I hold him and hold him, pressing him close to my chest, his face to my shoulder, kissing and kissing the soft skin just behind his ear, caressing the back of his head, and I know that I will never, ever let go of him again, that although the world frowns on this sort of love, love him I will, if it is the death of me.
“Come,” I whisper, in his ear.
Then I push him away slightly, to take his face in my hands, and look into those eyes. “Let me feed you, my love, and then we will think, hey?”
He nods, and swallows, and smiles a small shy smile, full of undecipherable emotions.
Chapter Six
“Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate…”
William Morris, The Earthly Paradise
Nathaniel
It stopped raining, and the chamber-pot on the landing has been pushed into a corner. We are walking very stealthily down the stairs, like thieves carrying some precious and fragile loot, when the extraordinarily painted woman from last night huffs up from the ground floor, bulging skirts all a-flutter in her haste.
“Ah, you are up. Finally. I don’t know that it will do any good, mind.”
Gabriel pauses on the stair. He’s a few steps ahead of me. I can see only his straight back and his fair, slim, elegant hand resting on the dark banister.
“He is here,” says the woman, simply, and I see his hand twitch, and grasp at the banister. The knuckles have gone even paler, actually bone white, like bared teeth.
“Who’s here?” I ask.
“Nobody,” he says, his voice very nearly steady.
“None of your business, sailor,” says the landlady, squinting up at me through the gloom.
I walk the few steps which separate me from Gabriel. “Who’s here?” I ask again, softly.
“Nobody,” he repeats. “Please, Nathaniel. Please, it doesn’t concern you.”
He turns to the woman and nods. “I will talk to him.”
“That going to do any good? I could send him on his way. I’ll say you are sick. You sure look sick enough to me. I don’t want a ruckus in the house.”
“No, I will talk to him. There will be no ruckus.”
He trips quickly down the stairs feigning unconcern, but I can’t forget those white knuckles, and I look down at the landlady, pondering. Gabriel has squeezed past her, and we are now standing face to face on the stairs, with six or seven steps between us.
“Man of name of Browdie?” I ask after a few moments, lightly. She squints at me even harder and nods, and the next second, I am rushing down the stairs, heedless of the thunderous thumping of my feet on the old steps.
“Stop, stop!” she screams behind me. “You will do no good! You’ll get you both killed!”
But I run down, leaping the last ramp of stairs, sliding on the damn drugget, up again, rushing down the corridor. I see Gabriel at the front door, he’s turning to watch me coming, his mouth an astonished O, and a big, big man outlined in the lit rectangle of the doorway, reaching a hand to grab Gabriel’s arm, shake it...
And it’s rage.
Like a photographer’s powder, it goes off in in a blinding flash. One moment it wasn’t there, it had never existed, and the next moment, it is the whole world, the only thing there is.
I launch myself past Gabriel and right through the doorway, in pure, unadulterated, primal animal fury. The man is taller than me, much heavier, and feels like he’s made of rubber, leather and horn, and it matters not. I am beside myself—nothing matters at all. I grab his lapels as I bodily fly at him and he goes down, falling off the two steps outside the door.
Sheer surprise, didn’t expect it. We go down together, but I am on top, and he takes the brunt of the fall, head bouncing hard on the pavement.
He is winded, stunned, is down, down, down, and I am hitting his face, splitting my knuckles, on nose, cheekbones, brows, jaw, hitting, hitting, hitting, you pig, you pig, you pig, how dare you, how dare you, how dare you touch him. I am screaming. I believe I’m screaming, but my ears tell me the words are not coming out right, they are a hoarse yowling snarl, and I am hitting, hitting, hitting…
Split flesh, clotted crimson, and running blood, glossy scarlet, transparent over teeth and bone. Dreadfully beautiful, but difficult, difficult, how, how to paint…
****
Later—it must be later, because I am coming back from far, far away, and I am weak with fatigue, as if I ran five miles—later, I am sitting on the first step of the staircase, inside the green hallway. Gabriel is holding my hands, dabbing a bloody cloth to my knuckles. It hurts, but the gleam of unshed tears in his eyes hurts more.
