The Clockwork Nightingale's Song
Page 4
He’d never used anything other than Shem’s surname before, and it meant something, but Shem was too tense and furious to care what. He lifted his shoulders, ready to shrug the man off, but Marchmont’s thumb brushed the back of his neck lightly, and some of the tightness eased out of his spine.
“You can’t expect me to solve a problem if I don’t have all the information,” Marchmont said. “What aren’t you saying?”
“It’s not your job to fix things,” Shem reminded him. “You make things. Beautiful things. I keep them running.”
“Too simple,” Marchmont complained. He was close to Shem, not quite pressed against him, but his presence was tangible just behind Shem’s back. His thumb kept circling on Shem’s neck, soothing and steady. “Occam’s razor is a terrible obstacle to creative thought, you know.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Shem said, but his mood was beginning to lighten, and he took a slow breath, closing his eyes.
Marchmont was quiet for a long while, and Shem could almost hear him thinking. He imagined gears clicking rapidly together in Marchmont’s mind and smiled.
“Did you never indulge?” Marchmont murmured. “Did you never get tempted?”
“A few times,” Shem admitted, lulled by the way Marchmont’s other hand was rubbing around the curve of his shoulder, warm and kind. “A few kisses.” Marchmont wouldn’t understand without more than that, though, and Shem didn’t want to make him ask. “I had a friend….” Marchmont’s fingers tightened, digging into Shem’s shoulders, so he amended that quickly. “No, an actual friend. This isn’t a story about me. I never….”
“Never what?” Marchmont prompted. His fingers had moved into the ends of Shem’s hair now, distracting him. It had been so long since poor Giles was attacked, and the details had lost their immediacy. He could barely remember the clean lines of Giles’s young face and the freshness of his laughter.
“Never had a weakness for rogues,” he said. When he had indulged, it had been with shy, earnest boys, whose kisses were as sweet and clumsy as his own.
“But your friend did?”
“One of them came back for seconds,” Shem said, his throat closing around the words. “And brought his friends, to which Giles said no. They forced him, and then they beat him, for presumption, they said. By the time we found him….”
“How bad?”
“He lived,” Shem said, but that didn’t say it all. “He works in the tunnels now. Doesn’t leave them much. His face is….” He swallowed. “They put worse scars on his heart. He doesn’t speak much, and never to anyone who knew him before. The boys who work for him tell me he screams sometimes while he lies sleeping.”
“I’m sorry,” Marchmont said. He was close enough now that his breath stirred the hairs on the back of Shem’s neck.
“And then there are the girls,” Shem continued. “A lot of the girls I grew up with, they found respectable work or they married, but not all of them. Some of them got tempted into something foolish and ended up on the street. Others… there’s men out there who think if a girl is poor she’s theirs for the taking, whether she wants it or not. A lot of those girls, the ones who lost the fight to be respectable, are dead, whether it was violence or the pox. Most of the rest are sick or gone to drink. So don’t you tell me it’s just harmless fun.”
“I won’t, not again.” Marchmont slid his arms around Shem’s waist, holding him lightly. “I never did anything like that. I swear.”
He should have been concerned with how inappropriate it was and castigating himself for hypocrisy. Instead the warm clasp of Marchmont’s arms, hugging him close, threatened to tear him apart. Half of him wanted to take the offered comfort, but it made him twitchy, aware of every point where their skin brushed, desperate for something different, either to be held tighter or to fight free. He couldn’t remember anyone ever holding him like this.
Marchmont hummed a little in his ear, one of his thinking noises, and Shem relaxed a little at the familiar sound.
“So,” Marchmont said at last. “You don’t take risks, and you don’t indulge. Would you marry?”
Shem considered it. There were times when his little room in the boarding house felt very lonely, especially as his contemporaries married and moved out. Much as he respected the women around him, though, he could never imagine touching one of them, not in the way he dreamed of men, dreamed of Marchmont.
His life was already organized, everything regimented. He wasn’t happy, as such, but he was safe and content in his work. There was no place for a wife, let alone….
“No Mrs. Holloway on the horizon, then?” Marchmont asked, sounding amused.
“No.”
“No Mr. Holloway, either?” Marchmont kept his voice quiet, right into Shem’s ear.
He had half been expecting the question. He hadn’t been vigilant with Marchmont as he would have been with anyone else, and the man could not have missed the way Shem was slowly melting under his hands. Keeping his voice quiet, he said, “That brings other dangers.”
“If it was someone you could trust?” Marchmont asked. His lips caught the edge of Shem’s ear, and Shem shuddered against him. He wanted to take what Marchmont was offering: wanted to turn in his arms and meet his mouth, wanted it so much.
