Micah reached for a pen and a sheet of foolscap.
Dear Aunt Judith and Uncle Amos, she wrote. Sorry I’m not back yet I love it here even tho the people are confusing sometimes. Twelve-siders are actually called something I don’t know how to spell yet, but they have a name and now I know it. Don’t forget to plant the peas in three days I will see you soon. Love, Micah.
“But if you despise him so,” said the duke from the blue damask couch by the window, as Rafe paced around the library of Tremontaine House, his long stride made longer by impatience, “then why continue attending his lectures?”
“If I’d known I was going to have to pay for my chocolate by rehearsing my unpleasant and embarrassing career in the College of Natural Science, I don’t think I would have stepped into your carriage, after all.”
The chocolate had been amazing, better than the finest he’d ever tasted at his father’s table. If this was what Tremontaine served to casual visitors, Rafe couldn’t imagine what he brought out for special occasions. And somehow it had only made Rafe’s mood worse.
“The chocolate is gratis. The rehearsal is entirely at your discretion.”
Rafe stopped pacing and sighed. He was above rudeness for the sake of rudeness, or he ought to be. But he was distracted by the exquisite cut of the duke’s black breeches against the deep red velvet of the couch. “He’s brilliant, for one thing,” he finally brought himself to say. “His take on planar geometry, his work on elliptical motion, his commentary on Delphin’s mapping of the stars. He thought I was brilliant too, until I realized that the College’s guiding principle—and his—was wrong.” The delicacy of the man’s hands as he brought his chocolate cup to his lips was extraordinary. Rafe turned away from Tremontaine to face the crackling fire. “He’s also the only one left.”
“Pardon?”
Rafe sighed, defeated. His shoulders slumped. He ought to turn back around and face the duke again, but for some reason he was reluctant to do so. “I started with de Bertel, when I first came to the University,” he said to the fire, and rubbed his hands together. “Then I abandoned him for what seemed greener pastures. But gradually I’ve gone through most of the other magisters, breaking with each one as I grew more and more cognizant of their mistake. I ended up back with de Bertel, who forgave my betrayal at first, but now that I have the knowledge to back up my intuitions, it’s worse with him than it ever was with any of the others. Today’s fracas was the inevitable result of the last several years of my life.”
“And what did it concern?”
He turned back to the duke, and his eyes suddenly filled with the sight of cheekbones. “The fact—not the idea, my lord, but the fact—that the earth revolves around the sun. I’ve been driving myself mad trying to prove it, but I can’t. No matter how many observations I make, no matter how many measurements, the math never works out right.” His hands had started moving again, in ever-larger sweeps and circles. “Or it does, but only because I add some lunatic number of epicycles, which simply compounds the problem I’m trying to solve.”
“Which is?”
“Our current, stupid, stupid cosmology has the universe rotating horizontally with respect to the earth, but also moving on an epicycle oblique to that orbital rotation, so—” Rafe felt himself begin to step forward, thought better of it, stopped.
“Never mind. Go back to the magisters. You’ve worked with most of the others?”
“The ones whose lectures I never attended are idiots.”
“Then I don’t understand. How were you planning to find anyone to sit on your examination board who would pass you, let alone sponsor you for a mastership?” The duke turned over a questioning hand palm up, his wrist framed by elegant lace. “If every magister in Natural Science either hates you or is an idiot?”
“Oh, I had it all worked out,” said Rafe, closing his eyes. “The examiners were going to be Chauncey, Martin, and Featherstone. Chauncey is an idiot, but I’m almost certain he agrees with me, alone of the magisters, though he wouldn’t dare say it out loud. Martin is also an idiot, but he’d pass me if he thought it would increase his chances of getting me into his bed, which, by the by, it wouldn’t; I may be free with my favors, but I don’t do charity work. And Featherstone hates me, but he’s a coward and invariably votes with the majority. He’d vote with the majority if they proposed to draw and quarter his daughter.” He opened his eyes, only for them to be drawn again to the breeches. “Which means that if I had Chauncey and Martin, then I’d have him, too.”
