A Beggar’s Kingdom
Paullina Simons
How much would you sacrifice for true love? The second novel in Paullina Simons' stunning End of Forever saga continues the heartbreaking story of Julian and Josephine, and a love that spans lifetimes. Julian has travelled from the heights of joy to the depths of despair and back again. Having found his love – twice – and lost her – twice, he is resolved to continue his search and find her in the past again. Perhaps this time he can save her. But the journey is never so simple and Julian will have to decide just how much one man can sacrifice. He is willing to give up everything – but he must learn what that truly means, and how much more can be taken from you than you ever believed possible.
A BEGGAR’S KINGDOM
The second novel in the End of Forever saga
Paullina Simons
Copyright (#u07b4a1c9-e1f0-52f0-baa5-837cac4532c7)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd in 2019
This edition in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © Paullina Simons
Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Hands by Mark Owen / Trevillion Images; Icebergs on the water by Jason Hynes / Getty Images
Part title illustrations by Paullina Simons
Author photo by Paullina Simons
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007441679
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780007441686
Version: 2019-07-09
Praise for Paullina Simons (#u07b4a1c9-e1f0-52f0-baa5-837cac4532c7)
Tully
“You’ll never look at life in the same way again. Pick up this book and prepare to have your emotions wrung so completely you’ll be sobbing your heart out one minute and laughing through your tears the next. Read it and weep—literally.”
Company
Red Leaves
“Simons handles her characters and setting with skill, slowly peeling away deceptions to reveal denial, cowardice and chilling indifference … an engrossing story.”
Publishers Weekly
Eleven Hours
“Eleven Hours is a harrowing, hair-raising story that will keep you turning the pages late into the night.”
Janet Evanovich
The Bronze Horseman
“A love story both tender and fierce” (Publishers Weekly) that “recalls Dr. Zhivago.” (People Magazine)
The Bridge to Holy Cross
“This has everything a romance glutton could wish for: a bold, talented and dashing hero [and] a heart-stopping love affair that nourishes its two protagonists even when they are separated and lost.”
Daily Mail
The Girl in Times Square
“Part mystery, part romance, part family drama … in other words, the perfect book.”
Daily Mail
The Summer Garden
“If you’re looking for a historical epic to immerse yourself in, then this is the book for you.”
Closer
Road to Paradise
“One of our most exciting writers … Paullina Simons presents the perfect mix of page-turning plot and characters.”
Woman and Home
A Song in the Daylight
“Simons shows the frailties of families and of human nature, and demonstrates that there’s so much more to life, such as honesty and loyalty.”
Good Reading
Bellagrand
“Another epic saga from Simons, full of the emotion and heartache of the original trilogy. Summer reading at its finest.”
Canberra Times
Lone Star
“Another epic love story—perfect reading for a long, lazy day in bed.”
Better Reading
Dedication (#u07b4a1c9-e1f0-52f0-baa5-837cac4532c7)
To Kevin,
I can do all things through you who strengthens me.
Epigraph (#u07b4a1c9-e1f0-52f0-baa5-837cac4532c7)
“Guess I was kidding myself into believing that I had a choice in this thing, huh?”
Johnny Blaze, aka Ghost Rider
Contents
Cover (#ue720c326-9fa9-5c10-964f-1a63afc8b72e)
Title Page (#u4f85a5ad-b7f3-5d1b-a0eb-b04ce0d3b964)
Copyright
Praise for Paullina Simons
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Real Artifacts from Imaginary Places
Part One: The Master of the Mint
Chapter 1. Fighter’s Club
Chapter 2. Oxygen for Julian
Chapter 3. Silver Cross
Chapter 4. Keeper of the Brothel
Chapter 5. Lord Fabian
Chapter 6. Infelice
Chapter 7. Dead Queen, Revisited
Chapter 8. Bellafront
Chapter 9. Bill of Mortality
Chapter 10. Six Persuasions
Chapter 11. Objects of Outrage
Chapter 12. A Subject of Choice
Part Two: In the Fields of St. Giles
Chapter 13. Rappel
Chapter 14. Gin Lane
Chapter 15. Cleon the Sewer Hunter
Chapter 16. Agatha
Chapter 17. Midsummer Night’s Dream
Chapter 18. The Ride of Paul Revere
Chapter 19. Bucket of Blood
Chapter 20. The Advocate
Chapter 21. Troilus and Cressida
Chapter 22. Grosvenor Park
Chapter 23. Bowl of St. Giles
Chapter 24. Quatrang
Chapter 25. Karmadon
Chapter 26. Best Shakes in London
Chapter 27. Refugees
Part Three: Lady of the Camellias
Chapter 28. Airy’s Transit Circle
Chapter 29. The Prince of Preachers
Chapter 30. Sovereign Election
Chapter 31. The Love Story of George and Ricky
Chapter 32. Pathétique
Chapter 33. Five Minutes in China, in Three Volumes
Chapter 34. The Sublime and Beautiful
Chapter 35. My Love and I—a Mystery
Chapter 36. Foolish Mervyn and Crazy-eyed Sly
Chapter 37. The Valley of Dry Bones
Chapter 38. Ghost Rider
Chapter 39. A Mother
Chapter 40. Two Weddings
Part Four: Tragame Tierra
Chapter 41. The Plains of Lethe
Chapter 42. Masha at the Cherry Lane
Chapter 43. What Will They Care
Chapter 44. Termagant
Chapter 45. Hinewai
Chapter 46. Hula-Hoop
Chapter 47. The Igloo
Chapter 48. Door Number Two
Chapter 49. Heart of Darkness
Keep Reading …
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#u07b4a1c9-e1f0-52f0-baa5-837cac4532c7)
Real Artifacts from Imaginary Places (#u07b4a1c9-e1f0-52f0-baa5-837cac4532c7)
ASHTON STOOD, HIS BLOND HAIR SPIKING OUT OF HIS baseball cap, his arms crossed, his crystal eyes incredulous, listening to Josephine trying to sweet-talk Zakiyyah into going on Peter Pan’s Flight. Julian, Josephine, Ashton, and Z were in Disneyland, the last two under protest.
“Z, what’s not to love?” Josephine was saying. “You fly over London with Peter Pan aboard a magical pirate ship to Neverland. Come on, let’s go—look, the line’s getting longer.”
“Is it pretend fly?” asked Zakiyyah.
“No,” replied Ashton. “It’s real fly. And real London. And a real pirate ship. And definitely real Neverland.”
Zakiyyah rolled her eyes. She almost gave him the finger. “Is it fast? Is it spinny? Is it dark? I don’t want to be dizzy. I don’t want to be scared is what I’m saying, and I don’t want to be jostled.”
“Would you like to be someplace else?” Ashton said.
“No, I just want to have fun.”
“And Peter Pan’s magical flight over London doesn’t qualify?” Ashton said, and sideways to Julian added, “What kind of fun are we supposed to have with someone like that? I can’t believe Riley agreed to let me come with you three. I’m going to have to take her to Jamaica to make it up to her.”
“You have a lot of making up to do all around, especially after the crap you pulled at lunch the other week,” Julian said. “So shut up and take it.”
“Story of my life,” Ashton said.
“What kind of fun are we supposed to have with someone like that?” Zakiyyah said to Josephine. “His idea of fun is making fun of me.”
“He’s not making fun of you, Z. He’s teasing you.”
“That’s not teasing!”
“Shh, yes, it is. You’re driving everybody nuts,” Josephine said, and then louder to the men, “You’ll have to excuse her, Z is new to this. She’s never been to Disneyland.”
“What kind of a human being has never been to Disneyland?” Ashton whispered to Julian.
“That’s not true!” Zakiyyah said. “I went once with my cousins.”
“Sitting on a bench while the kids go on rides is not going to Disneyland, Z.”
Zakiyyah tutted. “Is there maybe a slow train ride?”
“How about It’s a Small World?” Ashton said, addressing Zakiyyah but facing Julian and widening his eyes into saucers. “It’s a slow boat ride.”
“That might be okay. As long as the boat is not in real water. Is it in real water?”
“No,” Ashton said. “The boat is in fake water.”
“Is that what you mean when you say he’s teasing me?” Zakiyyah said to Josephine. “You sure it’s not mocking me?”
“Positive, Z. It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears. Let’s go on It’s a Small World.”
After it got dark and the toddlers had left and the crowds died down a bit, the three of them convinced Zakiyyah to go on Space Mountain. She half-agreed but balked when she saw the four-man luge they were supposed to board. Josephine would sit in front of Julian, between his legs, and that meant that Zakiyyah would have to sit in front of Ashton, between his. “Can we try a different seating arrangement?” Z said.
“Like what?” Ashton kept his voice even.
“Like maybe the girls together and the boys together.”
“Jules, honey, what do you think?” Ashton asked, pitching his voice two octaves higher. “Would you like to sit between my legs, pumpkin, or do you want me between yours?”
“Z, come on,” Josephine said. “Don’t make that face. Ashton’s right. Get in. It’s one ride. You’ll love it. Just …”
“Instead of you sitting in front of me,” Ashton said to Zakiyyah, as cordial as could be, “would you prefer I sit in front of you?”
“You want to sit between my open legs?” Zakiyyah’s disbelieving tone was not even close to cordial.
“Just making suggestions, trying to be helpful.”
“Aside from other issues, I won’t be able to see anything,” Zakiyyah said. “You’re too tall. You’ll be blocking my view the whole ride.”
Ashton knocked into Julian as they were about to board. “Dude,” he whispered, “you haven’t told her Space Mountain is a black hole with nothing to see?”
“We haven’t even told her it’s a roller coaster,” Julian said. “You want her to go on the ride, or don’t you?”
“Do you really need me to answer that?”
They climbed in, Ashton and Julian first, then the girls in front of them. Zakiyyah tried to sit forward as much as possible, but the bench was narrow and short. Her hips fitted between Ashton’s splayed legs.
“Can you open your legs any wider?” she said.
“Said the bishop to the barmaid,” said Ashton.
“Josephine! Your friend’s friend is making inappropriate remarks to me.”
“Yes, they’re called jokes,” Ashton said.
“They’re most certainly not jokes because jokes are funny. People laugh at jokes. Did you hear anyone laughing?”
Zakiyyah sat primly, holding her purse in her lap.
Ashton shook his head, sighed. “Um, why don’t you put your bag down below, maybe hold on to the grip bars.”
“I’m fine just the way I am, thank you,” she said. “Don’t move too close.”
“Not to worry.”
They were off.
Zakiyyah was thrown backwards—into Ashton’s chest. Her hips locked inside Ashton’s legs. The purse dropped into the footwell. Seizing the handlebars, she screamed for two minutes in the cavernous dome.
When it was over, Julian helped a shaky Zakiyyah out, Josephine already on the platform, jumping and clapping. “Z! How was it? Did you love it, Z?”
“Did I love being terrified? Why didn’t you tell me it was a rollercoaster in pitch black?”
They had a ride photo made of the four of them: Zakiyyah’s mouth gaping open, her eyes huge, the other three exhilarated and laughing. They gave it to her as a keepsake of her first time on Space Mountain, a real artifact from an imaginary place.
“Maybe next time we can try Peter Pan,” Ashton said as they were leaving the park after the fireworks.
“Who says there’s going to be a next time?” said Zakiyyah.
“Thank you for making this happen,” Josephine whispered to Julian in the parking lot, wrapping herself around his arm. “I know it didn’t seem like it, but she had fun. Though you know what didn’t help? Your Ashton pretending to be a jester. You should tell him you don’t have to try so hard when you look like a knight. Is he trying to be funny like you?”
“He’s both a jester and a knight without any help from me, believe me,” said Julian.
Josephine kissed him without breaking stride. “You get bonus points for today,” she said. “Wait until we get home.”
And other days, while she walked through Limbo past the violent heretics and rowed down the River Styx in Paradise in the Park, Julian drove around L.A. looking for new places where she might fall in love with him, like Disneyland. New places where his hands could touch her body. They strolled down Beverly and shopped for some costume jewelry, they sat at the Montage and whispered in nostalgia for the old Hotel Bel Age that overlooked the hills. He raised a glass to her in the Viper Room where not long ago someone young and beautiful died. Someone young and beautiful always died in L.A. And when the wind blew in from Laurel Canyon, she lay in his bed and drowned in his love and wished for coral trees and red gums, while Julian wished for nothing because everything had come.
But that was then.
Part One (#ulink_bac77d9d-3738-5bf2-a271-38de9799d026)
The Master of the Mint (#ulink_bac77d9d-3738-5bf2-a271-38de9799d026)
“Gold enough stirring; choice of men, choice of hair, choice of beards, choice of legs, choice of everything.”
Thomas Dekker, The Humors of the Patient Man and the Longing Wife
1 (#ulink_0cc6eef8-1a60-5b6c-aeaa-4c210d3f3788)
Fighter’s Club (#ulink_0cc6eef8-1a60-5b6c-aeaa-4c210d3f3788)
ASHTON WAS AFFABLE BUT SKEPTICAL. “WHY DO WE NEED TO paint the apartment ourselves?”
“Because the work of one’s hands is the beginning of virtue,” Julian said, dipping the roller into the tray. “Don’t just stand there. Get cracking.”
“Who told you such nonsense?” Ashton continued to just stand there. “And you’re not listening. I meant, painting seems like a permanent improvement. Why are we painting at all? There’s no way, no how we’re staying in London another year, right? That’s just you being insane like always, or trying to save money on the lease, or … Jules? Tell the truth. Don’t baby me. I’m a grown man. I can take it. We’re not staying in London until the lease runs out in a year, right? That’s not why you’re painting?”
“Will you grab a roller? I’m almost done with my wall.”
“Answer my question!”
“Grab a roller!”
“Oh, God. What did I get myself into?”
But Julian knew: Ashton might believe a year in London was too long, but Julian knew for certain it wasn’t long enough.
Twelve months to move out of his old place on Hermit Street, and calm Mrs. Pallaver who cried when he left, even though he’d been a recluse tenant who had shunned her only child.
Twelve months to decorate their new bachelor digs in Notting Hill, to paint the walls a manly blue and the bathrooms a girly pink, just for fun.
Twelve months to return to work at Nextel as if he were born to it, to wake up every morning, put on a suit, take the tube, manage people, edit copy, hold meetings, make decisions and new friends. Twelve months to hang out with Ashton like it was the good old days, twelve months to keep him from drinking every night, from making time with every pretty girl, twelve months to grow his beard halfway down his chest, to fake-flirt sometimes, twelve months to learn how to smile like he was merry and his soul was new.
Twelve months to crack the books. Where was he headed to next? It had to be sometime and somewhere after 1603. Lots of epochs to cover, lots of countries, lots of history. No time to waste.
Twelve months to memorize thousands of causes for infectious diseases of the skin: scabies, syphilis, scarlet fever, impetigo. Pressure ulcers and venous insufficiencies. Spider angiomas and facial granulomas.
Carbuncles, too. Can’t forget the carbuncles.
Twelve months to learn how to fence, to ride horses, ring bells, melt wax, preserve food in jars.
Twelve months to reread Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe, Ben Johnson. In her next incarnation, Josephine could be an actress again; he must be ready for the possibility.
Twelve months to learn how not to die in a cave, twelve months to train to dive into cave waters.
Twelve months to learn how to jump.
Twelve months to make himself better for her.
It wasn’t enough time.
Every Wednesday Julian took the Overground to Hoxton, past the shanty village with the graffitied tents and cucumber supports to have lunch with Devi Prak, his cook and shaman, his healer and destroyer. Julian drank tiger water—made from real tigers—received acupuncture needles, sometimes fell into a deep sleep, sometimes forgot to return to work. Eventually he started taking Wednesday afternoons off. Now that Ashton was his boss, such things were no longer considered fireable offenses.
Ashton, unchangeable and eternally the same on every continent, lived as if he didn’t miss L.A. at all. He made all new friends and was constantly out partying, hiking, celebrating, seeing shows and parades. He had to make time for Julian on his calendar, they had to plan in firm pen the evenings they would spend together. He flew back to L.A. once a month to visit his girlfriend, and Riley flew in once a month to spend the weekend in London. When she came, she brought fresh flowers and organic honey, marking their flat with her girl things and girl smells, leaving her moisturizers in their pink bathroom.
And one weekend a month, Ashton would vanish, and was gone, gone, gone, Julian knew not where. Julian asked once, and Ashton said, seeing a man about a horse. When Julian prodded, Ashton said, where are you on Wednesday afternoons? Seeing a man about a horse, right? And Julian said, no, I’m seeing an acupuncturist, a Vietnamese healer, “a very nice man, quiet, unassuming. You’d like him.” Julian had nothing to be ashamed of. And it was almost the whole truth.
“Uh-huh,” Ashton said. “Well, then I’m also seeing a healer.”
There were so few things Ashton kept from him, Julian knew better than to ask again, and didn’t.
He was plenty busy himself. He took riding lessons Saturday mornings, and spelunking Saturday afternoons. He joined a boxing gym by his old haunt near Finsbury Park and sparred on Thursday and Saturday nights. He hiked every other Sunday with a group of over-friendly and unbearably active Malaysians, beautiful people but depressingly indefatigable.
He trained his body through deprivation by fasting for days, by going without anything but water. Riley would be proud of him and was, when Julian told her of his ordeals. He continued to explore London on foot, reading every plaque, absorbing every word. He didn’t know if he’d be returning to London on his next Orphean adventure, but he wanted to control what he could. After work, when Ashton went out drinking, Julian would wander home, six miles from Nextel to Notting Hill, mouthing to himself the historical tidbits he found along the way, an insane vagrant in a sharp suit. In September he entered one of the London Triathlon events in the Docklands. One-mile swim, thirty-mile bike ride, six-mile run. He came in seventh. An astonished Ashton and Riley cheered for him at the finish line.
“Who are you?” Ashton said.
“Ashton Bennett, do not discourage him!” Riley handed Julian a towel and a water bottle.
“How is asking a simple question discouragement?”
“He’s improving himself, what are you doing? That was amazing, Jules.”
“Thanks, Riles.”
“Maybe next year you can run the London Marathon. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Julian stayed noncommittal. He didn’t plan on being here next year. The only action was in the here and now. There was no action in the future; therefore there was no future. Devi taught him that. Devi taught him a lot. The future was all just possibility. Maybe was the appropriate response, the only response. Maybe.
Then again, maybe not.
“But what exactly are you doing?” Ashton asked. “I’m not judging. But it seems so eclectic and odd. A triathlon, fencing, boxing, spelunking. Reading history books, Shakespeare. Horseback riding.”
“My resolve is not to seem the best,” Julian said, “but to be the best.”
“Why don’t you begin being the best by shaving that nest off your face?”
“Ashton! That’s not judging?”
“It’s fine, Riles,” Julian said. “He’s just jealous because he’s barely started shaving.”
She came to Julian during the new moon, her loving face, her waving hands.
In astronomy, the new moon is the one brief moment during the month when the moon and the sun have the same ecliptical longitude. Devi was right: everything returned to the meridian, the invisible mythical line measuring time and distance. When the moon and the stars were aligned, Josephine walked toward him smiling, and sometimes Julian would catch himself smiling back. He knew she was waiting for him. He couldn’t pass the time fast enough until he saw her again.
To be on the meridian was life.
The rest was waiting.
A reluctant Julian was dragged back to California by Ashton to spend the holidays with his family in Simi Valley. In protest, he went as he was, heavily bearded and tightly ponytailed like an anointed priest.
Before he left London, Zakiyyah called to ask him about Josephine’s crystal necklace. Josephine’s mother, Ava, kept calling her about it, Z said. Could he bring it with him to L.A.? Julian lied and told her he lost it. For some reason she sounded super-skeptical when she said, are you sure you lost it? It’s not in some obvious place—like on your nightstand or something?
It was on his nightstand.
“Please, Julian. It belonged to her family.”
And now it belongs to me.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Julian said.
“Who was that—Z?” Ashton said, overhearing.
“Yes, still bugging me about the stupid crystal.”
“The one on your nightstand?”
“Yes, Ashton. The one on my nightstand.”
Over Christmas break in Simi Valley, his parents, brothers, their wives and girlfriends, his nieces and nephews, and Riley all wanted to know when the boys would be moving back home. Not wanting to hurt his mother’s feelings or get her hopes up, Julian deflected. That was him: always dampening expectations.
He cited ethics: they couldn’t break their lease. He cited family: Ashton’s father, after some health problems, had finally retired from the news service, turning over most of the daily operations to his son. He cited friendship: someone had to help Ashton be in charge. Ashton’s livelihood once again depended on Julian.
“Someone has to be Ashton’s wingman,” is what he told his mother.
“Are you sure you’re my wingman, Jules?” But Ashton backed Julian up. It was true, they weren’t ready to leave England yet. “I can’t navigate London without Jules,” Ashton said. “Your son is insane, Mrs. C. Riley will tell you. He’s like an autistic savant. His psychotic knowledge of London is both random and shockingly specific. He has no idea what the exhibits at the Tate look like, but he knows precisely when it opens and closes. He knows the hours and locations of nearly every establishment in central London. He knows where all the pubs are and all the churches, and what stores are next to each other. Though he’s never been on a double-decker, he can tell you the numbers of every bus route. He can tell you what West End theatre is playing what show. He knows which comedians are doing standup. He knows where the gentleman’s clubs are—though he swears, Mrs. C, that he has not been inside, and from the monastic growth on his face, I’m inclined to believe him. He can’t tell you what the best vanilla shake in London tastes like, but he sure can tell you where you need to stand in line to get one—Clapham apparently.”
“Explain yourself, Jules,” Tristan said.
“Because he’s still walking everywhere, isn’t he?” Julian’s mother said, shaking her head, as if suddenly understanding something she didn’t want to about her fourth-born son (or as Julian liked to call it “fourth-favorite”). “Jules, I thought you were better?”
“I am, Mom.”
“Then why are you still looking for that non-existent café? You’re not still dreaming that awful dream, are you?”
Julian was spared an answer by his father. “Son, Ashton told us you’re boxing again,” Brandon Cruz said. “Please tell us it’s not true.” After nearly forty years in the California educational system, the senior Cruz had retired and now kept busy by trying to save Ashton’s flagging store. “Your mother is very concerned. Why would you start that nonsense again after all these years?”
Once, to be in the ring was life. It’s not nonsense, Dad, Julian wanted to say. It’s not nonsense.
“Son, I hate to say it, but your father is right, you shouldn’t be boxing, you’re blind in one eye.”
“I’m not blind, Mom. I’m legally blind. Big difference.” He smiled a weary smile of a man being assailed.
“Still, though, why?”
“He’s trying to improve himself, Mrs. Cruz,” Riley chimed in with fond approval, patting Julian’s back. “He’s boosting his self-confidence, increasing his fitness levels—and muscle mass.” She squeezed his tricep. “He is de-stressing and revitalizing himself. Staying healthy, you know? He’s doing much better, honest.”
“Oh, Ashton!” exclaimed Julian’s mother, “it can’t be easy, but you really are doing a wonderful job with him. Except for the hair, Riley is right, he looks much better. Thank you for watching over him.” Julian’s entire family bathed Ashton with affection and praise. Joanne sat him at her right hand and gifted him a tray of homemade cardamom shortbread! Ashton took the cookies, looking altruistic and put-upon.
Wordlessly, Julian watched them for a few minutes. “Tristan, bro, earlier you asked me for a London life hack?” he finally said. “I got one for you.” He put down his beer and folded his hands. “If you want to display a head severed from the human body, you need to weatherproof it first. Otherwise after a few weeks, you’ll have nothing but a bare skull. You want to preserve the fleshy facial features at the moment of death, the bulging eyes, the open sockets. So, what you do is, before the head starts to decompose, you partially boil it in a waxy resin called pitch—are you familiar with pitch, Trist? No? Well, it’s basically rubber distilled from tar. Very effective. You waterproof the head by boiling it in tar, and then you can keep it outside on a spike to your heart’s content—in all kinds of weather, even London weather. How long will it last, you ask? A good hundred years.” Julian smirked. “Someone said of William Wallace’s preserved head at the Great Stone Gate on London Bridge that in his actual life, he had never looked so good.”
It was Ashton, his mouth full of shortbread, who broke the incredulous silence of the Cruz family at Christmas by throwing his arm around Julian, swallowing, and saying, “What Jules is trying to say is he’s not quite ready to return to the fun and frolic of L.A. just yet.”
“In London in the old days, they used to break the teeth of the bears in the baiting pits,” Julian said in reply, moving out from under Ashton’s arm. “They broke them to make it a more even fight when the dogs attacked the bear. They did it to prolong the fight, before the bear, even without the teeth, ripped the dogs apart.”
“Settle down, Jules,” said Riley, passing him her smart water. “Believe me, we got the message at the parboiled head.”
“Man is more than his genes or his upbringing,” Julian said, refusing the water and picking up his beer instead. “A man is a force of the living. But—he’s also a servant of the dead. As such, he’s an instrument of some powerful magic—since both life and death are mystical forces. The key,” Julian said, “is to live in balance between the two, so as to increase your own force.”
Don’t worry, Riley whispered to a miserable-looking Joanne Cruz. He just needs time.
To be on the meridian, in the cave, on the river, was life.
The rest was just waiting.
Finally the Ides of March and his birthday were upon him. And that meant that after a year of training and boxing and fencing, the vernal equinox was upon him.
“I wish I could bring some money with me,” Julian said to Devi a few days before March 20.
“How is money going to help you?”
“If I’d had money in 1603, I would’ve asked her to marry me earlier. We could’ve left.” It would’ve been different. “I’d just feel better if I had some options.”
“Options.” Devi shook his black-haired head. He was starting to get some gray in it. It was time. The man was over seventy. “Some men are never satisfied.”
“Can you answer my question?”
“There’s no easy way to do what you want.”
“Is there a hard way?”
“No.”
“Why can’t I bring money with me?”
“A thousand reasons.”
“Name two.”
“You don’t know where you’re going,” Devi said. “Are you going to bring every denomination of coin from every place in the world, from every century?”
Julian thought about it. “What about gold? Or diamonds?”
“You want to take diamonds with you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Something of value, yes.”
“You can’t. What I mean is—you literally can’t,” Devi said. “The diamond you talk about, where was it mined, Russia, South Africa? Was it worked on by human hands? Was it then picked up by these hands and shipped to where you could buy it? Was it bought and sold before you ever laid your paws on it, a dozen times, a hundred times? You think it’s sparkly and new just for you? A thousand hearts were broken over your diamond. Bodies were killed, discarded, cuckolded, buried, unearthed. The blood of greed, envy, outrage, and love was spilled over your diamond. Where do you want to end up, Julian? With her, or not with her?”
Having bought a sturdy Peak Design waterproof backpack and loaded it with every possible thing he could need that would fit, ultimately Julian decided not to bring it. Well, decided was a wrong word. He showed it to Devi, who told him he was an idiot.
“I like it very much,” Devi said. “What’s in it?”
“Water, batteries, flashlights—note the plural—a retractable walking pole, crampons, Cliff Bars, a first aid kit, a Mylar blanket, a Suunto unbreakable ultimate core watch, heavy-duty insulated waterproof gloves, three lighters, a Damascus steel blade, a parachute cord, carabiners, climbing hooks, and a headlamp.”
“No shovel or fire extinguisher?”
“Not funny.”
“What about glacier glasses?”
“Why would I need glacier glasses?”
“How do you know you’re not headed into a glacier cave?” Devi paused. “Permafrost in bedrock. Ponded water that forms frozen waterfalls, ice columns, ice stalagmites.” He paused again. “Sometimes the ceiling of the cave is a crystalline block filled with snow and rocks and dirt.”
“You mean full of debris that freezes in the icy ceiling?”