“Gabriel, Gabriel, why are you crying?”
He’s startled by my voice, and looks up at me, uncertain. Shy. As if I might bite. Or as if I were a stranger.
“Nathaniel, are you all right?” he asks, softly.
“Yes, yes, I am. Winded, some. Where’s he?”
“Bessie and Mrs. Gride dragged him through the backyard and in the alley behind, by the privy. He’ll be out a while. God, you did a number on him.”
I look down to my bleeding hands.
“And on me as well. I was never much good at boxing.” I give a small edgy laugh. I feel altogether strange.
He takes my hands in his, tears spilling finally, down his exquisite cheekbones, to his chin, where they hang a moment and drop. He’s chalk white, but where the tears have run his skin has a sheen and reflects the walls, like lustre glaze, or like he’s weeping trails of thin green venom.
“Will you be fine?” he asks, choked. “You were not yourself for a while. And your poor hands. You, an artist and all…” He leans to kiss my knuckles softly and his lips come away stained with red.
“I’ll mend. Don’t cry. Don’t cry, my love, please.”
He sniffs, and wipes his face with the same cloth he used to dab at my wounds, and then presses his left eye in the heel of his free hand, still weeping quietly, with no emphasis whatsoever, and again I notice, as I did earlier, upstairs, that he is too starved and exhausted, too worn out with misery and fear to think clearly, to make any sort of coherent plan. It’s as if a darkness has closed around him, and he can’t see out of it.
I have known that feeling for a long time. I need to think for both of us, and I do think, fast, fast…
I take the cloth from him, find a clean corner of it, and brush a smear of blood, my blood, from his chin. Then I make him turn towards me.
In the dim hall his pupils are immense, barely ringed with a gleam of pale iris, green now, in this verdant sort of subaqueous gloom.
“What now, Nathaniel?” he whispers. “I don’t know what to do. I need to hide. And you too.”
I am about to answer, when Mrs. Gride comes into the hallway from the back, puffing like a locomotive. There’s blood on her skirt, blood on her hands, blood even on her face.
What did I do to that man?
She looks at me with an appraising eye.
“Well, you are a game cock, I’ll give you that. But stupid. Stupid! You should have let me talk to him. This is not the end of it. I won’t call the constables, but they might come anyway, with the racket you did. You two must scarper now. They’ll come for you. The blues. Or worse. Pray that he came alone. That he didn’t have a pal lurking in some corner. Either way, I don’t want you here if they come. It’s messy enough as it is.”
“Yes, yes, thank you, Mrs. Gride, thank you,” says Gabriel, but there’s pure desperation in his voice.
I nod. “We’ll be gone in a minute, madam. Fetch my drawings, Gabriel, please. From your room.”
“Yes, yes, and my clothes.”
“There’s no time to pack, Gabriel. Just the drawings.”
“But…”
“Gabriel, you don’t need clothes.”
He gives me an arch
look, and suddenly I begin to laugh, uncontrollably.
“I don’t mean it that way,” I say, finally, wheezing. “Of course you need clothes. All kinds of clothes. But. There’s clothes to be had. In Paris.”
“Paris?”
“Yeah. To begin with. We need to run and hide, you said. Well, we’ll run, but I’ll be damned if I hide in some sooty rathole in London with that beast on my tail.”
"But how are we ever going to get to Paris?”
“Why, the usual way, I suppose. Cab, train, ferry… Unless you can fly. Maybe you can.” My angel, maybe you really can.
He looks at me with real concern now.
“Nathaniel. Nathaniel, my dear, you are not making any sense. Does your head—does the fall bother you? You took an awful tumble down the steps. Of course I can’t fly. What are you talking about? And we can’t—we have no money. I am broke, and you are worse. God knows I broke you.”
“We have my drawings. Fetch my drawings, Gabriel, please. Fetch my drawings, and any essentials you absolutely need, and let’s go. Trust me. Just trust me, for the love of God.”
