kisses in the woods, or the revelations and the fight which followed?

“But that is not how things are,” Ashbrook said, and took back his hand. “I have to live in the world, not in a fantasy, and reality tells me that I am done for. It is
Evander’s
name that draws crowds, not mine. And a performer must have an audience. Without him I have no home, no living, no life.”

Enough.
The self-pity sat as badly on him as a flowered bonnet on a pig, making a mockery of everything he could be. Joshua surged to his knees, rising up a few inches above Ashbrook’s head to give his indignation a better platform.

“So you are content to live not only as a pretty jewel in a box, but a slave or painted whore as well?” The words were harsh, but all the better to snap the man out of his bout of sulking. Somewhere in the back of his head he could imagine Sophie laughing herself absolutely sick at the hypocrisy in it, in
Joshua
of all people telling off someone
else
about lying and staying dependent on another!

“Even if you can bring yourself to work with him again, you do not have to give him yourself as well as your music,” he urged.

It made little impact. Ashbrook pushed himself up from the floor, grabbed for the coat he had left draped over the pianoforte. “My music
is
my self,” he said fiercely, denying everything else that Joshua had begun to know. His compassion, his humor, the way he lost himself sometimes in dreams, the loyalty that made him the kind of man so deserving of pure and absolute love—and the least likely to receive it. “Beyond that, without that, what else am I?”

“A man. A heart. Someone who deserves better.” Joshua stood and faced him down.

All Ashbrook did was shake his head. “Maybe I deserve this,” he said, which made no sense.

Joshua reached for him, but Ashbrook stepped away, leaving Joshua adrift, unmoored, with no notion what to do or say next.

“Press me no further,” Ashbrook said firmly, and Joshua’s heart thumped painfully in his chest. “I am not angry with you, but I can cope with no more tonight.”

If he argued, he would be as cruel and controlling as Cade, and yet if he let Ashbrook walk away now, was there any guarantee that they would find themselves alone again? The summer was not so long that they had endless days to while away. Soon enough they would all leave this house and its velvet rooms, the sunny parlors and days that only reluctantly faded into evening.

The cold of the winter sea would take them all one day. He felt something similar to that leaching frost even now.

Let it take him. He was used to swimming alone.

Good God in heaven, the man’s melodrama is rubbing off on me.

Joshua nodded, once.

With his head low and his mouth pressed into a tight line, Ashbrook left the conservatory and let the door close softly behind him. The sound of the latch echoed in the room.

Where would he go now? Back to Cade? To brood alone somewhere in the garden? Whatever it was that Ashbrook needed, Joshua was apparently not it.

Joshua fell into sleep eventually, but his night was filled with dark and sinister dreams. He lost count of the number of times his eyes flew open, of the thick sensation of some nightmare creature sliding away just out of view, the world tilting dangerously and his white-knuckled grip on the sheets barely enough to keep himself from falling. The dreams vanished as easily as they had come, leaving him with nothing in the morning but a mind fogged by exhaustion.

A clock somewhere chimed the hour—seven—too early by far to go in search of coffee and sausage, but too late to return to bed. Joshua rose, washed, dressed, all in a haze, his thoughts whirling by and yet too insubstantial to pin down.

The light in his sitting room was all wrong for any kind of work so early in the morning; it would not be useful until at least midafternoon. Joshua paused in the middle of his room, his sketchbook and charcoals in his hands and momentarily at a loss. The parlor was no good. He would look everywhere and see Ashbrook’s smile, his ear daubed with blue paint, a streak of green across his cheek.
The merry sound of his laugh, the crinkles in his smile—

Outdoors, then, to take advantage of the sun. There would be chance for solitude there, and a bench to keep the dew from his seat.