“Yes,” Devi said, his face a block of ice. “I mean full of things that freeze in opaque ice four hundred feet deep. Things you can see as you pass under them but can’t get to.” Devi blinked and shuddered as if coming out of a trance. “That reminds me, best bring an ice axe, too.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“You haven’t mentioned a toiletry kit, a journal, a camera, a neck warmer, and a fleece hat. I feel you’re not prepared.”
“I’m tired of your mocking nonsense.”
“No, no, you’re fine,” Devi said. “Get going. When noon comes, and the blue shaft opens, just send in the backpack by itself to find her. Because there will be room for only one of you. But the bag’s got everything, so it should go.”
“Why can’t I throw the backpack in and then jump after it?”
“I don’t know why you can’t. But as I recall from your story, last time you got stuck. What happens if the backpack gets stuck, and you can’t get to it?”
“Why are you always such a downer? It’s no to everything.”
“I’m the only one in your life who said yes to you about the most important thing,” Devi said, “and here you are whining that I haven’t said yes to enough other things? No to the backpack, Julian. Yes to eternal life.”
“If I can’t bring a backpack, can I bring a friend?” a defeated Julian asked. He would convince Ashton to go with him. He wasn’t ready to part with his friend.
“I don’t know. Does he love her?”
“No, but …” Julian mulled. “Maybe I can be like Nightcrawler. Anything that touches me goes with me.”
“You don’t impress me with your comic-book knowledge,” Devi said. “I don’t know who Nightcrawler is. What if there’s time for only one of you to jump in? You get left behind in this world, and your friend’s stuck in the Cave of Despair without you?”
“I’ll go first, then.”
“And abandon him trapped in a cave without you? Nice.”
But isn’t that what Julian was about to do, abandon Ashton, without a word, without a goodbye? Guilt pinched him inside, made his body twist. “Cave of Despair? I thought you said Q’an Doh meant Cave of Hope?”
“Despair and hope is almost the same word in your language and my language and any language,” Devi said. “In French, hope is l’espoir and despair is désespoir. Literally means the loss of hope. In Italian hope is di speranza. And despair is di disperazione. In Vietnamese one is hy vong and the other is tuyet vong. With hope, without hope. It all depends on your inclination. Which way are you inclined today, Julian Cruz?”
Julian admitted that today, on the brink of another leap through time, despite the remorse over Ashton, he was inclined to hope. “In English, hope and despair are separate words.”
Devi tasted his homemade kimchi, shrugged, and added to it some more sugar and vinegar. “The English borrowed the word despair from the French, who borrowed it from Latin, in which it means down from hope.”
“What about the Russians? You have no idea about them, do you?”
“What do you mean?” Devi said calmly. “In Russian, despair is otchayanyie. And chai is another word for hope. All from the same source, Julian, despite your scorn.”
Julian sat and watched Devi’s back as the compact sturdy man continued to adjust the seasonings on his spicy cabbage. Julian had grown to love kimchi. “What does the name of the cave actually mean?”
“Q’an Doh,” Devi replied, “means Red Faith.”
Julian wanted to bring a zip line—a cable line, two anchors, and a pulley—strong enough to hold a man.
Devi groaned for five minutes, head in hands, chanting oms and lordhavemercies, before he replied. “The anchor hook must be thrown over the precipice. Can you throw that far, and catch it on something that won’t break apart when you put your two hundred pounds on it?”
“Calm down, I’m one seventy.” He had gained thirty of his grief-lost pounds back.
“Okay, light heavyweight,” Devi said. “Keep up the nonstop eating before you grab that pulley. You won’t beat the cave. It’ll be a death slide.”
“You don’t know everything,” Julian said irritably.
“I liked you better last year when you were a babe in the woods, desperate and ignorant. Now you’re still desperate, but unfortunately you know just enough to kill yourself.”
“Last year I was freezing and unprepared, thanks to you!”
“So bring the zip line if you’re so smart,” Devi said. “What are you asking me for? Bring a sleeping bag. An easy-to-set-up nylon tent. I’d also recommend a bowl and some cutlery. You said they didn’t have forks in Elizabethan England. So BYOF—bring your own fork.”
Silently, they appraised each other.
“Listen to me.” Devi put down his cleaver and his cabbage. “I know what you’re doing. In a way, it’s admirable. But don’t you understand that you must rediscover what you’re made of when you go back in? The way you must discover her anew. You don’t know who she is or where she’ll be. You don’t know if you still want her. You don’t know if you believe. Nothing else will help you but the blind flight of faith before the moongate. If you make it across, you’ll know you’re ready. That is how you’ll know you’re a servant not just of the dead and the living, but also of yourself. Will a pole vault help you with that? Will a zip line? Will a contraption of carabiners and hooks and sliding cables bring you closer to what you must be, Julian Cruz?”
Julian’s shoulders slumped. “You’ve been to the gym with me. You’ve seen me jump. No matter how fast I run and leap, I can’t clear ten feet.”
“And yet somehow,” Devi said, “without knowing how depressingly limited you are, you still managed to fly.”
The little man was so exasperating.
A pared-down Julian brought a headlamp, replacement batteries, replacement bulbs and three (count them, three) waterproof flashlights, all Industrial Light and Magic bright. He had a shoemaker braid the soft rawhide rope of his necklace tightly around the rolled-up red beret. Now her beret was a coiled leather collar at the back of his neck, under his ponytail. The crystal hung at his chest. Julian didn’t want to worry about losing either of them again.
“Do you have any advice for me, wise man?” It was midnight, the day before the equinox.
“Did you say goodbye to your friend?”
Julian’s body tightened before he spoke. “No. But we spent all Sunday together. We had a good day. Do you have his cell number?”
The cook shook his head. “You worry about all the wrong things, as always.” Conflict wrestled on Devi’s inscrutable face. “Count your days,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Why do you always ask me to repeat the simplest things? Count your days, Julian.”
“Why?”
“You wanted advice? There it is. Take it. Or leave it.”
“Why?”
“You’re such a procrastinator. Go get some sleep.”
Julian was procrastinating. He was remembering being alone in the cave.
“Go catch that tiger, Wart,” Devi said, his voice full of gruff affection. “In the first part of your adventure, you had to find out if you could pull the sword out of the stone. You found out you could. In the second part, hopefully you’ll meet your queen of light and dark—and also learn the meaning of your lifelong friendship with the Ill-Made Knight.”
“What about my last act?”
“Ah, in the last act, you might discover what power you have and what power you don’t. What a valuable lesson that would be. After doing what he thinks is impossible, man remembers his limitations.”
“Who in their right mind would want that,” Julian muttered. “I hope you’re right, and Gertrude Stein is wrong.”
“That wisecracking old Gertrude,” said the cook. “All right, let’s have it. What did she say?”
“There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”
“Is it too much to hope,” Devi said, “that one day you’ll learn to ask better questions? You haven’t asked a decent one since the one you asked my mother.” What is the sign by which you recognize the Lord?
“I’ll learn to ask better questions,” Julian said, “when you and your mother start giving me better answers.” A baby in a swaddling blanket indeed!
2 (#ulink_cb82929d-4fbd-52a8-80b5-f8609f3fafc1)
Oxygen for Julian (#ulink_cb82929d-4fbd-52a8-80b5-f8609f3fafc1)
HE TRAVELLED THROUGH A DIFFERENT SHAFT, HE TRAVELLED through a different cave, he travelled to a different life.
Noon came to zero meridian at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, the sun struck the crystal in his palm, the kaleidoscope flare exploded, the blue chasm opened for Julian once more. This time he didn’t get stuck. He slid without resistance, plummeted through the sightless air, skydived. He could’ve brought the bigger backpack, Ashton, Devi, Sweeney, an airplane. It occurred to him that if he didn’t stop falling, he’d crash to the ground. Before he had a chance to ponder this, he plunged into warm water.
It was like falling into terror.
His boots never touched bottom. He panic-paddled from the ebony depths to the surface and fumbled in his cargo pocket for the headlamp. When he switched it on, he felt better; when he slipped it over his forehead he felt better still. The rocky bank was only a foot away. He swam to it, grabbed a ridge, and pulled himself out. At first unsettled by the bathwater temperature—in a cave no less—now Julian was grateful. It could’ve been freezing, and then where would he be. How long did the Titanic’s men last in the northern Atlantic?
It was hard to call any footwear waterproof when everything on him was sopping wet, his Thermoprene suit, his boots, his jacket and pants, his two shirts. Wiping his face, he shined a flashlight around the cave. This was a whole new subterranean world than the one he had encountered the first time he went in, a year earlier. He was at the edge of a black cove at the bottom of a mountainous gorge. Hundreds of ragged feet of rock flared up around him. On two sides of the inlet, the vertical slope was unscalable limestone. But on his bank and the bank opposite, the angle was more gradual, and the walls, though rocky and uneven, looked climbable. Good thing Julian had brought crampons. He attached them to the bottom of his boots, careful not to cut himself on the razor-sharp spikes. The blades scraped against the rock as he took a few steps to adjust to walking on them. It was like balancing on Poppa W’s razor wire.
Feeling heavy and cumbersome, Julian wrung out his jacket, shook himself off like a dog, and checked his equipment before climbing to find the moongate. Batteries, extra lights, her stone on his chest, the beret wrapped in rawhide at the back of his neck, his Suunto watch, an impressive wrist computer with a barometer, altimeter, and heart monitor. Proud of his new gadget, Julian switched on the Suunto to check the cave temperature and his GPS coordinates. How deep was he below sea level? What direction was he facing?
The unbreakable scientifically precise timekeeper showed him noon, the coordinates of the prime meridian, the direction as north. In other words, the exact measurements of the Transit Circle as the sun hit the quartz crystal. Well, that was £400 well spent.
On all fours, Julian crawled up the rough slope to the highest elevation in the cave floor where it hit the limestone wall. The walls were solid. Feeling for the moongate with his bare hands, he walked back and forth along the wall but found no opening. On this side at least, the chamber was hermetically sealed.
Julian knew there had to be a way out because otherwise there would be no river and no Josephine, and also because he could hear running water in the distance. He scaled back down to the swimming hole and shined one of his heavy-duty, high-powered flashlights up and down the cave walls. Finally he spotted it. Across the pool, up the slope in the far corner, as if concealed from casual view, the water trickled out from a perfectly round opening in the bedrock and dribbled down into the cove below.
The only way to get to the other side was to swim across. Julian felt some relief. It wasn’t long-jumping over a canyon, it was just swimming, right? When he first fell in, he had swum to the wrong side, that was all. Shame, but now he would swim to the right side.
He hesitated before he dived. Was the pool a wormhole, a shortcut between two distant points in infinite time and space? He didn’t know. He didn’t think so. It didn’t look far, maybe thirty, forty feet. And the water was warm. He was a good swimmer. He came in seventh in the London Triathlon. Riley had been so proud of him. Granted he didn’t enter the top-level category, but still, he had to swim an entire mile, not a few measly feet. Full of confidence, Julian jumped in, like the starting gun had gone off. He swam methodically, pacing himself, without undue exertion. The headlamp illumined only a few feet of black water in front of him. He couldn’t see the other bank. No matter. A minute or two at most and he’d be there. He was glad he had listened to Devi and brought a minimum in his backpack. Fifty pounds of extra weight would’ve been a burden.
Julian swam and swam and swam and swam. It felt longer than forty feet. He must have gotten confused, lost his orientation. It had looked so easy—swimming forward—but for some reason forward wasn’t getting him to the other side, and his headlamp with its short beam was annoyingly little help.
He swam and swam and swam and swam. Above him the cliffs loomed, ominous and oppressive like stone Titans. How could he see those, much farther away, but not see the opposite bank of a medium-sized cave pool?
Julian began to tire, to feel oppressively heavy. And when he started to feel heavy, he panicked.
And when he panicked, he started to sink.
His boots, jacket, gloves, flashlights all felt like anchors strapped to his body. Yes, the water was warm, but so what? He was being sucked into a slow warm drain.
Was he just treading water or actually moving forward? He spun around but couldn’t see where he had been, nor where he was going. He was in the middle of nothing and nowhere. He stopped swimming, held his breath, listened for the trickling stream on the rocks. He heard no sound except his anxious gasps.
He didn’t know what to do.
There was no going back. The only way out was through it.
Julian resumed the front stroke, in slow motion. His body was weighted down, as if concrete blocks were tied to his feet. The body refused to cooperate with staying afloat. He tried to turn onto his back for a rest, but kept sinking. When he stopped flapping his arms, he sank. Even as he swam forward, he sank. It became nearly impossible to hold his head above water.
He flung away the waterlogged gloves, the extra lamps, the batteries, the carabiners, the hooks, his non-working £400 Suunto Ultimate watch. He threw off his jacket and unstrapped and kicked off his boots with the metal crampons. He unzipped and pulled off his cargo pants. He discarded everything but his headlamp and a thin Maglite that fit into a chest pouch in his wetsuit.
And still he sank. Fear was heavier than fifty pounds of gear.
His head slipped under water. He resurfaced, opened his mouth, tried to swim. The effort required to stay afloat became greater. His breath got shorter, the time under got longer. In panicked desperation, gulping for air, Julian lowered his chin to his chest and rammed forward.
His headlamp hit something solid and immovable. Rock! The lamp cracked, slipped off his head and vanished into the deep. He grabbed on to the edge of the rock and after a few moments of gasping, pulled himself out.
For a long time he lay in the darkness getting his breath back. Had the headlamp not been on his head to absorb the blow, he would’ve cracked his skull open. He must’ve been swimming pretty fast, despite his clear perceptions to the contrary. That was quite a jolt he had received. What an ugly cheat it was, not to be able to trust your own senses.
So—four sources of light were not enough. New boots, hooks, spikes, new jacket, new pants, not enough. Extra batteries, bulbs, gloves, all of it at the bottom of the bottomless cave. After all the preparation to offer his woman a new and improved man, Julian was right back on novice course, climbing a steep uneven terrain, barefoot and without his clothes, holding a small cheap flashlight between his chattering teeth.
Past the moongate, the river was shallow and flowed slowly—and in the wrong direction! It flowed back toward the black hole cove. After a curve in the cave and a shallow whirlpool, it finally turned and flowed in the direction Julian was wading, filling the barrel-shaped passage to his knees. The cylindrical walls shimmered with hallucinations, with carved etchings. Julian no longer believed his eyes. It could be a Rorschach test. He saw what he wanted to see, not what was really there. But why would he want to see illusions of writhing beasts with open groaning, screaming mouths, why would he wish to see colliding live things loving each other, fucking each other, killing each other? In many cases all three.
Before long, trouble came. It came in the form of water that rose to his legs and then to his waist. The Thermoprene suit was wet inside, and the trapped moisture kept him warm, but the water that seeped in and trickled down his ribs and back also made him itch like a motherfucker. The cave remained troublingly warm, as did the water. Weren’t caves supposed to be 54ºF at all times? Maybe not magic caves. He should’ve brought an inflatable boat. He was so tired. There was no ledge or shelf for him to rest on, no dry ground. Endlessly, relentlessly, half-blind, Julian trudged hip-deep in water, avoiding the images that filled his defective vision, of gods and men and beasts intertwined.
He should’ve known better than to complain about cave drawings. As soon as they vanished, the water rose to his chest. He could no longer walk in it. That meant he could no longer carry the flashlight or even hold it in his mouth. In impenetrable darkness, he swam. Either the water level kept rising or the cave narrowed, because when Julian lifted his arm for the front stroke, he hit the roof of the cave. The space between the surface of the water and the ceiling—in other words the space in which he breathed—was no longer large enough to fit his head. He had eight inches, then six, then four.
He stopped swimming, turned on the flashlight, stuck it between his teeth, and put both palms on the ceiling to rest for a bit while he looked around. He lifted his mouth to the limestone and breathed through the slit of remaining air. He couldn’t stay still for long because the channel began to fill up with black rushing water. Oh—now it was rushing. It swallowed him and pitched him forward before he had a chance to put away his one light. While Julian was flung about like a rubber duck, the flashlight slipped out of his hands and swirled into the void, and Julian once again was plunged into wet spinning darkness.
What did he learn in advanced spelunking that could help him now? The first thing he remembered was decidedly unhelpful.
Never cave alone.
Dennis, his unruffled instructor, could not have been more plain. The only reasons to be alone in a cave were injury and emergency.
As he tumbled through the gushing current, Julian came up with a third reason. Insanity.
Cave diving was the most advanced, specialized, dangerous of all caving activities. Without training, Dennis said, no human being had the knowledge to stay alive. Only months of rigorous preparation could help you. You had to learn to control five things on which your life depended. If those five things weren’t built into your muscle memory, you would die.
Not could die.
Would die.
Julian recalled precisely two things.
Number one: respiration.
Number two: emotion.
The first one was impossible, since he was fully submerged in the current, and as for the second one, check. Emotion aplenty.
You have no training for open water, he kept hearing in his head. Stop. Think. Picture the reaper. See her face. Prevent your death. Respiration. Emotion.
What else?
His head bobbed up for a moment, he gasped for air, was pulled under, and then driven forward. But there was air above him! There was oxygen for Julian. Sounded like a song.
Respiration!
Emotion!
Calm yourself!
Think!
Another bob.
Another gasp.
Oxygen for Julian.
He must keep his mouth closed. If he swallowed water and his lungs filled up, he wouldn’t be able to continue bobbing like a buoy. He would sink. Think! Breathe! Another bob. Another gasp. Oxygen for Julian.
Trouble was, when his mouth was closed, he couldn’t breathe.
How could he save her when he couldn’t even save himself?
Josephine. Mary.
Calm yourself. Think! Breathe.
Oxygen for Julian.
All he could feel was panic for his life.
Finally, Julian found something to grab on to, a churning plank. Pulling himself on top of it, he lay down on it lengthways, grabbed the short edge with both hands, put his head down, gurgled up a lungful of water, and was asleep in seconds. No terror was so strong that it could force his eyes open.
3 (#ulink_b6ba4edd-8a9f-59d4-a7c4-afc17594aa93)
Silver Cross (#ulink_b6ba4edd-8a9f-59d4-a7c4-afc17594aa93)
HE WAKES UP BECAUSE HE’S BURNING. HE CAN’T TELL WHAT’S wrong with him, only that it’s so hot, he wants to crawl out of his skin to cool down. The plank he drifts on is hot, the water underneath him is hot, the air is hot. Not warm like cove water, but hot like near boiling. He falls sideways into the water, and the steaming plank, scorched as a summer deck, drifts down river.
Julian can finally stand, and even though his flashlight is gone, the cave isn’t completely without light. He can see.
Why is it so blisteringly hot? His body itches intensely under the Thermoprene. He unzips the suit, pulls it halfway down, stands against the wall of the cave and like an animal rubs against the rock to relieve his back. He pulls the suit down to his knees and scratches his legs, his stomach. It’s better, but not great. The more he scratches, the more it itches, his skin as if crawling with a thousand mosquitoes feasting on his body.
Now that he’s out of the water, Julian remembers the other three things he learned about cave diving. Posture. Propulsion. And buoyancy. How the hell do you learn buoyancy, he thinks. You either float or you don’t. I know this for a fact. Idiots.
Julian is so excited to be alive even though he is fucking itchy.
No way he can zip up the suit again. He tries. As soon as the foam fabric touches his body, he’s in a frenzy. Both he and the suit need to dry, but as he dries, he starts to sweat, and the salt in his sweat makes his itchy body burn. What a hot mess he is. He’s got to get out, get to somewhere cooler. Where is he? Where did the river bring him?
Leaving the wetsuit dangling at his waist, Julian climbs up the slope, away from the river and toward the dim flickering light. He’s burning the soles of his bare feet and the palms of his hands on the hot rocks. The light that illumines a sliver of the cave is somewhere above his head. He keeps climbing to it, as if up a spiral staircase carved into the rocks, up, up, up, and round and round.
There’s an overhanging wooden ledge above him. Wooden? He pulls himself up and GI Joes through a narrow opening, crawling out into a tight, musty space with timber rafters. It looks like a secret closet under a dormer. It’s half-height, but there’s a door in front of him! The ambient flicker that led him here is streaming through a keyhole in that door. He hears muffled voices. He peeks through the keyhole.
He sees a small section of a shimmering room lit entirely by candles placed so close together it looks like a fire. How long did it take someone to make those, Julian thinks, knowing what a thankless and tedious task it is, and just as he thinks this—he leans on the door too hard. It swings open and he falls through.
As he tumbles out, he knocks over the small table, and the stacked candles fall in a melting waxy jumble onto the floor. The rug fringe catches fire. Someone in the room squeals.
“Careful! You’ll burn the house down!”
Someone else squeals. “Well, don’t just sit there. Put it out!”
Julian swats the rug with his bare hands and blows at the downed candles. With potential disaster averted, his eyes adjusting to the dim remaining light, he surveys the room, still on his knees.
Before he fell into the dormered space, his plans were grand. He was prepared. He’s read, he’s fenced, he’s cave dived, he is a daredevil, he isn’t scared.
But in this room, the plans change. Between two windows there’s a bed, and on this bed sit two naked women intertwined, pressing their breasts against one another and eyeing him with lanquid curiosity. The burning fireplace is behind them. He can’t see the women’s faces, only the contours of their naked bodies. They’re like iridescent drawings. But mostly they’re women’s naked bodies.
“Well, hello there,” one girl says. “Where did you come from? Did you sneak in to spy on us? That costs extra, you know.” The girl has a British accent, not posh—not that he expects posh here, wherever he is. “Look at him, he’s got a beard, how delicious. Maybe we won’t charge him?”
“Well, that would hardly be fair,” whispers the other, also in a British accent, “we charge everyone else.”
“Oh, don’t be a ninny, let him sample the goods. We can charge him double next time, right, handsome? Come here,” the girl croons. “Come here, precious.” Two pairs of female arms reach out to him. “Don’t be shy,” the girl says, wiggling her fingers at him, motioning him forward. “Don’t be afraid of us, we won’t bite.”
Julian gets up off the floor, stands straight. They appraise him, their smiles widening. “Well,” one girl says, “maybe bite a little.” All he can see in the semi-darkness is the whites of their teeth and the length of their brown hair. He is about to ask if he should light another candle—to see them better—but they grab his hands and pull him onto the bed, onto his back, crouching around him, interested and unafraid. They stroke his beard, pat his chest, tap his shoulders and arms, examine his necklace close to their faces, rub his stomach. “Look how warm you are, how damp you are. Why are you sweating? Are you hot?” They giggle. They pull at the wetsuit. To be helpful, Julian mutely shows them how to work the front zipper.
The nubile girls get distracted by the zipper of a commercially made suit. With some chagrin Julian notes that they’re more fascinated by the zipper than they are by the naked man underneath it. They unzip him past his groin, and with delight zip him up to his throat. Instead of playing with Julian, they’re playing with the zipper.
The suit is damp. His skin is damp. He had just been itchy and uncomfortable. He had just been tired and thirsty. Not anymore. He’s less the sum of all other parts than he is of the awakened primal hungry thing. He takes in their curves and dark nipples, their swaying white breasts, their loose hair and limbs amber in the candlelight. One has straight long brown hair, one wavy thick slightly shorter brown hair. One has larger breasts, one has larger hips. They’re both rounded and soft. They’re on their knees on the bed, joyfully running the polymer zipper up and down over Julian.
This is so unexpected.
Julian smiles.
“Ooh, what’s this?” one girl coos.
“Do you mean the zipper?” he asks. “Or …”
“What’s a zipper? No, this squishy black covering all over you. How do you squirm out of it? Oh, look, it stretches. And what’s this around your neck, some kind of talisman?”
“Yes,” he says, pulling the girl’s hand away from it and trying to glimpse into her shadowed face. “It’s some kind of talisman.”
“How do we get you out of this unwieldy thing?”
“You could stop playing with the zipper and pull the suit off my feet.” Julian is on his back. “Or do you want me to do it?”
“No, no, handsome, you just lie there, you’ve done enough, don’t you think? You almost started a fire. We’ll find other things for you to do.”
The women get off the bed and pull off his wetsuit. He feels better now that he is naked himself. He lies on a bed of silk sheets, while two young beauties, bounteous and bare, stand at his feet, lustily appraising him. They’re both delicious, both about the same height. Is one of them his? Julian hopes so. It’s hard to tell in the ghostly light. They’re both so beautiful, and he is so fired up.
“Are you sure we should touch him? Remember what the Baroness said? What if he carries the sickness?”
“Where are you from, sire?”
“Wales. The unknown forest.”
“There you go. Wales. The unknown forest. Where’s that?”
“Over yonder,” Julian says. “Where there is no sickness.”
“There you go. Just look at him. What sickness? I’ve never seen a healthier specimen of a man, have you?”
“I suppose not.”
“He is so robust, so full-bodied.”
“He is.”
“He’s the epitome of male health. Have you no interest in touching him where he’s especially strong and vigorous? Then leave at once. I’ll have him all to myself.”
“I didn’t say I had no interest in touching him.”
The girls stand, admiring him, smiling. He lies, admiring them, smiling.
The room is warm and getting warmer. Everything that can stir in Julian, stirs, simmers, gets hotter. Everything that can be switched on and lit up is switched on and lit up.
“What are your names, ladies?” Please let one of them be his.
“What do you want them to be, sire?”
“Josephine,” Julian says, his voice thick. He opens his arms.
“Your wish is my command,” says one. “I’m Josephine.”
Not to be outdone the other chimes in, “I’m Josephine, too.” They crawl to him, lie next to him, one on the left, the other on the right, pressing their breasts into his ribs. What good did Julian ever do in his life to deserve this? One kisses his left cheek, one kisses the right. One kisses his lips, the other pushes her away and kisses him, too. They run their hands over his body, from his long beard to his knees. They ooh. They ahh. He puts his arms around the girls, leaves his hands in their hair, one head silky and straight, the other soft and thick. He wills himself not to close his eyes.
“What would you like, sire?” one croons in her easy sexy voice.
“What we mean to say is, what would you like first?” the other croons in her easy sexy voice.
“I don’t know,” he murmurs. He doesn’t know where to start. He wants it all. “What have you got?”
A better question might be what haven’t they got.
For his visual pleasure, the girls fondle each other leaning over him, playing with each other’s breasts. Two sets of breasts are heaved into Julian’s hands, two sets of nipples are pressed into Julian’s mouth. They fight to climb on top of him and for his auditory pleasure, argue over which one gets to mount him first, a discussion Julian deeply enjoys. After a while, he informs them—again, trying to be helpful—that they can take turns or, if they wish, both get on top of him. He points to his mouth. They eagerly assent. For his tactile pleasure, they give him a lot, and finally—God, finally—all at once. They move him to the middle of the bed, throw off all the blankets and pillows, and ride him like a carousel. One mounts him, first facing him, then facing away from him. One presents herself to his mouth. They switch. They switch again. Their lack of modesty is as stunning as it is magnificent. They pull him up, both get on their hands and knees in front of him and summon him with their moans and beckoning open hips to alternate between them. A minute for me and a few seconds for her, sire. No, no, a minute for me and a few seconds for her, sire. Julian obliges. No one wants the bell at the end of that round to ring, not them, and emphatically not him.
While mortal man rejoices, refracts and rejuvenates, all the while wishing he were immortal and needed no bells and no rounds, the roses and lilies show him that downtime can also be wonderful, by intermingling with each other in ways Julian has only dreamed of. The flowers have reappeared on the earth. The girls make kissing and sucking sounds when he uses his mouth and fingers to please them, as if to guide Julian aurally to what they would like him to do to them orally.
He fights the desire to close his eyes as he is smothered under their warm abundant flesh in friction against every inflamed inch of him. With impressed murmurs, they cluck over his rigid boxer’s body, they praise his drive, his short rest, his devouring lust. They kiss his lips until he can’t breathe. One slides south. Aren’t you something, she purrs. She kisses his stomach. Josephine, she calls to the other one. Come down here.