“I see. But with de Bertel on your committee—”
“Exactly! That was the only possible combination of magisters.”
“And so you think your chances of passing the exam are shot.”
Rafe emitted something that bore as little resemblance to a laugh as he could manage. “Oh, how delicately put.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. Finally he strode toward the duke, who stood as he approached the couch. “No, you oaf, I don’t think it.” He tossed his head. “That was the only permutation of examiners that would have allowed me to pass. And now you’ve made it impossible, and I’ll never found my school, and my life is ruined, and it’s all your fault!” He was standing quite close to Tremontaine now, breathing hard, his face crimson, his index finger stabbing the offending air.
The duke seemed poised to step forward. Rafe, filled with an inexplicable sense of alarm, immediately crossed to the other side of the library and made a careful inventory of the books on the shelves before him. He heard Tremontaine walk to the chair by the fire and settle himself. “Tell me about this school you want to found.”
Rafe turned again but stayed where he was. “Describe your education, my lord.”
“Why, I had a tutor until I was . . . I don’t know, fourteen?” Tremontaine shrugged, the emerald green velvet of his doublet broadening his shoulders. “No, sixteen. When I came to the City. And since then I’ve merely read whatever has piqued my interest.”
“And describe the education of your architect, say, or your portrait painter.”
“Grammar school until twelve or so. If the parents are comfortable. Maybe even a tutor.”
Rafe seemed unable to look away from the duke’s shoulders. “And then?”
“Apprenticeship, I suppose. To learn a trade. To make a living.”
“Well, what if his education continued?” Rafe wrenched his eyes from Tremontaine’s shoulders to make a very close examination of the crown molding along the ceiling. “What if there were school at fifteen, at sixteen, seventeen? For people without tutors who wanted to keep learning without going to University? Or to be better prepared than most of the sluggards who start there now?” Rafe’s head turned back to the duke. “And here’s the beauty of it, the real point: If I got to them early enough, then the University’s antiquated, stultifying point of view could never take hold in the first place, and educated men would finally approach the world with the proper perspective!”
“Which is?”
Rafe sighed, his hands beseeching, his face alight. “Oh, my lord, there isn’t enough time left in the week! A new day is coming—has come! For hundreds of years, Natural Science has consisted of exactly two things, and two things only: Rastin, and commentaries on Rastin.” The duke’s eyes had darkened, Rafe noticed, his face limned by the fire behind him.
“Ah yes. I thought Chesney’s On the Velocity of Falling Bodies was particularly ingenious.”
Rafe snorted. “Certainly, if by ‘ingenious’ you mean ‘putrescent.’ Do you have it here?” The duke pointed, and Rafe crossed swiftly in front of him, scanning the books on the shelves as he approached them. He pulled a book out of the wall and gestured with it. “Chesney was wrong.” He pulled out another book. “Fontanus wrong.” Another. “Chickering was wrong too, though at least in an interesting direction.”
“Say more.” Tremontaine stood up and walked over to take the books from Rafe’s hands. When their fingers brushed, Rafe drew his away with a h
iss. Good god, were the man’s hands iron pulled from a fiery forge?
Rafe crossed quickly to take a seat on another couch. “What’s Rastin’s central principle?” he said, looking toward the books on the shelves to his left.
“Oh my. It’s been years since I’ve read Rastin. Let me see . . . It’s the mind and the senses, yes? Nothing in the mind but what is in the senses . . . no, that’s not right.” Well, the Tremontaine library certainly had a varied collection. Trevor here. Geographical Exotica there. Delgardie. “Would you stoop to reminding a poor pupil?”
Rafe saw no reason to stop looking at the books. “Nothing exists in the world, my lord, that does not first exist in the mind and in the senses.”
“Please be so good as to stop calling me that.” Tremontaine sat on the other end of the couch. Rafe turned to face him but immediately cast his eyes on the space between them on the couch, where the blue of the damask shone vividly between violet stripes.
