In a Tangled Relationship
The Bazaar is never precisely quiet; even when the clock strikes two in the morning, when most of the shops are closed, there are rowdy carousals in the drinking halls and late-night shoppers haggling with urchins and costermongers. Very occasionally, there is a scream as youngsters 'practise' for the next season of Knife and Candle. Therefore, while it would be incorrect to say that Henrik and Theodor lay together in silence--and neither Henrik nor Theodor can abide being incorrect--a species of tranquility presided over the bookshop nonetheless.
Theodor turned over again, as he had done approximately every fifteen minutes since they had blown out the candles. Pressing his shoulders back against Henrik's chest, he wriggled slightly in place as though to settle himself more precisely in the bedclothes. "Is something wrong?" Henrik ventured, when Theodor had stilled at last. "Ought I to warm a cup of milk for you?"
"The warmth in the bed is unbalanced," groused Theodor. "My back was chilled."
For a moment, Henrik only lay in consideration of this complaint, his eyes fixed on the doorframe and the faint whorls of the wallpaper. In the dimness, he could no longer make out the vivid green of the pattern. Even through the thin cotton of Theodor's nightshirt, he could feel that the man's back was furnace-warm. "Why not say it plainly?" he asked. "You miss Narciso!"
With a huffing sound, Theodor replied, "I miss nothing but the even, symmetrical distribution of warmth about my person." Had he been wearing his spectacles, he might have removed and polished them, wearing a look of fierce concentration; now, he only turned again to tuck his face against Henrik's chest. "And even if I did miss him, what course of action would present itself? I could hardly demand that he abandon Cassius in his bed because I felt slightly chilled."
"No, you'll simply keep yourself awake with fretting and pining," said Henrik. He combed his fingers through Theodor's hair, scratching gently behind his ears as though he were a great cat. "You're permitted to miss him, my dear. It doesn't somehow alter the balance of power between you, or make you weak or foolish--"
"You aren't reassuring me," answered Theodor. "That you immediately supposed that it would disadvantage me to miss him--"
"Because that's what you're afraid of! That you'll--that you can't connect to others, and that needing to connect to them makes you weak somehow--and damn it, Theodor, you know he loves you!"
Theodor didn't quite recoil at the charge, nor did he withdraw from his place against Henrik's chest, but nonetheless Henrik could recognise a palpable distance between them. "I do not know," said Theodor at last. "I find it incomprehensible that you can understand my fear that I'm unable to span the void between myself and others, and not understand that I can never know what others think of me or feel toward me. I find it incomprehensible that you could know--"
"I do know, though. Or, rather ... I'm as sure that he loves you as I am that he loves me. And perhaps that's not certainty at all, but it's all that I have to go on, and without it I should go quite mad."
"You haven't sufficiently convinced me that you aren't mad," said Theodor, but that inexpressible distance between them had closed again, and he relaxed under the pressure of Henrik's hand in his hair. "Nor have you convinced me that this isn't another ploy to persuade me into your conjugal bed."
"Only our bed is a conjugal bed," Henrik said, with a low laugh. "And he would scarcely need persuading to join us."
"Even so." Releasing a gust of breath, Theodor curled closer to press the cold tip of his nose against Henrik's neck (which made Henrik yelp only a little). "He will continue to share our conjugal bed chastely if he wishes to share it at all."
"And you'll confess your love for him?"
Somewhere in the anonymous London night, a man stepped on an ivory haircomb and screeched. Theodor sighed. "We'll see."
*
"Gentlemen, I require an escort to Tyrant's Gardens!"
Narciso was Narcisa today, with her hair curled and pinned up and her waist nipped in with a corset; she wore a day gown the colour of sunflowers, with a necklace of honey-agate. Perching on the arm of Henrik's chair with a winsome expression, she said, "The fungi will be nearly the size of trees!--and I know a charming young groundskeeper who's confided, entre nous, that there will be phosphorescent mushrooms in certain secluded alcoves. How can I possibly miss phosphorescent mushrooms?"
Henrik and Theodor exchanged glances freighted with meaning. Had Henrik spoken, he might have said, Now's your chance!