I’m coming, Josephine. They both kiss his stomach. Their hair, their kisses, their lips, their hands slide farther south. His hands remain on their heads, in their hair.
Four breasts bounce against him, four hands and two warm mouths caress him in tandem. They feed him and drink from him and melt in the fading fire. One scoots up to his face, holding on to the frame of the bed and lowers her hips to him. One remains down below.
I’m coming, Josephine.
They entrust him again and again with their bodies and their happiness, and he bestows them with his own gifts because he doesn’t like to deny insatiable beautiful girls with lips of scarlet.
If you keep this up, next time I’ll charge you double, one moaning girl murmurs.
If you keep this up, next time I’ll give it to you for free, murmurs the other.
Julian can’t decide which murmur he prefers.
The honeycomb hours pour forth in a treacly feast, in debauched splendor. The fire goes out. The room is lit only by faint moonlight through the open windows. It’s hot, and outside is quiet except for occasional bursts of revelry on the street below. Exhausted, the girls lie in his arms during another break, ply him and themselves with house wine, and confer to him all manner of knowledge.
Julian learns he’s near Whitehall Palace, in a house of pleasure named the Silver Cross. So for the second time, he’s back in London. He knows the tavern fairly well. The Silver Cross, a block away from Trafalgar Square, is one of London’s oldest pubs. He’s drunk and eaten there a few times with Ashton. The selection of beer is first rate and the red meat is tender. Whitehall, a short stroll from Westminster, was once the residence of kings. In 1530, Henry VIII bought the white marble palace from a cardinal, lived there, died there. A fire had decimated the palace (a fire? or the fire?) and now only the Banqueting House remains, and the eponymous street. It’s July, the girls inform him, which explains why it’s so bloody hot, that and the fiery female flesh scorching his hands.
Before Oliver Cromwell in his Puritan zeal shuttered all of London’s playhouses, pubs and houses of bawd, Charles I licensed the Silver Cross as a legal brothel and the irony is, to the present day the license has never been revoked. The king was beheaded, England became a republic, there was a civil war. There was so much else to think about besides a brothel license. For four hundred years, it had slipped everyone’s mind. Julian read this on a plaque in the pub, while dining and drinking there with Ashton.
The Silver Cross is run by a woman named Baroness Tilly. She has ten high-quality girls and “ten rooms of pleasure.” The house is colloquially called the Lord’s Tavern after its most frequent patrons—“the Right Honorable Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Kingdom of Great Britain, England, Scotland, and Ireland in Parliament Assembled!” the girls proclaim to him in happy unison. They do so many splendid things to him in happy unison. With the recently re-established House of Lords, the Temporal Peers have become the tavern’s most generous benefactors. They have unlimited time, unlimited money and unlimited vices. The girls are top-notch, game for all sorts of debauchery (as Julian can attest), and most importantly (after the recent “epidemic of death”), clean. The girls and the rooms adhere to rules of purity not found in other similar establishments, “like that pig-pit the Haymarket, or Miss Cresswell’s in Clerkenwell.”
Did someone say Clerkenwell?
Yes, sire, do you know it? It’s filthy.
I know it. It’s not so bad. His heart pinches when he remembers Clerkenwell, the rides to Cripplegate through the brothel quarter on Turnbull Street. He wants to peer into the girl’s face but can’t keep his eyes open.
At the Silver Cross, the rooms are spotless, richly decorated, well furnished. “And the girls, too,” Julian murmurs sleepily. His body is raw, sore, sated in all its imaginable and unimagined earthly cravings. This is his favorite room in the world.
Yes, this room is nice, the girls murmur in return, but there are a few others that have bathtubs, and in those rooms the girls can soap him, and lather him, and wash him. Would he like that, for the eager girls to soap his naked body? Look, it’s almost dawn, one girl says, what’s better than dawn by cocklight? Nothing, says the other, tugging on him and smiling. Nothing’s better than the crowing of the cock to usher in a new day.
Julian is nearly unconscious. Yet the mention of being soaped by the caressing hands of the lush sirens in his bed calls him to attention and turns the girls once again into warm quivering masses of excited and groany giggles—
The bedroom door is thrown open. The giggling stops. In the frame stands a tall woman wearing yesterday’s theatrically overdone face makeup and an outrageous pink velvet housecoat with a red fringe.
“Mallory!” she shouts. “How many times have I told you—No! Bad girl! No, no, no, no, no!”
One of the girls scrambles off the bed and searches the floor for her clothes.
“This isn’t your job! Do you know what your job is?”
“Yes, Aunt Tilly.”
Julian nearly cries. Don’t go, Mallory! Her back is to him, but if only he could catch a glimpse of her face …
“No, I don’t think you do know what your job is. And it’s Baroness Tilly while you’re working—and I assume this was work?”
“All my other work was done, Baroness.” The girl throws a chemise over herself, a skirt, a flowy blouse, an apron. She ties up her hair. “I was finished for the day.”
“You don’t look as if you were finished.”
“Just wanted to make some extra money, Baroness …”
“That’s everybody’s excuse. But you know I forbid it. Your mother, may she rest in peace, forbid it. I will not tell you again. I’m going to send you to the South of France if you don’t stop this. Do you want to be sent away with your boorish benefactor? He’ll be a lot stricter than me.”
“No, Baroness.”
“I didn’t think so. Then, go do what you’ve been hired to do and stop the wickedness at once. Oh—and who is this man? I allowed you upstairs at the start of the night for the viewing pleasure of Lord Fabian, and here you are, at nearly dawn, with another man in your bed.”
Viewing pleasure? Lord Fabian? What? Julian lifts his head off the pillows. Baroness Tilly, a broad, vulgar woman, turns her unwelcome attention to him. “I don’t remember you walking past me, good sir, and I certainly don’t remember you paying me. No one goes upstairs with my girls without me knowing about it. Announce yourself! Mallory, Margrave, who is this man?”
Still in bed with Julian, Margrave, a most unblushing flower a few minutes earlier, gets tongue-tied. Her brazen demeanor vanishes. She stammers.
The standing girl comes to his aid. “I believe he said he’s here for the position of the keeper of the house, Baroness. Aren’t you, sire? He came from the Golden Flute across the river. Madame Maud sent him.”
“So why is he up here with you? Why didn’t he speak to me first if Maud sent him?”
“He wandered in and got lost, he didn’t see you.”
“Oh, enough! There’s clean-up needed in Room Four. Golden Flute indeed. I am so tired of your nonsense, Mallory, so very tired.”
Mallory rushes past the hyperventilating baroness. Margrave covers Julian with a quilt. He finds it fascinating that she remains uncovered as if it’s only his modesty she is concerned with.
“Margrave, don’t sit there like a wanton hussy, get dressed. It’s morning. What is your name, sir?”
“Julian Cruz.”
“Well, Master Cruz, this is not the way I usually make the acquaintance of the keepers of my house. Did you need to sample the product before you could hawk it? I admire that. We have only the best here, sire. These are not the usual wagtails and bunters you’re used to at the Golden Flute, I can assure you.”
Julian doesn’t need to be assured. He knows.
“Our old keeper died last month without any warning. A little warning would’ve been so helpful. It would’ve given me and the girls time to prepare. This is a house run nearly entirely by women and there are things we do well, wouldn’t you agree, Master Cruz?”
Julian would agree.
“But there are other things we cannot do. Fix doors, patch holes, replace broken lanterns, fix the roof. We have lanterns that have not been filled with oil because Ilbert refuses to buy some, and the candles are running low, as is the soap. After the recent health problems, soap is an absolute necessity. We’re quite busy here. I hope you can manage. Marg, go tell Mallory to prepare the gentleman’s room, and you, sir, meet me downstairs as soon as you’re attired.” (Attired in what exactly, Julian wants to know.) “I’ll go over the rest of the details, and we’ll raise a glass. Margrave—spit spot.” With that, Baroness Tilly claps her hands twice, and exits.
As soon as she’s gone, Margrave jumps out of bed.
“We could’ve got into so much trouble,” she bleats, tying the sashes of her robe. “The Baroness hates it when Mallory disobeys. Not that she does anything about it, the girl is a terror.” She smiles. “But who could resist you? Even heartless Mallory couldn’t. Wait here, I’ll be right back with a robe. You should ask the Baroness for an advance, go buy yourself some clothes befitting a brothel keeper.”
“What do they wear, tuxedoes?”
“If you like, sire. Forever naked would be my preference.” Beaming, she straightens out, and Julian catches her eye. It’s dawn, he can see her smiling round face. She is pretty and young and sexy. Low light, a tired mind, lust, pounding desire are all great equalizers.
But Margrave is not his girl.
4 (#ulink_f03c00b7-7702-5b6f-a7fb-81eae034a7c7)
Keeper of the Brothel (#ulink_f03c00b7-7702-5b6f-a7fb-81eae034a7c7)
THE ALE IS A COVER. ALE FOR BREAKFAST, ALE FOR DINNER, ale for supper. It’s a euphemism for the other things that go on at the Silver Cross. Yet downstairs, the wood-paneled restaurant-bar appears as just that: a well-to-do tavern, patronized by connected and wealthy men (much as in the present). The ale is top-notch, Baroness Tilly tells him, the food superb.
Naked underneath a black velvet robe, Julian sits across from the Baroness, feeling ridiculous. Tilly’s pink robe has been replaced by hooped petticoats and gaudy layers of sweeping silk ornamental fabrics with puffy sleeves and lace velvet collars. She wears a huge blonde wig, her eyes hastily drawn in black and her oversized mouth made ever larger by smeared red cake-paint.
The pub is narrow and tall, with flagstone floors and tables of heavy oak. It’s upholstered in leather, draped with blue velvet curtains, and set with crystal and fine china. The breakfast tables are lined with white napkins.
“It’s a beautiful place, wouldn’t you agree,” the Baroness says. After colorfully describing what’s expected of him (the daily inspections of the girls before they begin work is one of Julian’s more intriguing duties), she offers him a salary and only as an afterthought inquires about his experience, which he recounts to her just as colorfully—parroting her own words from minutes ago (taking extra time to detail how he imagines the inspections of the girls might go). He would like to begin immediately. Where are these girls? When can he inspect them, so he can find his girl?
He and the Baroness have a sumptuous breakfast of porridge and milk, smoked herring, spiced eel pie (“caught fresh from the Thames just yesterday!”) and bread and marmalade. And ale. The Baroness lingers over breakfast as if starved for some normal company, entertaining an increasingly impatient Julian with stories about the Silver Cross. A hundred years earlier, a man named Parson from Old Fish Street was paraded in shame down Parliament Street for selling the sexual services of his apparently accomplished wife. After spending years in prison, he opened the Silver Cross in revenge, and his wife became the cornerstone of his business.
Julian tells the Baroness he’s read somewhere that a prostitute was murdered in the Silver Cross, and it’s been haunted ever since.
“I don’t know nothing about that,” the Baroness says, frowning. “Where did you read that, the Gazette?” Grudgingly she admits that the Silver Cross has only recently reopened, having been shuttered for the better part of last year, “because of the horror that befell all London. But we’ve had no recent murders here, sire, I can assure you. Murder is very bad for business.”
“What horror?” Julian asks and instantly regrets it when she stares at him suspiciously. He clears his throat. “I meant why stay shuttered for so long?” His eyes dart around, trying to catch the date from the newspaper lying on the next table.
“Where are you from, good sir, that you don’t know about the terrible pestilence that destroyed our town?”
The unknown forest, Julian tells her. Wales. Largely spared from the plague. One of these days, Julian will meet an actual Welshman and be promptly pilloried on Cheapside.
“I thought you’ve just come from across the river?” She lowers her voice. “You know, that’s where the Black Death took wind. From south of the river.”
Julian nods. It’s common knowledge—everything is worse south of the river.
“It got so bad,” the Baroness says, “death galloped in such triumph through our streets that King Charlie himself had had enough. He packed up his court and fled the city! That’s how we knew we was all doomed. When our own king abandoned us. His Majesty’s Government didn’t meet for a year.”
Julian commiserates. In 1665, the plague had reduced London to a wasteland. He hopes it’s a few years later, the worst behind them. He tries to make out that elusive date on the newspaper. LONDON GAZETTE, it reads. PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY. What year does it say?
“Yes, our once lively city has become a graveyard,” the Baroness goes on. “Nothing but a field of dismal misery. There was nothing open because there was no one alive.” She dabs her eye. “I’ll confess to you, sire, the plague has been absolutely terrible for business!”
“One hundred and thirty parishes in London,” Julian says. “Surely there are still men left. The bells still ring.”
“Oh, even more than before, because now they ring for the dead. But the dogs don’t bark. Because they’re also dead. Dead with all the honorable deep-pocketed gentlemen!” She sniffles.
Good God, what year is it? He squints at the Gazette, adjusts in his seat. “Does that say July 1666?” he asks, something inside him falling.
“Yes,” the Baroness says slowly. “Why?”
“The Silver Cross survived the fire?”
“What fire?”
“The one near Pudding Lane.”
“Pudding Lane? All the way down there by the bridge, inside the wall? I wouldn’t know nothing about that. I don’t go down there. We always have fires in London, good sir. Too many candles.”
“You’d know this fire,” Julian says pensively. “There won’t be a house left standing between Temple Bar and London Bridge. Pardon me, I’ve been traveling so long, I’ve lost track of my days.” Maybe he’s wrong about the year. He’s never been good with dates. What a failing to have when dates are of the essence. Cromwell, Puritans, beheadings, republic, Charles I, Charles II, when was the Glorious Revolution? Was the Great Fire of London before it or after? A little knowledge is an awful thing—
“It’s a Tuesday. Second week in July. We just finished the beer festival for the Feast of Saints.” The Baroness smiles. “That was very good for business.”
“I’m sure.” Julian shifts in his seat. “Can I get a small advance on my salary so I can buy myself a wardrobe befitting a tavern keeper? You said we needed fresh flowers. Perhaps I can take a walk to the market. Is Covent Garden open?” He wants to walk to Clerkenwell. He needs to see what’s become of the life he once lived with her.
The Baroness agrees to an advance. “Usually I send Ilbert to the market, but frankly, he has appalling taste in flowers. He always manages to get the ugliest ones. When you see Mallory, remind her to lend you something to wear. And tell her Gasper is here. The girl needs to be told everything three times. He’s been waiting an hour.” Gasper is a skeletal man in the corner by the open door, a stinking man in rags with flies buzzing around him, his head tilted and trembling.
As Julian walks up the main stairs, he hears the Baroness berating a humpbacked imp. “Ilbert,” she yells. “How many times must I tell you—it’s against the law to wash the entrails of pigs in the local waters!”
“I’m not the only one that breaks the laws, madam. The alley is slippery with refuse. It’s hard to carry the carcass to a less local water.”
“Oh, Holy Helpers, Ilbert, you are but an arsworm! You know Scotland Yard is next door! One of them clappers saw you. He told me you was throwing coal ashes right into Parliament Street. Have you no mind, scoundrel? We’re in front of the Palace of Whitehall, the residence of our king! You can’t keep breaking the laws of men.”
“But all the men is dead, madam. You said so yourself.”
“The few that are left will stone you to death, you scoundrel! I will celebrate when that day comes. Until then, stop mouthing off to me and go sweep the stones outside, as decreed by the Commissioner for Streets and Ways. And stop hooping the barrels on the sidewalk and sawing timber on the street. I can’t afford another fine because of you.”
“Where would you like me to saw the timber, madam? In the palace gardens?”
“You are an annoyance and a disorder, Ilbert, in desperate need of reforming. They will dispose of you with the ashes, dust and dirt, and I shall have nothing whatsoever to say about it except hallelujah.”
Tucked into a dormered corner on the second floor, on the other side of the house from his favorite room, Julian’s quarters are spacious and sunny. From his two open windows he can see the eastern Thames, curving toward Blackfriars, toward the direction of the slate-colored Globe, he can hear the bells of a hundred churches. His room has a four-poster bed with a heavy canopy, an intricately carved armchair, a walnut cupboard, a small table under the windows where he can eat or write, a wardrobe where he can hang his clothes once he gets some, and a washing station in the corner by the fireplace that includes not only a basin, but also a bathtub with a stone hearth. He could use a bath after last night’s steamy banquet. Perhaps the girls could come and wash him as they had so kindly offered.
In the desk he finds a quill with a bottle of ink. Julian remembers Devi’s instruction to count the days. Opening the bottle of ink, he dips the quill into it, pulls up the sleeve of his robe, and with the quill tip punctures the inside of his forearm, near his wrist, tapping a dot of ink into the wound. One.
When he turns around, a girl stands silently in the doorway, towels and sheets in her hands, her expression wary, her brown gaze on his arm. It’s Mallory.
“I can explain,” he says, putting the quill away.
“No need, sire.” He can barely hear her voice.
“I’m marking the days.” He steps toward her.
“Aren’t we all. May I make up your room?” Her gaze is on the bed.
“Mallory …”
The girl can’t look into his face. It’s either shyness or embarrassment. She stares at the periphery of his ear, at a slice of his beard, at his black robe, at anything but him. When he tries to touch her, she flinches from him. Holding her by the flesh of her arm, he lifts her chin to him. His eyes meet hers.
Mallory is his girl.
Julian fills to the brim with the wine of his ravished heart. He searches her face for a flicker of familiarity, of recognition and finds himself faintly disappointed that he can’t find any. She doesn’t fight him or move away. In her deep brown eyes there’s a hint of morning shame at the memory of their shameless night. Her full red lips are slightly parted.
“May I make up your room, sire … please?” She averts her gaze.
He watches her as she scurries and hurries in her maid’s clothes, a long black skirt, a gray workman-like bodice, a black apron. That is not what she looked like last night, sumptuous and inflamed. Her hair, once so wonderfully down, is tied up and hidden in a white bonnet. She is less hourglassy than Mary was, perhaps because she toils all day and has less to eat. And whereas Mary was a newborn soul that hadn’t learned to smile, this Mallory doesn’t smile perhaps because there’s less to smile about. Her delicate life is rough with work. She is efficient. In five minutes, the bed is made up, some ale is in a silver decanter, yellow lilies are by the open window. Julian condemns the yellow lilies but says nothing. The girl doesn’t know they stand for falsehood. He’ll replace them when he goes out, perhaps with red tulips for desire.
“Will that be all, sire?”
“The Baroness said you might have some clothes for me.”
“Yes, pardon me. I forgot.” She returns with some faded breeches, a frayed tunic, and a pair of old shoes. “If there’s nothing else …”
“Oh, but there is.” He reaches for her hand.
She retreats. “I’m very busy, sire. I’m not … I’m the maid, that’s all I am.”
“That’s not all you are.”
“Last night was an aberration.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You heard the Baroness. Me, Carling, and Ivy got ten rooms to clean and the downstairs to sweep and get ready for lunch. There’s only three maids cleaning, and you saw, the Baroness is already upset with me.”
“I don’t much care what she thinks.”
“I don’t have that luxury, not to care what she thinks, sire.”
From the floor below, Julian hears Tilly calling Mallory’s name. He tuts. “You’re making me forget everything, Mallory. The Baroness said someone named Gasper is downstairs for you.”
Mallory hardens.
“Who’s Gasper, your father?”
“No, sire, I don’t think my mother knew who my father was.”
“So Gasper could be your father?”
“Well, I suppose so. Anything is possible.”
“That’s true. I know for a fact,” Julian says, “that anything is possible.”
“But since Gasper was married to my aunt, I’d say it’s not very likely. He’s come to collect.”
“Your Aunt Tilly, the Baroness?”
“No, my mother’s other sister. She’s dead.”
“And your mother?”
“She is also dead.”
“Oh.” Julian can’t take his eyes off her pale, diffident, serious, beautiful face, with pursed lips and moist eyes. “Where are you from?”
“Clerkenwell.”
His expression must fall, because Mallory softens. “Did you perhaps know my mother, sire?” Almost imperceptibly, she smiles.
“No.” Circling his arm around her waist, he brings her to him. “Oh, Mallory,” he whispers.
She lets him embrace her, as if it’s her duty.
“Mallory! Gasper is waiting!”
Julian doesn’t want to let her go.
“That’s my cue, sire,” she says, easing out of his arms, her breathy voice low. “Gasper’s waiting.”
“What’s another minute? I’ve waited too, and longer than he has.”
“Have you also come to collect, sire?”
“What? No.” Julian raises her hand to his lips, kissing the inside of her wrist. “Come back tonight.”
“I can’t. Aunt Tilly forbids it. Besides, I’m busy tonight. Perhaps Margrave …”
“No,” Julian says. “Not Margrave. You.”
“Believe me, I promise you, swear to you, I’m not the girl for you, sire …” She stands stiffly.
“You are.” Their eyes lock. Pulling away, she hurries out, but the relieved and excited Julian is not put off by her daytime restraint. Her nighttime body is fresh in his memory and visceral in his loins. He has found her again, his garden of pomegranates, his orchard of new wine. He’s elated, not afraid.
It is thus that Julian becomes the landlord of a brothel. It’s an excellent job, one of the best he’s had, better than substitute teaching, better than working for fucking Graham. If only Ashton could see him now. No one would appreciate the multi-layered delights and ironies of Julian’s new position better than Ashton. The job allows him to make money and be surrounded day and night by sexy, enthusiastic women. Nights are busy, but it’s quiet during the day, and he can catch up on his sleep or read or go out for a walk to buy flowers and candles. In the mornings, Julian sends Ilbert to the butcher and the coal boy. He supervises the maids and the girls himself (of course) and selects his own roses and lilies.
Fresh flowers must be in vases in all the rooms, everything must be stripped and washed from the night before, the chamber pots emptied, the floors swept and mopped, beds made, windows opened, and rooms aired out. It’s like running a naughty bed and breakfast. Once a week Julian pays off the parish constable, a solid, likable chap named Parker.
Every morning, the Baroness and Julian count the silver, mostly pennies and farthings, and a few shillings. He helps the madam separate the operational coin from the profit, and at noon leaves for King Street to deliver the bag of silver to Lord Waas, the owner of the Silver Cross.
The London of 1666 isn’t quite what it was when Julian was last here in 1603. Yes, the roads have widened, and the trees have grown. But the city has been decimated by wholescale death and hasn’t had time to recover. The fear of the plague is apparent in the diminished bedlam on the streets and in the caution of the people who scurry past him, covering their mouths and faces. One afternoon, Julian takes a long aching walk all the way to Clerkenwell. The Fortune Theatre has been dismantled. The brothel quarter is shuttered. The Collins Manor with its stables and grounds is gone. Five new homes have been built in its place.
But even with London thus reduced, the clatter and cry of every living thing remains unending. The blacksmiths are the loudest of all, for they make things everyone else uses in their trades, so the blacksmith’s trade never stops, even at night. There are a hundred parishes within the City gates and another thirty scattered without, and every parish has a church and the belfries ring on the hour and half-hour and quarter-hour to announce the time, and the blacksmith foundries make the bells, and to make them they must test them, and every time they test them, the bells toll, and there are a hundred foundries, a hundred churches, and a million bells, over spires and doors and horses’ necks, and the metal against metal rings and rings and rings, far away, nearby, nonstop, even when Julian sleeps.
Aside from the relentless tolling of the bells, the job brings Julian happiness. Not only is he in the daily proximity of his beloved, but he is surrounded by other attractive women, more playful than she, women who defer to him and flirt with him. The visiting men seek no trouble except when they’re blind drunk and then a not so gentle shove from Julian into the street is enough for them to return sober and chastised the following evening.
It’s boisterous at night—like Normandie, the street where Josephine used to live with Z—but with more sex and less hip hop. There’s plenty to drink, and if Julian wanted to have a social life on the side, he could. Margrave (though not Mallory) has bragged to the other girls about the unrestrained bounty that is Julian. “His blood boils with such excess!” Margrave tells the other girls. “Mal and I feared there wouldn’t be enough of him for the two of us, but it turns out there wasn’t enough of us for the one of him! There’s enough of him to board all ten of us, isn’t that right, sire?” Occasionally in the late evenings, especially if it’s slow, he hears the patter of their feet outside his door, their low whispers, seductive warbles, spicy pleas. One kiss, sire, one bob, sire, one bout in the bowl, sire. He’s grateful the girls are often too tired if not too proud to beg. Grateful yet regretful. Now that he is landlord, the Baroness has commanded him to keep away. “They need to be fresh for the next day, Master Julian, no sense tiring them out unnecessarily.”
Every single day, the Right Reverend Anselmo arrives before the evening rush and stands in the middle of the restaurant downstairs, loudly sermonizing their sins away. “Constable Parker says we must put up with him to stay open,” the Baroness tells Julian. “The reverend is sent from the deanery of Whitehall to maintain something called prima facie decorum.” The Baroness swears. “Royal prerogative and all that. We must be mindful of our hallowed location. If it was up to me, I’d have that eunuch Anselmo castrated again. He calls my beautiful home the shambles! Can you imagine!”
Julian doesn’t have to imagine. Nightly he hears the vicar’s clarion call.
“He says the devil slaughters the souls of Christian men in our humble tavern!” The Baroness spits like a man. “In infinite ways, the devil butchers men’s souls at the Silver Cross, he says. Ah, yes, that Anselmo is a British treasure. He’s a convert, you know. He used to be a Catholic. Now he’s a reformed Puritan. And you know what they say about reformed Puritans.”
“That there’s nothing worse than a reformed whore,” Julian says, and the Baroness howls with laughter and for weeks repeats the line to everyone she greets.
One afternoon, while eating and socializing with the girls, amusing them by garbling their names, Julian makes the mistake of calling the one who’s named Jeanne “Saint Joan of Arc.” Immediately the banter stops. The Baroness steps forward from her table in the back corner. She hears everything. “Why would you call the Maid of Orleans Saint Joan?” the Baroness asks. “She was no saint.”
“My mistake. Wasn’t she canonized?”
“Canonized?” The Baroness doesn’t laugh. “She’s a rebel burned for heresy, for slaughtering the English, for impersonating a man, for saying she heard the voice of God command her to raise an army against the Crown. She was burned at the stake as a witch, not a saint.”
“My mistake, Baroness.” Julian must be more careful. Sometimes he forgets that beheadings and burnings aren’t just facts in history, but are real blood and real hatred. But wasn’t Joan of Arc canonized, though? Why is it, no matter how much Julian thinks he knows, it’s never enough?
He tries remembering the names of the girls by height, but four of them are the same height, and he tries remembering them by age, but eight of them are under twenty, and he tries remembering them by hair color, but all ten of them are some shade between brown and black. Six of them are bosomy, eight of them are hippy, two of them have barely any breasts at all, and their clientele is limited and specific. The Baroness tells Julian that there’s only one way he must rank the girls, “And that’s by how much money they bring in. That’s your only yardstick as the keeper of this house.”
“That is not his only yardstick, Baroness,” Margrave says, and the girls titter.
“Hush, Margrave. Stop wearing him like a medal.”
The madam is right. Julian learns their names much faster using her method. Brynhilda, a large, buxom lass of Germanic origin, is first. The men wait hours for her. Mute Kitty is second because she’s quickest. Beatrix and Millicent are sisters, work in tandem, and are three and four. Brazen Margrave is five, Ru is peppy and six, and French Catholic Severine is seven. The girl who’d been calling herself Jeanne before Julian ruined it for her, and who now must refer to herself as plain Joan, is currently underworked and number eight, boyish Allie is nine, and Greta is last. Greta is skeletal and at almost thirty has outlasted her usefulness. But her great-grandfather is rumored to be Parson, the man who founded the Silver Cross, so she’s not going anywhere.
