Chain of Gold

She looked paler than usual. “You would not be wise to spread such rumors. Let it be, Matthew.”

“I cannot.” He started in on his coat again; oddly his hands were steady, as if anger had flattened his nerves. “Charles is a bastard, but even he doesn’t deserve—”

“Matthew,” she said, coming closer and laying her hand on his elbow. He paused in surprise, looking at her face, upturned to his. He could see that the shape of it was indeed lovely, almost doll-like in its perfection.

She stroked her hand down his sleeve. He told himself he should pull back from her, but his feet seemed rooted to the floor. It was as if he were being drawn toward her, though he hated her at the same time.

“You feel something for me now, don’t you?” said Grace. “Kiss me. I demand that you do.”

As if in a dream, Matthew reached for her. He grasped Grace’s slim waist in his hands. He pressed his hungry mouth against her lips and kissed her, and kissed her. She tasted of sweet tea and oblivion. He felt nothing, no desire, no yearning, only an empty desperate compulsion. He kissed her mouth and her cheek and she turned in his arms, still holding his wrist, her body against his—

And then she stepped back, releasing him. It was like waking from a dream.

He flinched back in horror, stumbling away from Grace. There was nothing timid in that glance, nothing of the girl with her face downcast at the ball. The color of her eyes had turned to steel.

“You—” he began, and broke off. He couldn’t say what he wanted to say: You made me do that. It was ludicrous, a bizarre abdication of personal responsibility for an even more bizarre act.

When she spoke, her voice held no emotion. Her lips were red where he had kissed her; he felt like being sick. “If you get in my way after this, if you do anything to impede my marriage to Charles, I will tell James you kissed me. And I will tell your brother, too.”

“As if they do not already know I am a terrible person,” he said, with a bravado he did not feel.

“Oh, Matthew.” Her voice was cold as she turned away from him. “You have no idea what terrible people are like.”

13 BLUE RUIN

Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew

Wanted to know what the river knew,

For they were young, and the Thames was old,

And this is the tale that the River told.

—Rudyard Kipling, “The River’s Tale”

James sat on the edge of a stone bastion atop Blackfriars Bridge, his legs dangling over the edge. The dark-jade water of the Thames flowed by below. Small rowboats and lighters chugged alongside river barges, distinguished by their characteristic red-brown sails, like splotches of blood against the cloud-darkened sky. Aboard them, men in flat caps yelled to each other through the river spray.

To the north, the dome of St. Paul’s glowed against a backdrop of thunderclouds; on the other side of the river, the Bankside Power Station puffed black smoke into the sky.

The rhythmic slap of the tidal river against the granite piers of the bridge was as familiar to James as a lullaby. Blackfriars was a special place in his family: it figured in quite a few of his parents’ stories. He usually found it comforting here. The river rolled on, regardless of the turmoil in the lives of the people who crossed the bridge or boated across the water. They could leave no real mark on the river, as their troubles left no real mark on time.

Now it was not comforting. Now he did not feel as if he could breathe. The pain he felt was physical, as if sharp steel rods had been slid through his ribs, stopping his heart.

“James?”

James glanced up. Matthew was walking toward him, his topcoat open. He was hatless, fair hair tangling in the breeze off the river, scented with coal and salt.

“I’ve been looking for you all over the City,” Matthew said, swinging himself up on the stone bastion beside James. James fought the urge to tell him to be careful. It was a long fall to the river, but Matthew’s hands were steady as he braced himself. “Tell me what happened.”

James couldn’t explain it—the choking feeling, the dizziness. He recalled his father saying that love was pain, but this felt other than pain. It felt as if he had been deprived of air almost to the point of death and now was gasping and choking on it, trying desperately to get enough into his lungs. He couldn’t find words, couldn’t do anything but lean over and put his head down on Matthew’s shoulder.

“Jamie, Jamie,” Matthew said, and his hand came up to press itself strongly against James’s back, between his shoulder blades. “Don’t.”

James kept his face pressed into the tweed of Matthew’s coat. It smelled like brandy and the Penhaligon’s cologne Matthew nicked from Charles. James knew his body was bent in a somewhat awkward way, his hand gripping Matthew’s shirtfront and his face jammed into his shoulder, but there was something about the comfort of your parabatai—no one else could give it to you, not mother or sister or father or lover. It was a transcendence of all that.