But the world wasn’t made for happy endings, so he simply said, “If.”
Marchmont groaned heavily behind him, dropping his face against the back of Shem’s neck. “Why is it never easy with you?”
“I couldn’t say, my lord.”
“Gabriel,” Marchmont corrected him, a little crossly, and then froze. “Look!”
They had been too busy to notice that the nightingales were singing, their voices twining together.
“Persistence,” Marchmont remarked vaguely. “It’s rather…. Hmm.”
He’d vanished into thought again, so Shem indulged himself for a moment, leaning back against his shoulder to watch the nightingales’ devoted, hopeless courtship.
He was a little surprised when Marchmont released him without further demur. They walked back through the Gardens together, not quite touching, with Marchmont mumbling to himself. Shem recognized the look by now: inspiration had struck. He wondered what they would be trying with the poor nightingale tomorrow.
But the work continued as it had done. What changed was Marchmont’s behaviour. He didn’t press his case in words, but little things changed. He touched Shem more, a squeeze of his shoulder to get his attention or a bump of hips as they leaned over the bird together. Midway through their hour, the footman came rumbling down the stairs with a plate of chocolate éclairs, which of course spurted cream across Shem’s cheek as he bit into one, giving Marchmont an excuse to wipe it off and then suck his fingers clean.
It wasn’t the least bit subtle, and Shem was torn between laughter and constant arousal. By the way Marchmont grinned at him, as if it was some shared joke, he was in exactly the same state, which didn’t help at all.
When Shem left that afternoon, he got a warm, chaste kiss pressed to his cheek, and a murmur of “I’ll see you at dawn. Goodbye, Shem.”
“My lord.”
“No,” Marchmont chided, pressing his finger to Shem’s lips. “You’re supposed to say ‘Goodbye, Gabriel’ now.”
“Goodbye, Gabriel,” Shem said drily, amused and secretly liking having the name to use.
He got another kiss for that, and a chuckle.
In the Gardens that night, though, Gabriel’s behaviour was beyond reproach, and the same pattern continued all month. Gabriel flirted shamelessly in private and showed perfect respect in public. He came to breakfast with Shem, and every afternoon he fed him cake and kissed him good-bye.
Over orange sorbet, a delight in the heat of August, Gabriel remarked, “You shall have to be careful when you meet my sister Rosalind. They’re her favourite, and she’s vicious with a cake fork.”
“When?” Shem repeated sceptically.
“When.”
“Can’t I?” Gabriel sucked on his spoon, clearly pondering it. “Besides, it’s a courtship, not a seduction.”
There was nothing Shem could say to that, so he muttered a little, aware he was blushing.
Kissing him good-bye later, Gabriel murmured, “Come back here with me tonight. You can sleep in the spare room if you like. No one will know. My servants don’t have voices. I want more of you.”
“Gabriel.”
“Stay,” Gabriel sighed, pressing second and third kisses against his jaw.
“I have to work.” But Shem regretted every step out of there.
To his surprise, the tension didn’t stop Gabriel from working on the nightingale. If anything, the flirtation seemed to make him think faster and work more smoothly. He flitted from tool to tool, fitting pieces together with growing confidence, his explanations compressed into cryptic comments and incomplete sentences. Shem gave up trying to follow his train of thought and just leaned on the bench to watch him. Once you stripped away the arrogance, he was lovely. It would be good to have all that intelligence focused on him, Shem thought vaguely. It would be good to strip away Gabriel’s clothes as well.
He wasn’t thinking about the nightingale when Gabriel stepped back decisively, dropping his screwdriver on the floor.
“Respect your tools,” Shem chided him lightly. “That has a place.”
Gabriel scooped it up with a grin and stalked toward him. Shem realized, too late, that it hung on the wall behind him. He couldn’t move, but just watched Gabriel approach. He pushed off the side of the bench a little as Gabriel stepped close and reached over him to hook the screwdriver up. They pressed together from thigh to chest, and Shem went from pleasantly aroused to hard as iron, his cock pressed against Gabriel’s lean thigh.
“Does that have a place?” Gabriel inquired, his breath coming a little fast. “Because I certainly respect it.”
Shem looked up at the sly curl of his lip and the bright laughter in his eyes and gave up. Pressing up a little farther made Gabriel actually gasp, and Shem wasn’t the only one who was desperately hard here. Wrapping his arm around Gabriel’s neck, he tugged him down into a kiss.
For a moment, Gabriel’s mouth was soft and shocked beneath his. Then he breathed out in a great fierce sigh of relief and kissed Shem back fervently. It was so easy, in the end, and Shem lost himself in it, happiness sparking through him as his worries faded.
