Sugar
A story filling in a bit of the Marlow and Merrick past. Slash. PG for adult situations and passing mention of bestiality. No one from the books gets mentioned by name except the Joshua Merrick who made his pile in the slave trade and Ambrose and Anthony Merrick from the Players' books, but it's a Marlow and Merrick story for all that.
The Trennels and Mariot Chase settings belong to the estate of Antonia Forest, as do the Merrick and Marlow families. It shouldn't need saying, but please note I do not endorse all the attitudes expressed by characters in this fic.
Many thanks to jediowl for beta-ing!
Sugar
John over at the stables at Trennels New House remembers the kingdom over the great devouring sea, but I do not. His name is not really John, but mine is really Joshua. I was named for Joshua Marlow, the master of Trennels, when he gave me to Mrs Clarissa. Mr Gilbert said that it was a funny way of thanking him for settling that debate about the winter wheat out of court and Mr Anthony said they should have called me Oronooko.
"But he was an Indian savage, was he not, my dear?" asked Mrs Clarissa, looking up from the apron she was embroidering. It was made of material so fine that I was not sure it was cloth at all. Perhaps it was some rarefied form of paper, or spun sugar, or some other commodity that lived in locked boxes towards the front of a house.
"No, he was an African prince," said Mr Anthony, capering from foot to foot. He was not dressed half as well as I was, which surprised me, as I had thought the strange clothes I was wearing must be what the Quality wore and I dressed so to placate them, like an orphan lamb in another lamb's skin. But no lamb that I ever heard of was put into tight pink satin breeches and a starched frilled shirt too short in the sleeves.
Mr Gilbert looked at them over his spectacles. When I first met Mr Gilbert I thought he was always serious and rather frightening, but later I came to know when he was laughing inside. Mr Anthony knew when he was laughing inside all the time; sometimes, when Mr Anthony was young, they were not so much like father and son as the same person at different ages who happened somehow to live in the same house. When Mr Gilbert told me the old catch about the priest who bought the skull of St. Peter for his church and then went back the next year to the same seller and bought the skull of St. Peter as a child, it reminded me so much of him and Mr Anthony that I wondered whether either of them could be a saint, and whether I was very evil and had been put into the story as the saint's dark mirror.
"Joshua is not an African prince. He was born in the back kitchen of Joshua Marlow's house in Bristol. And I still think you would do better to settle on another name, my dear." He bowed gravely to Mrs Clarissa, who bent her head with equal gravity in return and made her gold ringlets and the ribbons on her cap dance. I had never seen anything like it. I could not decide whether it was all some elaborate cloth trimmed with the ringlets, or all growing from her head, ribbons, lace and all. "At least until our neighbour is Sir Joshua, as I dare say he will be any time these five years, and that gives us a way of distinguishing them."
"But Joshua may be grown too tall for a pageboy in five years!" said Mrs Clarissa with a pout. She tried to ruffle my hair but instead drew her hand back with a sharp little exclamation and said that I must have a turban.
"More and more like Joshua Marlow, if you count that odd Indian cap he wears in place of a wig," observed Mr Gilbert lightly. "Do give it up, madam, and call him Caesar or Pompey. Or make him Anthony's companion, and call him Bassanio."
Mrs Clarissa smiled as if she did not understand the joke and was a little angry that it had been made at all. She held out her hand to me. "What did they call you in Bristol, Joshua?" she asked, looking on me so kindly that I would have done anything for her, she was so fine.
"Boy," I said, and stared down at the turned-up toes of the strange Ottoman slippers I was wearing and felt all kinds of a fool. The slippers hurt my feet, and the unfamiliar stiff sash hurt my belly, and the silk breeches were too tight and made me feel as if I needed to make water though I could not tell how that was to be arranged as I did not know where the breeches unbuttoned.
"Well, that will not do at all. Dulcia's spaniel is called Boy."
"And I think it's stupid, too, he's not a poodle," said Mr Anthony bumptiously, and his father smiled and frowned at him to be quiet.
I could not stop looking at Mrs Clarissa. Mr Gilbert was not so strange, because I had seen Mr Joshua and his sons coming to the Bristol house sometimes. Mostly what I saw of them was either their heads from a window or their feet under a door, but still, he had the right kind of wig and the right shoes. Mr Anthony was a little strange, because I had not quite realised that one of the Quality could be a boy and smaller than me. Mr Geoffrey and Mr Lawrence Marlow were called the boys sometimes, but both of them looked to me like men. There were women in the Bristol house, of course - had there not been, I would have died in a corner, I suppose, when my mother went away - but they were great blustering creatures with their hair tied up in cloths to keep out the steam and grease and soot. I missed them badly. I had not known they were loud and coarse until I saw Mrs Clarissa.
"He's my dog when Dulcia's at school in Bath," said Mr Anthony kindly. I saw that he was talking to me. I was amazed, and felt all at once as if everyone in the room could see me where I had been invisible before.
"At least he speaks English," observed Mrs Clarissa, looking at me approvingly as if I had done something clever. I thought for a moment that she was saying the dog spoke, which would be no more surprising than anything else that had happened that day. Her husband looked at her as if he was too well-bred to laugh at her, but tenderly, at the same time.
"Well, Mrs Leggatt's monkey does not," said Mrs Clarissa, stabbing the fine cloth with her needle. "Not that I see why I should call on the Leggatts or their monkey either. They were nobody before they bought the poor Marshalls' house and pulled it down and built that insufferable temple with the pillars. I am sure the Marshalls will be remembered around these parts long after the Leggatts have moved on to another grander house. Blenheim Palace next for them, I dare say, or Chatsworth."
"Why not the Tower of London?" said Mr Gilbert with a wry smile.
"Why not indeed?" agreed Mrs Clarissa vehemently, and once again I saw that smile inside Mr Gilbert like a light moving inside a window, as if he loved her but could not help but laugh at her. "I hope we shall never do anything as vulgar."
"I am sure we cannot afford it, my dear," said Mr Gilbert. I felt thirsty by then, and hoped someone would give me a pan of water, but they did not. The conversation moved away onto young Mr Geoffrey Marlow, Mr Joshua's heir, who with some of his companions had beaten a party of Frenchmen half to death in Pilgrims Lane because he thought they were Scots, and then to his brother Mr Lawrence who was believed to have distinguished himself in a naval action aboard the Princess Louisa.
I listened to that, because Mr Geoffrey gave me sixpence once in his careless kind way, and Mr Lawrence was forever coming blustering into the kitchens like a glad invasion, to lean against the dresser and kiss my mother and the other women and steal fingerfuls of any food that was going and talk to them about the sea. Thinking about the big steamy kitchen, with its polished copper pans and flag floors, and the shouting voices and the smell of boiled vegetables and slop-buckets and tallow, made my eyes well up. I did not know whether there was a kitchen at all here, or what might live in it. For all I knew I would be put into it alone and made to do all the work that had taken five servants in Bristol, and without even the handy safeguards of a chop-house three streets away or a confectioners down the hill.
The view from the small sash-window was uncomfortably bare. No river, no docks, no seagulls, no street-sellers crying their wares, no clattering carts, no sedan chairs going crabwise half in the street and half off it, no church spire except a small one very far away. Outside everything was green and that was strange. In here everything was made of spindly gilt and upholstered in pale blue with a shadowy shining flower-pattern, and that was strange too. Whenever I had peeped into the rooms of the Bristol house where Mr Joshua and his sons lived, they had been full of red Turkey carpets and plaster busts, and smelt of stale tobacco.
"He is tired, poor boy," said Mr Gilbert, putting a hand on my shoulder. "If he has delighted you enough - " I looked under my lashes at Mrs Clarissa, and did not think she seemed delighted - "I shall ring for the steward to show him where he is to sleep."
"Find out whether he can serve tea," said Mrs Clarissa. "It will be a great labour if I have to teach him." I knew nothing about tea except that the leaves were washed and used again, and after that a man in a threadbare long coat came to the door and bought them from the cook along with various fatty-smelling and clandestine parcels. "And tell Flyte he is to have a turban."
"I'd like to see Flyte in a turban. It might fit better than his wig," said Mr Anthony pertly. "I think his wig is made of dead mice, sewn on in rows above his ears."
"It is Joshua who is to have the turban," said Mrs Clarissa reprovingly, and so my name was decided.
I first met John two summers later, when I was trusted enough to follow Miss Dulcia down the lane to Trennels New House to beg a recipe for rhubarb wine from the housekeeper and have tea in the still-room. I was not very good at holding the parasol over Miss Dulcia's head, as she was much taller than I was and the parasol had a long wobbly bamboo handle. The air was very still and very hot, and felt silky on my skin.
I did not know Miss Dulcia well. I never did; she was at school in Bath for most of the year, and then she married a distant cousin and went to live in Northumberland. She was never unkind to me; it was simply that we had nothing particularly to do with each other, any more than either of us had to do with the sweating men we occasionally saw going about their incomprehensible country business in the hedgerows. I was still, then, a town child reluctantly transplanted; and whilst I came to learn about horses, I never knew much about the tenant-farmers except as an alien horde who invaded the house twice a year by license, once at Christmas and once at the rent-audit, to eat at long tables and drink and dance. One of them opened the dancing each year with Mrs Clarissa, by custom, and his wife or daughter with Mr Gilbert, and then once they had drunk and danced their fill they were gone again out into the night for another half-year.
Trennels New House stood in front of us, a fine large house that looked all of a piece, like the new public rooms in Bristol, and not at all like Mariot Chase with all its chimneys and pitched rooves crowding together. Miss Dulcia put her chin in the air and ascended the steps. The doors of Trennels were opened for her by a solemn manservant in Mr Joshua Marlow's livery; it was a shock to me to see it, and to realise that Mr Joshua's households had gone on in quite a settled way without me all the while I was gone.
Miss Dulcia shooed me off round the back to the stables, saying that the housekeeper would not want me in her room. I do not know why, though I suspect a misdemeanour on the part of Mrs Leggatt's monkey, to whom everyone compared me, even though it died the first winter I was at Mariot Chase.
The stables were large and unfamiliar, but I saw the horse called The Turk who belonged to Mr Geoffrey and who I had seen sometimes in Bristol, and that made me feel it was a friendly place even though The Turk was vast and supercilious and Mr Geoffrey took great pleasure in telling everyone what a brute he was. And then I found John. He was short and bow-legged, with a hard grim face with lines that looked as if they had been stitched into it; age-lines, but knife-lines as well, carved into his cheeks, he told me, when he became a man. His skin was much darker than mine, plum-dark where the sun burnt it and ash-dark the rest, but his hair was just the same as mine though his was grey as pewter halfway through the polishing.