The ten bedrooms and ten girls mix and match depending on the workload. The rooms are strictly for pleasure, six on the second floor, four on the third. The girls sleep high up on the fourth floor, in the stifling attic rooms by the dormers, five ladies to a cubby. The three maids, including Mallory, are segregated down on the ground floor, in the back by the servants’ kitchen. They mix with no one.
Except for Mallory—who is the prettiest of all the girls at the Silver Cross—the cleaning girls are desperately unattractive. Carling is lame and Ivy is scarred. Carling and Ivy loathe Mallory, because she’s the Baroness’s niece and “not nearly ugly enough.” Though she’s not allowed to sit with Julian and the regulars while they have their dinner of spiced eel and fish pies, all the girls, the maids and the molls, resent Mallory for having too many privileges. The main complaint about her is that she never gets punished for the things she does wrong. Julian doesn’t dare ask what she does wrong, lest it reveal how he feels about her.
The girls don’t stop complaining about one thing or another. Nothing is so trivial that it won’t cause offense. Yes, on the one hand, Julian is surrounded by women. But on the other, Julian is surrounded by women. They’re soft and busty, flirtatious, voluptuous, and their erotic inclinations know no bounds. But when they’re not arguing with him over the house-set price of goods and services, they’re bad-mouthing each other. They’re also not above blatant mendacity. They ascribe to each other all manner of vice and malice, they saddle one another with the lies of the most hideous contagious diseases. They often accuse one another of attempted murder through poison and infection. It’s astonishing. They are beautiful but venal.
Fortunately, it’s the Baroness not Julian who deals with the bulk of their grievances. When he asks her how she sustains herself, she laughs. “Oh, dear boy,” she says. “Margrave is right about you. You’re too good a man. She says you may be of noble blood. Eventually you’ll learn how to handle the commoners.” A commoner is another name for prostitute. “Rule number one: You must stop being so respectful. Do like me and pay them absolutely no mind. I pretend to listen, for they need to complain. It’s about seniority. It’s about money. It’s only when they don’t complain that they worry me. And by the way, do you know who never complains? Mallory. And she’s the one who’s got the most to complain about, for the other girls are simply dreadful to her. But she never disparages them in return, she never whines about the cleaning, or being overworked, and she never says a bad word to or about anyone. Or a good word, for that matter. She’s my niece, and I love her like family, but frankly, she is too tame! She’s the one who vexes me the most with her unspeakable silence. Oh, how she vexes me!”
5 (#ulink_27801a90-e79f-52bd-9c05-f3e2d0c5038b)
Lord Fabian (#ulink_27801a90-e79f-52bd-9c05-f3e2d0c5038b)
LATE ONE NIGHT JULIAN IS ASKED BY IVY THE MAID TO BRING some wine to Room Two, his favorite room. It’s an odd request, for Julian is not usually in the business of fetching and carrying. He doesn’t mind the chore; the evening has been passing without a crisis. He’s only had to throw one man out into the street. As is his custom, Julian is formally dressed, in black silk hose and pointed-toe black leather shoes. He wears a blue velvet waistcoat with dark red buttons. His long thick hair is shiny and down, slicked back behind his ears. And he has shaved his epic beard, because wouldn’t you know it—in 1666, no one has beards! He can’t keep up with men’s facial hair fashion. Considered most virile at the turn of the century—the longer, the better—beards are now deemed lawless and dirty.
Julian knocks. A male voice answers. The room is dim, lit by three candles and a low fire. In a chair by the unmade bed sits a big fat man in loosened silk robes. Across the room from him, by the row of candles, illuminated from the side, Mallory stands naked. The man in the chair motions Julian to bring the wine and place it on the table by his elbow. Julian sets down the decanter, takes the empty one and turns to leave. He tries not to look at Mallory.
The man grabs his arm. “What do you think of our beauty, sir?” he says, chuffing like a horse.
Julian still won’t look at her. Our? “Beautiful.” He yanks his arm away.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Nope.” Julian doesn’t bother faking politeness. He doesn’t need to. He’s in charge. His antenna is up, and so is his concern for Mallory.
“This is Lord Fabian, sire,” Mallory says softly. “He is one of our most kind and generous patrons.”
“I know who you are,” the fat man says to Julian. His puffy white shirt is open. His chest is hairy, he’s perspiring, sickly perfumed. “And you certainly know who the girl is.” He sniggers, winded even from speaking.
“Lord Fabian watched us the other night, sire,” Mallory says. She points to a tapestried panel on the wall. “From a hidden enclosure.”
That does not endear Julian to the man. He backs away to stand between Mallory and the lord, shielding her from the man’s lecherous gaze.
“You put on quite a show, young man. Well done.” Fabian wipes his brow with a soiled handkerchief. “I’d like you to do it again.” He pauses. “But this time while I watch comfortably from a chair instead of peeping through a hole in a wall like a burglar.”
“No,” Julian says.
“Pardon me?”
“You heard me. Mallory, get dressed, come with me. The Baroness is asking for you downstairs.”
“No, sire,” Mallory says calmly. “The Baroness knows where I am. She allows me this indulgence from time to time—because it’s Lord Fabian.”
“I should think she allows it,” Fabian says, bristling, “all the money she’s made off me.”
“Yes, you have been very good to me, my lord.”
“Come, Mallory,” Julian says, reaching for her.
She pulls away from his hand. “No.”
From me you pull away, Julian wants to say to her.
“I demand you stay,” Fabian says to Julian, “or God help me, I’ll have your job. And possibly your head on a spike.”
Julian walks out, leaving the door open behind him.
He returns to his room and sits on the bed, contemplating his options. Before he has time to get more upset, there’s a knock. It’s Mallory, hastily dressed.
“Sire, may I talk to you?” She shuts the door behind her. “Why won’t you help me?” She comes forward. “Is it because I refuse to come to you privately?”
“No.”
“If you help me, I will agree to see you from time to time.”
“No.” He frowns. Is she trying to make him more upset? “I don’t want you to come to me because we made a bargain, Mallory. I want you to come to me because you want to.”
“I’m too busy around here to want to do anything, sire. But you don’t seem as if you are too busy tonight to help me. So why are you saying no?”
“I’m saying no because I don’t want to do it.”
“You don’t want to be with me?” Her voice is soft, cajoling, her brown eyes large like a baby fawn’s.
“Not like this.”
“I know you must think him vile, but if you touch me, he won’t touch me. Don’t you want that? In some way, this is to protect me.”
“There must be another way.”
“There isn’t,” Mallory says. “Not at the moment. The lord wants to perform and can’t. This makes him angry, first with himself, and then with me. He says I judge him for his malady, and no matter what I try to do or say to let him know it’s not true is wrong. Unfortunately, the pressure of my willing body works on him in reverse. But then you appeared to us, sire, to me and Margrave! Afterward, the lord told me he hadn’t felt as aroused and happy in many years.”
“Good for him. Nothing I enjoy more than hearing I make that man happy and aroused. But you’re not one of Tilly’s girls. You’re a maid.” Julian is trying to shut his heart to her. “Just do your job and stay away from him.”
Mallory wrings her hands. “The Baroness allows me to be with him because he promised her he wouldn’t really touch me. He is my only customer. Mostly all he does is look, because that’s all he can do, and that’s the truth. I only do it to make a little money on the side.”
“What’s it to me?”
“The other girls get paid more, and I work so much harder.”
“So complain, Mallory. Speak up. The Baroness says you never say a word.”
“What’s there to say!” The girl takes a deep breath, and then lowers her deathless voice. “Listen to me, sire, please.”
Julian closes his eyes, to avoid looking at her. He wants to put his hands over his ears to not hear her.
“You’re an idling satyr,” she purrs, reaching for him, caressing him through his silk hose. “Why waste your unused pillar of gold? Put it to use, sire. Put it to good use.”
“Don’t butter me up, I’m not toast. You know I don’t want to be idle,” Julian says after a beat. “I’m just not going up on his stage.”
“It’s your life and your stage,” says Mallory. “As it is mine. Decide if you want to be in the center of it or in the wings.” She takes his hand. “In the center of it, with me.”
“No.” He turns to the window. What is she doing to him?
“Please, Julian.”
She calls him by his name. Next to the things she did to him when they were together, it’s the ultimate seduction. Will the vixen stop at nothing?
“The lord said he’ll give me a crown if you lie with me,” Mallory says. “A crown, sire! A quarter of a pound. A crown for a few minutes of your time. I make a shilling a week. I have to work five back-breaking weeks to make one crown. The other smuts, with all their experience, make three pennies a customer. Even Brynhilda’s tits fetch her barely six. And the lord is offering us a crown! Why can’t you help me? You did it the other night.”
“The other night, I did it for free.” He pulls his hand away from her.
“You may have done it for free,” Mallory returns cruelly. “But Marg and I knew he was watching us. We got paid for touching each other, and I got paid a bonus for touching you. Two extra shillings after you broke in.”
“Did you split that with Margrave?”
Mallory’s face is cold. “She makes plenty as it is.”
Julian is astonished. “The other night … that was you performing for him?”
“I beg pardon, sire, I hate to be impertinent, but … are you aware where you are? Where you and I both work?”
“Quite aware, thank you. I just thought you had been performing for me. My mistake.” Julian stares into his hands. This is Josephine’s acting life. Mary Collins told her lady mother: all she wanted was to be up on a stage. Josephine told him she invented a stage everywhere she went. Well, here is what the stage looks like in 1666.
Minutes pass. He pulls up his velvet sleeve, counts the ink dots. Seven. A week has passed since his first night here with her. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll do it. But tell your lord it’s a crown only if he leaves the room and spies through the hole.” Julian pauses. “It’s two crowns if he stays in the chair.”
Mallory beams. Julian doesn’t beam.
Without hesitation, Fabian agrees to two crowns. They should’ve asked for more, Julian thinks, as he pushes the heavy bed farther away from the man’s repugnant feet, and he and Mallory undress. Julian wishes he had money he could offer her instead of the toady watching them from three floorboards away.
He and Mallory stand naked in front of each other.
Julian really wants to touch her.
Can he even perform in front of Lord Odious?
Why, yes, it turns out he can.
He does it by trying to forget that Fabian exists, though that’s less easy than it sounds, what with the barrage of winded wheezing commands spitting forth from the man’s foaming mouth as he sits in the nearby chair and directs Julian—as if Julian has no idea what to do on his own.
Why are you standing there? Kiss her. You’re in a pantomime of love, Fabian says. So pantomime.
They kneel on the bed. Julian cups Mallory’s face. It’s not a pantomime, he whispers to his maid and his princess, as he kisses her, kisses her until her nipples harden and he hardens and everything else on her softens.
Fondle her.
Pull on her nipples until she moans.
Tug on her until she squirms.
Lay her down, pour some wine on her.
Open her, eat her pussy.
I didn’t tell you to talk to her, what did you say to her?
Do you like that, Mallory?
Yes, sire.
Do not ask her what she wants or what she likes, you do what I want, you do what I like. Turn her over. Get behind her. Grab her, so she stops moving. Pull out all the way, so I can see. Now thrust all the way in. Tell her to hold on to the headboard if she needs to.
Hold on to the headboard, Mallory.
The orders are barked only to Julian. But Julian knows, Fabian is not barking. He is begging. He’s beseeching Julian to be his proxy with the maiden. All things he cannot do himself, Fabian does through Julian. But Fabian’s shallow panting is so distressing that at one point, Julian lies flat on top of Mallory, even though his instructions were expressly not to. He stops moving and covers her body with his to shield her from the fat lord’s jealous gaze. Easing one arm under her, Julian slows between her hips and presses his face against her cheek, to cover her ear. It’s going to be okay. Are you okay?
I’m fine. She pats his back. It’s not me he covets, sire. It’s you and your able-bodied youth. He’s not looking at me. He’s watching you. It’s your strong legs he desires, and your arms that hold your weight and hold mine. Your hard stomach. Your hard everything.
They kiss in a prolonged moan as if they are real lovers.
I’d like to kill him, Julian says.
No, no, not until we separate the fool from his money, says Mallory.
Julian laughs, Fabian shouts, Julian loses his rhythm, and rhythm is so important in love.
Stand on the floor, have her kneel in front of you. Tell her to suck your cock, but do not discharge in her mouth. So what if the floor is hard. I want to see her on the hard floor. She is getting two crowns from me. She can take a little discomfort in her knees for two crowns, can’t she? Because you’re about to give her more discomfort than that. Tell her to get on her hands and knees. Yes, right on the floor.
Julian is in his own bed when he hears a soft tap. Mallory steps in, dressed in her morning clothes, gray apron, black skirt.
“Am I disturbing you, sire?” Her voice is a whisper.
“No.” He sits up.
The candles have been blown out, the room is dark. Uncertainly she closes the door behind her.
“I think the lord was pleased.”
“And that is what I was aiming for. To please him.”
Even in the night, he sees her blushing face. “I just wanted to say thank you for tonight.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m sorry to have put you in such a spot. He’s a peculiar man, I grant you, but he is generous, and very little is required of me.”
“And thank you for that.”
She stammers. “I meant to say that usually not very much is required of me.”
“What about the other night with Margrave?”
“Yes, we do that sometimes if the lord wishes it, lie together. She is my friend.” Mallory bobs her head. “Well, a friend and an enemy.”
“Where I come from, we call that a frenemy.”
Mallory smiles. “What a good word. Is it Welsh? Frenemy. I’ll remember that.” She doesn’t leave. She takes a step to his bedside table. In her hands is a decanter and a plate. “I brought you a piece of pie. Margrave mentioned the other day that you liked apple pie and there was hardly any left after supper. I saved you a piece and some wine if you’re thirsty.”
“It’s after four in the morning. Leave it. I’ll have it for breakfast.”
She sets it by his bed.
He waits.
“I’m so tired, sire,” Mallory whispers.
Julian swings open the covers.
She takes off her clothes, folds them, stacks them neatly in the corner, and climbs into bed with him. He spoons her, draws the quilt over them, and covers her with his arm.
“I’m worried about that man, Mallory,” Julian said. “I can’t help it. I don’t know if you are safe with him.”
“Oh, sire,” she coos. “You are so kind-hearted. Trust me, you don’t have to worry about him.”
She nestles against him, milling into him a little, murmuring something sexy and inaudible. Julian starts to say something, but she is already asleep. He lies awake cradling her, running his fingers up and down her arm, remembering how much Josephine had loved falling asleep like this back in L.A., in another life. They would deplete themselves there, too, and fall into a stupor at the break of dawn. What sweet days they were before the demon that lay in wait came for them. What warm days of syrupy, salty bliss, of ocean water, of lilies and superhighways. That wasn’t shadowboxing, that wasn’t a shadowlife. That was real.
Or is this real?
Julian clutches the sleeping girl to him, embraces her in a brothel built into the wall of a palace that’s about to crumble and be dismantled for marble. Josephine, Mia, Mary, Mallory, he whispers. I really believed our time had run out, even as I continued to search for you in the London of my nightmares—or is it the London of my dreams? You are my love, the heat of my heart, raising me in flames above my mundane days and dropping me naked at your feet. Where will all this lead us? Where will all this end? I wish I knew. I wish I could see the future. Because sometimes, even when we are like this, it feels to me that you and I are nothing but winged phantoms, Josephine.
6 (#ulink_94b00b5e-83d3-5d1e-9457-c33b2e605940)
Infelice (#ulink_94b00b5e-83d3-5d1e-9457-c33b2e605940)
THE FOLLOWING EVENING MALLORY’S AT HIS DOOR AGAIN. “The lord is back.”
“He’s here every night now?” Julian says. “Doesn’t he have some government business to attend to? A bill to veto? A bishop to consecrate? A family of his own, perhaps? You’d think a man of his, um, stature had some other hobbies.”
“He’s a widower,” Mallory says. “He works late, and to unwind he comes here to spend a little time with me. I offered him a double with me and Marg. But all he wants is you and me.”
That’s all I want, too. You and me. Quietly Julian sits. His body throbs for her. Though not on these terms! he pretends to justify to himself.
Even that’s a lie.
To his marrow, Julian is relieved that the girl in his hands is real. That someone other than him sees Julian make love to her and says, yes! I see her. She is under him, and she is alive. Her arms are around his back. She wraps her legs around him. His hands grip her hips. She bears his weight. She lives. She is not a hallucination. She is not his imagination.
Look, I, the vile creature, see it, too.
The pearls are cast before swine, yes, but they are pearls, and they are cast.
Once again Fabian asks Julian for all sorts of things, and Julian complies. With every fevered caress, Mallory grows more vivid, Fabian more dim, and the silver piles up on the table next to the wine.
Julian almost forgets the man heavy in the chair and sees only the light moaning girl under him. After it’s over and it’s nearly dawn, she knocks on his door again and climbs into his bed. As he cradles her in his arms, he tries to make pillow talk in the foggy minutes before they’re both unconscious. “What kind of name is Mallory? Is it derived from Mary?”
“Mother thought so,” the girl replies. “She was sore mistaken. When she went to baptize me, she found out Mallory was derived not from Mary but from France.”
“Did your mother love France?”
“Oh, no,” Mallory says. “Hence her predicament. When she found out that my name meant suffering in French, she hated France even more.”
Julian also doesn’t like that her name means suffering. “Mallory is a good name.”
“Thank you, sire.”
“I like your name, your face, your voice. I like all of you.”
“Thank you, sire.”
“You can just go ahead and call me Julian.” As you used to.
“Very well.” Then: “Is your name derived from Caesar? Like a conquering emperor, strong in battle, virile, constant as the northern star?”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe the constant part.” He lifts his head off the pillow and leans over her to study her sleepy face. “Mallory, are you quoting Julius Caesar to me?”
She smiles. “I saw it in a playhouse once. Mother and I were walking past the Fortune a few years back when it was still open. They let us in for half a penny. I liked it.”
“Oh, you would, Mal. You would.”
She nestles into him. “Julian … yours is my favorite name in the whole world.”
And the next night, and the next, lust and love abounding.
When Fabian is away one night, Julian falls into a panic. He cannot be without her.
“He’s not here today,” Mallory confirms, peeking into Julian’s room. “You must be so grateful we don’t have to work—again. Now you can finally get a good night’s rest, be refreshed for the morning.” She vanishes before she can see his wounded expression.
Half a minute goes by before she reopens the door and pokes her head in. Her face is lit with a luminous smile. “You keep saying you don’t think I’m funny, sire,” Mallory says. “I just wanted to prove you wrong.”
Julian utterly loses himself in this version of his girl. She is quiet, unassuming, agreeable. She is never painted, yet her mouth is always red; she is youthful and lovely. Her body is abundant everything. Every night Julian’s carnal strings are pulled by his naked puppet master, first in front of Fabian and sometimes by themselves in the conjoined intimacy of his bed.
She is amiable and kind. This is how Julian knows the other girls are mendacious fools. They call Mallory wanton and cunning. This could not be more false. She holds his gaze, speaks truth to him with courtesy. No matter what he talks about, she listens raptly. She even tolerates his homilies on the fauna and flora of London’s public gardens. She tolerates them especially well. She is endlessly fascinated by his tales of the plants and flowers that have been imported from faraway lands like China and India and planted in the royal gardens of the kings and queens. On Sunday afternoons, they walk together arm in arm through the Westminster parks like a gentleman and a lady, he in his velvet waistcoat, she in her Sunday best. “Mallory, why do you keep your eyes to the ground when we walk?” Julian asks.
“That’s where the pennies and the berries are, sire.” Mallory smiles as she devours his heart. She likes St. James’s Park most of all, because that’s where they have the most exotic foliage, and the crocodiles in the ponds and elephants grazing. Once she and Julian even saw two camels! She’s amazed by this; he no less so. It’s remarkable to see a crocodile in the middle of post-plague Westminster in 1666.
Mallory loves to hear about the blooming things. She listens to him as if he’s reciting poetry, sonnets he had composed for her, borne of love and loss. She listens to him wax and wane about oleander and elephant ear, larkspur and lily of the valley, about golden chain and bleeding heart. She adores his stories of rosary peas and laurels, jasmine and azaleas, wild cherries, oak, and yew. Moonseed and mistletoe please her, hemlock and nightshade enchant her.
And in return, on their weekday morning trips to Covent Garden, Mallory entertains Julian with the things she loves. In lavish detail she recounts for him the one play she’s seen besides Julius Caesar and tells him about her modest dream of one day being able to attend the theatre like a rich lady—which to her means any time she chooses. He loved his wife so much, he built her a theatre so she could attend the opera any time she wanted, echoes in Julian’s overfilled heart.
“You don’t wish to be on stage yourself, Mallory?”
Coquettishly she dismisses him. “I don’t need to be on stage, sire. I told you, my life is my stage.” She confesses that if she could be in any play, she’d like to be in The Honest Whore, the backdrop for Othello. She saw it five years ago at the Mermaid Theatre by Puddle Dock when she was fifteen. Her mother took her. It was subtitled Humors of the Patient Man and the Longing Wife. Julian and Mallory are walking back from Covent Garden, pushing a cart filled with red peonies and yellow daisies as she regales him with the colors of the play. “The Duke of Milan fakes his daughter’s death so her lover Hippolito will leave her alone.”
“Why does he need to fake her death?” Julian asks. “Is Hippolito very persistent?” He smiles.
“Very,” she replies. “It’s one of Hippolito’s most endearing qualities.”
“But not his only endearing quality, right?”
“By far not his only endearing quality.” Mallory covers Julian’s hand with hers as he pushes the flower cart. “The daughter’s name is Infelice. Which means unhappiness.” Mallory shrugs. “Almost like my name. Don’t look so suddenly glum, sire. Unfortunately for Infelice, a whore named Bellafront also falls in love with Hippolito. He doesn’t want to love Bellafront back, because he wishes to remain faithful to Infelice, but he cannot help himself. He falls in love with Bellafront, too.”
Julian stops walking near St. Martin-in-the-Fields and waits for the church bells to stop ringing as he draws the girl to him. “Mallory, my beauty, have you considered the possibility that the new seductress and the former lover are one and the same?” He kisses her.
“That can’t be. Infelice is dead.”
“She is not. You said so yourself. She’s hidden.”
“Hidden!” As if the thought had never occurred to her.
“Yes. Bellafront is Infelice disguised.”
Mallory looks thrilled and stunned by this development. “You don’t say, sire. You don’t say. Well, well. Was I too young when I saw the play and simply missed such a vital detail?”
“Yes, Bellafront,” he says fondly, his arms around her. “I think you missed it.”
Julian doesn’t need to exaggerate any aspect of his present life, doesn’t need to embellish any part of his existence by hyperbole. In every sense, in every way, without any help from heightened metaphor, Julian’s love-soaked days here with Josephine are altogether marvelous and good.
Except … sometimes near Covent Garden, as they pass empty lanes of such dismal misery that they must put their heads down, Julian glimpses something else in Mallory. Something hidden. To comfort her, he tells her that the ruthless epidemic that took her mother and aunt is the last such epidemic England will ever have. Mallory doesn’t believe him, and why should she? Seeing the world as it is, especially around the nearly abandoned Drury Lane, his words are impossible to believe. She bristles as he carries on about the need to cleanse London of the parasitic scourge. “Please, sire!” she exclaims with barely concealed scorn. “What do you think we need here, an overflowing volcano, like Pompeii? The brimstone fire of Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“Yes,” Julian says. “A fire.” Slightly his limbs shake. He wishes he knew the exact date of the Great Fire. It was in 1666, right? He’s not sure of anything anymore.
“Look at the way we live,” Mallory says. “Fire, no fire. What do you think a little flame will do? Drury Lane will remain the same fetid alley, riddled with the dead. And my mother will still be gone. She’s the only one who ever loved me, the only one who tried to keep me from harm.”
Your mother is not the only one who ever loved you, Mallory.
“What does it matter to Mother what might happen in the future? She’s dead. Frankly, what you’re saying is nothing but cold comfort, sire.”
In the night, when they are warmer, Mallory divulges things about the Black Plague. They had suffered bouts of the pestilence before, and no one paid much mind to the initial stages of the plague. At the first sign that it was a real epidemic, not just a flu that was going around, Anna sent Mallory south to live with her sister Olivia. As everyone around her continued to die, the mother finally abandoned her house of bawd and traveled across the river to reunite with her daughter. She carried in her hands bouquets of wormwood, a most bitter smelling and tasting flower. “Mother had heard that it might protect me from harm. She made me drink a potion made from vinegar and wormwood. Oh, was it ever vile!”
“Did they paint your door?”
“With a bloody cross? Yes,” Mallory says. “Death is a pale horse, but it shall not come near thee, Mother prayed over me. Then her buboes burst, and she bled to death.”
Mallory shows Julian a sheet of yellowing parchment. It’s from the parish of Clerkenwell. The paper is called the Bill of Mortality. Every week, the parish publishes the causes and numbers of the local dead. Anna ripped it from the priory wall as she was fleeing.
Diseases and Casualties this Week:
Apoplexie 1
Burned in his bed by a candle 1
Canker 1
Cough 2
Fright 3
Grief 3
Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1
Lethargy 1
Suddenly 1
Timpany 1
Plague 7165
Seven thousand people dead in one parish! Out of how many? “Eight thousand,” Mallory replies. Julian shudders. She leaves the list with him when she goes to start her day. “For safekeeping,” she says.
Does she mean the Bill of Mortality or her?
What happened to you, Mallory? Julian asks when they lie in the hot bath together.
I don’t know what you mean.
Once upon a time, you used to be in such revolt. When was this?
When I knew you last, Julian whispers.
Who has time to revolt, sire, Mallory says, her face turned away from him. I don’t have time for such frivolity.
The steam from the bath fills the room and escapes through the open window. Mallory hints she might like to escape, too. Where, he says, and she replies, what’s it to you. She is smoke herself, her skin translucent crepe paper, once real, now an ashen vapor.
Carling and Ivy, the cleaning girls Mallory shares the room with, have confronted her about her mysterious absences from their quarters behind the kitchen. They demand she pay them, or they’ll tell the Baroness she’s up to no good. Julian pays them. Blackmail doesn’t sit well with him; he knows it’s a temporary fix. Now that the urchins know he will pay, they’ll keep raising the price. But what choice does he have? The Baroness will not take kindly to his poaching the orphaned niece entrusted into her care by her two dead sisters.
But the second reason Julian pays off Carling and Ivy is Lord Fabian. Because things have changed in Room Two, and not for the better. A week earlier, as Julian was in the final pangs of his exertions, he felt a fist strike him between the shoulder blades. It was Fabian. He’d gotten out of his chair, waddled over to the bed and hit Julian. “Stop it!” Fabian hissed. “You’re hurting her. You’re tormenting her.”
“No, my lord,” Mallory said, underneath Julian, peeking her head out, controlling her panting breath. “He’s not hurting me.”
“You were crying out.”
“Not from pain, my lord.”
After that night, Fabian stopped requesting Julian’s presence in Room Two. That is why Julian pays off the hooligan maids—so Mallory can continue to share his bed.
Sometimes in the afterglow, while she lies in his arms, he tries to talk to her about a future that doesn’t involve the Silver Cross or Miss Tilly’s girls, or Lord Fabian, but Mallory always falls asleep, and the next morning is up and out before he wakes.
The bells ring, the children play, the ink dots on his arm multiply like summer bug bites.
He and Mallory walk along the Thames, through the parks, through green lanes. They stop for fireworks and carriage races. Whitehall Palace is open to the public. They stroll through the royal gardens, and when they’re not discussing unusual plants, Julian attempts a conversation about a life that might include something for just the two of them, that might include marriage and even babies. He talks about it in fantabulous terms, in the language of dreamers not realists, not as in, let’s get married, but more as in, what if we were a prince and a princess and got married and lived in a white marble palace like this one? Wouldn’t that be something? Mostly Mallory nods.