People were wont to dismiss Matthew—because of his clothes, because of his jokes, because of the way he took nothing seriously. They assumed he was liable to break, to give way when things became difficult. But he wasn’t. He was holding James up now, as he always had—and making it look easy, as he always had.

“I suppose there are a lot of useless things I could tell you,” he said in a low voice, as James drew back. “That it was probably better this happened sooner, and that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and all that. But it’s all rot, isn’t it?”

“Most likely,” said James. He was aware his hands were shaking in a way that reminded him of something. He couldn’t quite recall what. He was having trouble focusing, ideas skittering about like mice diving away from an approaching cat. “I thought my life would be one thing. Now it seems it is to be entirely different.”

Matthew screwed up his face in a way parents often found adorable. James thought it made him look like Oscar. “Believe me,” he said. “I do know how that feels.”

James was slightly surprised to hear it. He’d walked in on Matthew in compromising positions before with girls and boys, but he’d never thought Matthew’s heart was engaged with any of them.

There was Lucie, of course. But James suspected that Matthew did not love her, either, beyond the remnants of a childhood infatuation. Somewhere along the way, James sensed, Matthew had lost faith in most things. It would be easy for him to keep his faith in Lucie, but faith alone was not love.

James reached his hand into Matthew’s coat. Matthew grumbled but didn’t slap his hand away as James unbuttoned the inside pocket and drew out his parabatai’s silver flask.

“Are you sure?” said Matthew. “The last time you were feeling heartbroken, you took shots at a chandelier with a mundane gun and nearly drowned yourself in the Serpentine.”

“I wasn’t trying to drown myself,” James pointed out. “Besides, Magnus Bane saved me.”

“Don’t mention that,” said Matthew, as James uncapped the flask. “You know how angry I am about that. I idolize Magnus Bane, you had one chance to meet him, and you embarrassed us all.”

“I’m quite sure I never mentioned any of you to him,” said James, and tipped the flask back. He choked. It was blue ruin: the cheapest, harshest kind of gin. It went down like lightning. He coughed and thrust the flask away.

“Even worse,” said Matthew. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful parabatai.”

“I’m fairly sure that isn’t the original Shakespeare,” James said. “It was a good thing Bane was there,” he added. “I was in a bad state. I barely recall it. I know it was because of Grace—she had written to me to say we should cut off contact with each other. I couldn’t understand it. I went out to drink, to forget—” He broke off, shaking his head. “The next day she wrote to me again to apologize. She said she had only been frightened. I wonder now if it would have been better had things ended then.”

“We do not get to choose when in our lives we feel pain,” said Matthew. “It comes when it comes, and we try to remember, even though we cannot imagine a day when it will release its hold on us, that all pain fades. All misery passes. Humanity is drawn to light, not darkness.”

The sky was full of London’s black smoke. Matthew was a pale mark against the storm-dark sky; the bright fabric of his waistcoat shone, as did his fair hair. “Math,” James said. “I know you never liked Grace.”

Matthew sighed. “It doesn’t matter what I think of her. It never did.”

“You knew she didn’t love me,” James said. He still felt dizzy.

“No. I feared it. It is not the same. Even then, I could never have guessed what she would do. Charles will never make her happy.”

“She asked me to marry her last night—to run away and marry her in secret,” said James. “I said no. Today, she told me it had been a test. It was as if she had decided that our love was already a broken and ruined thing, and was trying to prove it.” He took a ragged breath. “But I cannot imagine loving her more than I have—more than I do.”

Matthew’s fingers whitened where he grasped the flask. After a long moment, he spoke with some difficulty. “You cannot torment yourself,” he said. “If it had not been that test, it would have been another. This is not an issue of love, but of ambition. She wishes to be the Consul’s wife. Love has no place in this plan.”

James tried to focus on Matthew’s face. It wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been. Lights danced behind his eyelids when he closed them, and his hands were still shaking. Surely this could not be from one sip of blue ruin. He knew he wasn’t drunk, but a feeling of detachment was still there. As if nothing he did now mattered. “Tell me, Matthew,” he said. “Tell me the name of the shadow that is always hanging over you. I can become a shadow. I could fight it for you.”