“Oh, yes, please.” It felt good to be this shameless, to seize Avery’s hand and pull it down to his swelling cock, to turn his head and meet Avery’s kiss.
It was slower the second time, but no less magical.
WHEN LAURENCE woke the next morning, he ached, the low pleasant throb of a well-used body. It was cozy under the blankets, with Avery’s arm slung over his waist and Avery snuffling in his sleep against his shoulder.
Laurence could get used to this, though he knew perfectly well that it could not last. Eventually they would both have to go back to their normal lives—though quite what the normal life of a self-proclaimed Elizabethan wizard looked like, he couldn’t imagine.
But they could steal a few more days.
In the gray light of a rainy winter morning, there was none of the gold and glory of last night. Laurence found he didn’t mind. He certainly wouldn’t turn down another chance of that, but this was good too. It felt a little more real, especially when he turned around enough to see Avery’s face and saw that his hair was on end, his chin was stubbled, and there were slight bags under his eyes that Laurence had never noticed before—did he hide them with magic?
He lay there until Avery blinked his way awake.
“Good morning,” Laurence said.
And Avery smiled, so bright and guileless that Laurence’s heart started beating a little faster.
The next few days were the easiest he had ever spent. The rain settled in, and they took that as an excuse not to leave the house and, some mornings, not to leave their bed. It was a week of shameless indulgence. Laurence loved it all, loved giving his body up to another’s touch, loved the way he could bring Avery to the edge of dissolution time after time, loved that this was all happening with a near stranger, that neither of them was required to worry about consequences or commitments.
But day by day, the Yule log in the hearth burned smaller.
Avery’s touches lingered sometimes, and there were moments when his gaze grew wistful. He took his time in saying anything, though. When he did, it was not quite what Laurence had expected.
“It’s Twelfth Night.”
“Yes?” A whole sack of chestnuts had shown up in the pantry that morning, and Laurence was doing his best to roast them over the fire. He looked up at that, though, to where Avery was sprawled out in his usual chair. “Good Lord, have I really been here less than a fortnight? It feels like much longer.”
“You could stay.” Avery sounded very careful.
Laurence considered it wistfully for a moment. In the end, though, he knew better than to think he could hide from the world forever. “I have business affairs to see to, and I still need to find a job. I’ve got a bit of a pension and some money put away, but it won’t keep me indefinitely.”
“Laurence,” Avery said meaningfully. Then, when Laurence just blinked at him, he added with impatience, “I have magic. What else do we need?”
Laurence sighed. It was a lovely fantasy, but there were too many dangers. “And when someone notices us both living here and starts to ask questions? Or did you plan to use your magic to hide from them too? From the whole world? This has been wonderful, but you know it can’t last.”
“Yes, I know that.” That faraway look had settled on Avery’s face again.
Laurence patted his ankle. “It’s been the best Christmas I’ve ever spent. But it can’t always be Christmas.”
Avery let out a hollow laugh.
“We can still see each other,” Laurence said, though he knew it would be better to make a clean break of it. Could even Avery keep magic alive in the glare and roar of the modern world? “If you’re ever in town, or I’m ever down here, we—”
“Stay,” Avery said again.
Laurence didn’t answer, but he saw the bitter disappointment on Avery’s face and felt its echo in his own heart. It was foolish. He’d only known the man for twelve days. Once he was back in the real world, all this would fade away and he’d probably feel silly remembering it. There was no real reason to have regrets.
It cast a pall on the evening, though. The chestnuts, once roasted, seemed to have little flavor, and Avery was subdued and distant. Laurence was surprised when the other man suddenly rose to his feet, holding out his hand. “Come to bed. Please.”
It was even more tender than the first time, and Laurence wasn’t surprised when he looked down to see Avery’s eyes shining, not with light and fire, but with tears.
“Don’t,” he said, reaching down to wipe the tears away, even as he rocked into Avery, their bodies in perfect harmony even if their hearts were not.
“Then stay,” Avery murmured.
“I can’t,” Laurence said, not sure who he was trying to convince.
He went to sleep that night, as he had every night since the New Year, wrapped in Avery’s warm embrace, but tonight regret made his chest feel tight.
AND WHEN he woke the next morning, he was alone in the bed and the cottage was cold.
More than simply cold, he realized as soon as he sat up. The warm blankets that had covered them last night were still there, though they were newly threadbare, but everything else had changed. The rag rug on the floor was gray with dust. Cobwebs hung from the corners of the room and in the cold fireplace, where a warm fire had crackled the night before. The glass in the window was broken, and the cold wind that blew in made Laurence swear and scramble hurriedly into the clothes he had discarded on the floor last night.
“Avery?” Laurence called. “Avery!”
No reply came, and Laurence left the room to search for him.
There were broken floorboards on the landing, and dry leaves moldering below the shattered window over the stairs. He found his kit bag in the room he had first slept in, but the bed there was a rotting mattress on a splintered frame and the window was gone completely. Arms of ivy reached in through the space where it had been, bare and dark in this season. A broken basin sat on a dirty table by the bed.
What the hell was going on? Had Avery’s magic been the only thing making the cottage habitable? And if so, what had happened to the spell, and where the hell was Avery?