“Then what should I call you?” Rafe looked up. The duke’s eyes were a deep cornflower blue. Rafe tried for lightness. “My friend Joshua calls me pigeon, but somehow I don’t think that’s right. Hawk, perhaps?”
“Most certainly not.” Tremontaine’s voice was almost offended, the curve in his lips slight. Rafe felt feverish. “Call me”—the duke cleared his throat and paused—“do you even know my first name?”
“You mean it isn’t My?” No, the eyes weren’t just deep blue. There was a touch of the green sea in them as well.
The smile broadened. “Would that I were so lucky. No. It’s William.”
“All right.” Rafe shifted toward him on the couch. Why on earth should he feel a small thrill run through his chest? “William. So Rastin’s point is that reason is our guide in the search for truth, and observation nothing more than her handmaiden.” His hands illustrated his eloquence, animated, urgent. “The idea of isolating nature, of experimenting, to discover whether the conclusions to which reason has led us have anything to do with reality, is looked upon with horror. Observe nature out of its context, say Chesney and Chickering and Fontanus and all the rest of them, and it ceases to be either nature or an appropriate subject for Natural Science.”
“And you feel differently.”
Rafe swallowed. “How could any thinking man not?” His voice was thick with something that had to be frustration. “The earth orbiting the sun is only the beginning.”
“But aren’t you doing the same thing, coming up with an idea about the truth first and then using observation as its handmaiden?”
Rafe inhaled sharply. William smelled of apricots and cinnamon and something else he couldn’t name. “Absolutely not. The endeavor I’m engaged in is completely different.”
“Really?” William’s voice was mild. “Because it sounds to me as if you were indulging in exactly the failure of logic you find in your university doctors.”
Rafe’s breath caught in his throat, and he sat up, very straight and very still. Suddenly Joshua’s voice rang in his head. You tend to ruin things for yourself. But his tongue would not be held.
“As if you cared at all anyway,” he said, his voice low, “about any of it. No, you just want to waltz on down to the University, slum it there until your moronic amusement is sated, stop for a moment and destroy the students, and come back to your fine house on the fine Hill to drink fine chocolate.”
He stared at William, his nostrils flared. In one fluid motion, William reached out, put his hand on the back of Rafe’s head, and drew their lips together.
For some time the spitting crackle of the fire was the only sound to be heard in the library of the Duke Tremontaine.
“I’ve always envied University men their hair,” said William at last, softly, fingering the leather tie that sent Rafe’s hair neatly down the nape of his neck. “I keep hoping that at some point long hair will come into fashion on the Hill.”
“How long have you lived on the Hill?”
“Twenty of my last thirty-seven years.”
“Someone is an optimist,” said Rafe.
William’s only response was to rearrange a stray lock of hair over Rafe’s forehead. “This is not at all the direction I was expecting our conversation to turn.”
“Nor I.” Rafe’s tone was casual, but he still felt as if he’d drunk far too much chocolate far too late in the day. “You still haven’t told me which way you voted today.”
“Other matters seemed more pressing.”
Rafe shifted his balance and a slight gasp escaped William’s mouth. “And now seem more pressing still.” This earned him a chuckle. “Nonetheless, I would very much like to know.”
“I suppose I could be persuaded to tell you.”
“And how might I do that?” He repositioned his hand. “Would this help?”
“Oh, most definitely. But what would be even more persuasive would be to . . . yes, that. Oh yes.”
And for a time Rafe was unable to speak, and then it was William’s breath that had grown ragged. “But I am discomfiting you,” said Rafe, his eyes wide and innocent. “Forgive me, good my lord. I don’t know what could possibly have possessed me.”
William’s fingers moved to unbutton Rafe’s robe and allow it to fall, to untie and toss his shirt to the floor, forgotten, to run smooth hands up and down his skin, caressing peaks of muscle and valleys of sinew.