He spoke English - like me, and unlike the monkey and the dog - but his voice had the tone in it that I remembered from the oldest woman in Mr Joshua's Bristol kitchen, the woman who sat by the fire with her tiny hands flat on her knees and looked round the room and ruled it. It was as different to English voices as poured molasses from sprinkling sugar. His name was not really John. He told me what it was, and I heard then clearly the language he had grown up speaking, that he had made an English out of in much the same way that Miss Dulcia made a painting out of dyed birds' feathers in Bath, but it was not English nor a painting really. He tried to teach me his name but I could never say it. I asked him to give me a real name but he said he could not, I was not a man yet, and in any case it was my father's business.
I had been secretly wondering whether John could be my father, since he looked as much like me as Mr Gilbert looked like Mr Anthony. I must have shown my dismay, for he gave me some tack to rub and told me the way of cleaning it properly, and explained a little more, saying that my father should give me my grandfather's name.
"My name is Joshua," I said uncertainly.
"Ah," said John, and said no more about it, but talked to me of a new horse coming who was The Turk's half-brother, and of the widow in Bristol who Mr Geoffrey had been courting, but Mr Geoffrey preferred to spend his time in taverns and at the races and in the end she'd upped and married someone else. A harried-looking girl came running out looking for me, and I was given a basket that smelt enticingly of plums and cheesecake which I had to manage as best I could as well as the parasol all the way home.
I often went to see John, when I could, after that, and he must have told someone that I had an aptitude for horses; for I found myself promoted to postillion as well as page-boy and given a different livery including neither sash nor turban but a wig that I was told I must set myself with soap and then come to the steward's room to see it powdered. I remember sitting hunched on the box all through a very long and rainy journey to Colebridge with soap and flour dripping into my mouth, thinking of nothing but how miserable I was, and how the boy who came running out of the inn to take the horses thought I was a piebald ghost.
John talked to me sometimes about his homeland; not all at once, but in small pieces here and there, though I always wanted more. He was forever saying that the trees were not like our trees, or the food not like our food, which was most frustrating for me as I wanted to know what they were like. "Was it hot?" I asked him.
"A man can bear heat better in his own home than he can anywhere else," he said with a scowl, and took me on his knee and told me about a great beast that lurked in the sugary dark amongst the cane in the island plantations, and ate men who were so tired they walked into its mouth. I leaned against his chest and sucked my thumb, comforted with horrors.
The year I turned ten Mr Gilbert hired a painter. He painted Miss Dulcia looking out of a window and holding a rose in her hand; that was cheaper than the others, because, I supposed, he didn't have to pay out for all the paint to show the broad masses of her skirts. He painted Mr Anthony sitting on a square sideways-on pony, and Mrs Clarissa in a chair with Mr Gilbert standing behind her. I was to stand to the other side and back a few paces, in my livery, and hold a pineapple, though I never held any such thing before or since.
It was a stupid-looking portrait when I finally saw it hung in the long saloon; he had the look of buried amusement in Mr Gilbert's unhandsome short-nosed face right, and the bright polished beauty of Mrs Clarissa, even now that she had taken to tying her cap under her chin to hide the softness there, and her ringlets had turned silver-gold; but why Mr Gilbert and Mrs Clarissa should be sitting in a great gilt chair out in the middle of a misty park that looked like nothing on the Mariot Chase estate or out of it I could not tell you, nor why there should be sixty yards of crimson velvet cascading down - out of a tree, I suppose - behind Mr Gilbert's shoulder. Nor could I see why either of them should be about to say 'Joshua, bring me my pineapple.' But there it was; and it was greatly admired.
I suppose Mr Gilbert had some money that year, as he bought The Turk from Mr Geoffrey. It was supposed to be a commission for a cousin of his by the name of Ambrose Merrick, who had a large estate in Ireland, but somehow or other when Mr Gilbert saw The Turk he remained in our stables, and it was Kingcup who was sent to Ireland instead. I don't know why Mr Gilbert was involved in any of it; from all I heard in the stables they had better horses than we did in Ireland anyway.
Mr Anthony and I could quite well have gone on being strangers who lived in the same house. There were other boys our age about who neither of us had anything to do with; the boy who turned the spit, the boy who attended to Mr Gilbert's dogs, the French boy who attended on Mr Lebecq who was entered on the household register as 'librarian' but was really the chaplain, the estate steward's ruddy-faced eldest son William Priest who both of us separately envied for his brisk understanding of his father's business. No doubt I would have cared as little for Mr Anthony as I did for Miss Dulcia if Mr Gilbert had not taken it into his head in my thirteenth year that my soul should be saved.
Mrs Clarissa, who took only a lazy interest in other peoples' souls, said that that was all very well but she did not know that she could spare me; but then she thought that I would look very well assisting at Mass. Mr Gilbert could not square it with his soul that I should do so only by rote, and so he said that I should prepare for First Communion along with Mr Anthony and he would instruct us both in Latin himself.
I was already two people - one in the household and another in the stables, with a certain extra part to the stable person, like a vestigial finger, whenever I was with John. Now I became three; a scholar, also, sharing Mr Anthony's lessons, as William Priest and his brother Jacob had for a few years when they were learning their letters. I had no letters and was starting straight out on Latin and Greek, and I kept trying to write them in the wrong alphabets with the pen squared off in my hand as if it were a chisel until Mr Anthony showed me how.
I felt like a great looby squashing myself into a little desk, which Mr Gilbert said had been part of the schoolroom at Mariot Chase since some ancestor or other of his called Ambrose, like the cousin in Ireland. It certainly looked dark and inky enough. Mr Anthony looked dark and inky too, his thin dark brows drawing together over his thin dark eyes. He had a quick face. It was quick to turn from fine-bread-white in winter to a clear freckly brown half-way to the colour of mine in summer, and quick to turn back again, and quick with all its expressions. I heard he had all but driven William and Jacob Priest out with his wild antics, and I was afraid, even though I was bigger than him by then and stronger. I looked as if I had two or three years over him, though Mr Gilbert thought we were the same age. And yet there he was asking bright sharp questions about Hesiod, and there I was unable to reckon or make my letters and folded like an outsize quilt into the little desk.
Mr Gilbert treated us both with exactly the same grave courtesy when he was teaching us Latin and Greek or reading to us from Shakespeare. Mr Lebecq taught Mr Anthony alone and behaved, whenever he noticed me at all, as if I had just come in on some errand from Mrs Clarissa, to offer a glass of elderflower cordial or seek a lost handkerchief. Mr Flyte the house steward, who was supposed to teach me to read and reckon, gave me an old cracked hornbook and set me copying from it, and went off about his own affairs, only coming back to beat me when he was out of humour.
It was on one of these occasions that Mr Anthony came into the classroom and found me. He was carrying a vase of flowers, from his sister, no doubt. He put them down on the high panelled-in windowsill and came and sat by me.
I looked up at him under my arm, miserable, and thinking he might well beat me too. Mr Geoffrey had beaten a tutor of his near to dying once and the man had sued Mr Joshua for throwing him out onto the street without the rest of the quarter's pay. Mr Anthony perched on the desk and looked at me alertly like a bird.
"That's not the way," he said. "You great fool. Has no one shown you how to hold a pen?"
"I suppose you hold it like anything else," I muttered ungraciously.
"Well, that's nonsense, isn't it? You'd hold a horse's foot differently than you would an egg."
"I wouldn't be helping to shoe an egg," I said, more ungraciously still.
"You're not shoeing that paper, either." He reached down and unfolded my fingers with his own strong clever small ones - brown fingers, for it was summer, thin and spare with almost no flesh to them at all but on the pads of the fingers. "Here. Take it like this and it won't sputter so."
I don't believe anyone ever uttered their thanks more ungraciously than I did mine; but he was right, and it came more easily. "Father says you're clever," he said, watching me still under those brows like lines drawn with a new quill. "More like Lawrence than Geoffrey."
"Is Mr Lawrence clever?" I asked, not caring much if he was. Mr Geoffrey was not, so people said, but he had the same sound hard-headed sense about making money that his father did, and the same knack of knowing which tide would bring success and plenty, and which only a long windless spell of no news, and then a sad third-hand tale of a foundered ship and all hands and all profit lost. I stared at the hornbook. "They all just look like pothooks to me, Mr Anthony. What letter's that at the beginning?"
"That's Our Lord's cross. It isn't a letter."
"I'm cross and all," I said, weary with the whole fidgety business of it. He laughed and I laughed too; and there we both were, acquainted.
And so my soul was saved. I never had a chance at any other religion. For that I am grateful, of course, Our Lord's teaching being the truth and the road to Heaven; but I think sometimes about John's religion, and it makes me feel as I did when John told me his true name; as if I had lost something that I never knew I had.
John only talked to me once about how they prayed in the country where he was born. I thought he must be a Mussulman and started showing off by telling him things that Mr Anthony had told me about their ways. I was meaning only to be complimentary - telling about their cleanliness and the chivalry of Saladin, and how they'd preserved the texts of the Greek masters - but John stopped telling me about his religion and never spoke to me of it more.
I pestered him to tell me again, but he would not. I wanted to save his soul, by making sure he was a Christian, but also I wanted to hear again about the ways he had learnt as a boy. Sometimes, in a hot summer, or in the cold of winter that crept into my bones, I could feel the heat and the expanses of that land pressing softly against me like a great cat passing; and I could hear that distant sea on distant shores.
John never came to care for the country around Mariot Chase and Trennels New House. It would always be alien to him, that supple green land, its rising and falling as neat and proportionate as the curve of the small of a man's back. I felt as if perhaps it should be an alien land to me too. Mr Gilbert often looked at me over his half-moon spectacles when he read 'How shall we sing the Lord's songs in a strange land?' But I sang no songs at all, since my voice broke early, and wherever my mother and father came from I did not think it was either Israel or Babylon.
Winters and summers passed. Miss Dulcia married, and passed out of our lives except for an occasional month-long visit full of complaints and tumbling children and strange brusque servants with accents none of us could understand. Mr Lebecq caught a cough and died of it, and Mr Gilbert did not think it safe to replace him. He argued with Mrs Clarissa about it. Mr Anthony and I heard their voices, creeping out from under the library door with the candlelight. Mrs Clarissa, who was born in Southampton and met Mr Gilbert in Bath, had become more wedded to the family traditions than her husband, and was insisting that the Merricks had always had a chaplain, and Mr Gilbert was saying that it was too much of a risk with things as they were.
"What things?" I asked Mr Anthony.
"Oh, the French and the Duke of Newcastle and so on," he said, not making anything any clearer as far as I was concerned. "Isn't it cold?"
His body pressed against mine in the dark. I felt a very pleasant tightening in my breeches, and a strong awareness of exactly where in the dark he began and ended. I knew, of course, what men and women did; and men and men, sometimes, since I had lived for long enough in the draughty attic barracks with the footmen. I thought they did it because it was the right time of year, like horses, or to settle who was the master, or because they had nothing better to do. I had not realised how much it could be a matter of need. The need of him flowed in all my veins like hot sugared rum in the blood. The whip-thin strength of his bony shoulders and back, the new-grass smell of him. It was sin, I thought, but how could it be sin, when it was through him that I had come to the love of God?