Had Theodor replied, he might have said, It will be a cold day in Hell first.
"Tyrant's Gardens?" asked Henrik innocently. "The spies meet there, don't they? Haven't they devised a new cipher, to be conveyed through chess games?"
Theodor sat straighter in his chair, unconsciously straightening the papers in his lap. He knew very well that he was being baited, but he knew equally well that when secrets were at stake, he would leap upon the most suspect of bait in a heartbeat. "A cipher," he answered, flat and disbelieving. "Conveyed through chess games. Surely this is your area?"
"I suppose," said Henrik, "But you've given me near eighty pages of songs in Loamsprach to edit. I'll be entirely unable to accompany Narcisa to the gardens--and you know how quickly ciphers change!"
"I do." Theodor turned a venom-laced expression on his husband, and said quite plainly, "You will have finished all eighty pages by the time we return, or I will be forced to take corrective action."
"You're terrible at devising incentives," Henrik laughed. "Enjoy your promenading, my dear. Will you reward me, if I've finished all eighty?"
"I reserve rewards for exceptional accomplishments," said Theodor. "Meeting expectations should be its own reward."
*
"Oooh, over there! Against the fence, by the dapperlings--I do believe I see a glimmer--!"
"You're only trying to draw me away from the path."
A pout. "Why would I try to draw you away from the path, unless it were to see phosphorescent mushrooms?"
"You know very well why else." A sharp glare.
With a laugh bright and brittle as an ice-stricken stream, Narcisa answered, "If I want to kiss you, I'll kiss you whether we're on the path or not!"
Her lips caught Theodor's, pressing the taste of cinnamon there; that complete, she tugged at his arm. "Now, come to see the glowing mushrooms with me. Perhaps there's a code in them--a secret code, written in mushroom-light!"
Narcisa was by far less practiced than Henrik at laying bait, but Theodor had to admit the possibility of a mycological code. Cursing himself inwardly, Theodor let himself be drawn by the hand to a cluster of lepiota. The caps curved like parasols over bright, low clumps of amanita, and at the very edge of the fence, yellow chantarelles strained skyward.
There were no luminescent mushrooms to be seen, encoded or otherwise--but Narcisa's kisses were warm and sweet and giddy, and she made the most delightful squeaking sounds when Theodor's hand curled at the back of her neck.
*
When Theodor required anything not in immediate reach of his armchair or his spot at the end of the sofa--a pencil, a fresh sheaf of paper, a cup of tea--it was his habit to hold his hand out insistently until Henrik divined what it was he required. Henrik had become pleasingly apt at monitoring Theodor and discerning his wants, and this time, he had only to ask, "Brandy? Milk?" before putting the kettle on.
"Brandy, yes," said Theodor, his eyes still trained on Lyme's essay on labour relations at Wolfstack Docks.
"If you allow for the factual errors, it's really not that bad," Henrik replied. "The theory's sound, and he makes such fascinating use of Owen, Hegel, and Marx!"
"You know I can't abide Hegel," Theodor answered. Narciso glanced up from Theodor's lap, which he had appropriated as his pillow, and Theodor met his gaze without flinching. "That he should privilege fear over curiosity as the primary operant quality for self-knowledge--and to ignore the seminal Frygt og Bæven, and Kierkegaard's rightful refashioning of the dialectic into a crisis of the self in terms of both the other and the universal--I mean Lyme here, and not Hegel, of course--"
"Since you've cast aside Epicurus and the very concept of Ἀταραξία, why not throw off Hegel as well?" Narciso replied airily. "Throw off tranquility and fear! Refuse all thinkers, if it makes you happy. But it's not your task to decide which thinkers your pupils can credit; let them come to their own conclusions! If they can come to conclusions on their own, that's an accomplishment. Tea with my brandy, if you please, Henrik--"
"Any right-thinking person would cast aside Hegel, and a failure to do so indicates a failure of thought," said Theodor--and he would have said more, perhaps, but then Henrik put a cup of brandy-laced tea into his waiting hand. Narciso straightened only a little, moving from Theodor's lap to his shoulder, and received his tea-laced brandy eagerly.