The immutable tattooing makes Julian feel ridiculous. Count the days, Devi said, but a few times Julian gets on with his day without marking the days—on purpose, not on purpose.
He and Mallory still haven’t talked about the future in the language of realists. He doesn’t want to rush things, push things, like before in L.A. when he ruined everything with his hurry, as if he had felt on some subliminal level that Josephine was running out of time. Here in post-plague London, he wants to live with her—and does live with her—the way most people live. As if they’re going to live forever.
7 (#ulink_e509b035-7011-5cfb-895e-9aa7798533d5)
Dead Queen, Revisited (#ulink_e509b035-7011-5cfb-895e-9aa7798533d5)
AT THE END OF AUGUST ONE OF THE PATRONS OF THE SILVER Cross dies in the night.
A panting, irritated Baroness Tilly bangs on Julian’s door. She was woken up by the one-eyed Ilbert, who said the dead man’s blood dripped through the floorboards into his cubby below. “It’s the last thing we need,” the Baroness says to Julian. “Today is a Saturday, our busiest night of the week. Nothing could be worse for business than death. Julian, let’s hurry and take care of it before the stench takes hold.”
It’s Lord Fabian.
In his velvet robes, the man lies face down on the floor. He has collapsed, hit the iron leg of the table, and smashed his head open. He may have bled to death, but it’s hard to tell. Why would he fall in the first place? Julian and the Baroness stand in shock.
“His heart must’ve finally gave out, the poor fat bugger,” the Baroness says. She is probably right. Nothing is out of place, except the overturned table, the silver decanter on its side, the broken crystal glasses, and the enormous corpse.
“This is the kind of thing that closes down establishments!” the Baroness says. “People are so superstitious about death. And this is one of our best rooms. Bugger it. Bugger it all to hell.”
Fabian’s head is turned to the side. His eyes bulge out of their sockets, as if he had suffocated before he died, not simply lost consciousness after a fall and a blow to the head. The suffocation seems odd for a cardiac event. Blood spills out of his filled-up mouth. There’s foam around his lips—as if he’d been gasping for breath before dying. From the disturbance around the armchair and the knocked-over table, it looks to Julian that the man could’ve gone into convulsions. The foul mess under his swollen body suggests a severe gastric disturbance.
To keep from retching, Julian and the Baroness breathe into their velvet sleeves. He opens the windows to let in some air. It’s already miserably hot, though it’s barely sunrise.
Lord Fabian is a nobleman, a temporal lord, a peer in Parliament. He is a well-known figure around London, and there’s going to be an outcry if his desiccated, exsanguinated corpse is found in a brothel. Someone will get charged with murder. Not may. Will. Someone will get quartered. In 1666, they disembowel first and ask questions later.
While the Baroness wrings her hands, Julian looks around. Usually Fabian keeps a small purse on the table by the wine. From the black pouch, the lord pulled out shillings and half-crowns and stacked them in phallic towers for him and Mallory. It takes Julian a moment to find it, but there it is; it’s fallen off the table and under the bed. At least Fabian wasn’t robbed, that’s something.
“These things happen, Baroness,” Julian says. “The man fell and hit his head. As you said, he probably had a heart attack. Let’s call for Parker. He’s a reasonable chap. He’ll see this for what it is, a terrible accident.”
“This is the City of Westminster!” she hisses. “Good God, man, do you know nothing? Lords of His Majesty’s Government don’t drop dead in brothels.”
“This one did.”
“Who was the lord with, do you know?” The Baroness trembles. “Please tell me it wasn’t Mallory!”
“No, madam,” Julian says. “It wasn’t Mallory.”
“How do you know? How do you know for certain?”
Julian knows because Mallory was with him last night. He can’t admit it to the Baroness. He goes on the attack instead. “Baroness, who did you assign Lord Fabian to?” he asks, turning Tilly’s own words against her, since the woman is constantly bragging about how no man can walk up the stairs without her knowledge.
The whoremonger grows reticent. “I may have overlooked writing his name in my book,” she confesses. And then, “Truth is, I didn’t see him come in.” She hesitates. “It’s not unusual. He often enters the back way, to avoid being seen. He’s too recognizable. But enough claptrap,” she says with a forceful air. “He’s not getting any fresher while we stand here shooting our mouths off. What does it matter who was with him and which way he came?”
“You asked me who was with him, madam.”
“The man is dead! Isn’t that what’s most important? We must get him out of here before anyone else wakes up. Isn’t that what’s most important?”
Julian is tasked with removing Fabian’s corpse from the premises, dumping it in a nearby canal, and cleaning up the room as if the death never happened. It’s a stifling end-summer morning in Westminster, where no smell, no matter how faint, cannot be made worse by the wretched heat. A man dead and decomposing in the swelter of August is not what Julian would call a faint smell. The Baroness insists Ilbert help Julian. She calls the eel-like servant a humpbacked tomb of discretion. “Oh, and Julian,” the Baroness says before she leaves, “have Carling and Ivy wash down the room. Keep my niece out of it. She and Lord Fabian were close. I don’t want her getting upset. As soon as you’ve cleared him out, let me know, and I’ll take Mal to the market while the other girls mop up.”
Julian and Ilbert wrap Fabian’s body in burlap and tie him up with twine. A quick-thinking Ilbert first cleans up the mess around Fabian so they can work without getting soiled themselves. He then suggests lining the burlap with pieces of flagstone from the basement to help weigh the body down during final disposal.
It takes hours, but fortunately the girls work late and sleep past noon, so the house stays quiet. Just in case, the Baroness stands guard up in the attic with a tray of biscuits and marmalade to stop the girls from wandering downstairs.
Julian and Ilbert drag the heavy, unwieldy sack down the narrow back stairs into the alley, and heave the body into a cart, the very same pushcart Julian and Mallory line with flowers each morning. Julian orders Ilbert to take the cart to a canal or an estuary as far away as possible from Whitehall and the Silver Cross. Anywhere Ilbert wishes. But far from here. Ilbert nods as if he understands things.
“What do you think happened to him, Ilbert?”
“I know nothing about nothing, sire,” the tomb of discretion replies. “He could’ve died from many things.”
“Like what?”
“I have one eye and my hump prevents me from looking anywhere but down.” Ilbert’s cunning expression reads as if down is where it’s all at. It reminds Julian of what Mallory had once said in passing, why her gaze was always to the ground. Because that’s where the pennies and the berries were, she said.
After Ilbert leaves, Julian vomits in the alley that centuries later will become Craig’s Court.
He cleans himself up in the downstairs slop sink and, carrying buckets filled with vinegar and lye, goes upstairs to collect the last of the man’s belongings for burning before Carling and Ivy arrive to clean. The room reeks. It will take the maids hours to rid it of the smell of human waste and death. But they must do it, the room must be ready for business by nightfall. What a great room it was, Julian laments, now ruined.
After collecting Fabian’s clothes and righting the table, Julian surveys the floor for anything suspicious in case Constable Parker comes to call. Near the open window, where Fabian fell, Julian notices that one of the floorboards isn’t level. A short plank seems to have gotten loose. He pops it out, aligns it straight, and is about to bang it into place with his fist when underneath, resting on the subflooring, he sees a dark brown satchel.
Alarm pounds through Julian’s body.
The purse is brown leather with red velvet ribbons, stitched with gold and silver. As he lifts it out, he hears the sound of dull rolling marbles. Pulling open the strings, Julian finds inside not marbles but gold coin.
There are female voices in the corridor. Awkwardly, he stuffs the satchel down his belted breeches, a kangaroo pouch with a golden joey in it. He must calm down or he’ll have a heart attack himself, drop dead with a bag of gold in his pants. He replaces the short board, bangs it in until it lies evenly with the rest of the floor and takes one last glance around to make sure nothing else looks disturbed.
His bedroom door has no lock, as most rooms do not in a brothel. He drags an oak table to barricade the door and sits down on the bed with his back to the entrance as a precaution.
Trying to be as quiet as possible, Julian pours out the clanging gold onto his bedspread. Each the size of a half-dollar, the coins are gleaming, hefty, pristine. He’s never seen anything like them.
Except …
He’s seen something a little bit like them. The head of the coin is the imperious, fully robed body of a queen. He recognizes the queen because in 1603, her face was on all the silver shillings and farthings and pennies he took with him to Smythe Field market to buy flowers for Mary’s wedding. It’s Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Regina is stamped on the face. On the obverse side is the royal coat of arms.
Julian is confounded and troubled. Why is there a bag of freshly minted historic coin? Why was it hidden in the floorboards at the Silver Cross? Is it Fabian’s? Was he hiding sovereigns in a brothel and dropped dead? Was that why his face was on the floor, was that why he fell? Did he know he was dying and was trying to get to his money?
Julian counts it. There are 49 gold coins. He estimates each weighs about half an ounce. That’s about 25 ounces of gold he’s got on his bed. Breathing heavily, he sits, his hands running over the bullion. Why would a lord hide a treasure in the Silver Cross of all places? Didn’t he have a home where he could stash his ill-gotten gains? Was it blackmail money on the way to another destination? Or was Fabian the destination? Was it in transit or being delivered? Did Fabian steal the money and was killed for it, or was it his money and he was killed for it? Was it even his money? Is it even real gold? The weight of his intuition heavy in his hand tells him that it is.
Julian has a million questions and zero answers.
He also has zero time to reflect and ruminate. Coincidence or not, an esteemed member of the House of Lords was killed literally over gold. Before Julian can find out if it was by chance or design, he must get the treasure out of the brothel.
But get it out to where? He has no friends in London in 1666. No Devi to consult, no Ashton to help him. He’s friendly with the girls but knows no one else except Mallory, and until he finds out more, she can’t be endangered in any way. If it’s real gold as Julian suspects, she can’t be an accomplice to a theft of this magnitude. They cut you in half for stealing pewter bowls. She can’t help him anyway, she has no room of her own to hide the money. She keeps her dead mother’s Bill of Mortality in his desk for safety. Can Julian hide the money in his unlocked cupboard? What about in his floorboards? He investigates, but his floor is assiduously nailed down.
Afraid, exhilarated, his heart thumping, Julian returns the coins to their pouch, except for two. After he changes into fresh clothes, he binds the purse inside his trunk hose, pulling a pair of belted breeches over them. He tightens another belt around all three—the hose, the breeches and the purse—to keep the coins from jingling as he walks.
Julian needs to do two things. He must find a goldsmith on Cheapside who can appraise the coin. And he must hide the money somewhere safe until the investigation into Lord Fabian’s death is behind them, and then he and Mallory together can decide what to do.
Flattening out the bedspread where the weight of the coin has made a tell-tale depression, Julian throws on his coat to cover the awkward and conspicuous bulge in his groin and heads downstairs. After giving cleaning instructions to Carling and Ivy, he learns that the Baroness has taken “an extremely unhappy” Mallory and left for the afternoon. Relieved that he doesn’t have to explain to the Baroness why he’s wearing a coat in ninety-degree heat, Julian runs out to Parliament Street.
It’s brutally hot out. It has been a nearly rainless August. Why can’t it rain just once in London, just once! Stepping over the horse manure on the cobblestones, Julian hurries to the Strand where he hops on a hackney carriage that takes him through Temple Bar to Cheapside.
Cheapside, the queen of thoroughfares, is wide like a boulevard and sports fountains and water channels. It has dozens of taverns, merchants’ mansions, luxury shops, milliners and cobblers, silversmiths and blacksmiths. Cheapside has everything, including the most venerable gold dealers in the world. Everyone in London shops on Cheapside on Saturday afternoons. The jammed congestion around St. Paul’s is so bad, Julian must hop off the carriage and walk the rest of the way to Goldsmiths Row, sweating in his absurd overcoat.
The building he enters is dark inside, a grand space like a cave chamber, but no amount of dimness can hide its ostentatious wealth. It’s not just the gold trinkets in the glass cases and the gold display platters on the walls. Even the crown mouldings, the door latches, and the sills on the windows are plated gold. Plated gold, right, not cast in gold? The candlesticks are gold, and the beveled edges of the polished oak table behind which Julian sits are trimmed in gold. The hands of all the softly chiming clocks are gold. The man across from him has a gold pocket watch laid out on the table to remind Julian of the value of time.
“How can I be of service, sire?” the elegant man says. He’s impeccably dressed in gray velvet and white silk. His name is Arnold Bertie. He is in the employ of the great Earl of Lindsey who is one of the owners of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths.
His fingers shaking, Julian slides the gold coin across the table. “I was hoping you could tell me something about this coin.”
Bertie doesn’t pick it up. That’s how Julian instantly knows it’s not counterfeit. The gentleman, for whom gold is his livelihood, doesn’t touch the coin with his hands. “Sire, please,” he says to Julian. “Do not slide it across the desk. You could scratch the coin.” Bertie pulls out a silk white cloth, a magnifying glass, brings forth the burning lantern, pulls closer the candlesticks, and tenderly picks up the gold piece with a white-gloved hand, laying it on the white silk. Wordlessly he examines it for no less than ten minutes. He treats the coin like a holy relic. From his drawer, he produces a scale and eases the coin onto it. “Astounding!” he cries. “Wherever did you get this?”
“It was a small token of affection from a deceased uncle.”
“Oh, this is no small token, I can assure you. What you’ve got here is one of the most exquisite coins ever to be hammered by the Royal Mint. It’s called angel. It’s an Elizabethan fine gold sovereign. Nothing even close to it is being made today. Or for that matter is likely to be made again. It is simply too expensive to produce. It is 23-carat gold, and precisely one-half of a Troy ounce. The coin is 99% pure gold. It is a work of art. And judging by its condition, yours has never been used.”
Julian doesn’t know what to say.
“Are you all right, sire? You look unwell.”
“I’m fine,” Julian says, his voice unsteady. “Please—continue.”
Bertie gazes upon the coin with reverence. “During the Elizabethan era, all our coin was hand-hammered like this one, but you can imagine how much labor that entailed, melting the gold ingots, softening them, casting them into blanks, hammering and softening them again. The hammering and annealing happened another twelve times before the edges were deemed sufficiently rounded, and that was just to make the blank, sire. Then it had to be coined in a hand-held die, coined with the precision of a master craftsman. These coins haven’t been minted for over a hundred years, at least not to my knowledge. Is it the only one you’ve got? Such a shame. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in selling this piece to us? Would you like me to see what we can give you for it today?”
“Well, I suppose there’s no harm in that,” Julian says evenly.
Clutching the coin inside a silk handkerchief, Bertie disappears. Julian, his nerves electrified, waits impatiently.
In a few minutes, Bertie returns. “Here’s what I can offer. The Charles II guinea, weighing barely half of this coin, and not comparable to it in either quality or gold content, is worth twenty-two shillings, so a little more than one pound sterling. For this coin, I can offer you three hundred shillings.”
Three hundred shillings. Julian is speechless. That’s fifteen pounds! Mallory would have to work six years to make that. As a keeper of a brothel, Julian would have to work three.
And there’s another 48 where it came from.
Julian knocks over the chair as he stands, dropping his hat on the floor. “I’m sorry, Bertie,” he says, clutching his groin where the coins warmly reside. “I’m in a terrible rush. Simply maddening hurry. I accept your offer, if you would be so kind.”
“Oh! Very good, sire. I am delighted. How would you like your money?”
“Three dimes, a hundred-dollar bill and eighty-seven ones,” Julian mutters in a daze. “I mean—ten guineas, fifteen crowns, and twenty-five shillings.”
With money in hand and coins in his crotch, he bows and backs out. Lost and breathless, Julian stands on Cheapside, trying to think, think! To the left of him is Poultry, to the right St. Paul’s. The river is up ahead, all around him is the London Wall. Where does he go? He’s boxed in.
He has stolen an unconscionable amount of gold. Julian is certain he and the dead lord can’t be the only ones who know about the fortune in the floorboards. For all Julian knows, Ilbert may know about it. If Fabian didn’t drop dead by accident, which seems less and less likely, he was probably killed for this money. Greater men have been murdered for far less. Now the killer will be coming to get what’s his, and he won’t stop until Julian is dead, and all the cullies are dead, and the Silver Cross is burned to the ground.
Is this Julian’s way of protecting Mallory?
Nearly fifty gold coins at fifteen pounds each. That is £735 in 1666. Motionless he stands, watching the slow carriages, the hurrying people, the cantering horses. He’s euphoric, but in trouble.
It’s impossibly hot out and he’s wearing a long wool coat to disguise his thievery. He looks like a criminal, looks guilty and sweaty, his face red and wet. Lowering his head, Julian hurries away from Cheapside, up St. Martin’s Le Grand to Cripplegate on the way to the familiar and haunted Clerkenwell. It’s all he knows. In the courtyard gardens of the church of St. Giles by Cripplegate, just outside the City gates, Julian finds a bench between the side of the church and the Roman wall and drops down. He needs a prayer. But how does one pray for help in a situation like this? He needs to hide the money is what he needs to do, and then he must persuade Mallory to run away with him. He was able to persuade Josephine to marry him, almost against her will, and he was able to persuade Mary—when it was too late. This time, he must do better, try harder. That’s why he’s been given a second chance! Where is it safe for him to stash it? He gazes around the empty garden, the quiet alley. The stone church stands silently, its grounds wilting with heavy, end-August browning leaves, the London Wall a few yards away. The last time, Julian wanted to take Mary to Italy. This time, with £700, they can go anywhere. They’ve been offered a new life. They can travel like the Pilgrims across the sea, to Massachusetts Bay Colony. But run they must; they can’t stay where they are, that’s for sure. He’s been lulled into a false sense of immortality, he knows that now, the bathwater in the brothel too warm, the girl too addicting. Now he must act.
Julian stares into the distance a few more seconds—and then shoots up and bolts, the crowns and guineas jingling in his pocket. He knows what to do. He needs to find a mason; he needs a hammer, a chisel, a trowel, some lime-based mortar. He has figured out where to hide the money. All will be well. He will fix it. He will fix everything.
8 (#ulink_f9215463-f3e2-531c-82ab-5a768d381366)
Bellafront (#ulink_f9215463-f3e2-531c-82ab-5a768d381366)
GRIMY, SWEATY, PANTING, GROSS, JULIAN RETURNS LATE TO the Silver Cross.
The Baroness is ready to send him to Newgate for his day-long absence just when she needs him most. Not only had he vanished, but he’s come back with no flowers! And in his absence, a nasty fight has broken out between the girls, the constable has come by twice, inquiring about a possible death on the premises, Ilbert has been making strange noises about blackmail, and Carling and Ivy did such a poor job disinfecting the room that an early client has just stormed downstairs demanding a refund.
In the corner of the tavern, Father Anselmo stands, loudly pleading to the men present. “My fallen angels, have you already forgotten that pestilence was retribution for your wicked ways?” he cries. “It was punishment for your wrongdoing. I beseech you, good gentlemen and a lady—turn from your stinking and horrible sin of lechery! Which grows daily in this stew by your continual employment of strumpets, all to the one misguided and idle women. How long can this continue—until you’re all dead of syphilis or the plague? A conflagration will not be enough to punish you for your sins. How long do you intend to dwell in your odious wickedness? Until there is more death? Don’t you know that wanton lust, divorced from civilizing forces, leads to errors in judgment, to compromised honor, to blackmail, to murder! All the deadly sins are boiling under your roof, and you call yourselves reputable men. Repent! Repent before it’s too late.”
The Baroness, her face unpainted, perspiring, aggravated, folds her hands together in a frantic plea to Julian. She looks as Julian feels. “I’m going to throw myself into the River Thames if that miserable wretch doesn’t shut his gob this instant!” she exclaims about Anselmo. “Where have you been all day, Julian? Why do you look as if you’ve been swimming in mud? Why aren’t you dressed for the evening? It’s Saturday night. You know how busy we get. We have no flowers, and Room Two still smells of corpse. The girls are ripping each other’s hair out—and I mean that in the most literal sense. Ilbert is more insolent than ever, you’re nowhere to be found, and look like a leper. Please—go change into your evening attire. Blimey, one little death, and everything’s gone to pot!” The woman fans herself wildly, raising her eyes to the ceiling. “Bloody helpers, it’s hot! I’m praying for a little rain and for that beastly man to lose his tongue. Is that really so much to ask, O Lord?”
Julian pats Tilly’s arm. On the outside, he remains composed. “I think some of your prayers may already be answered,” he says. “There was a strong east wind as I was returning. Rain is around the corner. About everything else, Baroness, don’t worry. I’ll take care of the constable and the girls and the smell. Give me an hour. I’ll take care of it all.” Calmly he starts up the stairs. “Which girls are fighting?”
“All of them. But mainly Margrave and Mallory. Tell them to stop hollering or they can leave right now and go work at the Haymarket. They beat their girls there, soundly, like gongs.”
“Mallory is fighting?” Julian hurries.
On the second floor, thirteen girls are yelling in the corridor. Margrave is soaked from head to chest as she and Mallory scream at each other. Julian’s first instinct is to defend Mallory, but a more careful listen tells him that Mallory is the attacker. Apparently, she threw a bucket of putrid water into Margrave’s face. It’s gone into the girl’s eyes and nose and mouth and is burning her. Instead of apologizing, Mallory stands and shouts. Julian has never seen Mallory this red-faced and enraged.
Julian steps between the two women, separating them and pulling Mallory away. She doesn’t want to hear it, not even from him. But he’s had enough. He raises his voice to show the girls he means business. “Stop it, you two. Margrave, go clean yourself up. Mallory, you too, downstairs. You look a fright. You’re scaring off the customers.” He frowns. “What’s the matter with you?” he says to her quietly. “Go.” And louder, “Carling, Ivy, come with me—the rest of you, get back to work. Show’s over.”
The Baroness is right. Fabian’s room still smells awful. Death must have seeped into the floorboards.
“We tried, sire!” Carling and Ivy cry. “We used up all the vinegar you gave us and all the lye.”
Julian sighs. “Let’s declare this room occupied for the rest of the night. Put a sign on the door. We’ll work with nine rooms tonight, nothing we can do.” The Baroness won’t be happy with the loss of earnings. And tomorrow is Sunday, and all the markets will be closed. Nowhere to buy more lye. Exasperated, Julian follows the maids downstairs. He hasn’t gotten himself cleaned up as he had promised the Baroness, but he needs to speak to Mallory. He finds her in the servants’ kitchen, still irate. “Mallory?”
“Go away.”
“Why are you upset? What has Margrave done?”
“She’s a thief.”
“I thought she was your friend?”
“She hates me. She’s always hated me.”
“What could she possibly steal from you? You have nothing. You barely have a change of clothes.”
“Yes, by all means, demean me.”
“I’m not demeaning you,” Julian says, chastised, “I’m trying to understand.”
“Please, sire, can you leave so I can do my job?” She won’t look at him.
As he’s about to head upstairs, he hears the Baroness sharply calling his name from the ground floor of the tavern. She’s still in her pink velvet robe, but now Constable Parker stands by her side. Julian’s mood worsens. He wasn’t expecting to face Parker so soon. He can’t deal with the constable at the moment, not least of all because he is so disheveled.
Usually Parker is delightfully apathetic. He comes every week, Julian gives him a drink, a meal, and a cut of the week’s earnings. For this, Parker looks the other way if a fight breaks out, or if there’s some petty theft. But tonight Parker says he can’t really look the other way because there’s chatter all over Westminster that a well-born man has been found dead in a brothel.
“Who says a man’s been found dead?” Julian asks.
“The one-humped bloke with a shovel.”
“Ilbert?” The Baroness laughs. “No, no, constable. Ilbert was born in an insane asylum. Born to a leper who died at childbirth. He is half-blind because of his mother’s leprosy. It ate away his brain. He once told me,” the Baroness says, “that two men died of spotted fever on Drury Lane!”
“That’s probably correct, madam.”
“He’s never been to Drury Lane. How would he know? The other day he was whispering to Father Anselmo that English aristocrats and Members of Parliament were conducting a sado-masochistic orgy in this very house until daybreak. Don’t you think I’d know if this was happening under my own roof? Orgy! What is this, the Haymarket? Besides, we don’t have rooms big enough for an orgy even if we wanted one. So you see, Ilbert often makes things up, all cock and bull stories from him. Pay him no mind, constable, no mind at all.”
The constable almost buys the Baroness’s own cock and bull story. “Here’s my pickle,” Parker says. “Ilbert keeps muttering that some fat man has died. I wondered if he could’ve meant Lord Fabian, so I took a stroll over to the honorable gentleman’s home in Belgravia, to make sure he was all right. The gentleman is widowed and childless. And wouldn’t you know it, his butler informed me that Lord Fabian is missing! He hasn’t been home since early Friday morning. That’s never happened before, apparently. The household is frantic.”
Julian and the Baroness shrug. “Maybe he’s at work,” the Baroness says.
“Great minds think alike, madam,” Parker says. “That was my thinking. So I took a ride over to the Tower this afternoon, and guess what?”
“I can’t fathom.”
“The Tower?” says Julian. “Like the Tower of London?”
“Yes, sir,” Parker says. “That’s where the honorable gentleman works. Unfortunately, no one was there to answer my queries at the weekend. I was told to come back on Monday.”
Julian and the Baroness both exhale with relief as the constable shakes Julian’s hand and feigns to go. Then, almost as an aside, he asks to speak to the cleaning girl.
“Which cleaning girl? We got three.”
“Ilbert mentioned that one of them was always hanging around the gentleman,” Parker said. “Maybe she can tell us something—like the last time she saw him.”
“I assure you, constable, he hasn’t been here.” The Baroness waves her little book of hours in the air. “No one goes upstairs without me knowing. No orgies. No Lord Fabian.”
“Just a quick word with the girl, Baroness.”
“She’s my niece, constable. She’s the only daughter of my youngest sister, may God rest her soul. I can vouch for Mallory on the Bible.”
Parker raises his hand to assure her. “It’s just routine, Baroness, please don’t worry.” He coughs. “Though one other small thing … Ilbert says that a week ago he saw this Mallory girl in the main kitchen, where she has no business being, crushing something with a mortar into a pestle. When he confronted her, she scraped out the pestle and hurried off.”
“Probably grinding some nuts,” the Baroness says. “Is that also against the law?”
“By also, do you mean grinding some nuts and also murder?” Parker says. “One of them is against the law, madam, yes. And Ilbert may be a more enterprising fellow than he lets on because he ran his finger through the pestle she left behind and tasted the grindings.”
“And?”
“Ilbert says he damn near died. Says he was sick for three days. The bitter thing that touched his tongue burned a hole in it, singed his throat and gave him terrible digestive upset. He started vomiting up blood, which may be the only thing that saved him, since he believes he vomited up whatever was poisoning him.”
“Poisoning?” Julian opens his hands with a chuckle. “Constable Parker, Ilbert touches his mouth and face after handling the filthiest things. Has the man ever had a bath? He could’ve eaten a spoiled pig snout, old fish, bad eggs. In any case, it clearly wasn’t poison since Ilbert’s still walking around, alive as all that.”
“As opposed to who?” Parker says. “As opposed to an esteemed Member of Parliament, a Lord Temporal, who has vanished and can’t be found?”
“Do you always assume the worst when a man can’t be found for a day?”
The constable eyes Julian, then the Baroness. “Not any man. Lord Fabian. Many powerful people are going to notice the lord’s conspicuous absence. Among them His Majesty Charles II, your king.”
Julian and the Baroness stand motionless. Julian’s leg itches with anxiety.
“I don’t need to remind you both,” Parker says, “that murder by poison is a heinous crime. The punishment for it is being boiled in oil. Now will you two let me talk to the girl so we can clear her of any wrongdoing?”
They look for her, but Mallory can’t be found. Night is falling and the tavern is getting busy. The Baroness manages to charm Parker into returning on Monday morning, when he can have all day with Mallory if he likes. “And perhaps the honorable Lord Fabian will turn up by then, and this confusion will be put behind us.”