He began to explain it. I was listening only a little to the words, and mostly to the rise and fall of his voice, and imagining the sweet rise and fall of his pale-skinned throat also, until he said something that puzzled me about the French making alliance with the Russians. "I know the French uphold the true religion, but do the Russians?" I asked him. "I thought Mr Gilbert said they did not."
"No, they don't," he said, pleased to have a chance to trot out his cleverness, and started talking to me about the Council of Nicaea until Mr Gilbert came suddenly out of the study and drove us both away to our beds.
I loved Mr Anthony all that year, sullenly, unhopefully. Sometimes I did small things for the love of him, like sharpening his pens, or saying that it was me who took the young colt out without leave and taking a beating for it, and sometimes I hunched my shoulder up and would not talk to him, or, worse, took advantage of my place as a servant to go places that he could not without making everyone stare and bustle and see what he wanted.
"Joshua," he said eventually, in his coaxing voice, when we were in the cupboard getting candles. "Why are you angry with me?"
"I'm not angry with you," I said, holding the ladder resentfully steady.
"You are," he persisted. "What is the matter with you? Are you crossed in love?"
I was. I was crossed and re-crossed like a poor relation's letter, and love had written itself on every spare corner of me. "Of course I'm not," I said angrily.
"Is it Dulcia's nursery-maid? I saw the way she was looking at you."
"I thought she just had a squint," I said honestly. "And I couldn't tell whether she was asking me to pass the bread or what my opinion was on the Prince of Wales' mistress, that barbarous way of speaking she had."
He came down the ladder with an armful of candles, and I tried hard not to look at the curve of his backside in his breeches, which was difficult enough with it swinging around almost in my face. He put the candles down, and slid an arm around my shoulder, and looked up at me wheedlingly, the way he sometimes did with Mr Gilbert. "Won't you tell me, Joshua?"
"I can't," I said gruffly. "It's sin."
"Sin is only our own misunderstanding of what God wants from us," he said. I couldn't tell whether he'd read it somewhere or worked it out for himself. "I thought you'd always be my friend, Joshua. Like Nisus and Euryalus, or... or Absalom and Achitophel."
"I think they only come together in a poem," I said, not sure, because I hadn't read it. "You take the candles down to your father in the chapel. I have to go and see about the horses."
I shouldered past him out of the cupboard and took a brusque joy in it; partly because I had hurt him, and partly because my skin had brushed against his and felt burnished from the touch.
The next day, I did something very stupid. I let The Turk kick me. I knew horses too well, usually, to let anything like that happen, and I knew The Turk better than most; I knew that he was aggrieved by the smell of Mrs Clarissa's very new, very chancy ginger mare, and I knew better than to come up on him by that quarter, whether he was aggrieved or not. But that day I was busy and clumsy and self-absorbedly angry with the world and everything in it, as lumbering great boys sometimes are. I believe I saw his head come round, and the look in his eye that was not so much malicious as knowing; I believe I knew he would kick me, and half wanted it, to prove how out of sorts with me the whole of God's Creation was.
Damned if I would have let him if I'd known how much it would hurt. I bruised my head so hard the stable roof spun, and I heard the apothecary say to Mr Gilbert later that my sight was despaired of. I broke my leg, and was confined to bed for a long tail-end of winter and then a long spring, with goose-grease and Mrs Flyte's kind clucking attentions. Mr Gilbert came to read to me often, and redoubled his attempts to make me a Latinist.
"But what will he do with the learning, my dear?" I heard Mrs Clarissa ask him once.
"Teach children - catalogue rare plants - play Othello on the stage," said Mr Gilbert lightly. I thought at the time that he was flippant because he had not thought about my future. Now I think it was because he had given it thought, and could find no answer. I was angry with the world and my place in it, and The Turk, and my own sweaty bed.
And then Mr Anthony came to me. It was a spring night, and my candle had been snuffed out long before. At first I could not sleep in the stillroom where my sickbed had been set up, because I was used to the companionable sounds of the footmen snoring and shifting about in their dreams and doing the things that men do in the dark. But I became used to solitude, and company woke me. Something tugged at my sheet. I thought it must be the housekeeper's cat. "Be off with you, George," I said sleepily.
"Who's George?" asked Mr Anthony.
I was awake all at once. "What's the matter?"
He climbed nimbly in beside me. I felt my skin quiver at the touch of his warm sparse flesh, all along my flanks and my back. He put a hand out and traced the outline of my mouth, the generous plump shape I had always been a little ashamed of because there was nothing like it among anyone else I knew here except John. I lay quiet under his hand, afraid lest he should take offence and be gone. His hand traced its path down over my jaw and my quivering throat. Still I said nothing.
"You'll let this George have you and you won't let me?" It was an ugly phrase, have you, but not ugly in his mouth; I knew he was only saying it because other softer words were impossible, and would make him hate himself. His hand spread itself, greedily, and rode its path down lower over my breast and my belly. "Do you know what you've been doing to me?"
I knew now, with him so close-packed behind me. And so would he know about me if his hand cared to roam a little lower. I thought about my people, chained in rows on their sides with their knees bent so that they could be stacked the closer, and did not think that any of them, even after an eight months voyage, could know their fellow as well as this. I was a child and a fool, of course, as only a boy who thinks he is a man can be a child and a fool; but that is what I thought then, and I must tell it truthfully.
"Are you accusing me of slaking my lusts on the housekeeper's cat?" I asked him, my breath coming sharply. "There is no one but you. There never was."
His arm tightened at the elbow and hugged me close, and I felt his cheek pressed against my shoulder-blade, prickling me, where he had just begun to have himself shaved. He pressed a kiss into my willing skin. He could not have kissed me, I think, if it had not been dark, and I facing in the other direction.
"You are like my brother," he said fiercely. "You are my brother."
His hand found its mark and I gasped, and I almost said that he wouldn't do that to his brother, but I had the sense - somehow - to know that I must accept whatever way he found of explaining himself, if I wanted him at all.
And I did. Lord Jesus Christ, I did.
And so we were brothers.
We would go riding together, out over the Crowlands; it was easier for me to ride than to walk, because my leg healed a little crooked and I limped the rest of my days. It saved me from being a page any more, at any rate. Mrs Clarissa did not want a page with a limp. Nor did she particularly want a page who was tall and broad enough to fit into a footman's livery and had a boy's usual troubles about the skin. I was promoted to Mr Anthony's groom, and had a fine new set of clothes and a new bed, as well, over the stables, where they played the usual tricks on the newcomer, but where I settled down well enough. I thought we would be happy for the rest of our days.
And then the letter came from Mr Ambrose Merrick in Ireland, saying that now the war was over for the time being, and Austria and Prussia and France glaring at each other like dogs in their own kennels rather than fighting in the common yard, he was sending his son, another Ambrose, to tour through France and Italy and Greece, and pick up what he could of culture and polish and perhaps a few paintings or statues. From what I'd heard of the younger Mr Ambrose, he was another one like Mr Geoffrey Marlow, and any culture or polish would have its work cut out to stick to him. He was travelling with an old priest and the grandson of an Irish earl, and they wanted another along to make up the numbers, and Mr Ambrose the elder had thought of Mr Anthony.
We were joyous at first, Mr Anthony and I. We lay out on the Crowlands and baked in the summer heat, and made grand sprawling plans. We talked of crossing the Alps, and sailing on Homer's wine-dark sea. Mr Anthony thought that Mr Ambrose and the earl's grandson might think it a fine joke if I dressed up and pretended to be one of them, the King of Ethiop's son making a Grand Tour like any other young gentleman of fashion.
"In whose clothes?" I asked, stretching my arms above my head and yawning. The sky was a great blue canopy over our heads, stretching away forever. "I won't fit into yours."
"Oh, well, Ambrose was always the size of a Guardsman. Or perhaps the earl's grandson is a Goliath too. Or we can buy clothes for you in Paris on tick."
"Well, even if Mr Ambrose and his friend Mr Fitz-whatsit will play along, I'm sure the priest won't."
"He'll do what Mr Fitz-whatsit tells him," said Mr Anthony, rolling over onto his belly on the small yellow grass. It crunched underneath him. "He knows who pays his wages."
With that I had to be content. It was a favourite fantasy of his, that I was secretly an African prince, and he, sometimes, a poor castaway on my shores. I wasn't fond of it. It was at once too apposite to my own experiences and too far away from them.
That was the last day of summer. When we returned to Mariot Chase, it was to a small trickling rain, and to Mr Gilbert's decree that Mr Anthony would need a manservant more than he needed a groom. He would take Sellars, his father's steady old valet; he would share Mr Ambrose's groom, and there was no money for any further expense.
Mr Anthony pleaded with him, but he was as obdurate as only a mild man could be. Mr Anthony was to go, and I was to stay. We were divided like the sheep and the goats.
That autumn it rained forever. The trees turned brown like fruit left in a bowl, and drooped. The rivers were like brown distended snakes. Once in September they broke their banks and the church bell was rung to warn the villagers of Westbridge of a flood. I was made merely one of the grooms again, among men who had disliked my being set above them before and now thought it only a proper attention to the balance of things that they should show me my place. In October John died, and was laid to rest in the ice-hard ground at the back of the Trennels New House stables, the Protestant rector having refused him burial in the churchyard.
I came back angry from watching him put in the grave without even a cross to mark the place. I wished I had known what his own people did to mark a man's passing, even though they were pagans and in Hell, or Mussulmen and subject to whatever arrangements God made for those. On my return, I met Mr Anthony crossing the stable-yard at Mariot Chase, so fine in his new green coat with its great brocaded cuffs, and his dark eyes and his powdered hair.
"What's amiss?" he said, but I was too angry to talk. It began to rain again. My anger became lust, as everything was prone to become lust around him. I pushed him into the tackroom, through the door and up against the wall with my hands covering his wrists, and had a long hard kiss from him with his face lifted to mine. I did not usually glory in being taller and stronger than him; he was all that was perfect, and I lumpen and overgrown. But that day I wanted him to know my strength. I do not know why. He broke from me at last and rubbed his lips, looking at me ruefully. Outside the rain clattered down around us until it almost sounded like a scream.
"It's my father, isn't it?" His body was still prisoned between mine and the stone wall, but there was no fear in him, not of me. "I don't know why he won't let me take you. Well, I do - he's making me take old Sellars because he's steady, and he thinks we'd be a pair of rackety blades and you wouldn't have the sense to make me wrap up warm if I took a cold. But I'll be home in a year. Eighteen months. This time two years, for sure, I'll be home."
Two years was as much of a desert to me as Trennels New House had been to John. "Run away with me," I said desperately. "To Bristol, London, anywhere. Anywhere we can be together."
His sharp dark eyes narrowed. "We'd never manage it."
