by L. J. Greene
Life at the mansion was not as dire as I’d been imagining, not at first.
Alice was upset to see me arrive, or I guessed she was, since she disappeared to her wing of the house soon as Cresswickham told her I’d be staying awhile. Betts followed her, and all his Lordship said to me was, “Where are the rest of your bags?” and then Leo and I were left to our own devices. Gabriel was nowhere to be seen, nor any other staff.
Where Chateau Marmont had been stuffed to the gills with staff making themselves scarce, the mansion was remarkably empty. I’d expected a battalion of servants but my footsteps echoed as we went up the grand staircase and down empty hallways. I felt I could go hours without seeing a soul. There was no dust to be seen but I couldn’t imagine Gabriel flitting around with a feather duster, or Betts for that matter. There was a chef, of course, but I knew he lived downtown and came in on a schedule. Later I found out there were several cleaning maids, a housekeeper who kept the house stocked, and an ancient, half-blind gardener with a few underlings, but I only caught fleeting glimpses of any of them.
Then there were the attendants. Gabriel was one of them; the other was Michael, a sulky-faced kid with dark hair styled like James Dean. He was more inclined than Gabriel to send me sidelong looks while he served me up potatoes at dinner. I called him Mike once in front of Leo and got blasted for it: “Reggie would whip you for that! He re-christens them as Angels, you see.”
I saw, alright. The Lord Cresswickham considered himself the Lord God Almighty.
Since there was no one to take my bag for me when I first arrived, I hoisted it myself. Leo took me to my room—the same one I’d stayed in before—and helped me unpack. “I don’t need a valet for one damn suitcase,” I said to him, but still he hovered.
I thought back to Leo’s dismissal of the valet idea the first night I’d ever come here. It didn’t seem right to me that a man like the Marquess of Holford, Lord Reginald Cresswickham, would do for himself. Expected to dress himself, when he wouldn’t even fuck for himself?
I said as much to Leo, and he gave a small chuckle.
“Actually, you were right that first night you came here. I do help him dress, but not really as a valet. He likes my advice on fashion sometimes, and he finds it difficult to move too freely. War wounds, you know.”
“It’s odd, though, the lack of servants. A house this size should be swarming with them.”
“Reggie doesn’t like to keep a large staff.”
“Where do they sleep?”
“They live offsite. All of them, except the Angels; they sleep in the servants’ quarters.”
“But—”
“For Christ’s sake, use your head,” he sighed. “Reggie doesn’t want gossip getting out about him. Think what your American papers would make of it. Sodomite Peer Hoards Harem in City of Sin.”
I considered him for a moment before I said, “My American papers? Are you angling to forget your Steel City roots?”
He flushed. “What’s got into you today? I thought we were going to be friends.”
“Maybe it’s being made part of a sodomite peer’s harem. Maybe that’s what’s got me antsy today.”
In fact, I’d just had my sense shocked back into me. Mancini was a liar; it was the one truth I knew about him. I needed to stay wary of him if I wanted to protect myself. I couldn’t see a way out of this bucket of crabs, but I hadn’t yet given up hope of clambering free.
Leo’s face had turned hard. “Take some advice,” he said. “Get what you can, while you can. You think it’s a prison here, but it doesn’t have to be. Reggie can be exceedingly generous to the people who please him.”
“So I’ve seen. I don’t like the strings attached.” I paused in my unpacking, staring into my suitcase. I’d left my oldest clothes behind me at the Chateau, and I had a strange, sudden sense of disconnect. What was all this that I stared at, neatly packed into one ratty suitcase? Silks and linens and fine wools lay before me, but surely this was not my life. My life was threadbare cotton, worn leather shoes and the one fine tweed jacket my father had left me—which, now I thought of it, I realized I’d left at the bungalow.
Mancini slithered up behind me and slipped cautious arms around my waist. “Not even this string?” he said into my neck, and I had to think for a moment what he meant.