As soon as Parker leaves, Julian turns to the Baroness. “Ilbert’s not to be trusted.”
“What could Mallory have been grinding up in that pestle? Damn that girl!”
“Nuts, Baroness! But this isn’t about Mallory. It’s about Ilbert. You do remember, don’t you, how just this morning he and I dragged Fabian’s body down the stairs?”
“Shh!”
“On your orders, he helped me bind the man,” Julian says. “He carted him away. Ilbert knows for a fact there’s a body, for an absolute fact. What’s stopping him from leading the constable right to it?”
“Why would he do that?” The madam sounds offended. “We’ve had a death here before, some years ago. Ilbert was exemplary. Took care of everything. He’s been working for me for twelve years. He’s like a loyal son.”
“You’re sure about that? Because if he squeals, we’ll all be boiled in oil for murder and for conspiracy to conceal it. You, me, Mallory, and half your girls.”
“Murder! What are you on about? The lord had a heart attack! You said so yourself.”
“Who will believe you,” Julian says, “when his body is found bound and dumped in a canal?”
That Saturday night, from September 1 to September 2, 1666, is one of the worst Julian has at the Silver Cross. It’s one crisis after another. He barely has enough time to wash and change before Room Two is demanded by a contingent of celebrants who are willing to overlook the smell. They pay handsomely for a flow of wine and meat and girls to be brought up at regular intervals throughout the night. Carling stokes the fire, Mallory lights the candles and Ivy carries the ale and the steins. But the other nine rooms also need tending. At one point, Julian is reduced to changing the enseamed sheets himself. A fight breaks out between Brynhilda and a customer over the difference between services provided and price paid. Brynhilda, twice the size of the weasely john, punches him in the face, sending him tumbling down the stairs. For this Julian must negotiate a peace and restitution. One of the girls is sick in the night, vomiting violently in the middle of working, and the Baroness herself must haggle for a reduced fee instead of a refund. The night refuses to end.
It’s after five in the morning when the business of the house finally dies down, the patrons leave, the Baroness goes to bed, and an exhausted Julian locks up and returns to his room. It’s dark blue outside. Dawn is near. After taking off his jacket and puffy shirt, he gets the quill and dips it in ink. How many dots? Six columns of seven plus one; 43 dots in all. His forearm burns as the quill pierces the skin. He wipes up the drop of blood and wonders how many days he’s missed, four, a week, more?
A voice from a corner says, “Julian.”
He drops the quill, nearly falls himself. He thought he was alone.
Mallory is crammed between the dormered wall and the side of the cupboard, huddled on the floor, her knees drawn up. How did he not see her?
“Don’t scare me like that,” Julian says. “What are you doing?” He scans the room. It looks as if his things have been gone through. The journal is not where he left it, the shirts have been refolded. “Why are you on the floor?”
“Shh,” she says.
“What’s the matter?”
She rocks back and forth.
“Is it about Margrave?”
She won’t say.
He perches on the bed. Seeing her distraught makes him distraught. Outside the sun is not up yet, the air is blue-gray with a tinge of amber. The east wind is strong. On this wind, Julian can smell burning wood. What fools build fires in this crazy hot weather?
“You have to help me,” she says in a low cold voice. “This is all your fault.”
What is she talking about?
“Marg robbed me,” Mallory says from the floor.
“Peanut, don’t get offended again, but what could she take from you?”
She doesn’t answer. “You have to silence Ilbert,” Mallory says at last. “Do you know anyone in this town who can do it? Or can you do it?” She says the last part as if she doesn’t expect Julian can silence a mosquito.
“What do you mean, silence him? Like tell him to shut his trap? I can do it.”
“Well, perhaps before you beg him politely to quiet down, you can ask him what he’s done with the lord’s body.”
So she knows. The Baroness tried to shield her from it, Julian didn’t want to tell her, but she’s found out anyway. There are no secrets in a brothel.
“Mal, I’m really sorry—”
She cuts him off. “I heard you tell the imp to take the body far from here, and instead, Ilbert threw it into a canal a few streets away, a canal with barely six inches of standing water. The body isn’t even submerged. It’s what some might call hiding evidence in plain sight.”
Julian pales. “How do you know this?”
“Ah, it’s a funny story. I know this,” Mallory says, “because Ilbert told me.”
“Why would Ilbert tell you that?”
“Oh, no, dear one. You misunderstand. He didn’t confess to me because he wanted to get it off his skeletal chest. He told me, you see, because he wanted me to pay him to keep quiet.”
“Pay him? Why would you pay him?”
Mallory doesn’t answer. “But I can’t pay him because Margrave has stolen my money.”
“What money? The money we’ve been earning for you on the side? I thought you always keep it on your person? Isn’t that what you told me? Keep your valuables on you?”
“That little game Ilbert was playing with the constable about the mortar and pestle,” Mallory continues, as if Julian hasn’t spoken, “that was just him letting me and the Baroness know that we’ll all hang unless he gets what he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“Half,” Mallory says.
Julian fumbles inside his waistcoat pocket for the purse with the guineas in it. “Half of what?” he asks dully.
“Don’t you get it? If Margrave didn’t rob me, then Ilbert must’ve robbed me, in which case, he’s just toying with us. Tormenting us before the slaughter. It wouldn’t surprise me about him, wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”
She puts her face in her hands.
“Half of what?” Julian repeats in a whisper.
“Half a bag of fucking gold,” says Mallory.
Julian stops being mild or consoling. He gets off the bed, stands in front of her. He doesn’t speak because he can’t speak. He tries to put together his next thought, his next word. The sun drifts up over the gray slate rooftops of Whitehall. The wind is strong and dry. It still smells of burning wood. He crouches in front of her, sinks to the floor next to her. Their feet could touch, but they don’t.
“Lord Fabian hid it in the floorboards in Room Two,” Mallory says. “It’s not there anymore. I didn’t take it. You’re saying Margrave didn’t take it. So if it wasn’t Ilbert, who could’ve taken it, Julian?”
She doesn’t look at him as she speaks, doesn’t see the shock on his face. This can’t be. It simply can’t be. “Why would Fabian hide gold in the floorboards of a brothel?” Julian asks.
“It was ill-gotten gold,” Mallory says. “The lord was Master of the Royal Mint up in the Tower of London. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yes. That’s what he was. These days they use a machine press, but a hundred years ago they hammered the coin in dies. Two years ago, I found one of those hand-made coins on him as I was undressing him. That’s when he told me he was a lifelong coin collector. He said that a few years earlier, in the chaos after Cromwell fell from power, he swiped one of the discarded dies they used to cast the commemorative Elizabethan sovereigns. He said the die had been retired prematurely. It needed a little sharpening on the face side, a little etching. He said the coat of arms side was perfect. After he fixed the die, he started staying late and hammering his own coin. He told his boss, the Warden of the Mint, that he was working overtime on commemorative metal for our new king, Charles II. And he was. But he was also minting coin for himself, using the purloined die.”
His body slumping, Julian waits for the rest.
“It took him over six years to mint just 49 coins! He had to be so careful. He could make barely one every seven weeks, they were so labor-intensive in the hammering and softening. He told me when he got to fifty, he would stop. The risk of getting caught siphoning off drops of liquefied bullion was becoming too great. To make the coins accurately, he had to use drops from the rare 23-carat gold ingots, not the 22-carat they use today. A month or so ago, he got to 49. He needed only one more! And now they’re gone.”
Julian sways. “And he is also gone.”
“Yes,” Mallory says without inflection. “He is also gone.”
“Why would he hide them here?”
“He used to keep them at his house. I was the one who persuaded him that here was safer. And it was—much safer. The floor is nailed down in every room. I made the hiding place for the coins myself. In the lord’s house, the servants were disgustingly nosy. They waited for him to come home, they undressed him, bathed him, they dusted every nook. A locked chest with a key the lord carried on his person had alerted his staff that there was something in the chest worth locking away. He didn’t trust them. But he trusted me.”
“Why would he trust you?” Julian says in a hoarse voice.
“He was lonely. He liked me.”
Julian doesn’t look at her.
“When I found that one coin on him, he was relieved!” Mallory says. “His secret had been choking him. He was dying to tell someone. He was an artist and each coin was his masterpiece. I made a proper show of being impressed. I made a place where he could hide them. Room Two has always been a special, mysterious room. It’s secluded and private, and in it, the candles that fall don’t catch fire, though sometimes you do hear strange noises from the closet under the dormer. Some say the room is haunted. You appeared from the closet in that room.” She half-smiles.
Julian’s face is a mask.
“Every time the lord minted a new coin, we would celebrate. We’d have some wine and admire it. Make a pomp of placing it together with the others. I never took a coin from him, not one. He had to know I could be trusted. That I wouldn’t steal from him or betray him or blackmail him.”
“Why would he trust you?” Julian repeats.
“You’re beheaded for stealing from the king’s Royal Mint. It’s called treason to the realm.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” He takes a breath. “What were you getting out of it?”
“A way out.”
Rigidly Julian waits for her to say more.
“We were going to leave for the South of France. For Nice or Marseilles.”
“Leave as in … leave together?”
“Yes.”
“Lord Fabian was the benefactor who would take you away to the South of France?”
“Yes.”
“But what were you actually planning to do?”
“I told you I’ve been planning my escape, didn’t I?”
Julian sits on the floor and wishes he could stop listening to her air more misdeeds through her bitter lips.
I don’t know if you are safe with him, Julian says.
Oh, sire, she coos. You are so kind-hearted. Trust me, you don’t have to worry about him.
As in, Fabian is not the one Julian needs to worry about. Julian had heard it all wrong.
“Everything was going perfectly,” Mallory continues. “Only one more coin to cast. Seven weeks to go! So close. But then you came into our life and ruined everything. Everything! At first your blind desire for me allowed me to make some extra money, and gave him a little pleasure, but quickly it all went wrong. And I didn’t even know how wrong until it was too late.”
“How is that my fault?”
“Because you ruined it with your love!” she cries. “At first, the lord thought you and I were just for show, another night of staged ribaldry at the Silver Cross. But soon he began to suspect that you weren’t putting on a show, you weren’t acting—like everyone else in this godforsaken place—but that you really loved me! He thought he was using you, and then it dawned on him that it was the other way around, that you were using him! And when he suspected that I might love you back, that’s when everything I’ve been working for since I was eighteen was destroyed.”
“Might love me back?”
“He and I had violent words about it,” says Mallory. “I told him it wasn’t true. I swore to him I didn’t even slightly love you.”
“Ah.”
“He didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe that when the time came, I would leave you and travel with him to Marseilles. I vowed to him I would. I begged him, I pleaded. I tried, Julian, oh how I tried to save his pitiable life! But he was so stubborn and jealous. He wouldn’t listen.” She wrings her hands. “The other night he came and said he was taking his coin and leaving for good because he was afraid you would kill him and lure me away.”
“He was afraid I would kill him?”
“Yes. So you could have me all to yourself. I tried to persuade him otherwise, but it was no use. He said when he saw us together, he saw the face of love. He said he knew what it looked like because it was how he himself gazed upon me. He didn’t trust me anymore and could never trust me again.”
It’s Julian’s turn to put his head in his hands. Mallory is right. It is his fault. How badly Julian has misjudged another man. How badly he has misjudged his woman. Again. “Fabian was right not to trust you,” Julian says. “You killed him for fifty pieces of gold.”
“Forty-nine,” she cries, “and do you have any idea how much they’re worth?”
As it turns out, he does. “But you were with me all night. You couldn’t have killed him.” He whispers it. He still refuses to believe it’s true. You’re not going to marry another man, are you, when you promised yourself to me, Josephine.
“I wasn’t with you all night.”
“How did you do it?” Julian doesn’t want to know.
“With your help.” Mallory wipes her face. “A thousand ways to kill a human being. That’s what you taught me. Oleander, wild cherry, rosary pea. You made it so easy. You’re a very good teacher, Julian. You explained it well. I learned so much about all the wonderful plants that grow in London’s parks. I pulled off the rosary pea from a bush while we were walking in the palace garden last week. Right in front of you, I dropped the pea in my apron. All it took was a little grinding and a drink of honeyed wine. He drank around eleven. I begged him not to leave until I came back to say goodbye. Then I was with you. At four in the morning when you were asleep, I checked on him.” She shakes her head. “Poor lord. He became so angry when he realized he had been poisoned. He worked himself up into quite a rage. I must say, I didn’t expect him to go into such violent convulsions. Flailing, foaming, hitting his head, falling down right over the spot in the floor where we kept his gold. I didn’t want him to die alone. I sat with him until the end. I held his hand. I figured as soon as his body was removed, I’d get my money. No one knew it was there but me—or so I thought. But then the Baroness shepherded me out for the day, Carling and Ivy mopped up, and when I came back, the gold was gone.”
Rosary pea! When they strolled through the park on Sundays, arm in arm like lovers, she was scheming to betray a man who loved her, to kill him and rob him and run off—by herself—without the other man who loved her.
She dry heaves.
Wait, no, it’s Julian. He’s the one who’s dry heaving.
She begins to crawl to him but sees his face and stops.
“Julian,” Mallory says from her hiding place, “I’ve never been touched or held by anyone in my whole hard life the way you hold me when you love me, and when we sleep. You gave me something I didn’t know I wanted, that I didn’t know was real. For that, I thank you. But the most important thing to me is not love, not even yours. It’s to save my own life. It’s the only one I’ve got, and it’s what my mother kept saying she wanted for me. I do this partly to honor her.”
“You poisoned a man to honor your mother,” Julian says.
“It was never going to last between me and you,” Mallory says. “Don’t look so upset.”
“I don’t look upset,” he says. “I am upset. Do you know the difference?”
“I do. But don’t be. You are young, passionate, beautiful. The girls swoon over you. Pay me no mind. You’ll find someone else.”
“You don’t love me?”
“I love you,” Mallory says. “But I can’t trust you.”
“You can’t trust me?”
“That’s right. You sold me to the lord. What you wanted came first.”
“I didn’t sell you!” Julian exclaims. “I gave you what you wanted. I would’ve never done it. You begged me to help you. You wanted to make money. I gave that to you.”
“And you wanted to have me—at any cost. Well, this is the price.”
“Mallory! You killed a man who took care of you so you could get to his gold, and you’re talking to me about trust?”
“What did you do for his gold?”
“I didn’t kill him. I didn’t betray my benefactor.” Julian shudders. Little did he know that his girl was in the fourth ring of the ninth circle of hell. And he was right by her side. “Oh, Mallory.” He shrinks and bends like a bow.
“You traded your body and mine,” she says. “You don’t think that’s worse?”
“No.”
“You whored yourself out, and you whored me out.”
“Stop being cruel. I did it for you.”
“You say for me. I say for you. So you could have what you want. Well, I did the things I did to have what I want.” Mallory whispers this, but her words are so deadly she might as well be screaming.
Julian doesn’t know what to do. To tell her or not to tell her? Who’s to say his own fate will be different from the Temporal Lord’s? She’s already disposed of one man. What’s one more?
“I saved some money, Mallory,” Julian says. “You can have it. Let’s go. Let’s run together.”
She shakes her head.
“You said you want to save your life. That’s also what I want. I swear to you.” Julian clenches his fist over his heart. “To save you is all I want. You’re in terrible danger. You don’t even know. Parker suspects you of foul play. And you know the punishment that awaits you. Please, let me protect you. You can’t do it alone,” he adds when he gets no reply from her.
“Is that a threat, Julian? Are you going to give me up to the constable?” There is something merciless and frightening in Mallory’s expression.
Julian becomes certain if he tells her about the treasure, she will kill him. She will poison his wine, too, and form a Satan’s alliance with Ilbert, and like Fabian, Julian will be tossed face down into the shallow canal by Savoy Palace.
“I’m not going to give you up,” he says, struggling to his feet and pulling her up with him. “You are my country. My allegiance is to you.” He fights to avoid placing a confrontational emphasis on my. But also—he can’t form a coherent thought anymore. He will have to deal with this tomorrow. It will be here soon enough.
He makes her lie down with him in the bed and with cold scared arms holds her cold scared body, hiding his terrified face behind her. Cyril Connolly is wrong. It is possible to be made wretched in a brothel.
Half-dressed, they fall into a restless sleep, the sleep of guilty lovers in anguish as they choose something else over what they feel for each other.
9 (#ulink_4b066eec-949e-52cd-9079-0586a6ba2ba2)
Bill of Mortality (#ulink_4b066eec-949e-52cd-9079-0586a6ba2ba2)
A NOXIOUS COMMOTION AWAKENS THEM A FEW HOURS LATER. Sitting up against the headboard, Mallory looks like a cornered animal.
“Margrave is dying! Margrave is dying!” Julian hears as he opens the bedroom door.
Casting Mallory a long backwards glance, telling her to stay in his room and not come out, Julian runs upstairs, hoping it’s hyperbole.
But Margrave does not look well. She’s winded, profusely hot, abnormally thirsty, wet, and gray. He crouches in front of her low bed. No one else wants to get near her; the other girls are afraid it’s pestilence (though Julian doesn’t think so); most of them have cleared the room. Only the lowly and unwanted Greta remains unafraid by Margrave’s side, holding her hand.
“I didn’t feel well all night, sire,” the girl whispers, reaching for Julian. Her swollen tongue is bleeding. She has foam around her mouth.
Julian races downstairs to the kitchen, grabs a few coals from the basket by the hearth, and shaves them down with a knife until fine powder lines the bottom of a mug. He fills the mug with a bit of ale and flies upstairs. In the ten minutes he is gone, Margrave has gotten worse. Her body is jerking. She mumbles incoherently. Greta is down on her knees. “Margrave, drink this,” Julian says. “It doesn’t taste great, but it will help you.”
The girl takes a sip, makes a face.
“I know,” he says. “It’s activated charcoal. It’ll absorb whatever’s making you sick. It’s an antidote for poison. Please, drink all of it.” God help them all, is it the rosary pea?
Margrave drinks all of it. He waits with her while Greta mouths words of extreme unction from the Gospel of James. Is any among you afflicted? Is any among you sick? The prayer of faith shall save you. The Lord shall raise you. The hot burning wind blowing in through the open windows isn’t helping. Carling and Ivy reluctantly bring wet rags and Greta wipes Margrave down while Julian paces the room, smelling the wind. A rat king of anxiety is gnawing out his guts.
Greta lays down her rags. Carling and Ivy cry.
“What?” he barks. Margrave has stopped convulsing.
From down below, he hears the Baroness holler. “Fire! There’s a fire!”
Shrieking, Carling and Ivy push past Julian and plummet down the stairs. “You’ve done all you can for Margrave, O noble sire,” Greta says. “But she is gone.”
Alas it’s true. Poor Margrave. Julian can’t bear to return to his room, where Mallory is waiting. Instead he follows the maids downstairs to inform the Baroness of the girl’s demise.
Constable Parker stands grimly at the front door. The Baroness is with him. Parker is dressed in his most formal attire, a black uniform and a tall red hat. Next to him is the High Constable of Westminster with a royal staff in his hand. Behind them are foot guards from the King’s Regiment and horse guards from the Lord General’s Troop. What’s going on? Julian stops hurrying down the stairs.
“By the proclamation of the Honorable High Constable of the City of Westminster—” Parker reads from an unrolled parchment.
The Baroness interrupts him. “Wait, constable—where’s the fire?”
“The City. Started near a bakery in Pudding Lane.” Parker is thrown off his officious manner.
“Pudding Lane!” The Baroness utters a shrill cry. “Pudding Lane?”
“Baroness, Margrave is dead!” Ivy wails, clutching the Baroness’s elbow. “She’s dead, madam!”
“She’s been poisoned!” Carling joins in. “For sure, she has!”
Baroness Tilly turns from the wailing girls, from the frowning constable, her gaze seeking out Julian, who stands motionless at the foot of the stairs. He wishes he could vanish before she catches his eye. “You said there wouldn’t be a house left standing between Temple Bar and London Bridge after the fire at Pudding Lane … And a prostitute’s been murdered …”
Julian remains silent. Walk lightly, Devi told him. Carry no stick. Do not disturb the order of the universe.
“How could you have known any of that?” the Baroness hisses.
Parker thinks she’s addressing him. “Everybody knows it by now, madam,” the constable replies. “Fire started around midnight last night. It was small at first. Can you smell it? The Mayor of London is refusing to demolish the burning buildings to help contain it. He believes it’s not necessary. As if to prove him wrong, the fire’s been burning uncontained for over fourteen hours.” Clearing his throat, Parker raises his voice. “The fire is not why we’re here, Baroness. Where’s your niece? We’ve come to take her into custody for the murder of Lord Fabian. His body was found this morning in the Savoy Canal. We have reason to believe he’s been poisoned in your very house. And did I just hear correctly that Margrave has also been poisoned?”
The Baroness pierces Julian with her glare. It’s too late for regrets. In the Baroness’s eyes … Julian can’t put a finger on it. There’s hatred, disbelief, incomprehension, and a terror of sorcery. That’s how she stares at him. As if he is the other.
“Constable—arrest that man!” the Baroness shrieks to Parker, pointing her finger in Julian’s direction. “Arrest him for the lord’s murder, and for treason to the Crown! Arrest him for witchcraft. My niece is innocent! He’s the one who killed Lord Fabian!”
“No, it wasn’t the kind master!” Greta cries. “Mallory killed our Margrave when she threw poisoned water in her face.”
The other girls squeal their assent. It was her! It was her! Our kind master is innocent of wrongdoing.
“He is sent by the devil, constable!” the Baroness yells. “He’s a warlock! He carries knowledge of all the poisons right here.” She taps herself violently on the head. “I can prove it. Ilbert, get over here! Where are you?”
Julian is frozen. He can’t run out the front door, the constable and the palace guards are blocking the way. And what does he do about Mallory? He can’t leave her. The Baroness continues to screech, flinging her pink velvet arm at him, her manicured nails shaking the air. “Don’t let him get away!” She, too, is blocking the narrow entry in and out of the Silver Cross. No men can move past her to grab him. Meanwhile, the florid girls have formed a line of defense in front of him.
Tilly’s high-pitched screeching mentally and physically paralyzes Julian. The High Constable bangs the floor with his heavy staff. “Out of the way, madam! Out of the way, ladies!” In one second, Julian won’t have the luxury of wavering, he won’t be able to move even if he wishes to.
From behind, he feels a shadow barreling down the stairs. There is a hard knock into the center of his spine, and a shove forward. “Don’t just stand there—run!” Mallory says, already in front of him. “Back alley, go!”
The Baroness shouts hysterically. “Mallory, Mallory, darling, no!”
Julian and Mallory race through the kitchen, down the narrow corridor.
The back door is blocked by Ilbert, who is curved over a broom and a metal bucket.
“Move, hunchback!” Mallory yells.
“Where are you two off to?” Ilbert straightens and raises the broom as a weapon and moves nowhere.
Julian lunges past Mallory and slams into Ilbert, knocking the man down with the force of his body, broom, bucket and all. As Ilbert’s spindly fingers grab at their feet, Julian and Mallory jump over him and run down the winding alley that leads to the Strand.
The entrance to the Strand is blocked by a single royal guard. The uniformed man jumps off the horse and draws his sword. “Stop right there!” he says.
“Mallory, for God’s sake, move!” Why is the girl always in front of him? Does she plan to fight? Match the sword with her fists? Pushing her out of the way, Julian charges the guard.
“Julian, no! He’ll kill you!”
The guard lowers his sword slightly. “Julian?” he says. “Did you just say Julian?”
“Don’t tell him anything!” Mallory yells.
“What’s it to you?” Julian says, ready to bust his way out.
“Julian what?” the guard asks, the metal blade still pointed.
“Julian Cruz—why?”
The sword is lowered for good.
Julian remains in a fighting stance. His fists are up. His guard is not lowered. He and the Mountie stare at each other. The young man in uniform wears a tall red tubular hat. Julian’s certain he’s never met him before. He doesn’t recognize him. “Do I know you?”
“Are you related to a Julian Cruz, from Wales?” the guard asks.
Julian doesn’t know how to answer that. “Yes!” Mallory answers for him, clutching the back of his tunic.
“Who are you, his grandson?”
“Yes!” Mallory says from behind. “Tell him yes.”
“Yes?” Julian replies uncertainly.
The guard steps aside. He points his sword to the Strand. “Go this way, straight to Temple Bar.” He speaks quickly. “Then try to get into the City through the entrance at Aldgate. It’s unmanned because of the fire. Hide inside the walls. There’s nowhere else for you to go. You’re both wanted for the murder of the Master of the Mint. But the City is on fire, and no one will look for you there until it dies down. Don’t stick around. As soon as you can, get out. Whatever you do, don’t take the bridge south or any of the river crossings. You’ll be stopped. Find another way out. Now go!”
Mallory doesn’t have to be told twice. She grabs Julian’s hand.
Slowly, Julian walks by, considering the man. “I don’t understand,” he says perplexed. “How do you know me?”
“I don’t know you,” the guard replies. “But I know Julian Cruz. He is my grandfather’s favorite story, I heard about him many times when I was growing up. Grandfather was about to die, but a man named Julian Cruz appeared out of nowhere, like an angel of the Lord, and saved his eyes and saved his life.”
“Cedric is your grandfather?” Julian says, astonished.
“How did you know my grandfather’s name?” The guard is stunted by confusion. “I’m only here because of Julian Cruz. My grandfather got married, had children, had my father. He never forgot.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Julian, we must go!” Mallory cries.
“Yes, alive … but for the love of God, the girl is right, run, sire! You’re out of time. They’re coming.”
Julian shakes the royal guard’s hand. “Tell my friend Cedric,” he says, pointing to the impatient girl waiting on the Strand, “that is Lady Mary. The Lady Mary.”
The man’s uncomprehending eyes well up. With a trembling hand, he salutes Julian. Mallory and Julian run, bobbing and weaving through the crowd.
“Who is Cedric?” Mallory asks.
“I think a better question, especially from you,” Julian says, “would be who is Lady Mary.”
“Okay, who?”
Julian smiles. “Take my hand,” he says. “When we get out of here, I will tell you everything.”
The dry east wind carries the smell of burnt dwellings, clothes, wicker, trees, wood. It’s already harder to breathe, and they’re still so far from the fire. In the distance beyond Temple Bar, beyond the Roman wall, black smoke swirls.
Behind them—though not far enough behind them—the horsemen and footmen give chase, forging a path through the panicked crowd.
It’s the stampede out of the fire that saves Julian and Mallory. Of all the people on the Strand, only they are headed inside the burning City. Everyone else hurries in the opposite direction. Barging past the fleeing crowd, the royal horses get spooked. The guards—in their heavy uniforms, big boots, big hats, and big swords—can run, but Julian and Mallory are faster. Hearing the fading equine cry, Julian glances behind him (or is he Orpheus and is not supposed to?). The cavalry and infantry have mercifully dropped back.
“We’re okay, we’ll make it,” Julian says to her, panting. “We’re almost at Temple Bar.”
But they can’t get through Temple Bar. The guard isn’t letting people in, only out. “Are you crazy?” the gatekeeper says to Julian, as frantic people shove past them. “Where do you think you’re going? To a river crossing? Impossible. The Thames inside the gates is cut off by the flames.”
People push past, adult daughters dragging their mothers, little children hanging onto their mothers’ skirts, mothers and children everywhere. As soon as the guard loses track of them, Julian pulls Mallory offside, and they inch through the gate unnoticed.
It’s another five long city blocks from Temple to Aldgate with the thick hot smoke blowing in their faces. They don’t run anymore, they walk, gasping to catch their breath. Julian wishes he could express to Mallory how much he doesn’t want to head inside the inferno. She must feel ambivalent herself because after a few blocks, she stops walking. Her hands fall, her head hangs. She slides down to the sidewalk near Primrose Hill. “Forget it,” she says dejectedly. “What’s the point? Where are we going to run with nothing?”