Downstairs was worse. The larder roof was gone, and there was no food left at all—nothing but an abandoned mouse’s nest below the bottom shelf. The stove was cold and streaked with rust. The fireplace where he had roasted chestnuts the night before was nothing but a broken grate and a blocked flue. He crouched down to stir the ashes and found a scrap of blackened ribbon, but the Yule log itself had finally crumbled to nothing.
Twelve nights and twelve days it will burn, Avery had said, and when it is done, so is this Christmastide, and we must wait for all to begin again.
“Avery!” Where was he? Had something happened to him?
The hallway was full of dead leaves, and the front door hung loose on its hinges, rotted away at the bottom.
“God damn it! Avery, where the hell are you?”
But no matter where he looked or how hard Laurence searched, Avery was not there.
Chapter Five
BY MIDMORNING the snow had begun again, and Laurence was reluctantly forced to admit that he would find neither food, shelter, nor his lover here. With no idea what else to do, he searched through the ruined cottage until he had found all his belongings, hefted his kit bag back onto his shoulder, and made his way slowly back to the road. From there, only the roof of the cottage showed over the holly bushes, tiles missing that had been intact just yesterday.
Already it seemed hard to believe that he had lived twelve joyful nights below that roof. He lingered on the road, though, even as the snow settled on his shoulders and soaked into the wool of his greatcoat.
Then, from the heart of a copse, he heard a bird sing—not the robin, but the steady fluting call of a thrush, a wild thing living in a place free from men.
That was enough to spur him into action, and he started downhill, concentrating grimly on his direction.
It was surprisingly easy to find t
he station, and there was a train due. He bought his ticket, went to the waiting room, warmed his hands over the brazier, and felt normality settle heavily over him. Standing there, with the snow falling, he suddenly recalled another day, long ago, in weather as far from this as could be imagined, sitting on the veranda of his parents’ bungalow in Calcutta and puzzling over a book of British fairy tales sent by a well-meaning great-aunt. They had made no sense to him then, when the Ganges was more familiar to him than the Thames, but a forgotten fragment had him hurrying to check the date stamped on his ticket.
Still 1947. He had not lost years to fairy mischief.
But what had Avery lost?
Had Avery been real?
Yes, Laurence decided. Yes, he had. Laurence had spent twelve nights under his roof, and since he was neither frostbitten nor starving, he was inclined to think those nights had been real.
So what the hell had happened last night?
LONDON WAS unchanged, still the same smoggy mess of battered buildings and unbroken spirits. Laurence moved without thinking, booking himself into the Charing Cross Hotel—still somewhat the worse for wear after the Blitz—until he could find proper lodgings, then popping down to the news seller on the station concourse to buy a paper and catch up on what new troubles had wracked the world in his absence.
He couldn’t finish reading it. Instead he just stared out his window, running through everything that had happened over and over again.
He’d known he needed to come back to London—known it had to end. He just hadn’t expected it to end like this.
That night he dreamed of holly, glossy and sharp on every side of him as he staggered and slid along a muddy path. Twice, as the path curved, he glimpsed Avery’s figure far ahead of him, his shoulders slumped and his head bowed, but no matter how much he tried, Laurence couldn’t reach him.
He forced himself to leave the hotel the next day, walked the tired, tatty streets of central London until his feet ached, getting lost more times than he cared to count. He made himself see a show, though he took in nothing but a vague impression of cheerful singing and brightly clad dancers.
He walked back to the hotel through heavy wind, remembering Avery’s voice singing carols and stopping at every intersection to check his direction.
The wind did not let up for days, though the snow seemed to have faltered out for another year. The tempest got under Laurence’s skin, made him dream of dark seas under sullen skies. He found rooms in a lodging house and started scanning the small ads in the paper for work. Nothing appealed, so he took himself off to see his old professor for advice.
“Leave medicine?” Baldwin growled at him. “Why the devil would you do that?”
“Tricky to prescribe when you’re essentially innumerate,” Laurence observed.
“Pah. Get yourself one of those mechanical devices, or better still, a wife.”
Laurence grimaced.
“That’s the thing,” Baldwin continued, warming to his theme. “Plenty of girls will leap at a doctor. Get yourself a bright young nurse who can add up, and you’re set for life. Plenty of them going spare these days.”
“And what an appealing prospect for her,” Laurence observed, not quietly enough.
“Doing yourself down, boy. A pretty nurse and a country practice, and all’s well that ends well. Plenty of jobs out there, if you can put up with this nationalization lark.”
Laurence, who was quite in favor of a national health service, held his tongue and nodded his way through the rest of lunch. He didn’t want a wife.
He wanted Avery, and that would have been a daunting realization even if his lover hadn’t vanished from the face of the earth.
On the way back to his lodging house, still annoyed, he muddled a turning and somehow ended up on Charing Cross Road. Since he was already there, he dropped into Foyles. Despite failing to find the book he wanted, settling for another, and being roundly abused for queuing in the wrong line, he emerged feeling oddly patriotic and wandered over the road to browse the secondhand shops.