“So you want to just pick up again. Is that it?” I wanted to wrench his hands off me, but I pulled him closer instead, and then turned in his arms. His face was close enough that I could see the fine lines around his eyes, the different colors flecking his iris. “You’ve got some kind of sorcery about you, Mancini,” I said with a sigh. “If I didn’t know better, I’d take you for a demon.”
“That’s not very flattering,” he said, and smiled. “If you’re tired of unpacking, we could baptize the bed.”
“Wipe that simper off your face,” I told him, pushing him away. “I’ll take your advice and get what I can, while I can. And right now that means I’ve got writing to do.”
He was a superb actor. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, upset or rethinking his approach. He watched me set my notebook on the writing desk in the corner, ostentatiously straightening it.
“Well?” I said. “Anything else?”
“We should have brought your typewriter from the Chateau. I’ll make sure a new one is provided.” With that, he gave a little bow and left me alone.
I sat heavily in the chair behind the desk, wishing like hell I could stop yearning for him. It would make things much easier.
Chapter 19
The typewriter appeared as promised. It was sitting on my desk the next day when I came out freshly showered from my en suite bathroom. Part of me wanted to resist using it, as though spiting myself would somehow spite Leo, too. But I couldn’t stay away from it. The muse was on me, as wild a harpy as she’d ever been, and the story was bleeding out of me like I’d opened an artery on one of her claws.
I’d first set out to write an answer to Gatsby, show how the American Dream might still come to life, but I found my characters disinclined to happiness. They were a morose bunch, and beginning to tussle with each other. I was determined to give them a happy ending whether they wanted it or not, and so I spent my mornings as I had at the Chateau, bashing out words and ignoring the bottle until I felt I’d made progress.
I had little idea what Cresswickham did all day, but he went out regularly and Leo often accompanied him. Sometimes there were deliveries to the house and I would watch blanketed objects being eased off the backs of trucks and into the house from my second-story window. I was surprised to learn that Leo and Cresswickham had separate bedrooms, although they came off the same corridor.
Alice slept in the east wing of the house and had the whole show there to herself. One of the few times Cresswickham spoke to me was to tell me I was forbidden from entering the east wing. I never knew where Betts slept—or if he even did, for that matter. His one concern, when he wasn’t playing cards, was Alice. He was forever at her heels like a favorite bloodhound, and when she retired, he usually did too. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he curled up at the foot of her bed overnight, one ear ever-pricked for danger.
Occasionally I heard music coming from Alice’s wing: waltzes, usually, or melancholy classical pieces. One morning I recognized Mozart’s Lacrimosa, the mournful notes drifting down the grand staircase and into the foyer where I paused to hear it. Alice sometimes spent the mornings in the parlor beyond the arch of the grand staircase, when the sun streamed in the French windows to light up even the darkest corners of the room, and in the second-floor library in the afternoons. She favored the drawing room after dinner. More often she was nowhere to be found, or not in the parts of the house in which I was allowed.
There were no televisions in the whole house. Cresswickham loathed TV, of course. There was an ancient Victrola in the drawing room, and Leo was putting together a collection of jazz records, though he never played them when the Englishman was about.
A locked door in one corner caught my attention and didn’t let go ’til I’d asked about it one night.
“It’s a screening room,” Leo told me. “For films, you know. The previous owner of this house was a producer, or director, some Hollywood bigwig. I never know the difference.”
“We should show his Lordship what he’s missing out on,” I suggested, malice in my heart. “We could make a night of it, play him the best Hollywood has to offer. That would make him sit up, alright.”
Leo ignored my venom. “Reggie doesn’t care for American cinema,” was all he said.
My first few days passed amiably enough in that usually-desolate mansion, and the nights as well, once the theatre of dinner was over. We attended in formal attire and sat through it mostly in silence, unless Cresswickham had made a new acquisition. In those cases we heard all about its provenance, and what he had paid for it. It was a time of day I grew to dread for the sheer boredom, although I did appreciate the food. The chef lived and breathed his work and the man was a marvel. I felt myself becoming sleek and plump gorging on his creations, like a prize pig being fatted up for market.