"You mean you want the Alps and the wine-dark sea, and the carriage with the Earl's livery, more than you want me," I said bleakly. "I'm not angry. I would want it too."
"If you were an African prince." He was at that again. I turned my head away, not wanting to hear it. His voice turned velvety, and I could no more resist it than The Turk could resist the rackety ginger mare when she was in heat, even though the rest of the time he couldn't stand the smell of her. "Would you give up your apes and peacocks for me?"
Oh, I was lost. I turned again to him fiercely. "Every single ape," I said, punctuating it with kisses, "and every last peacock." He would submit to be kissed; respond to it, like a drowning man drinking air from another man's mouth; but he would never kiss me. It was that way in bed, too, when we ever managed to find a bed, which was not very often in a household so full of bustling harmonious activity.
"Run away with me," I said again. "I'll find us horses and clothes, things that won't be missed. All you need bring is yourself and some money. I'll meet you by Leeper's Bluff, the day before you're supposed to start out to meet Mr Ambrose the younger and Mr Fitz-whatsit. Maybe we can even meet them in Paris."
"I'd sooner have you than Sellars," he admitted. "But we'll run through the money I have soon enough, and the rest is arranged to come from cousin Ambrose, in exchange for some rents or other on the London house."
"I'll work for you. I'll keep you," I said desperately. I realised I had said the wrong thing; a frown swept over his face like a storm over the Crowlands. He liked to think of himself at the mercy of an African tyrant, but he did not like the cold thought of being kept. "Or we'll both find work. Me in a stables somewhere, you as a secretary or a tutor."
We both heard footsteps in the main stable block. Cheerful, open footsteps and the rattle of tack; the footsteps of someone who did not need to hide in corners and beg to be part of their lover's arrangements. We jumped apart. The head groom came in. "Are you thinking of riding out today, sir?" he asked Mr Anthony courteously.
"Not in this rain," he said. "But the plan we were speaking of, Joshua? To ride to Leeper's Bluff once more before I go? We must certainly do that."
And he closed one eye as he went out into the yard, the long lashes lying against his cheek, and winked at me.
It took me all my guile, a quality of which I never had much, to spirit away shirts for him from the back of cupboards, and harder-wearing clothes for me that looked as little as possible like livery. Soap, salt, tea, a tinder box - all the things he would not think of. I thought long and hard about Mr Gilbert's gold-chased pistols, but I could not bring myself to steal from him. The rest did not feel like stealing; it was only taking what Mr Anthony would have been given in any case. The pistols would have been. I cannot explain it, and I am aware that one day I will have to account for it all before God. Perhaps it will be soon.
I managed to get the horses away. There was a bad moment when the head groom called to me, but he only wanted to tell me that he was glad he had finally managed to beat the sulks out of me. I grinned and nodded and tipped my broad-brimmed hat to him. And then I was gone out of the gates, riding one horse and leading the other, and grateful for my escape.
I waited there in the rain all day. The waves pounded against the base of the dark cliff beneath me. The horses showed their disapproval of the rain and the boggy ground, though I did my best for them with blankets and the cover of trees. The saddlebags grew water-wet and heavy. The tea and salt would be ruined. All my careful preparations. All for nothing. He did not come.
It was late at night when I got back, to a pained inquisition from the head stableman and a beating for troublemaking and insolence; and then a horrible interview with Mr Gilbert, which was very much worse. I was halfway back to my bed above the stables when it occurred to me that I was under the staircase that led to Mr Anthony's bedroom. I was not much in there; it was too dangerous, but I knew the place as well as any man could. It was where I always thought of him sleeping, the thought like a private talisman clutched in the hand, before I slept myself.
No one was on the stairs. They were dark, but I knew they were hung with paintings; the portrait of a young Mr Anthony on his horse, a small picture of some other Anthony in a ruff, and a set - not very good - that had belonged to Mr Gilbert's father, of different birds poking around in cloudy classical ruins. The chickens were all right but I didn't believe for a minute in the flamingo. I climbed the stairs. I knew his door so well. It was just like every other door in the passage, but beatified, for having Mr Anthony behind it.
I counted the steps towards his room. Twenty paces, with my wet shoes squelching, and my limp getting worse from a day in the rain.
A door opened further along. I froze still in place. Uncertain candlelight spilt out on the floorboards. And then the door closed again. I walked quietly for six more paces, almost to his door. There was no light there. I could not hear his breathing.
I realised then that perhaps it was a better and a more healing thing, not to know. There was a side door at the bottom of the next staircase; I could be out of there, and back to the stables, before I changed my mind. And so I ran as if I saw the great gates of Heaven in front of me, impossibly tall and vast, and the light of God flowing out from between them, and the hordes of Hell behind me snapping at my heels.
He left the next day. I rubbed through the next two years somehow; tending to The Turk and the rest of the stable business, avoiding Mr Gilbert's too-kindly eye. He and Mrs Clarissa took to spending much of the year in London and I was glad of it. Sometimes I went down to the tavern in Westbridge to spend my pay, not so much for the companionship as for the sight of other people being companionable around me. The fire was warm and the ale wasn't too bad.
Sometimes women looked kindly on me, and sometimes lickerishly, but I wanted none of them. I was not made that way, not I. I wondered sometimes how God could have made me this way and then made what I was a sin; and it came to me that perhaps He had given me a harder path because He believed me as strong in spirit as I was in my arms and back. It would be sin indeed to say He was mistaken, but I could not see how it could be so. I did not feel strong in spirit, but yielding and weak.
And then, at last, Mr Anthony came home. He was thinner still, but taller, his face gone sharper in its bones and more like itself than Mr Gilbert. He had a firm decided chin and a long straight nose, and he was finer than young Mr Ambrose or the Earl's fair-haired grandson. He wore his own dark ungovernable hair tied back and not powdered, under a wide-brimmed hat, and a shirt of Italian lawn, and he rode better than he ever had before, with light hands and a straight back. I came to take his horse. The closeness of his long sinewy thighs and the smell of his journey-sweat all but undid me. I wanted to pull his boots off and hang up his hat, and make him joyously at home. But I wondered whether he had forgotten me, and whether things could ever be the same.
He looked down at me. His narrow black eyes were shadowed under his hat. I saw his mouth curve, and my heart leapt. Whatever it was he felt for me, he had not forgotten.
"I can't talk to you here," he murmured. "I'll meet you out at Leeper's Bluff at dawn tomorrow."
"That place?" I almost said. It was an ill-omened place to me. But it was what he wanted. I got through that evening somehow, and did right by the weary unfamiliar horses; but tired as I was, I could not sleep. All night his words remained with me, and the new shape of his face, that I had to reconcile in my memory with the old.
The next day, I met him there. It was easier for him to get away at dawn than it was for me, with all my duties, but for him I would have done all that and more. I stood there waiting for him. The sea charged again and again against the rocks, like a knight in an old story. The sky was a changeable colour halfway between silver-gilt and fishbones. My lover was home, and the air smelt of the deep familiar sea. I could not have been more happy.
He came to me. I watched him, my eyes drinking in the fineness of him. Broad enough shoulders for his height, and that dark ragged hair long enough to hang on his collarbones, and the way he walked lightly on the earth, all quickness and unsuspected strength. I opened my arms to him. He laid his head on my shoulder as if he would weep - though he never wept in front of me - and my arms closed around the sinewy smallness of him, and I felt as if more joy had been poured into me than I could bear.
At last he broke away. "There was a woman in Naples," he said, balancing from foot to foot like a prize-fighter, his slitted eyes assessing me.
I had always thought there must have been, and not just in Naples either. "Don't tell me you're poxed."
"I hardly could be," he said bitterly. "I couldn't do it, Joshua. There were Ambrose and Ned a room away, roistering and laughing, and her sprawled on the bed looking at me with her insolent eyes, and I felt as violent a distaste as if someone had asked me to serve the donkey at the Westbridge mill."
"I heard Mr Geoffrey did that once for a bet," I said, trying to lighten the mood.
His brows drew downward, shaggier than I remembered. "I tried again in Vienna. It was just the same. And I must marry some day and make an heir for Mariot Chase."
"Not on an Austrian harlot, surely," I said, still not understanding him.
He came to me again and took my face in his hands. "There is no one for me but you, Joshua! No one!" He flung the words into the sea-wind like a challenge. If he had been a knight of old, he could have ridden out with pennants to joust; and perhaps he would have been happier.
"There's no one for me but you, either," I said, stating the puzzled truth. "Why..."
He kissed me, forcefully, on the mouth, the first and last time he ever did. I was still thinking of that, the wonder and the beauty of such a gift, when he pressed his palms against the broadness of my chest and with all the surprising strength in that wiry young body of his he pushed me over the edge.
I saw him weep, too, afterwards, when my body was lying brown and broken amongst the surf. He sobbed aloud, and said things through his tears. Wild things; that I was a demon, an incubus, that he must be rid of me. And then he went down to the shore and washed his face in the sea, and squared his shoulders and went home to his inheritance.
After that, the time passed quickly. I saw Mr Gilbert grow gouty. I saw a tree begin to grow where John was buried, and Mr Geoffrey Marlow's new young wife came and sat under it sometimes, and played with a kitten. I saw the woman Mr Anthony brought home in triumph from a visit to Dublin with his cousins; Euphèmie Ferry, her name was, the daughter of a man called Patrick Ferry who had made his fortune in Antigua. I knew her for what she was the moment I saw her. She was tall and plump and exquisitely graceful. Her skin had a deep ivory glow to it; it was like a spoonful of molasses stirred into a bucket of hot milk. That might have come from a Spanish grandmother as she claimed, but her lovely noble out-thrust profile of nose and cheeks and lips had not, and nor had her eyes.
My God, her eyes. I had never seen such on a human creature. They were large and round and a little protruding, like my own; but where mine were brown, hers were golden. Great shining lamps of gold. I looked at her languidly greeting Mrs Clarissa, and wondered which should have the mastery, that iron kitten or that great sugar panther.
In the end, they came to a hard-fought peace treaty over her firstborn daughter, born the year Mr Gilbert took to his bed. I do not know whether she was Mr Anthony's or someone else's; I never spied on their bedchamber. Her son Mr Patrick was born three years later and married a Northumberland cousin, so they were Merricks again by then, one way or another.
It was Mr Patrick's grandson, another Mr Anthony, who ordered the chapel painted; a wild display of gold and palm-leaf green and rich cinnabar red, the colours of my livery in the portrait with the pineapple, which has been varnished and varnished again until you can barely see my face in the gloom.
I remain here. I do not know whether this is my Purgatory or something else, but I know that God is gracious. I believe I am waiting for Mr Anthony. He was a murderer, but if I have forgiven him surely Our Lord can do no less. I walk the gallery outside his bedroom, and I wait. Every night I walk it; twenty steps, and six, and then I run.