When the music began to play overhead, he thought it was an illusion. It wasn’t until Gabriel slowly pulled back to catch his breath that either of them looked up.
The brass nightingale was perched on the beam above them, singing joyfully.
“How did it get up there?” Shem asked.
Gabriel just grinned at him, beyond words. As they watched, it spread its gleaming wings and took off again, swooping along the length of the workroom, music tumbling from its polished beak.
“You did it,” Shem breathed, and then kissed Gabriel again, just to celebrate. Within moments, they were both distracted, their hands wandering across each other to the sound of the nightingale’s song.
They didn’t break apart until it went quiet. It took them a moment to spot it. When Shem saw it perched completely still on one of the benches in the back corner, he pulled his hand out of Gabriel’s shirt to point. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t….” Gabriel started, and then chagrin swept across his face. He spat out a couple of words Shem didn’t think gentlemen knew and went striding across the room. “It needs rewinding, and it will keep needing it, and so we’re not done at all!”
“It can be solved,” Shem said, because there was no need to despair, not when his skin was still warm from Gabriel’s hands. “Can you harness the bird’s own movement with a winding rotor?”
“I could,” Gabriel murmured, but he still looked distressed. “But then what? It’s a machine, not a living creature. There are so many parts that could fail or break. How can I be sure it will last?”
“How long does a real nightingale live?” Shem asked.
Gabriel turned to frown at him.
Of course he wouldn’t understand. He was too much a perfectionist, too good at creating and with no instinct for when something could no longer be repaired. Trying to find the right words, Shem said, “You can’t make it immortal. You shouldn’t. Give it the chance to live as long as its mate, and then let it be free. It’s the opportunity that matters. Just let it have the chance to live and love.”
Gabriel stared at him with his fiercest problem-solving glare, his hands curling into fists. At last, he said, his voice a little plaintive, “You believe that? That happiness is the freedom to take a chance on love?”
It wasn’t quite what Shem had been trying to say, but it was close, so he nodded. “What the bird does with the chance is out of your power.”
“I’m not talking about the bird!” Gabriel snapped, taking a step closer. “Why won’t you take that chance? Why can’t you forget about making everything in your life safe and perfect and orderly? Why won’t you just take the risk and love me?”
The last words rang out like a slap, and Shem felt like he’d been hit, all the breath rushing out of his lungs.
Love Lord Marchmont, the hoity-toity Earl of Godalming?
Love the inventor who was determined to save one brass nightingale from a broken heart?
Love Gabriel?
As he caught his breath, he began to feel like the nightingale, free to fly for the very first time. His hand was shaking as he raised it to cup Gabriel’s cheek. Swallowing, he said, “I will.” It came out choked and quiet, so he tried again, watching Gabriel’s eyes widen with hope. “I’ll try that. It’s not something I’ve got much skill at, taking risks, but I will try. Loving you, I mean, not doing foolish things for the sake of—”
Gabriel cut him off, not kissing him this time, but grabbing him tight. This time Shem didn’t want to twitch his way out of his lover’s hold. Instead, he wrapped his own arms around Gabriel and let him murmur wild, disorderly words into the crook of Shem’s neck, until Shem just had to kiss him quiet again.
A few weeks later, they stood in the misty dawn. The first hints of autumn were touching the leaves here in the Gardens, and Shem was glad of the warmth of Gabriel’s hand in his. They watched as, yet again, the little brown nightingale came flitting out of the trees to sing to its metal lover. And this time, when it flew away, the brass nightingale followed it, vanishing into the dawn on shining wings.
About the Author
Amy Rae Durreson is a quiet Brit with a degree in early English literature, which she blames for her somewhat medieval approach to spelling, and at various times has been fluent in Latin, Old English, Ancient Greek, and Old Icelandic, though these days she mostly uses this knowledge to bore her students. Amy started her first novel a quarter of a century ago and has been scribbling away ever since. Despite these long years of experience, she has yet to master the arcane art of the semicolon. She was a winner in the 2017 Rainbow Awards.
Blog: amyraenbow.wordpress.com
Twitter: @amy_raenbow
Other Works by Amy Rae Durreson
Novels and Novellas
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Reawakening
Resistance
Recovery
The Lodestar of Ys
Emyr’s Smile
The Court of Lightning
In Heaven and Earth
Lord Heliodor’s Retirement
Ghost stories
A Frost of Cares
Spindrift
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Short stories
Contemporary
Granddad’s Cup of Tea
Philip Collyer vs. The Cola Thief
Humming a Different Tune
Historical
Aunt Adeline’s Bequest
&
nbsp; Seasonal
A Distant Drum (coming December 2019)
Gaudete
The Ghost of Mistletoe Lock
The Holly Groweth Green