After the final course each night, when she judged an appropriate amount of time had passed, Alice would withdraw to where Betts anxiously awaited her across the grand foyer in the drawing room. Cresswickham and I would drink cognac or brandy as the mood struck him. Leo never touched a drop, but always made sure to pour our drinks. He was doping Cresswickham on the regular. Not thirty minutes after the aristocrat’s second drink, he would be yawning and drowsy and need Leo’s help up to his bed.
Every night on Leo’s return downstairs we joined Alice and Betts in the drawing room and the atmosphere distinctly changed. We put on records and talked, or played cards and parlor games.
The three of them were trying to teach me bridge. They were mad for it, and I was happy enough to go along. We played for money, which made me nervous even though I was still being paid. A yellow envelope stuffed with bills had shown up on my writing desk on the usual day. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I didn’t see any point making a moral stance in rejecting the cash. I needed a nest egg, after all.
Betts was savvy at cards, and was making a tidy income from our games. A tidy income off me, in fact: he never let me get away with beginner’s mistakes like the other two. I was beginning to feel he had it in for me. But at the end of each night he was all smiles, and he’d pour me out a bourbon and pat me on the back.
“Nothing personal,” he’d assure me. “I just think the game should be played by the rules.” He was the strictest follower of rules I’d ever met, forever consulting a battered copy of Hoyle’s Games for minutiae. The rest of us would sigh, and take a break for cigarettes or refilling drinks, while Betts pedantically read aloud. I never told him when I saw Leo occasionally palm a card or sneak a glance at Betts’ hand. It would have caused a row and besides, I was amused despite myself, even when I went down because of Leo’s cheating. Sometimes Alice noticed it too, and we would twinkle at each other in shared mischief, keeping secrets together.
Yes indeed, we made a most convivial little family once Cresswickham was out of the picture. Alice liked to go to bed earlier than Leo or I did, but I made sure to hurry off as soon as she retired, not wanting to linger alone with Leo. I could see it hurt him. There was hope in his eyes every time Alice bid us goodnight, and I dashed it every time I agreed it was late and time for bed.
I didn’t trust myself to be alone with him, you see.
But in fact, if it hadn’t been for the circumstances, I really might have considered myself a lucky man, living in that mansion with and with my every need satisfied—except for one. I’d expected Leo to front up in my bedroom one night and try it on, but he never did. He was painstakingly polite, even lavished attention upon me, but not once did he make a pass at me. To my own shame, I found myself missing him, missing his mouth on me and his hands; his fingers closing around my throat and wriggling their way inside me. My dreams were full of him and I woke with him on my mind, my body aching for him.
Leo, who drew every eye wherever he walked, but seemed untouched by the gaze. I’d never seen him with other people like this. Our time spent together had been spent alone—in bed, mostly. But the staff loved him, from the cleaners to the gardeners to the Angels who drew the curtains in the morning and took in breakfast on a tray. They loved him, and so they loved me, or at least they pretended to. I wanted for nothing.
It was certainly easy to believe I was a houseguest instead of a prisoner.
All of that changed after lunch one day when Leo knocked on my bedroom door.
“He’s asking for you,” he said, immediately as I opened it.
My temper rose at once, and I gave an insouciant shrug. “Let him ask. I’m not his court jester.”
Leo fidgeted, and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Anything else?” I asked coldly. “I’m working.”
“Writing?”
“Yes.”
“May I see?”
He made to push the door wider, but I pulled it close to myself, blocking his way into the room. “Shouldn’t you be catering to his Lordship’s whims?”
He colored. “If it’s all the same to you, friend, I’d like to at least pretend I tried to persuade you. Won’t you let me wait with you for five minutes?”