He will come back to me. Perhaps he will have the same dark clever eyes, slitted against a wind that no one else ever seemed to feel.
Or perhaps his eyes will be as golden as Mrs Euphèmie's.
The Trennels and Mariot Chase settings belong to the estate of Antonia Forest, as do the Merrick and Marlow families. It shouldn't need saying, but please note I do not endorse all the attitudes expressed by characters in this fic.
Many thanks to jediowl for beta-ing!
Sugar
John over at the stables at Trennels New House remembers the kingdom over the great devouring sea, but I do not. His name is not really John, but mine is really Joshua. I was named for Joshua Marlow, the master of Trennels, when he gave me to Mrs Clarissa. Mr Gilbert said that it was a funny way of thanking him for settling that debate about the winter wheat out of court and Mr Anthony said they should have called me Oronooko.
"But he was an Indian savage, was he not, my dear?" asked Mrs Clarissa, looking up from the apron she was embroidering. It was made of material so fine that I was not sure it was cloth at all. Perhaps it was some rarefied form of paper, or spun sugar, or some other commodity that lived in locked boxes towards the front of a house.
"No, he was an African prince," said Mr Anthony, capering from foot to foot. He was not dressed half as well as I was, which surprised me, as I had thought the strange clothes I was wearing must be what the Quality wore and I dressed so to placate them, like an orphan lamb in another lamb's skin. But no lamb that I ever heard of was put into tight pink satin breeches and a starched frilled shirt too short in the sleeves.
Mr Gilbert looked at them over his spectacles. When I first met Mr Gilbert I thought he was always serious and rather frightening, but later I came to know when he was laughing inside. Mr Anthony knew when he was laughing inside all the time; sometimes, when Mr Anthony was young, they were not so much like father and son as the same person at different ages who happened somehow to live in the same house. When Mr Gilbert told me the old catch about the priest who bought the skull of St. Peter for his church and then went back the next year to the same seller and bought the skull of St. Peter as a child, it reminded me so much of him and Mr Anthony that I wondered whether either of them could be a saint, and whether I was very evil and had been put into the story as the saint's dark mirror.
"Joshua is not an African prince. He was born in the back kitchen of Joshua Marlow's house in Bristol. And I still think you would do better to settle on another name, my dear." He bowed gravely to Mrs Clarissa, who bent her head with equal gravity in return and made her gold ringlets and the ribbons on her cap dance. I had never seen anything like it. I could not decide whether it was all some elaborate cloth trimmed with the ringlets, or all growing from her head, ribbons, lace and all. "At least until our neighbour is Sir Joshua, as I dare say he will be any time these five years, and that gives us a way of distinguishing them."
"But Joshua may be grown too tall for a pageboy in five years!" said Mrs Clarissa with a pout. She tried to ruffle my hair but instead drew her hand back with a sharp little exclamation and said that I must have a turban.
"More and more like Joshua Marlow, if you count that odd Indian cap he wears in place of a wig," observed Mr Gilbert lightly. "Do give it up, madam, and call him Caesar or Pompey. Or make him Anthony's companion, and call him Bassanio."
Mrs Clarissa smiled as if she did not understand the joke and was a little angry that it had been made at all. She held out her hand to me. "What did they call you in Bristol, Joshua?" she asked, looking on me so kindly that I would have done anything for her, she was so fine.
"Boy," I said, and stared down at the turned-up toes of the strange Ottoman slippers I was wearing and felt all kinds of a fool. The slippers hurt my feet, and the unfamiliar stiff sash hurt my belly, and the silk breeches were too tight and made me feel as if I needed to make water though I could not tell how that was to be arranged as I did not know where the breeches unbuttoned.
"Well, that will not do at all. Dulcia's spaniel is called Boy."
"And I think it's stupid, too, he's not a poodle," said Mr Anthony bumptiously, and his father smiled and frowned at him to be quiet.
I could not stop looking at Mrs Clarissa. Mr Gilbert was not so strange, because I had seen Mr Joshua and his sons coming to the Bristol house sometimes. Mostly what I saw of them was either their heads from a window or their feet under a door, but still, he had the right kind of wig and the right shoes. Mr Anthony was a little strange, because I had not quite realised that one of the Quality could be a boy and smaller than me. Mr Geoffrey and Mr Lawrence Marlow were called the boys sometimes, but both of them looked to me like men. There were women in the Bristol house, of course - had there not been, I would have died in a corner, I suppose, when my mother went away - but they were great blustering creatures with their hair tied up in cloths to keep out the steam and grease and soot. I missed them badly. I had not known they were loud and coarse until I saw Mrs Clarissa.
"He's my dog when Dulcia's at school in Bath," said Mr Anthony kindly. I saw that he was talking to me. I was amazed, and felt all at once as if everyone in the room could see me where I had been invisible before.
"At least he speaks English," observed Mrs Clarissa, looking at me approvingly as if I had done something clever. I thought for a moment that she was saying the dog spoke, which would be no more surprising than anything else that had happened that day. Her husband looked at her as if he was too well-bred to laugh at her, but tenderly, at the same time.
"Well, Mrs Leggatt's monkey does not," said Mrs Clarissa, stabbing the fine cloth with her needle. "Not that I see why I should call on the Leggatts or their monkey either. They were nobody before they bought the poor Marshalls' house and pulled it down and built that insufferable temple with the pillars. I am sure the Marshalls will be remembered around these parts long after the Leggatts have moved on to another grander house. Blenheim Palace next for them, I dare say, or Chatsworth."
"Why not the Tower of London?" said Mr Gilbert with a wry smile.
"Why not indeed?" agreed Mrs Clarissa vehemently, and once again I saw that smile inside Mr Gilbert like a light moving inside a window, as if he loved her but could not help but laugh at her. "I hope we shall never do anything as vulgar."
"I am sure we cannot afford it, my dear," said Mr Gilbert. I felt thirsty by then, and hoped someone would give me a pan of water, but they did not. The conversation moved away onto young Mr Geoffrey Marlow, Mr Joshua's heir, who with some of his companions had beaten a party of Frenchmen half to death in Pilgrims Lane because he thought they were Scots, and then to his brother Mr Lawrence who was believed to have distinguished himself in a naval action aboard the Princess Louisa.
I listened to that, because Mr Geoffrey gave me sixpence once in his careless kind way, and Mr Lawrence was forever coming blustering into the kitchens like a glad invasion, to lean against the dresser and kiss my mother and the other women and steal fingerfuls of any food that was going and talk to them about the sea. Thinking about the big steamy kitchen, with its polished copper pans and flag floors, and the shouting voices and the smell of boiled vegetables and slop-buckets and tallow, made my eyes well up. I did not know whether there was a kitchen at all here, or what might live in it. For all I knew I would be put into it alone and made to do all the work that had taken five servants in Bristol, and without even the handy safeguards of a chop-house three streets away or a confectioners down the hill.
The view from the small sash-window was uncomfortably bare. No river, no docks, no seagulls, no street-sellers crying their wares, no clattering carts, no sedan chairs going crabwise half in the street and half off it, no church spire except a small one very far away. Outside everything was green and that was strange. In here everything was made of spindly gilt and upholstered in pale blue with a shadowy shining flower-pattern, and that was strange too. Whenever I had peeped into the rooms of the Bristol house where Mr Joshua and his sons lived, they had been full of red Turkey carpets and plaster busts, and smelt of stale tobacco.
"He is tired, poor boy," said Mr Gilbert, putting a hand on my shoulder. "If he has delighted you enough - " I looked under my lashes at Mrs Clarissa, and did not think she seemed delighted - "I shall ring for the steward to show him where he is to sleep."
"Find out whether he can serve tea," said Mrs Clarissa. "It will be a great labour if I have to teach him." I knew nothing about tea except that the leaves were washed and used again, and after that a man in a threadbare long coat came to the door and bought them from the cook along with various fatty-smelling and clandestine parcels. "And tell Flyte he is to have a turban."
"I'd like to see Flyte in a turban. It might fit better than his wig," said Mr Anthony pertly. "I think his wig is made of dead mice, sewn on in rows above his ears."
"It is Joshua who is to have the turban," said Mrs Clarissa reprovingly, and so my name was decided.
I first met John two summers later, when I was trusted enough to follow Miss Dulcia down the lane to Trennels New House to beg a recipe for rhubarb wine from the housekeeper and have tea in the still-room. I was not very good at holding the parasol over Miss Dulcia's head, as she was much taller than I was and the parasol had a long wobbly bamboo handle. The air was very still and very hot, and felt silky on my skin.
I did not know Miss Dulcia well. I never did; she was at school in Bath for most of the year, and then she married a distant cousin and went to live in Northumberland. She was never unkind to me; it was simply that we had nothing particularly to do with each other, any more than either of us had to do with the sweating men we occasionally saw going about their incomprehensible country business in the hedgerows. I was still, then, a town child reluctantly transplanted; and whilst I came to learn about horses, I never knew much about the tenant-farmers except as an alien horde who invaded the house twice a year by license, once at Christmas and once at the rent-audit, to eat at long tables and drink and dance. One of them opened the dancing each year with Mrs Clarissa, by custom, and his wife or daughter with Mr Gilbert, and then once they had drunk and danced their fill they were gone again out into the night for another half-year.
Trennels New House stood in front of us, a fine large house that looked all of a piece, like the new public rooms in Bristol, and not at all like Mariot Chase with all its chimneys and pitched rooves crowding together. Miss Dulcia put her chin in the air and ascended the steps. The doors of Trennels were opened for her by a solemn manservant in Mr Joshua Marlow's livery; it was a shock to me to see it, and to realise that Mr Joshua's households had gone on in quite a settled way without me all the while I was gone.
Miss Dulcia shooed me off round the back to the stables, saying that the housekeeper would not want me in her room. I do not know why, though I suspect a misdemeanour on the part of Mrs Leggatt's monkey, to whom everyone compared me, even though it died the first winter I was at Mariot Chase.
The stables were large and unfamiliar, but I saw the horse called The Turk who belonged to Mr Geoffrey and who I had seen sometimes in Bristol, and that made me feel it was a friendly place even though The Turk was vast and supercilious and Mr Geoffrey took great pleasure in telling everyone what a brute he was. And then I found John. He was short and bow-legged, with a hard grim face with lines that looked as if they had been stitched into it; age-lines, but knife-lines as well, carved into his cheeks, he told me, when he became a man. His skin was much darker than mine, plum-dark where the sun burnt it and ash-dark the rest, but his hair was just the same as mine though his was grey as pewter halfway through the polishing.
He spoke English - like me, and unlike the monkey and the dog - but his voice had the tone in it that I remembered from the oldest woman in Mr Joshua's Bristol kitchen, the woman who sat by the fire with her tiny hands flat on her knees and looked round the room and ruled it. It was as different to English voices as poured molasses from sprinkling sugar. His name was not really John. He told me what it was, and I heard then clearly the language he had grown up speaking, that he had made an English out of in much the same way that Miss Dulcia made a painting out of dyed birds' feathers in Bath, but it was not English nor a painting really. He tried to teach me his name but I could never say it. I asked him to give me a real name but he said he could not, I was not a man yet, and in any case it was my father's business.