There’s a number of women, many of them in various states of undress, looking down the stairwell, in a narrow ascending spiral, like a somewhat tatty version of Burne-Jones’s Golden Stair. It is a very strange establishment, this house. Gabriel has to squeeze past on the way down, carrying my satchel of sketches and pencils and a cigar box which must contain all his worldly belongings now. When we are on the steps already, on our way out, one of the girls comes forwards to give him a quick hug. “Take care, Gabs.”
“You too, Alice,” he whispers, and kisses her on the nose in a tremendously endearing way. “I’m so sorry about your hat. Take my green dress. It’s my best. But you will have to shorten it.”
Another girl calls out, “Gabs, can I have your green shawl?”
He looks up to the stairs, a bit bewildered. “Sure … take everything. Share it out.”
Mrs. Gride comes after us, too. When we are almost on the door, she trusts a grubby folded paper in Gabriel’s hands.
“It’s this month’s rent,” she mumbles, affecting indifference. “It’s just the fourth of the month, you can keep it. You were always a clean, quiet lodger. Queer, mind, but quite clean.” She sniffs loudly, and mutters something mostly inaudible. I could swear that some of it is darling, darling boy, but surely it can’t be.
“Thank you,” he says, and hesitates, wondering what to say, but she pushes him off, towards me. “Go now, quick. Don’t make me cry. Would spoil my makeup. At my age and all, it’s all that’s holding me together, don’t you know.”
****
It must be six miles from the grimy streets of Spitalfields to Chelsea, and we do them all on foot, out of an obscure notion that we need to save every penny. In fact, it would make no difference at all if we spent a few shillings on a cab now or not. We are both somewhat beside ourselves, however, and the walking does me good. It clears my head from the last remnants of the fury that took hold of me earlier and the sort of drunken hysteria that followed it. I have become in fact tremendously lucid, as I haven’t been in years. Or maybe never. Certainly not since my sickness, when my will to live deserted me.
But I am alive now, and fiercely determined to remain so.
I look at Gabriel, wishing I could hold him close. He walks besides me briskly enough, but he is pale and drawn, and those deep shadows under his eyes have not gone away with the daylight.
“Have you been unwell?” I ask, after we walked in silence for maybe half an hour. It strikes me that it’s the first bit of normal conversation we had since I found Gabrielle again, perhaps the first since we first met. “Since last you came to Dartrey Road, I mean?”
“Me? I was a little unwell, yes. Not to worry about,” he says with a small smile. “I’ll be fine now.”
“Are you sure?” I am actually on the point of asking if he needs a doctor. I am as fretful as an old hen.
“Yes, I am sure.” He actually gives my arm a furtive caress as we are jostled by the crowd near St. Paul, and when I look at him in surprise, he shoots me a small wink, the first time I see a spark of Gabrielle’s impertinent humor in his boy’s face. I smile at him, feeling both odd at sharing our clandestine and dangerous intimacy here on the public street and on fire because of it. I detest the fact that I cannot hold him, as if loving him were a crime. Which it is in fact, for the law.
Well, sod the damn law.
“Nathaniel, listen,” Gabriel says after a minute, uncertainly.
“What is it?”
“This notion of going to Paris … Are you sure of it? I mean, I am not complaining, it’s a brilliant idea. Paris! Crikey, of course I want to go to Paris. But, seriously, how on earth are we ever going to get there?”
I give a quiet laugh at that. “Why do you ask? I don’t strike you as a competent traveler?”
“Well…” he says, shooting me a sideways glance that makes me laugh again. “I thought it was a marvel that you made your way to Leicester Square on your own, to be wholly honest.”
“Well, that was a marvel, in the circumstances. I did tell you, that I was sick? Well, maybe sick is not the right word. But I was not myself, for a long time.”
For a moment I wonder where they have gone, those five years of my life, that black hole cut in the middle of my time on earth. How can a man forget how to live? How can a man simply stop functioning? And yet, for five years I did. I don’t know if I am ashamed of it, or just grateful that I have a reason to live again, or terrified that Gabriel will leave me, and I will plunge into that darkness again. Could I go on now, without him? I honestly don’t know.