Julian crouches in front of her.
“The entire City’s on fire. Even if we make it out somehow, what then?”
He takes a hot gray breath. He doesn’t want to confess. But sometimes, you must trust the one you love. Sometimes, you must trust her even if she breaks your heart with murder.
And sometimes, you must trust her even after.
“Mallory, I have the gold,” Julian says. “Ilbert didn’t take it. Margrave didn’t take it. I took it. Now get up and let’s go find a place to hide.”
She stares at him for several fiery seconds. “You took my gold?”
“Well …” Julian draws out. “Yours, really?”
“It wasn’t yours!”
“I thought it was his.”
“It wasn’t his anymore. He was dead. The dead own nothing.”
“Semantics, I know,” Julian says, “but he was dead only after you killed him.”
Angrily, Mallory jumps to her feet.
“I took it for you, Mallory,” Julian says. “So you and I could run from here. You know, like together.”
“You stole my money to help me?”
“To help us, yes. I thought you and me … I thought there was a you and me,” he says. “That was before I knew you were planning to run off, ditching me to be boiled in oil for a murder I didn’t commit.”
“Don’t look all wounded, you thief! Why didn’t you just pay off Ilbert if you had the coin? You could’ve saved us a lot of trouble.”
“Because I don’t have it. I hid it.”
“Where, back at the house? Bloody hell! A lot of good that’ll do us now.”
“Not at the house.”
“Where, then?”
“Inside the London Wall,” Julian says. “Next to St. Giles Church by Cripplegate.”
“What do you mean, inside the wall?”
“I bought a chisel and a hammer,” Julian says, “popped out two Kentish ragstones, scraped out a hole in the interior bricks, hid the purse, replaced the boulders and spackled mortar around them to seal them. I’m not saying it was easy.” Gouging out a space in the interior stone with an inadequately short chisel, piece by piece, chunk by chunk, took hours. It was one of the more physically grueling things Julian has ever done.
“Oh, you’re a mason now, too.” Mallory’s anger dissipates. She eyes him with trepidation, a little amazement, a little hope.
“I’m not a mason,” he says, “but I became a mason. I did what I had to do.”
“O Lord, Julian! I suppose that’s quick thinking on your part, but why on earth would you hide it all the way up there?”
“As opposed to where, the Baroness’s bedchamber?”
“Why go all the way to Clerkenwell?”
“You’re from Clerkenwell,” Julian says. “Do you remember? You lived there once in a big gray mansion.”
“Must be another molly you were sweet on. That’s not where I lived. I lived in a ramshackle, falling-down, white-limed bordello where I slept on the floor while my mother entertained men in the bed, one of whom was my father.” Mallory flings her arm to point to the London Wall just up ahead near Aldgate. “The wall circles the City for a square mile! There’s the wall! There’s the wall! And there, too! You could’ve hidden the coin close by, and we wouldn’t have to cross a city on fire to get to it.”
“I didn’t know we’d need it so quickly,” Julian says. “I had no idea, did I, that you killed Fabian and Margrave, or that you’d hang murder over both our heads. I thought we had plenty of time to decide what to do. And I didn’t know there’d be a fire.” What garbage. What absolute tripe. Julian knew there’d be a fire. He just didn’t know when. He knew in part.
“Sounds to me like you knew nothing.” Mallory starts down Fleet Street. “Well, don’t just stand there like Lot,” she barks. “Are you coming or not?”
He catches up. “Where are we going?”
“Where are we going? Have you gone soft in the head? To Cripplegate, of course. To Clerkenwell. Just like you planned. We’re not leaving my gold in a fucking wall. What if the fire destroys it?”
Julian wants to tell her that the fractured Roman wall will be the only thing left standing of old London 400 years from now, that after the Great Fire, after industrialization, expansion, demolition, after the Blitz! a piece of the wall where he hid the gold will remain. He knows this because he’s seen it with his own eyes as he ambled past St. Giles through the maze of modern Barbican, searching for the café with the golden awning.
Julian points to the black plumes spreading north and west from the Thames, the vicious winds, the livid flame. “We can’t get to Cripplegate,” he says. “Between us and your gold is hellfire. But don’t worry. We just have to stay safe for a little while longer. Safe and hidden. We’ll get to it. Let’s wait it out. The wall’s not going anywhere, I promise you. Let’s find an abandoned shop, lie low. After the fire dies down, five days tops, then we’ll go get it.”
“This fire is going to rage for five days?”
A breath. “Yes.”
Mallory crows in disbelief. “What’s going to be left of this city after a fire that rages for five days?”
“Nothing.”
Julian wishes they were in the East End. Wapping, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green. The East End is a little safer because of the direction of the wind. Trouble is, the two of them are on the west side. And between east and west there’s a mountain of flame. Not listening to him anymore, Mallory rushes down Fleet Street; Julian follows close behind. Aldgate is unmanned. The gates are open. The gatekeepers have fled.
Inside the City walls, the heat and smoke are much worse. Julian knows something about out of control firestorms. In California, the Santa Ana winds are called the devil winds. Every September during the drought, they blow downhill through the mountain passes and scorch the forest using chaparral as fuel, and then obliterate the valley from San Bernardino to Santa Barbara, using homes as fuel. That’s what this is, too. But instead of thorny bushes and tangled shrubs, the City of London all in a blaze is chaparral for the wildfire. It’s the destruction of a civilization. Why can’t his stubborn girl understand? “Mallory, please.” He wipes his sweating face. He is so hot.
Without looking back at him, she hurries down Ludgate Street. She is brave because she knows he is right behind her. It’s as if in the heart of her soul she knows he won’t leave her side. “Is the man afraid of a little smoke?”
“Not smoke, Mallory. Fire. And yes,” Julian says. “Afraid of this fire. But not for myself. For you.” He tries to take her hand. She pulls away. Her legs get caught up in her skirts, she trips, rights herself, won’t even let him balance her.
“I can’t believe you’d hide all of it,” she says. “Not leave even one little coin for the just in case.”
“I sold one coin for the just in case,” Julian says, showing her the crowns and shillings inside his small purse.
She snatches it out of his hands and hides it in the apron of her skirt. “For safekeeping,” she says. “How much did you get for it?”
“Three hundred shillings.” Julian thinks she’ll be as impressed as he was.
“You got three hundred shillings for a priceless sovereign?” In disgust she shakes her head. “You were robbed. Come on, hurry. We need to get my money before you give any more of it away.”
Julian is troubled as they race forward, sweat dripping off them. But Mallory’s spirits have been lifted not only by the promise of a stash of gold nearby but by the actual shillings now in her possession. Things are looking up. She chatters excitedly. “Why so glum, mason? With the gold, we can get anywhere, bribe anyone, barter for anything. No guard will stand in our way. We’ll buy our way out. We are set for life. We’ll make it last. You’ll see, we won’t need much.”
“Much? How about nothing?” Julian says, looking around for a conduit, a fountain, a bucket of dirty water. They need to breathe into something wet—and soon. Smoke inhalation doesn’t favor survival. “Because that’s what we’ll have if we continue to Cripplegate. Nothing.”
“You yourself were blithely headed into the City not ten minutes ago!”
“To hide you!”
“Julian,” Mallory says, slowing down and turning her face to him. “There’s a time to think and a time to act. If we are going to make it, you really need to learn the difference between the two. Guess which time this is. Do you remember yourself on the stairs not an hour ago? Had I not reminded you with a sharp fist to your back that the time had come to run, not ponder, you’d be in Parker’s custody right now on your way to Tyburn. The Master of the Mint is dead! A prostitute is dead! And London is burning. This is no time to stand around, waxing poetic about what could’ve been and should’ve been.” She takes his hand and stares deep into his face. “No one can protect us if we ourselves are not prepared, not even God. Not because he won’t. But because he can’t. That’s what Jesus said. Carry oil in your lamps, he told us. I can’t protect you if you are not ready.”
“I’m not sure that by oil in your lamps Jesus meant murder,” says Julian.
“You and I have a chance for a real life somewhere,” Mallory says. “Someplace beyond this city. It’s waiting for us, like you said. But first we must act. We can’t simply will it to happen. We have to do something for ourselves. What will you do if the wall falls and we can’t find the purse? How will you feel if the guards find us hiding like leeches in some wet gulley? What are you going to say to me then? I’m sorry, O dainty duck, I tried?” Mallory pulls on him. “Let’s go. To get to the wall is the most important thing.”
“Are you sure it’s not love over gold, Mallory?” Julian says.
“Without the gold there’s nothing, not even love,” she replies. “But with it, there may be both. So hurry.”
It’s difficult to run. With each panting breath, they swallow more smoke. They’re dripping wet. He gapes at her as they do their best to hurry. “Who are you?” he says. “This wasn’t you two days ago, a month ago.”
“You are so wrong, dear dove.” Mallory yanks on him. “This was always me. Ruthless and resolute. What did Ivy call me?”
“Wanton and cunning.”
“You should’ve listened to her. The other Mallory you saw, you know what that was?” Stopping for a moment, the young panting woman sidles up to Julian, batting her eyelashes, rubbing against him, pitching her voice to a high shy purr. “That was an act, sire.” She kisses him deeply on the lips and tugs on him to get going. “I told you my life was my stage. Why do men never listen when women speak?”
Julian is breathless with love and terror as she leads him deeper into the siege. “Without your life, there’s nothing else, Mallory. No acting, no cunning, no gold.”
She shakes her head. “Gold over everything.”
Julian shakes his head, even though he knows she is right.
Because what you want most is what you have the least of.
Josephine over everything.
Hand in hand, they walk into the apocalypse.
The church at Cripplegate is a long way away through a burning city. It’s nearly a mile away. In just the last few minutes, the smoke has grown higher, turned blacker, the smell of charred wood and linen has become more acrid. There’s screaming near them, the neighing of frightened horses. The flames rise in the streets, and the wind carries fire like airborne tumbleweeds. They’re almost at St. Paul’s.
“Why couldn’t you have dug a hole in the ground at St. Paul’s?” Mallory says. “Would’ve been so much simpler.”
“I didn’t do that,” Julian says, “because tomorrow, there isn’t going to be a St. Paul’s.”
Mallory glances into his face to see if he’s joking. “You kept yammering about it.” She sounds mystified. “You wouldn’t shut up about a fire cleansing our city of Black Death. How did you know it was coming? How did you know the future?”
“Oh, Mallory,” Julian says. “I wish to God I knew the future. I don’t. I know the past.”
Their eyes catch for a moment. “Do you know what happens to you and me?” she asks, almost whispering, as if she wants to know, doesn’t want to know.
“No,” Julian says, and can’t even tell if he’s lying.
A vicar stands in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, shouting encouragement to the fleeing people. “We have a mayor who’s helpless before the conflagration!” the priest shouts. “Brothers and sisters, help yourselves! Do not be like our esteemed leader. Lord, what can I do, he cries. He says he’s out of solutions, though the fire has raged for barely a day! He’s like a fainting woman, and do you know why? Because his faith is faint! Do not be like Thomas Bludworth! Be unshakable! Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads unto life. Aldgate, Ludgate, Newgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Aldersgate! Seven gates out! Seven ways to save your life! Run, brothers and sisters, go find your gate!”
Julian’s eyes are tearing, and it takes him a moment to recognize Reverend Anselmo from the Silver Cross. Weakened by inhaling the smoke, the holy man wobbles on the apple crate as he fortifies the misplaced with prayer. “Oh, it’s you two,” Anselmo says when they stop at his feet. “The whole world is looking for you.”
Mallory holds on to Julian, weighing on him as she rests. “They’re not looking for us here,” she says.
“Yes, hide in hell,” the vicar says. “That’ll teach them.”
“All the parish churches inside the City will soon be cinders, Reverend,” Julian says. “Despite what you think of us over on Whitehall, you’re safer in the Silver Cross.”
“I don’t go where it’s safe, my son,” Anselmo says. “I go where I’m needed. And today, it’s here.”
“You don’t have any water, do you?” Julian asks. They desperately need something wet to breathe into.
“Find your narrow gate out, and you will find living water there,” replies Anselmo.
“Come on, Julian,” Mallory says. “No time to waste.”
The wood houses crackle, timber bursting apart in venomous flames and falling in ruins. The smoke makes everything dark upon the streets, dark upon the steeples, smoke whirls like ghosts between the homes and the cathedrals.
St. Martin’s Le Grand that leads to Cripplegate is impassable. The buildings have collapsed into the road. “Julian,” Mallory says, “in case we get separated, tell me where in the wall you hid my purse.”
“It’s down the slope and straight across from the last window in the back of the nave. About three feet off the ground. The gray mortar should still be fresh. You can’t miss it. But we’re not going to get separated.”
They walk in single file, she ahead of him. They’re drenched with sweat. The fire that swirls and fills the air with black satanic smoke slows them down. Her especially. “It’s not too far now,” Mallory says. She’s wheezing. “We’re close. Soon we’ll be out.” She stops walking. “Just let me catch my breath for a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute, Mallory,” Julian says, throwing his arm around her and helping her forward. “You told me so yourself. It’s more true now than ever.” There’s no preparation for the plague. There’s no preparation for the fire. Not even when you know it’s coming. No oil in the lamp will protect them now. Nothing could have prepared them for this except staying away. The hot wind fans the flames just like the Santa Anas. Who travels faster, a young determined rasping beauty under his arm or a blaze blown out of all control by a stiff dry breeze?
“Come on, just a little farther.” Who says that?
It’s Julian. Mallory has stopped speaking.
The smoke chokes him, shreds his throat, tears at the whites of his eyes. The plumes are heavy, a canopy of ash in the air. Mallory breaks into a coughing fit. She has pulled away from him and is staggering along the side of a building, trying to hide her face from the smoke. He barely makes her out, even though she’s right next to him. He searches for her like a blind man, his hands outstretched. Mallory, Mallory, is that you? She doesn’t answer.
Julian stares into his empty palm. His right fingers are tingling.
Mallory!
He can’t find her. He can’t see her.
People are hurrying past him, but none of them is her.
One second she was by his side, and the next … Mallory! His arms ache.
In the black trails, all women look like her. From the river upward, a flame tsunami rises higher and then falls. It’s raining fire. It’s light, but there is no sun. It’s day, but it looks like night.
Julian finds her lying on the pavement, wedged into the side of a building, as if she’s trying to hide. Mallory, what happened?
She is mouthing something, but he can’t hear. The smoke must have paralyzed her vocal cords. He kneels on the stones by her side.
Can you get up? Julian wants to ask this. The problem is, he also can’t speak. It must be the smoke. Please let it be the smoke. Oh God, Mallory. How far are they from Cripplegate? How far are they from the gold, from the wall? How far from each other, from salvation? So close, so close! Julian’s legs, neck, chest feel as if they’re being stabbed with ice picks.
Why did he let go of her hand! Or did she let go of his? She let go and fell noiselessly to the cobblestones, and the burning sky fell with her.
She holds her throat. He holds his throat. He reaches out to touch her, opens his mouth to beg her, beg her not to die. I love you, he whispers inaudibly. Please don’t die before you are redeemed.
Mallory almost smiles. Pulling a crumpled piece of parchment out of her apron, she slides it into his palm. Julian tries to stand her up, but she can’t, and he can’t. Why did you fall? Why did you let go of my hand? Why did you run into the fire, why did I hide your gold, why did I take it? Why did you kill him and her, why?
She is gasping.
Timber is being torn to pieces. Julian’s body feels as if it’s being torn to pieces. The ashes of London rise in the black ugly fumes and are carried by the wind into Mallory’s throat, into Julian’s throat, into Mallory’s soul, into Julian’s soul.
He is convulsing. His throat closes. He can’t yell, can’t speak, can’t tell her what he feels.
Reaching up, she touches his face, her eyes clearing and glazing over. Julian …
Still on his knees, he tips over her.
Go, she whispers. Or did she say gold?
Julian, go and come back for me.
10 (#ulink_0176f437-9997-5b49-8af8-909a6626eb08)
Six Persuasions (#ulink_0176f437-9997-5b49-8af8-909a6626eb08)
EACH DAY MAN IS PERISHING. YET HE IS RENEWED DAY BY DAY.
Julian didn’t know about the renewed part.
But about perishing? Check.
Still on his knees, covered with grime and soot, he threw up in front of Sweeney. This time he didn’t get up and walk out. They had to call an ambulance and carry him down the mountain on a stretcher. He was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital and treated with hyperbaric oxygen. The hospital called the police because Julian had no ID, nothing but a coin, out of circulation for four hundred years, and a Bill of Mortality from 1665 clutched in his blackened fist. Julian gave the police Nextel’s number, and Ashton arrived at Queen Elizabeth with Julian’s ID and optimistically with a change of clothes.
But Julian wasn’t going anywhere. His body has been ravaged by prolonged inhalation of carbon monoxide, he was coughing up blood and had swelling in his lungs that was causing continued oxygen deprivation. Julian scribbled his signature on a document making Ashton his health care proxy, and Ashton talked to the doctors.
“What are you talking about, smoke inhalation?” Ashton said. “Like from cigarettes?” He was standing at Julian’s bedside.
Like from a fire, one doctor said. Also he has a number of burst blood vessels in his arms and legs, and Lichtenberg flowers down his back from his neck to his pelvis.
“Is that also from smoke inhalation?”
No, another doctor said. We see Lichtenberg burns after an electrocution.
Ashton refused to believe it. It was obvious they’d mixed up Julian’s chart with someone else’s. They brought out Julian’s chart, showed Ashton there was no mistake. They pointed out that Julian had complained of being electrocuted a year earlier. Then, they had concluded, it was psychosomatic. This year they weren’t so sure. This year, the symptoms were visible.
“What about the tattooed dots on his arm that weren’t there the day before yesterday?” Ashton said. “Is that also from smoke inhalation? Or is it from electrocution? Or are the tattoos psychosomatic?”
The doctors had no opinion about the tattoos. Tattoos weren’t a medical emergency like swollen lungs.
Julian himself was confused and on painkillers and refused to confirm or deny anything. An X-ray showed three fractured bones in each foot.
“Is that also fucking psychosomatic?” Ashton said, fuming at their ignorance, and at his own.
After a week, Julian was sent home with an oxygen tank to help him breathe until his lungs healed. Oxygen for Julian.
While Ashton was at work, Julian, his crutches against the railing, sat motionlessly on the cold rainy balcony and rocked back and forth. When you want to escape from your blinding rage, stop moving, stop speaking. All action feeds the beast. Stop feeding it.
“Dude, I beg you. Explain,” Ashton kept asking in the evenings after work.
Which part?
“Um, the swollen lungs? Electrocution burns? Breeches and tunic? The broken feet, the catatonia, the tattoos? Literally a single thing. What happened to you? Where did you go?”
Smoke inhalation is from a fire.
“What fucking fire?”
The Great Fire of London.
At first Ashton had nothing to say. Then: “Why do you refuse to be straight with me? Why can’t you reply to a serious question with a serious answer? What fucking fire?”
I just told you, the Great Fire of London.
Ahhhh!
You wanted me to be straight. I’m straight.
Julian stuffed the ends of the plastic tubing into his nostrils, inhaled deeply, and closed his eyes. I can’t explain any better than that, Ash. We’ll try again if I’m renewed.
A week went by, the lungs got better, the tank had gone. Ashton and Julian still hadn’t talked. Julian still hadn’t returned to work.
After another week, Ashton walked into Julian’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon and surveyed the abnormal disorder inside. Julian knew his room did not look rational to a man who was used to Julian being meticulous with his belongings and who was suddenly greeted with a scene as after a ransacking or an earthquake. Hundreds of books were strewn on the bed and the floor: history, how-to, biography, travel, plays, and philosophies. Everywhere newspapers, broken pencils, open notebooks, pencil shavings, a sharpener on its side, half-empty plastic cups of water, an unmade bed, and on it, a half-naked Julian with a magnifying glass and a superbright LED lamp trained on a coffee-table tome of London paintings from the 1600s. He was trying to find a glimpse of something true somewhere, anywhere, to prove to himself she had been real. He’d been sleeping poorly, attacked by bewildering nightmares, callbacks to old visions and memories once so vivid, now half-forgotten. This time, there was no Josephine shining on the street. Instead there was terror and fire followed by a dismal icy darkness.
A pallid, unshaven Julian raised his head from the book to face Ashton grimly homing in on the chaos. Julian tried to smile. He could tell his friend wanted to make a joke, lighten the mood, but comedy was beyond even him.
“What the fuck,” Ashton said. That was as funny as he could make it.
“Don’t ask.”
“I feel I must, dude. I must ask. What the fuck.”
“Everything’s okay.”
“It’s two in the afternoon,” Ashton said, as if that was the only thing that was wrong.
“Then what are you still doing home? Did you go to Valentina’s, get us food like you said?”
“Don’t answer my questions with questions,” Ashton said. “What are you doing? What are you writing, reading, looking for? Why the magnifying glass, why the mania? What’s happening? What the fuck is happening?”
Dressed in nothing but boxer briefs, Julian swung his aching feet onto the floor. He was uncontained. He was a dead leaf in the yellow river, an ailing creature, a rotting marmoset. How could he have not seen it coming? How could he have allowed it to happen. Allowed it to happen again.
“Why are you examining this nonsense with a microscope? Old London? What are you looking for?” Ashton picked up A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. “Edmund Burke? If you’re going to self-destruct, why can’t you self-destruct with porn, with ribald novels from de Sade: Erotica, Justine?”
Julian could not explain to Ashton the inner howl of his helplessness.
“Burke wrote that all things are good that obey reason,” Ashton said. “Does anything you’re doing fit that category?”
“Did you come in just to harass me?”
“I need another reason? Put some clothes on, will you. You have a visitor.”
“You’re full of shit. Who?”
“I don’t know who, but there’s a man on the landing who says, and I quote, that he lost the piece of paper with my number but knew where I lived and you had told him to come tell me you weren’t coming back. I understood not a single fucking thing of that. The individual words maybe.”
“Devi?”
“I don’t know, Jules. I’m guessing he’s a fellow inmate, let out for an afternoon. Hurry up. It doesn’t look as if he’s got long before they come to take him back to the asylum. Kind of like you.”
A pale Devi stood at the door when Julian limped out into the living room in sweats and a pullover.
“Hello, Julian. I see you’ve returned—again.” Devi sounded so disappointed.
“You’re minimally observant.”
“Returned from where?” Ashton said.
“How are you feeling?” said Devi.
“How do I look?” said Julian.
“Like a man who’s been in a hundred and one fights. And lost them all.”
From the kitchen, Ashton smirked. “So he knows about the boxing? Wow.”
“Devi, you’ve met Ashton?”
“Not formally.”
“Ashton, Devi. Devi, Ashton.”
With wary reserve, Ashton stepped forward, and the two men shook hands, Ashton silent and blond towering over the little man silent and dark.
“Returned from where?” Ashton repeated. Neither Julian nor Devi answered. Ashton swore under his breath, grabbed his jacket and said he was going on a food run. Devi said Julian needed some plain chicken and white rice. Julian said no. Ashton said he was getting it anyway and split.
“You need food,” Devi said, coming closer.
Julian sank into the sofa.
“How’s your friend handling you?”
“Fine.”
“You haven’t told him?”
“Told him what.”
Devi perched stiffly in the corner of the opposite sofa. “Tell me.”
“You really need to be told? You know what happened.”
“I don’t.”
“Is that why you didn’t want me to go? Did you know all along?”
Devi stared into his crippled hands. “I’m waiting.”
Julian told him.
London burned. It burned to the ground. And she along with it. All the glory was laid to dust.
Then they were mute.
“Come back to Quatrang with me, Julian,” Devi said. “You need healing.” He added, “Please.”
“I’ve had just about enough of your healing, don’t you think?”
“Very often,” Devi said, “what God first helps us with is not virtue itself, but the power of trying again. And you did that. You tried again. What a noble thing that is. What a gallant effort. Don’t minimize it.”
“Hard to minimize it, Devi.” Julian rolled up his sleeve, thrusting the inside of his forearm across the coffee table into the cook’s face. “You see the ink? Forty-five minimized tattoos.”
“Is that how many days you had?”
“No. I got sick of marking them, so I missed some. A week, maybe more.”
Devi bowed his head.
“Let’s not minimize it,” Julian said. “Let’s maximize it, shall we? Here on my arm is the answer to the question I asked you before the first time I went. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“I asked you if I was going to find her young or old. And you said young. But you were wrong. Or lying. Which is it?”
Devi didn’t speak.
“I asked you at what point I was going to be inserted into her life, and you told me you didn’t know. Were you lying?”
“No.”
“Well, now you know,” Julian said. “And I know. Aren’t you glad we’re both so full of knowledge. When I find her, she’s not young.” Julian fell back against the cushions. “She is old. Each time she is at the end of her life.” Barely able to breathe, as if his lungs were still filled with smoke, he stared at the columns of black dots on his arm. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
“Is that too much time, Julian, or not enough?” Devi said. “I’m not clear. Because most of us don’t get even a picosecond extra.”
“Oh, fuck that.”
“I told you not to go,” the shaman whispered.
“You didn’t tell me she would die again!” Julian yelled.
“Control your temper. I told you, you couldn’t change things. I told you this over and over.”
“Okay, fine,” Julian said through his teeth. “You told me. I hear you—finally. Loud and clear. I’m done with this bullshit. With all of it.” He glared at Devi.
“Yes,” Devi said. “By all means live out your days in bitter pity for yourself while your life passes you by.” He stood up, gathering his hat into his hands and left.
After Ashton came back from Valentina’s with some precooked chicken and rice and found Devi gone and Julian back in his room, he banged on the bedroom door. “Food’s here.”
Julian sat on the sofa, Ashton across from him.
“So the man left?”
“The man left.”
“They took him back?” When Julian said nothing, Ashton said, “Who was he?”
“A cook from Great Eastern Road.”
“Cook. Great Eastern Road. Really. Well. Thanks for clearing that up.” When Julian offered nothing else, Ashton pressed further. “Is he the shaman you were asking me about a year ago? Some Hmong man who summoned the dead?”
Julian half-nodded.
“Does he have anything to do with what happened to you?”
Julian half-nodded.
“Jules, I can’t play twenty questions. I’m not Socrates. I’m going to start throwing shit by the next question. Talk to me. What happened to you?”
“Forget it, Ash. Honestly. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s in the past.” Julian clenched and unclenched his hands. “And you don’t want to know.”
“Like hell I don’t. And it’s not in the past. It’s the fucking here and now. Julian, you left home in the morning and by the afternoon you were in an ICU with smoke inhalation and electrocution burns. Does that sound like the past to you?”
“If I tell you, you won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
For interminable minutes, Julian stared at Ashton. “Short or long?”
“Short. Elevator pitch. Two sentences.”
“Devi showed me a way to go back in time to find Josephine. And I’ve gone twice.”
“Go back, like astral projection?”
“Go back, like body and soul.”
At first, Ashton was without words. “It’s a terrible pitch,” he said finally. “Based on that, I won’t be able to produce your script, I’m afraid. It’s not even remotely believable and you’ve left too many hanging questions. Have you got anything else? I’m serious now. Anything else.”
“The first time I went, she died,” Julian said. “And I was blasted back into my present life. It was just before you moved here. I went again a month ago. I thought I was leaving London for good. If she hadn’t died, I’d still be there with her. But … here I am, so.” He took a breath. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what, Julian,” Ashton said slowly. “How am I looking at you?”
“Like I’m nuts.”
“No.”
“I leap into a wormhole,” Julian said, “and float for a long time down an underground river, and when I come out on the other side, she lives.”