I had been secretly wondering whether John could be my father, since he looked as much like me as Mr Gilbert looked like Mr Anthony. I must have shown my dismay, for he gave me some tack to rub and told me the way of cleaning it properly, and explained a little more, saying that my father should give me my grandfather's name.
"My name is Joshua," I said uncertainly.
"Ah," said John, and said no more about it, but talked to me of a new horse coming who was The Turk's half-brother, and of the widow in Bristol who Mr Geoffrey had been courting, but Mr Geoffrey preferred to spend his time in taverns and at the races and in the end she'd upped and married someone else. A harried-looking girl came running out looking for me, and I was given a basket that smelt enticingly of plums and cheesecake which I had to manage as best I could as well as the parasol all the way home.
I often went to see John, when I could, after that, and he must have told someone that I had an aptitude for horses; for I found myself promoted to postillion as well as page-boy and given a different livery including neither sash nor turban but a wig that I was told I must set myself with soap and then come to the steward's room to see it powdered. I remember sitting hunched on the box all through a very long and rainy journey to Colebridge with soap and flour dripping into my mouth, thinking of nothing but how miserable I was, and how the boy who came running out of the inn to take the horses thought I was a piebald ghost.
John talked to me sometimes about his homeland; not all at once, but in small pieces here and there, though I always wanted more. He was forever saying that the trees were not like our trees, or the food not like our food, which was most frustrating for me as I wanted to know what they were like. "Was it hot?" I asked him.
"A man can bear heat better in his own home than he can anywhere else," he said with a scowl, and took me on his knee and told me about a great beast that lurked in the sugary dark amongst the cane in the island plantations, and ate men who were so tired they walked into its mouth. I leaned against his chest and sucked my thumb, comforted with horrors.
The year I turned ten Mr Gilbert hired a painter. He painted Miss Dulcia looking out of a window and holding a rose in her hand; that was cheaper than the others, because, I supposed, he didn't have to pay out for all the paint to show the broad masses of her skirts. He painted Mr Anthony sitting on a square sideways-on pony, and Mrs Clarissa in a chair with Mr Gilbert standing behind her. I was to stand to the other side and back a few paces, in my livery, and hold a pineapple, though I never held any such thing before or since.
It was a stupid-looking portrait when I finally saw it hung in the long saloon; he had the look of buried amusement in Mr Gilbert's unhandsome short-nosed face right, and the bright polished beauty of Mrs Clarissa, even now that she had taken to tying her cap under her chin to hide the softness there, and her ringlets had turned silver-gold; but why Mr Gilbert and Mrs Clarissa should be sitting in a great gilt chair out in the middle of a misty park that looked like nothing on the Mariot Chase estate or out of it I could not tell you, nor why there should be sixty yards of crimson velvet cascading down - out of a tree, I suppose - behind Mr Gilbert's shoulder. Nor could I see why either of them should be about to say 'Joshua, bring me my pineapple.' But there it was; and it was greatly admired.
I suppose Mr Gilbert had some money that year, as he bought The Turk from Mr Geoffrey. It was supposed to be a commission for a cousin of his by the name of Ambrose Merrick, who had a large estate in Ireland, but somehow or other when Mr Gilbert saw The Turk he remained in our stables, and it was Kingcup who was sent to Ireland instead. I don't know why Mr Gilbert was involved in any of it; from all I heard in the stables they had better horses than we did in Ireland anyway.
Mr Anthony and I could quite well have gone on being strangers who lived in the same house. There were other boys our age about who neither of us had anything to do with; the boy who turned the spit, the boy who attended to Mr Gilbert's dogs, the French boy who attended on Mr Lebecq who was entered on the household register as 'librarian' but was really the chaplain, the estate steward's ruddy-faced eldest son William Priest who both of us separately envied for his brisk understanding of his father's business. No doubt I would have cared as little for Mr Anthony as I did for Miss Dulcia if Mr Gilbert had not taken it into his head in my thirteenth year that my soul should be saved.
Mrs Clarissa, who took only a lazy interest in other peoples' souls, said that that was all very well but she did not know that she could spare me; but then she thought that I would look very well assisting at Mass. Mr Gilbert could not square it with his soul that I should do so only by rote, and so he said that I should prepare for First Communion along with Mr Anthony and he would instruct us both in Latin himself.
I was already two people - one in the household and another in the stables, with a certain extra part to the stable person, like a vestigial finger, whenever I was with John. Now I became three; a scholar, also, sharing Mr Anthony's lessons, as William Priest and his brother Jacob had for a few years when they were learning their letters. I had no letters and was starting straight out on Latin and Greek, and I kept trying to write them in the wrong alphabets with the pen squared off in my hand as if it were a chisel until Mr Anthony showed me how.
I felt like a great looby squashing myself into a little desk, which Mr Gilbert said had been part of the schoolroom at Mariot Chase since some ancestor or other of his called Ambrose, like the cousin in Ireland. It certainly looked dark and inky enough. Mr Anthony looked dark and inky too, his thin dark brows drawing together over his thin dark eyes. He had a quick face. It was quick to turn from fine-bread-white in winter to a clear freckly brown half-way to the colour of mine in summer, and quick to turn back again, and quick with all its expressions. I heard he had all but driven William and Jacob Priest out with his wild antics, and I was afraid, even though I was bigger than him by then and stronger. I looked as if I had two or three years over him, though Mr Gilbert thought we were the same age. And yet there he was asking bright sharp questions about Hesiod, and there I was unable to reckon or make my letters and folded like an outsize quilt into the little desk.
Mr Gilbert treated us both with exactly the same grave courtesy when he was teaching us Latin and Greek or reading to us from Shakespeare. Mr Lebecq taught Mr Anthony alone and behaved, whenever he noticed me at all, as if I had just come in on some errand from Mrs Clarissa, to offer a glass of elderflower cordial or seek a lost handkerchief. Mr Flyte the house steward, who was supposed to teach me to read and reckon, gave me an old cracked hornbook and set me copying from it, and went off about his own affairs, only coming back to beat me when he was out of humour.
It was on one of these occasions that Mr Anthony came into the classroom and found me. He was carrying a vase of flowers, from his sister, no doubt. He put them down on the high panelled-in windowsill and came and sat by me.
I looked up at him under my arm, miserable, and thinking he might well beat me too. Mr Geoffrey had beaten a tutor of his near to dying once and the man had sued Mr Joshua for throwing him out onto the street without the rest of the quarter's pay. Mr Anthony perched on the desk and looked at me alertly like a bird.
"That's not the way," he said. "You great fool. Has no one shown you how to hold a pen?"
"I suppose you hold it like anything else," I muttered ungraciously.
"Well, that's nonsense, isn't it? You'd hold a horse's foot differently than you would an egg."
"I wouldn't be helping to shoe an egg," I said, more ungraciously still.
"You're not shoeing that paper, either." He reached down and unfolded my fingers with his own strong clever small ones - brown fingers, for it was summer, thin and spare with almost no flesh to them at all but on the pads of the fingers. "Here. Take it like this and it won't sputter so."
I don't believe anyone ever uttered their thanks more ungraciously than I did mine; but he was right, and it came more easily. "Father says you're clever," he said, watching me still under those brows like lines drawn with a new quill. "More like Lawrence than Geoffrey."
"Is Mr Lawrence clever?" I asked, not caring much if he was. Mr Geoffrey was not, so people said, but he had the same sound hard-headed sense about making money that his father did, and the same knack of knowing which tide would bring success and plenty, and which only a long windless spell of no news, and then a sad third-hand tale of a foundered ship and all hands and all profit lost. I stared at the hornbook. "They all just look like pothooks to me, Mr Anthony. What letter's that at the beginning?"
"That's Our Lord's cross. It isn't a letter."
"I'm cross and all," I said, weary with the whole fidgety business of it. He laughed and I laughed too; and there we both were, acquainted.
And so my soul was saved. I never had a chance at any other religion. For that I am grateful, of course, Our Lord's teaching being the truth and the road to Heaven; but I think sometimes about John's religion, and it makes me feel as I did when John told me his true name; as if I had lost something that I never knew I had.
John only talked to me once about how they prayed in the country where he was born. I thought he must be a Mussulman and started showing off by telling him things that Mr Anthony had told me about their ways. I was meaning only to be complimentary - telling about their cleanliness and the chivalry of Saladin, and how they'd preserved the texts of the Greek masters - but John stopped telling me about his religion and never spoke to me of it more.
I pestered him to tell me again, but he would not. I wanted to save his soul, by making sure he was a Christian, but also I wanted to hear again about the ways he had learnt as a boy. Sometimes, in a hot summer, or in the cold of winter that crept into my bones, I could feel the heat and the expanses of that land pressing softly against me like a great cat passing; and I could hear that distant sea on distant shores.
John never came to care for the country around Mariot Chase and Trennels New House. It would always be alien to him, that supple green land, its rising and falling as neat and proportionate as the curve of the small of a man's back. I felt as if perhaps it should be an alien land to me too. Mr Gilbert often looked at me over his half-moon spectacles when he read 'How shall we sing the Lord's songs in a strange land?' But I sang no songs at all, since my voice broke early, and wherever my mother and father came from I did not think it was either Israel or Babylon.
Winters and summers passed. Miss Dulcia married, and passed out of our lives except for an occasional month-long visit full of complaints and tumbling children and strange brusque servants with accents none of us could understand. Mr Lebecq caught a cough and died of it, and Mr Gilbert did not think it safe to replace him. He argued with Mrs Clarissa about it. Mr Anthony and I heard their voices, creeping out from under the library door with the candlelight. Mrs Clarissa, who was born in Southampton and met Mr Gilbert in Bath, had become more wedded to the family traditions than her husband, and was insisting that the Merricks had always had a chaplain, and Mr Gilbert was saying that it was too much of a risk with things as they were.
"What things?" I asked Mr Anthony.
"Oh, the French and the Duke of Newcastle and so on," he said, not making anything any clearer as far as I was concerned. "Isn't it cold?"
His body pressed against mine in the dark. I felt a very pleasant tightening in my breeches, and a strong awareness of exactly where in the dark he began and ended. I knew, of course, what men and women did; and men and men, sometimes, since I had lived for long enough in the draughty attic barracks with the footmen. I thought they did it because it was the right time of year, like horses, or to settle who was the master, or because they had nothing better to do. I had not realised how much it could be a matter of need. The need of him flowed in all my veins like hot sugared rum in the blood. The whip-thin strength of his bony shoulders and back, the new-grass smell of him. It was sin, I thought, but how could it be sin, when it was through him that I had come to the love of God?
