City of Light

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR



Paris



11:30 AM



A scream arising from his own throat awakened Armand and he sat up in bed, his heart pounding and his hands gripping his silken sheets. The dream had already come once before and he suspected it would come again, that it might indeed haunt him through the rest of his life.

For it was unshakeable, this vision of Henry floating down the Seine, his face upturned and trusting, looking so much like a child in sleep. His skirts spread around him, his hair framing his face like a dark flower, the eerie serenity of the scene.

But there was another reason that the image gripped Armand. He had seen Henry floating in a river before.

Ian Newlove and Charles Hammond had known each other’s secret at a glance. In many ways Charles had been dealt the easier hand to play. Back when they were boys in Manchester, Ian’s large eyes and delicate frame, his precise gestures and perennially hopeful smile had made him the more logical target for the neighborhood bullies. But Charles was more –

Well, there was no way to say it except that Charles was more normal, that he had been better able to blend in. Charles had watched the other lads harass Ian, tossing pebbles and coal at him, following along behind with their silly songs and mocking nicknames, and he had initially considered himself the luckier of the two. But over the years that followed, there had been times when he had privately questioned this early assumption. For the ability to hide one’s true nature can be both a blessing and a curse.

Charles had never joined into the cruel games, but he had often pretended not to know Ian when the two passed on the street. He would turn his head and feign a great fascination with something in the distance. Ian forgave him these slights and had never betrayed him, even though, with a single word, he could have turned the wrath of the neighborhood boys toward a new and far more interesting target. No matter how fast Charles looked away, it was always there, in his peripheral vision. Ian’s knowing but compassionate smile.

Summers were a whole different world. They were brief, for when school was out for the term most of the local boys went straight to the mills and factories seeking work. Carting out slag, throwing buckets of water on the gears to keep them from overheating, rolling great bolts of cotton in and out of the warehouses. But between the school term and the summer work there were always a few precious days, three or four in June and a like number in September, when they found themselves at total leisure.

The summer they almost lost Henry – how old were they then? Fourteen? Fifteen? Ian’s mother had said to watch out for him and when Charles became an adult, looking back, he saw the unfairness of that request. Why would she saddle them with a toddler to care for on their fleeting days of freedom? Yes, they were fourteen and Henry had been…two. He was still wearing dresses, his curls yet uncut. They had packed a lunch and gone down by the river. Fishing they called it, although they had no nets or reels.

Despite appearances, Ian had been the true innocent of the two. Charles knew a bit more about matters, courtesy of the village parson, and thus he was able to show Ian places the boy had not known existed, take him to continents on his body that were hitherto unexplored. Even now, Charles could remember the shimmering light of that summer afternoon, Ian’s incredulous face, the way his hand gripped at the grass as they rolled, tuffs of it coming loose, freeing the hot wet smell of the earth.

Henry was there, of course. He was too young to know what he was seeing, too young to tell anyone if he had. Ian had smeared honey from their picnic on the boy’s fingers and given him a feather, which was his standard means of keeping the child entertained. Henry had sat on his little blanket rapt with concentration, peeling the feather first from one hand, and then from the other.

But alas, he had tired of his game before they had tired of theirs. At some point they had looked over and he had been gone, his little blanket empty, his cup overturned.

Ian had screamed. They had both sprung to their feet, rushed instinctively toward the water. Even before they arrived at the riverbank, Charles had convinced himself that the child must have drowned. The parson had instructed him in a rather convoluted type of theology during their own afternoons together, but even without this private tutoring, the majority of the citizens of Manchester carried a most literal fear of God. In a place where pleasures were so few, it was easy to convince the populace that these pleasures could only be purchased at a great price.

But there was a miracle. Henry’s dress saved him. His toddler’s dress, so full that it had formed a sort of bubble, just enough to keep him aloft as he bobbed there, near the shoreline, caught in the reeds.

Ian had plunged into the water and seized the child. As he held his brother to his naked chest, he turned back toward Charles, his face full of fear and relief and another emotion which was not so easy to read, a type of wonderment. And there, from the high bank, Charles had heard himself calling out promises. That he would protect Henry and Ian. That he would get them out of Manchester and protect them both for the rest of their lives.

The tragedy was that he had meant it. Charles saw himself as stronger and smarter and he honestly believed he could deliver them all. When the other boys hurled their slurs at Ian, Charles had silently vowed that someday he would take his revenge. Especially on the ones who liked it and said they didn’t. The ones who would pull Ian into an alley, have their pleasure against him, and then, just when it was finished, spit in his face.

Charles Hammond and Ian Newlove had both known what hypocrisy was before they reached the age of fifteen, but perhaps Charles understood it better, for he had wrestled with the hypocrisy of his own heart. A lucky toss of the genetic dice had left him with broad shoulders and a firm chin; otherwise, he would be suffering the same indignities which were daily heaped on Ian. The indignities that Henry someday too would suffer.

Through the years that followed, Charles’s hasty promise to protect them would inform every detail of their lives. Against all odds, he had gotten them out of the hellish streets of Manchester and into a life of money, security, power, and prestige. This transition had required multiple levels of deception, each painstakingly built one within another, like the ever-narrowing chambers of a fort. His marriage to Janet, for example. She was the one thing Mancunians hated and feared more than homosexuals – an intellectual woman - and thus she had been more than happy to take his name and the humble cottage his parents had left him. The title of man and wife, unearned as the words may have been, shielded them both from speculation and besides, he had grown fond of her. Janet was the one who had first taught him French. Charles had succeeded even in exacting an almost Biblical revenge against a certain type of man, the ones he would always privately think of as “the boys in the alley.” He had made those unholy bastards pay, and before this business was over, they would all pay even more.

But Charles had failed in his promise as well, which is why he now sat in his nightshirt, pulse pounding, his mouth sour with an alcohol-induced sleep.

He could close his eyes and be right back there, on that particular summer day. The birds, the trees, the dappled sunlight, the hallelujah of Ian’s single gasp. He suspected the memory had frozen in Ian’s mind as well. Only Henry was unaware of the birth of the bond they all shared, taking the older men’s careful care of him for granted, growing ever more spoiled and petulant with each passing year. He alone did not carry the memory of that moment when Ian first realized that his brother was gone, the moment when a moan of pleasure had turned into a shriek of despair. How they had seen the blue dress floating and slid down the bank in terror, only to find Henry perfectly fine, his hands still smeared with honey, bouncing and gurgling among the reeds.

When Ian had turned towards him, the child in his arms, Charles had known exactly what he was thinking. That their moments of joy had very nearly caused the baby’s death, that their wretched and unnatural desires had prompted God’s swift retribution. But Ian had been wrong. They were merely children, after all. This was before ambition and rage had hardened in Charles’s chest, fusing a diamond in the place where his heart should be. Before Henry’s sticky fingers moved from feathers to everything in sight, long before Ian would become Isabel. It would take seventeen more years before the culmination of their sins would fully overtake them. Seventeen more years until Henry would once again go down to the water.