Ashton draped himself over the couch. “Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s time for the long version.” He shot up. “Wait!” From the kitchen he brought a bottle of Grey Goose, two glasses, some ice, and some soda water. He made the drinks, gave one to Julian, didn’t clink, and gulped down half of his. “Go.”
Julian spoke for a long time. Meridian, crystal, the Transit Circle, tear in the fabric of the universe, future tense, moongate, river, dead queen, Wales, Mary, Lord Falk, the Silver Cross, Mallory, Fabian, Margrave, murder, gold, the Fire. Body immolating and reforming at the speed of light. Correction: at the speed of light, squared.
Ashton reached over and swallowed Julian’s untouched vodka.
“I know how it sounds,” Julian said.
“Oh no, my friend. I don’t think you do.”
“Do you remember the dream I used to have of her? Where she is walking toward me, happy and smiling? Devi says it could be a vision of her and me in the future.”
“Well, if Devi says … You mean in the future that Devi just finished telling you doesn’t exist, or some other future?”
“Everything you’re thinking of, Ash, I’ve thought of,” said Julian. “Yet here it is. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m not lying. There is a difference.”
“Oh, a huge one. If you were lying, it would mean you were sane.”
In silence the two men sat in their open sunny flat. Julian was oddly comforted by the shellshocked look on Ashton’s normally placid face, as if his friend didn’t know how to begin to begin to figure out how to help him. You can’t help me, Ash, Julian wanted to say. You can’t help a husk whose fruits have fallen and rotted on the ground.
“Explain my injuries,” Julian said.
“I can’t explain them,” Ashton said, “but you entered a triathlon event without my knowledge. You spent a year growing a sick beard without explanation and shaved it off without explanation.”
“I shaved it off because in 1666 men didn’t have beards.”
“Oh, that’s why. You’re boxing, caving, fencing. I can’t explain any of those things. 1666. Is that when you became a landlord in a brothel?”
“Yes.”
“You, Julian Cruz, son of a professor and a principal, were a caretaker in a house of women who got naked and had sex for money?”
“Yes.”
“I’m supposed to believe this?”
“That’s the part you find unbelievable? Not wormholes and—”
“Frankly, yes. Okay, from the top. You fell in love with a girl, but then she died.”
“Yes.”
“And you found a charlatan who showed you how to travel back in time to find her.”
“A shaman, but yes.”
“Potato, potahtoe. You traveled into this past.”
“Yes.”
“Not once but twice.”
“Yes.”
“And you found her, and fell in love with her again, and she with you, and both times, she died.”
“Yes.”
“And you were a landlord in a brothel?”
Persuasion #1: Julian showed Ashton the list of casualties from Mallory’s yellowing but intact Bill of Mortality. “Look at the paper. It’s from 1665. Why is it still in such good condition?”
“That’s your proof? How the hell should I know?”
“Because,” Julian said, “the paper is only a year old, not four hundred years old.”
Apoplexie 1
Burned in his bed by a candle 1
Canker 1
Cough 2
Fright 3
Grief 3
Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1
Lethargy 1
Suddenly 1
Timpany 1
Plague 7165
“What’s timpany?” Ashton said.
“That’s your question?”
“How does one die suddenly?”
“That’s your question?”
“How does one die of grief, I wonder.”
“To paraphrase John Green,” Julian said, uncle of nieces besotted with Hazel and Augustus, “slowly, and all at once.”
Persuasion #2: Julian took Ashton to the Silver Cross, off Craig’s Court on lit-up Whitehall. It was a Friday night. They ate. They drank. They read the plaque on the wall. “THE SILVER CROSS HAS BEEN THE SITE OF A PUBLIC HOUSE SINCE THE 17
CENTURY AND WAS EVEN THE SITE OF A LICENSED BROTHEL.”
Persuasion #3: Julian tried to hand Ashton his breeches and tunic.
“You got them in a costume store,” Ashton said, pulling his arms behind his back.
Persuasion #4: The Elizabethan gold coin.
“It’s fake,” Ashton said.
“Do you want to know how much one of these fake coins is worth today?”
“Fine, but it’ll prove nothing.”
Julian showed him the online collector’s currency markets. An Elizabeth I gold sovereign in fairly good condition, not mint condition, was selling for £50,000. “And there were 48 more.”
“So you say.” Ashton fake-shrugged. “Yours isn’t real. And even if it is real, so what? You found it on the street.”
“I found fifty thousand quid on the street. That sounds normal to you.”
“Jules, we left normal back at Tequila Cantina’s when you showed me a ring for a chick whose mother you’d never met.”
Persuasion #5: The pièce de résistance. Julian took Ashton to St. Giles at Cripplegate. He would unveil for his friend the ultimate proof—the gold in the wall. They went to a hardware store, purchased a hammer, a chisel, a bucket, a trowel, and some mortar.
“You know,” Ashton said, pointing to the supplies in Julian’s hands, “when someone is sick and you entertain him in his sickness, you become an accomplice in his disorder.”
“Let’s see what you say after I show you a leather purse full of ancient gold coins hidden in the London Wall.”
“After, I’ll be visiting you in jail,” said Ashton, “because it’s against the law to deface a historical monument. Douchebaggery most foul. Vandalism in the first degree. In Singapore you’d get fifty lashes.”
Ashton kept watch on a bench by the church, while across the narrow canal, over a hanging bridge, Julian spent the afternoon walking up and down the same fifty feet, feeling the remains of the crumbling Roman wall with his hands. When he reached the end near the circular turret, he’d turn around and creep back, inch by inch searching for the Kentish ragstone spackled by an amateur mason. Sometimes Ashton was on his phone, but mostly, he sat and watched Julian.
Hours passed. Julian, exhausted and sore from walking bent at the waist, collapsed next to Ashton. “I don’t understand why I can’t find it. It was so easy. Down the hill, in a straight line from the nave’s last window, three feet off the ground. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense.” Ashton shook his head. “Just for a second, step out of your skin and think about how you appear to me. Hunched over for the last two hours, pacing up and down the same stretch of wall, mumbling to yourself.”
“You think I’m nuts.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, Julian. Mentally ill.” Ashton wasn’t smiling.
“You think I’m obsessing over a girl and you’re afraid that eventually that obsession is going to drive me insane.”
“Eventually? And not a girl. A coin.”
Persuasion #6: One Sunday Julian took Ashton to Greenwich. To show him the telescope, to introduce him to the guard.
“Hello, Sweeney. This is my friend, Ashton.”
“Hello, Ashton,” Sweeney said, turning to Julian. “And who are you?”
“The guy who threw up a few months ago,” Julian said. “You had to call me an ambulance, remember?”
“I don’t remember the ambulance, but so many people pass this way, mate, and I’m terrible with faces, sorry. Me memory’s really the pits. One time, there was a bloke who appeared in my Transit Room nekkid! I have no idea how he got through security with his junk hanging out.”
“Maybe it was so small they didn’t notice,” Ashton said to Sweeney, and to Julian he said, “Naked?!”
“Don’t know what that guy is on about,” said Julian.
He and Ashton stood for a few minutes in front of the well, the stairs, the railing, the glossy Transit Circle. They looked up at the gray sky through the retracted roof. Julian told Ashton about noon and infinite meridians and the blue halo opening to another dimension. They visited the gift shop, walked around the soaked gardens, stood on the stone plaza with the panorama of London laid out before them, today glum and obscured, the oaks heavy with rain, the river in a mist.
Ashton didn’t speak on the train back home.
11 (#ulink_08b5c656-6b09-5986-8483-2ea97a2f2170)
Objects of Outrage (#ulink_08b5c656-6b09-5986-8483-2ea97a2f2170)
IN MAY, A MORE OR LESS HEALED JULIAN RETURNED TO Nextel. Reuters’ interest in buying the news agency intensified, and Ashton and Julian worked long hours trying to make the business efficient and profitable so that they could sell it. At night they went out drinking, sometimes even with Roger and Nigel.
Working was good.
Drinking, too.
It made time pass.
Something had to.
When he felt well enough in his body to no longer ignore the remorse in his soul, Julian went to Quatrang one morning before work to make peace with Devi. Not wanting to go by himself, he dragged Ashton along. “Why do we have to go see that man? You said yourself you were done with him.”
“I am,” Julian said. “But I want to apologize for the way I acted. I was rude. Plus I want to show you some things.”
“Unless it’s naked girls dancing, I don’t want to see anything.”
Devi was happy to see Julian. He said nothing when Julian walked in, he didn’t react, not smiling or even joking, but there was something in the way he had glanced up when the door opened that made Julian think the cook had been hoping Julian would return.
Ashton and Devi were even less impressed with each other on the second day of their acquaintance. They shook hands, but they may as well have been drawing swords. Barely able to fit inside the tiny Quatrang, Ashton stood in the corner by the window, tense and uncharacteristically awkward.
“You’re just in time,” Devi said. “I trust you two haven’t had your first meal of the day yet? I’ve been simmering a mohinga in a cauldron in the back. Would you like some?”
“What’s a mohinga?”
“Catfish soup with banana tree stem,” Devi said cheerfully. “A squeeze of lime, dried chilis, crispy onions. Very delicious. Can I bring you two a bowl?”
“For breakfast?”
“Of course. When else would you eat a mohinga?”
Julian shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“It’s the most popular breakfast dish in Burma,” Devi said, sounding offended for Burma.
“Devi, how about some eggs? French toast?”
“What am I, the Waffle House?”
“I’ll try this mohinga,” Ashton said.
“Look at you trying to impress him,” Julian said after Devi disappeared behind the curtain.
“What I’m trying to do is get out of here,” Ashton said. “I’m giving this thing a half-hour. Like lunch with my old man.”
“Speaking of your father,” Devi said, carrying out two bowls of strong-smelling fish soup, “how is he?”
“Um, he’s … fine?” Ashton squinted at Julian with a sideways glare that Julian did not return.
“He must be happy having you in London with him, working with him?”
“He’s semi-retired, but … I guess.”
“You and your father have had some difficulties in the past, yes? Is it better now?”
Ashton shook his head. “Whatever. Not really. Maybe a little. It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t want what I haven’t got.”
For a moment, the three men sat in silence, absorbing this. Julian wished he could say the same.
“Your father, does he have other children besides you?”
“What, Julian forgot to mention that part? No,” Ashton said. “I was his only child, and I still wasn’t his favorite.”
“Oh, I am certain that’s not true,” Devi said. “He is your father. You’re his only son.”
“Well, that he knows of,” interjected Julian.
“No, no,” Ashton said. “I’m pretty sure I’m it.”
Devi wouldn’t let it go. “Do you spend time together? Do father and son things?”
“Father and son things? We don’t fly kites if that’s what you’re asking. We have lunch once a week.”
“Well, that counts!” Devi said. He seemed happy it was so. “He must enjoy that very much.”
Ashton glanced at Julian by his side, as in what the hell.
In the uncomfortable hush that followed, Julian took the opportunity to apologize to Devi. He hoped there were no hard feelings.
“Apology not necessary,” Devi said. “I’m used to it.”
“I bet you are,” muttered Ashton.
“I was so angry,” Julian said.
“You still are,” Ashton said.
Devi nodded. “Stage two of grief: anger. It’s to be expected. No one should take it personally.” That sounded directed at Ashton. Certainly, that’s how Ashton took it because he scowled. They finished the mohinga, had kimchi and a banana cake with brandy. Gratefully Julian drank two glasses of the proffered murky tiger water. Ashton was given sake.
“So what’s wrong with him?” Ashton blurted to Devi after a second helping of the banana cake. “What really happened to his body? I’ve never seen anything like his injuries. Smoke inhalation? Electrocution? Multiple foot fractures?”
“Possibly by traveling into another dimension,” Devi said, “he had accumulated and stored a tremendous amount of energy, and on his improbable return, all of it was released as he was hurled through the physical universe at incredible speed.”
“Can you just stop it,” Ashton said. “Can’t one of you give me a straight answer for once?”
“That wasn’t straight enough for you?” Devi said. “He’s lucky to be back in one piece. He’s doing quite well, all things considered.”
“You think this is doing well?”
Devi shrugged. “Your friend’s predicament is not going to end here, Ashton. To truly help him, you must find a way to believe him, so he doesn’t have to keep dealing with the burden of your skepticism among all the other things he has to deal with. Ease his burden, don’t add to it. And, Julian, your accomplishment is not diminished just because you perceive yourself as having failed.”
“I don’t perceive myself as having failed,” Julian said, jumping off the stool. “I actually have failed.” It was time to go. “Ashton, ready? Thanks for the grub, Devi.”
As they were leaving, Ashton said to Devi, “We’re not trying to solve a crime here. I am helping him. He’s not looking for a solution to his predicament. He’s looking for compassion.”
“He’s looking for a little bit of a solution, too,” Devi said.
On the train to work, Ashton couldn’t stop talking about Devi. “The balls on that guy! Telling me what to do with you. Did I ask for his advice?”
“He’s the master of offering deeply unwanted advice,” Julian said. “It’s called being a shaman.”
“Being a fraud more like,” Ashton said. “There’s something he wants from you. It’s so obvious. How can you not see it? I don’t know why you bought into his lies. Has he hypnotized you? What’s in that gross water he keeps plying you with?”
“Tiger.”
“Right, okay. What I’m saying is he totally wants you to do again whatever it is you do for him.”
“I don’t do it for him.”
Ashton harrumphed.
“And you’re wrong,” Julian said. “Last time he tried to talk me out of it.” Tried to talk me out of it by fearmongering, Julian thought, not meeting Ashton’s eye.
“Not this time.”
“He doesn’t care, honest. He doesn’t have a dog in this fight.”
“Oh, not a dog, that swindler,” Ashton said. “Maybe a tiger.”
“How can he be a swindler, Ash? I fall into a starry profusion, through a sharp-fanged warp, and crawl out somewhere else in time and space, and find Josephine again. I told you about the Great Fire, about the Globe Theatre, the leper colony in the marshes near Drury Lane.”
“He’s drugged you. You’re having visions.”
“If I was going to have visions, why would I have them of her working in a brothel and murdering one of her customers? And did Devi break my feet and scorch my lungs, too?”
“He’s a dangerous and powerful man,” Ashton said. “He’s like an assassin bug—tiny but lethal.”
“Assassin bug?”
“One of the scariest insects known to mankind.”
Julian groaned. “Tell you what,” he said, “next time we go to Quatrang, I’ll tell him in front of you that I’m not going back, so you can see he wants nothing from me. Will that make you feel better?”
“Why would there be a next time?” said Ashton.
“There isn’t going to be.”
“I mean, next time for Quatrang, fool.”
“Oh.”
As they got off at Bank, Ashton asked Julian if Devi was right. Was his skepticism a burden?
Julian admitted it was. “But it’s fine, Ash, it’s no longer an issue. It’s in the past. And the past is done.”
They strode quickly down the long length of the Bank of England’s windowless marble wall, and as they turned the corner on Lothbury, Ashton said, “Then why do I keep feeling as Faulkner did, that if the past was truly done, there would be less grief and sorrow? Seems to me that not only is the past not done, it’s not even the fucking past.”
Faulkner was right. There was no was. There was only is.
But Julian was done. To prove to his friend there was nothing to worry about, the next time they had lunch at Devi’s, Julian announced he wasn’t going back.
“That’s fine,” Devi said.
“I mean it.”
“I hope so. As you know, I think that’s best—for many reasons.”
Julian gave Devi a shut-the-hell-up glare and Ashton an I-told-you-so one. Both men rolled their eyes.
“Sometimes, Ashton, I argue with your friend,” Devi said, “because in arguing back, Julian defines for himself what he is. When I agree with him too much, it unsettles him, makes him cantankerous. Like now.”
“That’s not true!” That was Julian.
Ashton said nothing.
“All things being equal, Julian will always choose a fight,” Devi said. “He prefers it to almost anything—inside and outside the ring. He needs combat to survive. The easy life suffocates him. The easy answer is the last thing he wants. Contact and combat is your friend’s motto.”
Ashton said nothing, looking upset that Devi figured out in five minutes what had taken him much longer.
“How is your father, Ashton?” Devi said. “Have you seen him this week? What did you two talk about?”
“I can’t stand that man,” Ashton said to Julian after they left.
Julian smirked. “What’s with you two? He’s not crazy about you either. The other week he called you a born wanderer.”
“That’s what I’m talking about, his insufferability,” Ashton said, full of pique. “I’m not the born wanderer. That’s how you know the guy’s a fraud. He can’t even see what’s in front of him. You’re the born wanderer.”
Julian continued to see Devi but on his own. Devi cooked for Julian. Often they had cha ca, sizzling chunks of fried fish with garlic, ginger, turmeric and dill. Julian could’ve eaten it every day for a year, it was that good. When he told the cook what Ashton had said, Devi smiled condescendingly. “Ask your friend if he knows the meaning of the word wander. You’re only a wanderer if you travel alone. When there are two of you, it’s not called wandering. It’s called an adventure. And you and your girl are on an extraordinary adventure.”
“Were on an adventure.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“And Ashton is not alone. He’s with Riley.”
“Tell me more about this Riley,” Devi said. “Is she living here in London with him?”
Damn that Devi! “Even so, he’s still not alone. I’m here with him.”
“Are you, Julian?”
It was really time to go.
“When is he moving back to L.A.?” Devi asked. “I don’t see the harp or the lamb with him. I see the smoke of torment. I see woe in the street.”
“Can you stop it? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you see?”
“Not much. I told you, I feel things. Things that aren’t good.”
“How many more things that aren’t good can happen to me, Devi?”
“Not to you,” Devi said. “To him.”
Grimly Julian stared at the shaman. Julian hated to be reminded of their conversation the previous year. What are you prepared to give up, Julian, to live as you want? Julian hated to have been proven wrong, hated to have failed. His blood was boiling. “Well, I’m never going back again,” he said, grabbing his coat. “So we’re good.”
After that day, he stopped visiting Devi.
Almost all Julian did until the end of the year was work and box and swim.
Except for the weekends when Ashton was away either back in L.A. or somewhere unspecified, or when Julian was at the pool or the gym, the two men hardly left each other’s side. They shopped together, went to work together, drank together, sparred together, played video games together. On rainy Notting Hill weekend afternoons, they scoped the streets, checking out garage sales, open markets, art galleries, pretty girls. They rode bikes through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, they hiked through Holland Park, they had long liquid brunches at quaint London pubs—like the Silver Cross—and got dressed up in fitted bespoke suits to go out on Saturday nights, when the class of women they chatted up increased geometrically with the price of their silk ties from Jermyn Street. Ashton tried, you had to give him that. No matter what Devi said, Ashton did his best.
Julian, too.
“Let me ask you a question, Jules,” Ashton said one night, late on the Central Line, as they were heading home thoroughly inebriated after last rounds at the Counting House.
“You’re in no state to question me, especially in that tone of voice,” Julian said, “and I’m certainly in no state to answer you.”
“In other words, the perfect time to have a serious conversation—when we’re both three sheets to the wind. Let me ask you: when you meet this girl, does she know who you are?”
“Why would she? How could she?”
“Uh-huh. But at the very least her name is Josephine, right?”
“No—because it wasn’t her name,” Julian said. “Her name was Mia.”
“Wait, so, a derivative of the most common name in the English language?”
“She falls in love with me!”
“Don’t shout, we’re on the tube,” Ashton said. “People will think we’re drunk.”
“We are drunk.”
After they got off at Notting Hill Gate and were staggering home, Ashton resumed. “Jules, have you considered the possibility that it’s just a random girl?”
“You think I’m on the receiving end of some cosmic prank? Go to hell.”
“Oh, sure, I mean, what are the chances of finding a nipply, lusty, brown-haired, brown-eyed chick named Mary who falls for you?”
“I’m done listening to you.”
But Ashton was on a roll. “You think you’re falling in love with Josephine, but it’s just some murdering broad named Mallory.”
“Am I listening?”
“You hook up with her in a brothel of all places—where naturally all true love begins—and she goes all doe-eyed on you, tells you you’re her one and only john, starts killing and stealing, and your first thought is—Josephine!”
“I’m not only not listening, I’m no longer your friend.” Julian tried to speed up, but drunk Ashton was a faster and more coherent man than drunk Julian.
“Are you pissed off because you know I’m right?”
“Why are you still speaking?” Julian said. “You think I travel through time so I can hook up with a stranger? What about her feelings for me?”
Ashton’s smile was from one side of the street to the other. “Jules, that’s my other point. Can we get real for a sec?”
“No.”
“We roomed together and lived together, lest you forgot.”
“I wish I forgot.”
“In our sophomore year, your bed was separated from mine by a thin sheet we hung up for fake privacy. Do you remember? Did you think this sheet was soundproof?”
“Go to hell.”
“I know all about you. Plus Gwen used to brag to Riley, who would then scold me—oh, and thanks for that, too, by the way. Julian does this, and Julian does that. Fuck you, buddy.” A grinning Ashton hooked his long arm around Julian’s neck as they zigzagged down the sidewalk. Julian tried to get away, but Ashton wouldn’t let him.
“Your point?”
“My point is,” Ashton said, “that any girl would be happy to biblically acquaint herself with you.”
“Get off me.”
“During foreplay you could ask her if she’s the one, and I promise you, promise you, by the time you get to the afterglow, she’ll be chirping yes! Yes, I’m the one, Jules! Wait, no, it’s me, I’m the one!”
Julian pushed Ashton off him. “You’re ridiculous.”
“But am I wrong?”
“Both ridiculous and wrong.”
“Here’s my final point,” Ashton said, grabbing Julian again. “Why do you have to spelunk, box, swim, bust up your body? Why can’t you find them and seduce them right here in London, in the comfort of your own home, in your tiny, woefully inadequate bed?”
“I’m moving out.”
“I promise to set you up only with brown-eyed girls named Maria. I know about a dozen off the top of my head.”
“I’m packing my shit as soon as we get home.”
“I’m not saying love again. I’m saying …”
“Shut up.”
Ashton was laughing, his arm around Julian’s neck. “You’ve tried it your way, Jules. You’ve tried it your way twice. Come on, buddy. Now let’s try it Ashton’s way.”
And Julian said okay. “I’ll try it Ashton’s way, said the barmaid to the bishop.”
Julian didn’t know how his friend accomplished these things, but Ashton did set him up with an attractive brown-haired woman named Mary. They went out for a bite and a drink at her local pub and ended up at her place near the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. When they were still at the pub, he told her he wasn’t looking for anything serious, and the woman said thank God because she wasn’t either.
Julian left in the middle of the night. There was no tube and he couldn’t find a cab, so he had to hoof home five miles across Lambeth Bridge and around Hyde Park. The next morning when Ashton asked him how it went, Julian said, “What can I tell you, everything is worse south of the river.” They both chuckled. “But on the bright side, the Imperial War Museum is near her. Let’s go grab a bite and check it out.”
“No, thank you. I don’t do anything south of the river, especially having to do with the war.”
And so it went.
Julian sparred with four different partners on four different days. He hit the speedbag five times a week with a thousand blurs of his gloved fists. He pummeled the heavy bag three times a week with five hundred blows of thunder. The bag would fall before Julian fell, and the blows reverberated through the gym, the glass in the grubby windows rattling with Julian’s immense anger. He pounded the bag to cleanse his body of rage, he swam miles in the local gym pool to exhaust himself, and when that still didn’t work, he slept with the women he chatted up in pubs and clubs and Franz Ferdinand concerts. They weren’t all named Mary. And Ashton’s theory proved not entirely correct. Not one of them, no matter how brown-haired and brown-eyed and Mary-monikered, no matter how long-limbed and white skinned, felt remotely like the Mary of Clerkenwell or the Mallory of the Silver Cross. Or the Josephine of L.A. Not one quantum particle of them felt like the girl he was eternally entangled with.
But Ashton was right: Julian had to move on. He had to try to find a way to live again. At the very least he had to have sex again.
And at the very least, that’s what he did.
On Sunday mornings, Ashton would crawl out of his room to find Julian making coffee or eating leftovers, and there would be another irate woman yelling, Callie from Portobello, Candy from King’s Road, a girl from the Botanist and from the Colbert. “Howling in the night, yelling in the mornings, destroying speedbags,” Ashton said. “All you do is fuck and fight. Both with the same temper.”
“I’m doing what you told me to, remember? You’re never happy.”
“When will it end? I’m going crazy from the racket, both in the middle of the night and in the mornings. I’m going to charge the noise-cancelling headphones you forced me to buy against my share of the rent. Can’t you stay at their place? Are you doing this deliberately? Are you making our apartment uninhabitable so I start praying you’ll go do the time warp again?” Ashton grinned at his own cleverness.
“Ash, I know it’s difficult for you to believe,” said Julian, “but when I’m with a girl, I hardly think of you at all. One might say never.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Women left Julian nasty messages or waited by his front door to shout obscenities to his face. You never called me, you piece of shit. You said you would and you never did, and then I saw you in the pub with someone else. I know you said we weren’t serious, but you could’ve called me. Julian was left neutral by it. Other women couldn’t move the needle, they broke their mouths on his bitter stone, shattering as they came, while he kept waiting for the end-bell to ring. It never did. Rage was blacker than blindness, blacker than grief.
Julian, go and come back for me. Clutching the Bill of Mortality in one hand, the gold coin in the other, he kept hearing Mallory’s dying voice in his head—when he wasn’t dreaming of Josephine, walking toward his café table.
Julian, come back for me.
Why, when the new moon was invisible in the sky, did he dream of her smiling? Earth, moon, and sun all in a line, a meridian line, a wishing moon, Josephine smiling, Mallory pleading …
Come back for me.
And in Notting Hill, the cast-off girls had fun, then wanted more, got insulted, bellowed at him, all hawks in motion. He told them he wasn’t looking for anything. And they assured him neither were they. Yet there was so much yelling. I’m serious, he would say. Please listen to me. But they had three pints, two cocktails, half a bottle of wine, and they couldn’t listen. And when he told one sober woman right at the outset, even before they had ordered the wine, that he wasn’t looking for anything long-term, she slapped him across the face and said, don’t get ahead of yourself, buddy, who even says you’ll get anywhere with me. He got somewhere with her, and now she, too, was shouting at him.
“Jules, what a mess you’re making of things,” Ashton said. “I think you’ve forgotten how to date women.”
“You call what I’m doing dating?”
“That’s true, this isn’t quite what I had in mind when I advised you to plug back into your life. You’ve gone from a monk to a player overnight. But sooner or later, all this whatever you want to call it is going to turn into a bloodbath. You’ll be sorry when one of them bashes your brains in with a cricket bat.”
“How do you know that’s not what I’m hoping for?” said Julian.
12 (#ulink_d4e22740-46c1-5032-b3de-8c222d0d5f11)
A Subject of Choice (#ulink_d4e22740-46c1-5032-b3de-8c222d0d5f11)
AFTER CHRISTMAS, ASHTON ASKED JULIAN TO SIGN OFF ON THE sale of the Treasure Box. Nextel was becoming too big a responsibility. There was a lot to do in London, both in work and in life. And the prop business was dying without Ashton, who sounded philosophical when he spoke about it. It couldn’t continue. Back in L.A. over the holidays, he and Julian held an auction for the remainder of the props, gave away some posters and trinkets to friends, kept a few items Ashton valued, like his Bob Marley poster, and didn’t renew their lease on the building. “It’ll be a taco place now. They might call it Treasure Taco.” Ashton grinned.
“Are you sure that instead of selling Treasure Box, you don’t want to move back to L.A.?” Julian said.
“What do I have to move back for now?”
“How about for me?” Riley said two months later. It was March. She was visiting the boys for a long weekend to celebrate Julian’s 36th birthday.
“But, cupcake, you’re here in London with me,” Ashton said. “If I go back, I’ll be in L.A. without you. Come here, delicious. Give me a big smooch.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Is that why you love me?”
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