It was there that he stumbled on something interesting—a narrow battered volume in the local history section, Legends and Folklore of Alton and Surrounding Villages. Pulling it out, Laurence flicked to the index. Under Privett, it read See fairies, curses and enchantment.
He bought it without really registering the price and clutched it close to his chest all the way to the Underground station and back to his lodgings. There he spread out the battered little volume on his desk and turned to the passage indicated, his fingers clumsy as he turned the pages. It read:
A charming Christmas legend associated with the village of PRIVETT, southwest of ALTON, warns of the dangers of rejecting fairy favors. One Avery or Aubrey Copland, supposedly a warlock living in the area, is said to have attracted the attention of the fairy queen. Stories vary as to whether the unfortunate wizard trifled with her affections or not, but all agree that he rejected her advances and was punished with transformation, either into a copse of holly or a mistle thrush. Legend claims that the wizard is granted twelve nights a year, from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, to seek out the true love, which will break his curse. Older stories insist that wizard Copland was once seen frequently in the area at Christmastide, and young girls were warned to beware strange men lingering by a certain holly copse near to the ruined Mistle Cottage. He has not been seen for many a year—perhaps some kind-hearted village maiden has finally freed him from his curse!
Laurence put the book down and thought of Avery on that first night, telling him how he no longer made plans for Christmas. Had he given up searching for love?
Twelve days a year. Laurence’s brain could not process how long that must have been in total—how many Yule logs Avery had burned to mark the passing of each chance.
It could just be a tale and his Avery a local man who knew it and had hidden behind it to seduce a stranger.
No. Laurence had felt the touch of that magic. He believed.
And for the first time since he had understood his career was over, he felt like he had a purpose. He glanced at the calendar on the wall. January 15. That was—well, that was many days until next Christmas, even if he couldn’t work out how many. It would come again, though, and Laurence would be ready.
He wasn’t sure if he was in love with Avery or Avery with him—for all the lonely yearning of his heart, twelve days was hardly long enough for more than lust or infatuation. But maybe twice twelve days could do it, or thrice twelve. Maybe all he would manage would be to help Avery find someone else.
But he owed the man, and it would a damn sight more satisfying than wasting away doing nothing for the rest of his life. By the time the afternoon was out, he had penned a note to his solicitor, asking him to find out who owned the cottage and how much they would sell for, and was busy jotting down every other idea that dashed through his mind.
To his disappointment, a week later, his solicitor informed him that Lady Copland was not immediately willing to sell, but would appreciate it if he called on her at the Savoy to discuss the matter at 3:00 p.m. on the twenty-fourth.
Both frustrated and a little irritated by the peremptory summons, no matter how intriguing the surname, Laurence decided not to risk the Tube when he was in no state of mind to concentrate on navigating the exits. He took a cab to the Savoy and had to force a genial smile as he made his way inside. It felt like stepping back ten years—everything inside was discreetly luxurious in the way the best London hotels had always been. It felt as if the war had never happened.
He was shown into a private parlor with a quiet murmur of “Surgeon Captain Payne, milady.”
“Excellent,” a hearty voice said, and a woman who could only be Lady Copland strode across the room to him, offering her hand in a firm shake. She was about his own age, more handsome than pretty, short-haired, and clad in a garment so shapeless and ugly Laurence couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. She was clearly unconventional in the way only the upper classes
could truly get away with, and Laurence’s initial animosity faded a little. He liked people who had the courage to thumb their nose at convention.
“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Copland.” The name might be familiar, but he could see no resemblance to Avery in her face.
“Likewise. Come and sit down, Captain—or is it Doctor now you’re on land? Tell me, what in the world brought your attention to Mistle Cottage? You don’t look like one of these developer johnnies, so what do you want with the place?”
“Do let him get a word in edgeways, Althea.”
Lady Copland, who certainly did not look like Laurence’s idea of an Althea, huffed but then waved to the woman already sitting at the tea table. “My secretary, Miss Hellier. Well?”
Laurence offered Miss Hellier his hand, amused by the contrast between the two. Miss Hellier, unlike her employer, was the epitome of well-dressed femininity, from her pageboy haircut to the perfectly aligned seams of her stockings. She smiled at him, revealing dimples, and said, “Do you take sugar with your tea, Captain? Althea can wait until we have dispensed with the usual social graces.”
“By Jove, Millie, must you fuss so?”
“Just one, please,” Laurence said, then waited until Lady Copland flung herself into a chair before he sat down. He said, cautiously, “As it happens, I stumbled upon the cottage when I was in the area recently and rather took a fancy to it. I’m looking for a quiet place in the country, you see.”
“Countless better places than that old ruin,” Lady Copland said. “Could recommend a couple in the parish myself.”
“I liked Mistle Cottage.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Lady Copland remarked, narrowing her eyes. “How the devil did you even find the place?”
“Language, Althea.”
“He’s a sailor, Millie. I’m sure he’s heard worse.”
“Misadventure, nothing more,” Laurence said, choosing his words carefully. “An old injury has left me with a tendency to lose my way. I was making for the village and got turned around, and there it was. I took shelter there until I was able to make my way back to the station.”
The Holly Groweth Green Page 4