“But I have traveled quite a bit, you know?” I say briskly, perhaps to convince myself as much as to convince Gabriel. “I have been to Paris. And Rome. And Athens. And Venice. And Vienna. Before I was sick. Hell, I made it from Glasgow to London on my own when I was thirteen years old, I can sure make my way to Paris again. I don’t know how to talk to a girl, granted. Least of all a girl like—like Gabrielle. But I do know how to board a ferry, and buy a train ticket. Even in French. Aren’t you impressed?”
“Very. But—”
“You are still worrying about money?”
“Well. Aren’t you?”
“You know, my dear, Mr. Browdie is not the only person in London with a well-placed friend. I have an idea.”
When we get to Cheyne Walk, I give silent thanks that Henry is home, and not at the gallery. When he comes down from the library, he looks at me in dismay, then at Gabriel, uncomprehending.
“What have you done? What have you done?”
“Henry, listen to me. Something happened. I must leave. Go to France, Italy maybe. Can you help me?”
He looks at me blinking in complete bewilderment.
I pass him my drawing of Gabrielle, lying on her tumbled bed, in her stockings and corset and boots, and that naked delta between her legs, and the detailed sketch of Gabriel’s member I did this morning, just a few hours ago, in fact, although it feels like half a lifetime.
“Can you sell these? Or something like? I made these in a hurry. I can do better.”
His eyebrows shoot all the way up.
“Oh, yes. I can sell these. Hell, I will buy these. If you can make more, I can certainly sell them. Not in the gallery. But I can. How did you come to do them? That’s not your usual… Who? How?”
Suddenly his eyes fall on Gabriel, and he takes a step back, recognition dawning in his face.
“Oh God,” he whispers. “Oh—my—God!”
“There’s also all my old things, in my rooms, and the Shadow is done, and there’s a bunch of new drawings I made,” I say in a hurry, before he has the time to be wholly overwhelmed. “I can’t go there. For reasons which I’ll explain… Here’s the keys. You can take everything. Sell everything.”
“Nonsense. I will have your stuff sent, when … whenever you decide to settle down. It can stay here, for now. There’s
room and to spare. I’ll need a note for Mrs. Crabwood, however. And let me tell you that I would not face that woman except for the sake of my dearest friend.” He turns to Gabriel, a bit awkwardly and a bit awed, as if talking to a being not quite in this world. “Do you have anything I should retrieve for you?”
Gabriel shakes his head. “I have nothing. Only … only Nathaniel.”
Henry blinks once or twice. “Well. Well, that’s settled then. I have two hundred pounds or so here,” he says turning to me. “Will that do? To get you started? You send me the work. Here. Not the gallery.”
I nod, and then of an impulse I hug him. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“There, there, dear old chap, that’ll do,” he says, patting my back, embarrassed or moved, or both. I am not sure. “Come now. Have a seat, a wash. A clean shirt. You can’t travel like this, that’s for sure. What on earth happened to you?”
I explain, in a somewhat confused manner, with large omissions, which fortunately he does not probe. He shakes his head when I tell him about my brief venture into boxing.
“No wonder your knuckles look like mutton chops, my boy. What a bloody mess. Well. I see,” he says in the end. He’s still looking at Gabriel and me in turns. “I see. Very well. Are you sure about this, Nathaniel?”
“I am. As sure as anything.”
“You will look after him?” Henry asks, to Gabriel.
Gabriel’s eyes go wide as saucers. “Me?”
“Yes, you. You’ll make sure he wears all his clothes? In the right order, if possible?”
Gabriel gives me another of those sideway glances, and I laugh. “We’ll be fine, Henry. There’s no reason to scare him.”
Henry heaves a long, suffering sigh. “I should probably carry you to Paris myself. Just to be on the safe side. Ah well.”
He finally nods, and then because that is what Henry does, he rings for the cook and orders a meal laid out that is nothing short of a Christmas feast. “You’ll need something in your stomach before you travel. And God only knows when I will see you again. I will send you off in style, at least. There is not another good meal to be had before you reach the other side of the Channel, you know?”
A Muse to Live For Page 10