He began to explain it. I was listening only a little to the words, and mostly to the rise and fall of his voice, and imagining the sweet rise and fall of his pale-skinned throat also, until he said something that puzzled me about the French making alliance with the Russians. "I know the French uphold the true religion, but do the Russians?" I asked him. "I thought Mr Gilbert said they did not."
"No, they don't," he said, pleased to have a chance to trot out his cleverness, and started talking to me about the Council of Nicaea until Mr Gilbert came suddenly out of the study and drove us both away to our beds.
I loved Mr Anthony all that year, sullenly, unhopefully. Sometimes I did small things for the love of him, like sharpening his pens, or saying that it was me who took the young colt out without leave and taking a beating for it, and sometimes I hunched my shoulder up and would not talk to him, or, worse, took advantage of my place as a servant to go places that he could not without making everyone stare and bustle and see what he wanted.
"Joshua," he said eventually, in his coaxing voice, when we were in the cupboard getting candles. "Why are you angry with me?"
"I'm not angry with you," I said, holding the ladder resentfully steady.
"You are," he persisted. "What is the matter with you? Are you crossed in love?"
I was. I was crossed and re-crossed like a poor relation's letter, and love had written itself on every spare corner of me. "Of course I'm not," I said angrily.
"Is it Dulcia's nursery-maid? I saw the way she was looking at you."
"I thought she just had a squint," I said honestly. "And I couldn't tell whether she was asking me to pass the bread or what my opinion was on the Prince of Wales' mistress, that barbarous way of speaking she had."
He came down the ladder with an armful of candles, and I tried hard not to look at the curve of his backside in his breeches, which was difficult enough with it swinging around almost in my face. He put the candles down, and slid an arm around my shoulder, and looked up at me wheedlingly, the way he sometimes did with Mr Gilbert. "Won't you tell me, Joshua?"
"I can't," I said gruffly. "It's sin."
"Sin is only our own misunderstanding of what God wants from us," he said. I couldn't tell whether he'd read it somewhere or worked it out for himself. "I thought you'd always be my friend, Joshua. Like Nisus and Euryalus, or... or Absalom and Achitophel."
"I think they only come together in a poem," I said, not sure, because I hadn't read it. "You take the candles down to your father in the chapel. I have to go and see about the horses."
I shouldered past him out of the cupboard and took a brusque joy in it; partly because I had hurt him, and partly because my skin had brushed against his and felt burnished from the touch.
The next day, I did something very stupid. I let The Turk kick me. I knew horses too well, usually, to let anything like that happen, and I knew The Turk better than most; I knew that he was aggrieved by the smell of Mrs Clarissa's very new, very chancy ginger mare, and I knew better than to come up on him by that quarter, whether he was aggrieved or not. But that day I was busy and clumsy and self-absorbedly angry with the world and everything in it, as lumbering great boys sometimes are. I believe I saw his head come round, and the look in his eye that was not so much malicious as knowing; I believe I knew he would kick me, and half wanted it, to prove how out of sorts with me the whole of God's Creation was.
Damned if I would have let him if I'd known how much it would hurt. I bruised my head so hard the stable roof spun, and I heard the apothecary say to Mr Gilbert later that my sight was despaired of. I broke my leg, and was confined to bed for a long tail-end of winter and then a long spring, with goose-grease and Mrs Flyte's kind clucking attentions. Mr Gilbert came to read to me often, and redoubled his attempts to make me a Latinist.
"But what will he do with the learning, my dear?" I heard Mrs Clarissa ask him once.
"Teach children - catalogue rare plants - play Othello on the stage," said Mr Gilbert lightly. I thought at the time that he was flippant because he had not thought about my future. Now I think it was because he had given it thought, and could find no answer. I was angry with the world and my place in it, and The Turk, and my own sweaty bed.
And then Mr Anthony came to me. It was a spring night, and my candle had been snuffed out long before. At first I could not sleep in the stillroom where my sickbed had been set up, because I was used to the companionable sounds of the footmen snoring and shifting about in their dreams and doing the things that men do in the dark. But I became used to solitude, and company woke me. Something tugged at my sheet. I thought it must be the housekeeper's cat. "Be off with you, George," I said sleepily.
"Who's George?" asked Mr Anthony.
I was awake all at once. "What's the matter?"
He climbed nimbly in beside me. I felt my skin quiver at the touch of his warm sparse flesh, all along my flanks and my back. He put a hand out and traced the outline of my mouth, the generous plump shape I had always been a little ashamed of because there was nothing like it among anyone else I knew here except John. I lay quiet under his hand, afraid lest he should take offence and be gone. His hand traced its path down over my jaw and my quivering throat. Still I said nothing.
"You'll let this George have you and you won't let me?" It was an ugly phrase, have you, but not ugly in his mouth; I knew he was only saying it because other softer words were impossible, and would make him hate himself. His hand spread itself, greedily, and rode its path down lower over my breast and my belly. "Do you know what you've been doing to me?"
I knew now, with him so close-packed behind me. And so would he know about me if his hand cared to roam a little lower. I thought about my people, chained in rows on their sides with their knees bent so that they could be stacked the closer, and did not think that any of them, even after an eight months voyage, could know their fellow as well as this. I was a child and a fool, of course, as only a boy who thinks he is a man can be a child and a fool; but that is what I thought then, and I must tell it truthfully.
"Are you accusing me of slaking my lusts on the housekeeper's cat?" I asked him, my breath coming sharply. "There is no one but you. There never was."
His arm tightened at the elbow and hugged me close, and I felt his cheek pressed against my shoulder-blade, prickling me, where he had just begun to have himself shaved. He pressed a kiss into my willing skin. He could not have kissed me, I think, if it had not been dark, and I facing in the other direction.
"You are like my brother," he said fiercely. "You are my brother."
His hand found its mark and I gasped, and I almost said that he wouldn't do that to his brother, but I had the sense - somehow - to know that I must accept whatever way he found of explaining himself, if I wanted him at all.
And I did. Lord Jesus Christ, I did.
And so we were brothers.
We would go riding together, out over the Crowlands; it was easier for me to ride than to walk, because my leg healed a little crooked and I limped the rest of my days. It saved me from being a page any more, at any rate. Mrs Clarissa did not want a page with a limp. Nor did she particularly want a page who was tall and broad enough to fit into a footman's livery and had a boy's usual troubles about the skin. I was promoted to Mr Anthony's groom, and had a fine new set of clothes and a new bed, as well, over the stables, where they played the usual tricks on the newcomer, but where I settled down well enough. I thought we would be happy for the rest of our days.
And then the letter came from Mr Ambrose Merrick in Ireland, saying that now the war was over for the time being, and Austria and Prussia and France glaring at each other like dogs in their own kennels rather than fighting in the common yard, he was sending his son, another Ambrose, to tour through France and Italy and Greece, and pick up what he could of culture and polish and perhaps a few paintings or statues. From what I'd heard of the younger Mr Ambrose, he was another one like Mr Geoffrey Marlow, and any culture or polish would have its work cut out to stick to him. He was travelling with an old priest and the grandson of an Irish earl, and they wanted another along to make up the numbers, and Mr Ambrose the elder had thought of Mr Anthony.
We were joyous at first, Mr Anthony and I. We lay out on the Crowlands and baked in the summer heat, and made grand sprawling plans. We talked of crossing the Alps, and sailing on Homer's wine-dark sea. Mr Anthony thought that Mr Ambrose and the earl's grandson might think it a fine joke if I dressed up and pretended to be one of them, the King of Ethiop's son making a Grand Tour like any other young gentleman of fashion.
"In whose clothes?" I asked, stretching my arms above my head and yawning. The sky was a great blue canopy over our heads, stretching away forever. "I won't fit into yours."
"Oh, well, Ambrose was always the size of a Guardsman. Or perhaps the earl's grandson is a Goliath too. Or we can buy clothes for you in Paris on tick."
"Well, even if Mr Ambrose and his friend Mr Fitz-whatsit will play along, I'm sure the priest won't."
"He'll do what Mr Fitz-whatsit tells him," said Mr Anthony, rolling over onto his belly on the small yellow grass. It crunched underneath him. "He knows who pays his wages."
With that I had to be content. It was a favourite fantasy of his, that I was secretly an African prince, and he, sometimes, a poor castaway on my shores. I wasn't fond of it. It was at once too apposite to my own experiences and too far away from them.
That was the last day of summer. When we returned to Mariot Chase, it was to a small trickling rain, and to Mr Gilbert's decree that Mr Anthony would need a manservant more than he needed a groom. He would take Sellars, his father's steady old valet; he would share Mr Ambrose's groom, and there was no money for any further expense.
Mr Anthony pleaded with him, but he was as obdurate as only a mild man could be. Mr Anthony was to go, and I was to stay. We were divided like the sheep and the goats.
That autumn it rained forever. The trees turned brown like fruit left in a bowl, and drooped. The rivers were like brown distended snakes. Once in September they broke their banks and the church bell was rung to warn the villagers of Westbridge of a flood. I was made merely one of the grooms again, among men who had disliked my being set above them before and now thought it only a proper attention to the balance of things that they should show me my place. In October John died, and was laid to rest in the ice-hard ground at the back of the Trennels New House stables, the Protestant rector having refused him burial in the churchyard.
I came back angry from watching him put in the grave without even a cross to mark the place. I wished I had known what his own people did to mark a man's passing, even though they were pagans and in Hell, or Mussulmen and subject to whatever arrangements God made for those. On my return, I met Mr Anthony crossing the stable-yard at Mariot Chase, so fine in his new green coat with its great brocaded cuffs, and his dark eyes and his powdered hair.
"What's amiss?" he said, but I was too angry to talk. It began to rain again. My anger became lust, as everything was prone to become lust around him. I pushed him into the tackroom, through the door and up against the wall with my hands covering his wrists, and had a long hard kiss from him with his face lifted to mine. I did not usually glory in being taller and stronger than him; he was all that was perfect, and I lumpen and overgrown. But that day I wanted him to know my strength. I do not know why. He broke from me at last and rubbed his lips, looking at me ruefully. Outside the rain clattered down around us until it almost sounded like a scream.
"It's my father, isn't it?" His body was still prisoned between mine and the stone wall, but there was no fear in him, not of me. "I don't know why he won't let me take you. Well, I do - he's making me take old Sellars because he's steady, and he thinks we'd be a pair of rackety blades and you wouldn't have the sense to make me wrap up warm if I took a cold. But I'll be home in a year. Eighteen months. This time two years, for sure, I'll be home."
Two years was as much of a desert to me as Trennels New House had been to John. "Run away with me," I said desperately. "To Bristol, London, anywhere. Anywhere we can be together."
His sharp dark eyes narrowed. "We'd never manage it."
"You mean you want the Alps and the wine-dark sea, and the carriage with the Earl's livery, more than you want me," I said bleakly. "I'm not angry. I would want it too."