"Kiss?" he asked, touching a finger to his lips; grinning, Henrik obliged him. Narciso wound his free arm about Henrik's shoulders to keep him close for a long, comfortable moment. "What a dear man you are," he murmured. "Ever ready with brandy!"
"You'd cease to love me if I ceased to serve you," said Henrik. "But so long as you defend Hegel against this heretic" at which Theodor made an aggrieved sound "I shall love you with all my heart."
"A postulate: that ignorance, far more than knowledge, is communicable." Tilting his face up, demanding a kiss in the same wordless way that he demanded tea or an inkwell, Theodor met Henrik's eyes. He did not need to say how it pleased him to correct error, to eradicate ignorance, and to reach a mutual knowledge that enlightened both partners.
"You know I only speak highly of him to make you cross," said Henrik at last, but with a swelling tenderness that half-surprised him. He lingered in the second kiss, lips parted against Theodor's, feeling Narciso's hand still warm on his shoulder.
*
The three of them lay together in bed, moonish light cutting across Henrik's hip and catching on the gold embroidery at the cuffs of Narciso's silk nightgown. Between them, Theodor lay awake, listening to the thick half-snore of Henrik's breathing. Narciso was trying to pretend sleep--credibly; his chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm--but Theodor had seen him in sleep, sprawled over the mattress with knees bent and elbows turned against his bedmates, mouth gaping. This Morpheus-touched portrait of a man was no more asleep than Theodor.
"It's no good pretending," he said sharply, low as a breath. "Whom do you think you're fooling?"
"Myself," Narciso answered, with a ragged sigh. "It's no good trying to fool you."
"And why are you trying to fool yourself into thinking you're asleep?"
Narciso opened one eye. His pupil was a dark hole, in the dimness, spanning nearly the whole of his iris. "The dreams," he said softly. Theodor understood that Narciso seldom confessed weakness of any kind, and that it was a gesture of profoundest trust for him to lay bare his fears.
He understood that this trust created a bond of obligation between them.
"Come here," Theodor whispered, and drew Narciso into his arms. Narciso went willingly, clinging childlike to Theodor's chest, and Theodor tucked back his soft curls (for want of anything better to do with his hands). "Tell me about the dreams."
"I dream that I'm hosting a party," Narciso said against Theodor's collar. His hands stroked anxious trails from shoulderblade to rib to hipbone. "A party in the tomb-colonies--they love me there, you know! I tell them all of the best gossip from the court, and teach them the latest Veilgarden fashions, and have their weddings written up in society papers--and all of the guests are dead, of course. And they love me there; they want me to be dead, too, so that I can host their parties for ever ..."
If Theodor were Henrik, he thought, he would promise never to allow it to happen, to charge in with his rifle out and whisk Narciso away from his guests or his captors--but Theodor was another man entirely, and his task was not to rescue but to read. "Might we say that the idea of being loved holds as much potential threat as the idea of being unloved, then?" he tried. "You seem not to fear your own death, but rather, the eternal and ineluctable quality of their love, and the obligation to which it requires you to submit."
"But you love me," said Narciso firmly.
"I--" Theodor flushed. "I don't--we have a perfectly agreeable arrangement--"
"And is there anything in our arrangement to say that you shouldn't love me?"
"... no." Theodor had the distinct impression that he was being deliberately led away from a more pressing subject, but Narciso had begun to nip lightly along Theodor's collar, and that at least was quite pressing indeed. "Get off--"
"Is there anything in our arrangement to preclude our being lovers?"
"Henrik makes--" and that was a bite "--makes a strong case for the sex act's being unnecessary to the category of 'lover'--will you stop that while I'm speaking to you--"
Narciso stopped, regarding Theodor in the moonish light with his eyes dark as a spectre's and his lips full and slightly parted.
Theodor found, contrary to his expectations, that he had nothing to say.
"Are we lovers, then?" Narciso asked, and the naked anxiety in his manner made Theodor bite back his instinctive, flat denial. Narciso's palm was still trailing breath-light over the worn linen of Theodor's nightgown, like an echo of the gestures by which he mesmerised his listeners. Theodor's hand was still in his hair.
He let out a long breath, then answered with a faint note of resignation, "I suppose we are."