Rafe leaned back on the couch, closed his eyes, and smiled the small smile of the cat who has come upon a dish it thought empty and found it full of milk. His pulse slowed and he breathed more easily, now that he was back on familiar ground; this was a pose that he knew well. Joshua would be scandalized and delighted in equal parts. To say nothing, of course, of how Rafe might make use of what was happening to influence the choice of magisters on his committee. This man could probably exclude de Bertel with a flutter of his little finger. Smiling, Rafe extended his arms above his head, his eyes half closed, as William’s mouth found chest, collarbone, neck, throat, earlobe—
And then stopped. Rafe opened his eyes. William had pulled away from him.
“Where are you?” asked William.
“What do you mean?” Rafe, languid, pulled William’s hand lazily to his mouth, tasting on his fingertips the slight, faint bitterness of the chocolate they had so recently grated. Rafe’s eyes were heavy, his lids half closed, his face relaxed in an expression that frequent and effective use had made second nature. “I’m right in front of you.”
William withdrew his hand and Rafe’s brow creased. “No, you’re not. This is somebody different. Where’s the man who ran to my bookshelves two minutes ago to show me how putrescent my books were?” Rafe’s skin felt warm, and his breath began to quicken. “He’s the one I want to be with.” William was looking at him with disapproval. “Not you.”
Rafe jerked as if he’d been punched, his stomach tightening, his hands clenching. “God!” he said, and stood up, his lips twitching. “Tell me how in the Seven Hells you voted!”
“This,” said William, “is much more to my taste,” and enfolded him again, and this time the feeling was one with which Rafe was entirely unfamiliar. All thought of de Bertel and Joshua and the movement of the heavenly bodies left him, to be replaced by the greedy hands on his shoulders, on his back, lower, the wet breath quick between the two of them, the delicious sting of teeth on his lips.
And then he leaped back at William, devouring everything he could touch, as if he were starving, fast, quick, careless, lingering nowhere, taking in as much as possible, with an abandon that frightened him, fingers splayed, now standing, now lush carpet, soft as a kitten, on his back, skin hot as fever.
“This?” William’s voice was quiet but steady.
“Yes.”
“And here?”
Rafe stiffened. “I only—I’m always the one who—”
“Shh.” William stroked his face. “Allow this.”
And Rafe could only melt, and they moved together, and over the heat in his belly he started m
aking sounds he’d never heard before, and William’s arms tight around him always, keeping him safe and releasing him at the same time, and oh, the pain, so sweet in surrender, and finally he gave a small cry and shuddered and William stiffened and there was paradise and then again the room was silent except for the sound of the fire and of the breath of the two men as it gradually slowed.
After some minutes, William rolled over onto his side and caressed Rafe’s face with the feathery touch of two fingers. “This school. How are you going to go about starting it?”
“Once I’ve figured out where to get the money to do it, I’ll rent rooms somewhere.”
“Who else will teach there? And how will people find out about it?”
“I don’t know; they’ll just . . .” When no answer came to him, he brought William’s fingers to his lips instead.
“It’s a compelling idea, but you seem to be somewhat vague on the specifics.” Rafe said nothing. “Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”
“Oh?”
“Well. I can’t fund the whole thing myself, but I can certainly help. And the Tremontaine estates are not a school, but I do have some little experience managing things. For example, you—”
Rafe tried to focus on the school, but the odors of apricot and cinnamon and sweat in his nose made it impossible. “Time enough for that later.”
“To be sure.”
“In the meantime, is it possible now to tell me how you voted?” Flirtation rather than a real question; it was obvious the man with him had stood against the measure.
“Well,” said William. A pause. Longer. Finally: “I voted for the measure.” A sudden dizziness came upon Rafe even though he was lying down. He tried to sit up, failed. “I thought we couldn’t trust the doctors produced by the University if they could manipulate their teachers like so many pieces in a game of Shesh.” The words kept coming, tripping over themselves. “But after listening to you, I see I was wrong. I’ll start working immediately to reverse the decision.” William swallowed. “If I can.” Silence. “The Board of Governors doesn’t meet again until the fall, though.” More silence. “So nothing will happen until at least next year.”
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 13