"If you were an African prince." He was at that again. I turned my head away, not wanting to hear it. His voice turned velvety, and I could no more resist it than The Turk could resist the rackety ginger mare when she was in heat, even though the rest of the time he couldn't stand the smell of her. "Would you give up your apes and peacocks for me?"
Oh, I was lost. I turned again to him fiercely. "Every single ape," I said, punctuating it with kisses, "and every last peacock." He would submit to be kissed; respond to it, like a drowning man drinking air from another man's mouth; but he would never kiss me. It was that way in bed, too, when we ever managed to find a bed, which was not very often in a household so full of bustling harmonious activity.
"Run away with me," I said again. "I'll find us horses and clothes, things that won't be missed. All you need bring is yourself and some money. I'll meet you by Leeper's Bluff, the day before you're supposed to start out to meet Mr Ambrose the younger and Mr Fitz-whatsit. Maybe we can even meet them in Paris."
"I'd sooner have you than Sellars," he admitted. "But we'll run through the money I have soon enough, and the rest is arranged to come from cousin Ambrose, in exchange for some rents or other on the London house."
"I'll work for you. I'll keep you," I said desperately. I realised I had said the wrong thing; a frown swept over his face like a storm over the Crowlands. He liked to think of himself at the mercy of an African tyrant, but he did not like the cold thought of being kept. "Or we'll both find work. Me in a stables somewhere, you as a secretary or a tutor."
We both heard footsteps in the main stable block. Cheerful, open footsteps and the rattle of tack; the footsteps of someone who did not need to hide in corners and beg to be part of their lover's arrangements. We jumped apart. The head groom came in. "Are you thinking of riding out today, sir?" he asked Mr Anthony courteously.
"Not in this rain," he said. "But the plan we were speaking of, Joshua? To ride to Leeper's Bluff once more before I go? We must certainly do that."
And he closed one eye as he went out into the yard, the long lashes lying against his cheek, and winked at me.
It took me all my guile, a quality of which I never had much, to spirit away shirts for him from the back of cupboards, and harder-wearing clothes for me that looked as little as possible like livery. Soap, salt, tea, a tinder box - all the things he would not think of. I thought long and hard about Mr Gilbert's gold-chased pistols, but I could not bring myself to steal from him. The rest did not feel like stealing; it was only taking what Mr Anthony would have been given in any case. The pistols would have been. I cannot explain it, and I am aware that one day I will have to account for it all before God. Perhaps it will be soon.
I managed to get the horses away. There was a bad moment when the head groom called to me, but he only wanted to tell me that he was glad he had finally managed to beat the sulks out of me. I grinned and nodded and tipped my broad-brimmed hat to him. And then I was gone out of the gates, riding one horse and leading the other, and grateful for my escape.
I waited there in the rain all day. The waves pounded against the base of the dark cliff beneath me. The horses showed their disapproval of the rain and the boggy ground, though I did my best for them with blankets and the cover of trees. The saddlebags grew water-wet and heavy. The tea and salt would be ruined. All my careful preparations. All for nothing. He did not come.
It was late at night when I got back, to a pained inquisition from the head stableman and a beating for troublemaking and insolence; and then a horrible interview with Mr Gilbert, which was very much worse. I was halfway back to my bed above the stables when it occurred to me that I was under the staircase that led to Mr Anthony's bedroom. I was not much in there; it was too dangerous, but I knew the place as well as any man could. It was where I always thought of him sleeping, the thought like a private talisman clutched in the hand, before I slept myself.
No one was on the stairs. They were dark, but I knew they were hung with paintings; the portrait of a young Mr Anthony on his horse, a small picture of some other Anthony in a ruff, and a set - not very good - that had belonged to Mr Gilbert's father, of different birds poking around in cloudy classical ruins. The chickens were all right but I didn't believe for a minute in the flamingo. I climbed the stairs. I knew his door so well. It was just like every other door in the passage, but beatified, for having Mr Anthony behind it.
I counted the steps towards his room. Twenty paces, with my wet shoes squelching, and my limp getting worse from a day in the rain.
A door opened further along. I froze still in place. Uncertain candlelight spilt out on the floorboards. And then the door closed again. I walked quietly for six more paces, almost to his door. There was no light there. I could not hear his breathing.
I realised then that perhaps it was a better and a more healing thing, not to know. There was a side door at the bottom of the next staircase; I could be out of there, and back to the stables, before I changed my mind. And so I ran as if I saw the great gates of Heaven in front of me, impossibly tall and vast, and the light of God flowing out from between them, and the hordes of Hell behind me snapping at my heels.
He left the next day. I rubbed through the next two years somehow; tending to The Turk and the rest of the stable business, avoiding Mr Gilbert's too-kindly eye. He and Mrs Clarissa took to spending much of the year in London and I was glad of it. Sometimes I went down to the tavern in Westbridge to spend my pay, not so much for the companionship as for the sight of other people being companionable around me. The fire was warm and the ale wasn't too bad.
Sometimes women looked kindly on me, and sometimes lickerishly, but I wanted none of them. I was not made that way, not I. I wondered sometimes how God could have made me this way and then made what I was a sin; and it came to me that perhaps He had given me a harder path because He believed me as strong in spirit as I was in my arms and back. It would be sin indeed to say He was mistaken, but I could not see how it could be so. I did not feel strong in spirit, but yielding and weak.
And then, at last, Mr Anthony came home. He was thinner still, but taller, his face gone sharper in its bones and more like itself than Mr Gilbert. He had a firm decided chin and a long straight nose, and he was finer than young Mr Ambrose or the Earl's fair-haired grandson. He wore his own dark ungovernable hair tied back and not powdered, under a wide-brimmed hat, and a shirt of Italian lawn, and he rode better than he ever had before, with light hands and a straight back. I came to take his horse. The closeness of his long sinewy thighs and the smell of his journey-sweat all but undid me. I wanted to pull his boots off and hang up his hat, and make him joyously at home. But I wondered whether he had forgotten me, and whether things could ever be the same.
He looked down at me. His narrow black eyes were shadowed under his hat. I saw his mouth curve, and my heart leapt. Whatever it was he felt for me, he had not forgotten.
"I can't talk to you here," he murmured. "I'll meet you out at Leeper's Bluff at dawn tomorrow."
"That place?" I almost said. It was an ill-omened place to me. But it was what he wanted. I got through that evening somehow, and did right by the weary unfamiliar horses; but tired as I was, I could not sleep. All night his words remained with me, and the new shape of his face, that I had to reconcile in my memory with the old.
The next day, I met him there. It was easier for him to get away at dawn than it was for me, with all my duties, but for him I would have done all that and more. I stood there waiting for him. The sea charged again and again against the rocks, like a knight in an old story. The sky was a changeable colour halfway between silver-gilt and fishbones. My lover was home, and the air smelt of the deep familiar sea. I could not have been more happy.
He came to me. I watched him, my eyes drinking in the fineness of him. Broad enough shoulders for his height, and that dark ragged hair long enough to hang on his collarbones, and the way he walked lightly on the earth, all quickness and unsuspected strength. I opened my arms to him. He laid his head on my shoulder as if he would weep - though he never wept in front of me - and my arms closed around the sinewy smallness of him, and I felt as if more joy had been poured into me than I could bear.
At last he broke away. "There was a woman in Naples," he said, balancing from foot to foot like a prize-fighter, his slitted eyes assessing me.
I had always thought there must have been, and not just in Naples either. "Don't tell me you're poxed."
"I hardly could be," he said bitterly. "I couldn't do it, Joshua. There were Ambrose and Ned a room away, roistering and laughing, and her sprawled on the bed looking at me with her insolent eyes, and I felt as violent a distaste as if someone had asked me to serve the donkey at the Westbridge mill."
"I heard Mr Geoffrey did that once for a bet," I said, trying to lighten the mood.
His brows drew downward, shaggier than I remembered. "I tried again in Vienna. It was just the same. And I must marry some day and make an heir for Mariot Chase."
"Not on an Austrian harlot, surely," I said, still not understanding him.
He came to me again and took my face in his hands. "There is no one for me but you, Joshua! No one!" He flung the words into the sea-wind like a challenge. If he had been a knight of old, he could have ridden out with pennants to joust; and perhaps he would have been happier.
"There's no one for me but you, either," I said, stating the puzzled truth. "Why..."
He kissed me, forcefully, on the mouth, the first and last time he ever did. I was still thinking of that, the wonder and the beauty of such a gift, when he pressed his palms against the broadness of my chest and with all the surprising strength in that wiry young body of his he pushed me over the edge.
I saw him weep, too, afterwards, when my body was lying brown and broken amongst the surf. He sobbed aloud, and said things through his tears. Wild things; that I was a demon, an incubus, that he must be rid of me. And then he went down to the shore and washed his face in the sea, and squared his shoulders and went home to his inheritance.
After that, the time passed quickly. I saw Mr Gilbert grow gouty. I saw a tree begin to grow where John was buried, and Mr Geoffrey Marlow's new young wife came and sat under it sometimes, and played with a kitten. I saw the woman Mr Anthony brought home in triumph from a visit to Dublin with his cousins; Euphèmie Ferry, her name was, the daughter of a man called Patrick Ferry who had made his fortune in Antigua. I knew her for what she was the moment I saw her. She was tall and plump and exquisitely graceful. Her skin had a deep ivory glow to it; it was like a spoonful of molasses stirred into a bucket of hot milk. That might have come from a Spanish grandmother as she claimed, but her lovely noble out-thrust profile of nose and cheeks and lips had not, and nor had her eyes.
My God, her eyes. I had never seen such on a human creature. They were large and round and a little protruding, like my own; but where mine were brown, hers were golden. Great shining lamps of gold. I looked at her languidly greeting Mrs Clarissa, and wondered which should have the mastery, that iron kitten or that great sugar panther.
In the end, they came to a hard-fought peace treaty over her firstborn daughter, born the year Mr Gilbert took to his bed. I do not know whether she was Mr Anthony's or someone else's; I never spied on their bedchamber. Her son Mr Patrick was born three years later and married a Northumberland cousin, so they were Merricks again by then, one way or another.
It was Mr Patrick's grandson, another Mr Anthony, who ordered the chapel painted; a wild display of gold and palm-leaf green and rich cinnabar red, the colours of my livery in the portrait with the pineapple, which has been varnished and varnished again until you can barely see my face in the gloom.
I remain here. I do not know whether this is my Purgatory or something else, but I know that God is gracious. I believe I am waiting for Mr Anthony. He was a murderer, but if I have forgiven him surely Our Lord can do no less. I walk the gallery outside his bedroom, and I wait. Every night I walk it; twenty steps, and six, and then I run.
He will come back to me. Perhaps he will have the same dark clever eyes, slitted against a wind that no one else ever seemed to feel.
Or perhaps his eyes will be as golden as Mrs Euphèmie's.