I sized him up for a moment, but then let him in and went silently back to my desk to continue where I’d left off. He watched me over my shoulder before picking up a few draft pages and looking through them.
“You’re making the most of your time here. This is excellent.” I didn’t reply. He sighed, and restacked the pages. “I’ll leave you alone. Good afternoon.”
“Wait,” I snapped as he reached the door. He paused with his hand on the knob. “What does he…” I couldn’t say the words, but he understood.
“I don’t know. I told him I wouldn’t—wouldn’t take you anymore. Not like I did before. I made that quite clear.”
I rubbed my knuckles hard in my eyes and thought it through. Leo was the carrot, but I knew Cresswickham was just as happy to use the stick. “Alright,” I said.
“Please don’t do this for my sake—”
My snort of contempt cut him off. “Don’t insult me. Let’s go, before I change my mind.”
He stopped me in the doorway, his face pale. “I didn’t want it to be this way.”
“So you’ve said.” I pushed past him and he followed me to Cresswickham’s rooms.
The bedchambers of the Marquess of Holford were larger than any man would ever need. The door opened into a massive room that I could see wound its way around the whole side of the building so that it afforded views of the front and side of the estate. To my right, bookshelves stretched floor to ceiling, filled with formidable tomes with dull titles. I saw five leather-bound volumes of Macaulay’s History of England from the corner of my eye, and something about Michelangelo. Mostly, though, I stared at the bed against the opposite wall: a giant four-poster that I imagined would be better at home in Buckingham Palace. Leo saw me gawking and said, “Reggie had it shipped here from home. Said he couldn’t bear sleeping in any bed but his own.” There was admiration in his tone.
“Doesn’t all this opulence make you feel a bit sick?” I asked.
“Why should it?”
“It’s not very American.” I gave him a sidelong look. “But then, neither are you.”
He looked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t.
“No, this isn’t right,” I muttered, looking around. I couldn’t articulate myself any better. What I meant is that no man should have such comfort and luxury around him yet feel the need to be so unkind to others. I’d never thought of myself as a Red, but Cresswickham’s sickening displays of advantage were turning me more colors than I’d ever thought possible.
I turned to Leo. “It’s like what Fitzgerald said, that the rich are different. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to t
hem—”
“Fitzgerald again?” Leo interrupted with a sad smile, and took my hand in his own. “Come on. Reggie doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
I let him take me through a door in the far wall, which led to a walkthrough chamber filled with suits and shirts and shoes. Beyond this was the adjoining bathroom, decorated in deep rich mahoganies and bronzes. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling and the bath, in the middle of the room, was a claw-footed copper monstrosity rising up like a leviathan from the floorboards. A sheepskin rug was laid out before it and my toes quivered in anticipation within my shoes as I imagined how it would feel on bare feet.
It took me a moment to see Cresswickham. He was seated a few feet away from the bath in a wing-backed armchair, its silk upholstery faded but still beautiful. He had crossed one long leg over the other and rested his elbows on the arms of the chair so that his fingers touched together at chest level.
“You have been an age,” he purred.
Chapter 20
“Sorry, Reggie,” Leo said automatically.
“I was busy,” I drawled. “Writing.”
The Englishman drew in a breath through his nose and closed his eyes, as though willing himself to control his temper. “Sometimes,” he said at last, and I tensed. “Sometimes Leo enjoys relaxing in a bathtub. He has one in his own room, of course, but he also likes to chat while he bathes. Don’t you, Leo?”
“Yes, Reggie.”
“This room is more conducive to conversation and so, you see, I invite him to bathe here from time to time.”
“Well,” I said, my muscles still tight, “that’s very generous of you. I can see that you like to share your…your good fortune with others.”
He opened his eyes to regard me, and I twitched. “My good fortune,” he repeated, as though it amused him. “Be a good chap and run a bath for Leo. Make sure it’s steaming. He likes it hot.”
