A Lily Among Thorns

Chapter 21


The brothers sat in Solomon’s room without speaking. Elijah had dressed and was hugging his bottle-green coat around himself as if it were chilly. It wasn’t. He and Serena had been naked and he’d never been cold. He couldn’t think about that now. He looked back at his brother, and broke the silence with an effort. “How long—how long have you—”

“How long have I been a sodomite?” Elijah asked harshly. “About as long as you haven’t been one, I daresay.”

Solomon flinched. “How long have you and Sacreval been— ”

“Lovers?”

They had always finished each other’s sentences, so eager to move on to the next one. Now Solomon just didn’t have the courage to finish them himself.

“Since I met him in Paris.”

Solomon stared. “You mean, all this time—”

“I hadn’t slept with him again until tonight, if that’s what you’re asking. For God’s sake, I’m working to—” Elijah cut off with a glance at the door. Hang him, he mouthed, his face contorted with misery.

Solomon remembered Elijah staring as the marquis and Lady Pursleigh leaned toward each other in the candlelight, and the pen almost snapping in his hand when he wrote that he was here to hang the marquis du Sacreval. Suddenly Elijah’s constant moody snappishness since his return resolved itself into perfect, gleaming sense. Part of Solomon thought with relief, It wasn’t my fault. Then he thought of something else. “You slept with Sir Nigel.”

Elijah bit his lip. “Sol, please—”

“You did, didn’t you.”

“Yes.” So soft he wouldn’t have heard it if it were anyone but Elijah.

“I don’t know you anymore.”

“You know me better than anyone!”

Solomon shook his head. “I always told you everything.”

“I always hoped you weren’t.”

It took a moment for Solomon to catch his meaning. “You mean, you wished that I—” He couldn’t keep the revulsion from his voice and Elijah didn’t even flinch, just huddled deeper into his ratty old jacket.

“I just didn’t want to be alone.”

“You’ve never been alone.” Solomon barely recognized his own voice. “Not like I was. For a year and a half. I had no one. You—have you ever done anything but lie to me?”

“I can’t lie to you, you know that,” Elijah snapped. “I just—didn’t tell the truth.”

Solomon snorted.

“When I started this job, they told me that the best lie is a half-truth. But I already knew that.”

“I’m glad that our connection had some professional value to you!”

Before he could say anything else, Serena came in through the connecting door with a tea tray. It was late; she must have made it up herself, alone in the dark kitchen. “I thought you could use this,” she said, her voice neutral. Even in the throes of passion she’d kept command of her voice. Only when he’d said he loved her had it risen, breaking like a snapped thread.

Her hair fell across her face and fringes rustled as she set the tray down on the table between them. She gathered her clothes off the floor. Her robe gaped a little as she bent over. Then she handed Solomon a note and walked out. He couldn’t drag his eyes away from her until she’d shut the door.

He opened the torn-off strip of paper. In the same neat hand that filled her account books, it said, A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. He looked at Elijah, who obviously wanted to know what the note said and couldn’t bring himself to ask for fear of a refusal. Silently Solomon pushed it across the table.

Elijah read it and passed it back. “Proverbs Seventeen: Seventeen,” he said wryly. Their eyes met, and for a second Solomon could feel Elijah’s terror beating against his own ribs like a trapped bird. Then Elijah looked away and said, “I wouldn’t have thought Lady Serena even owned a Bible.”

“I said it to her father, actually,” Solomon said.

“Really?”

He nodded. “It was the best impression of Father I’ve ever done, you would have died—” He cut off abruptly. “I’ll do an encore for you sometime.”

Elijah raised his head hopefully. Solomon thought of the look in Elijah’s eyes when he’d sat up in Sacreval’s bed and seen Solomon. It was a look Solomon had seen in the mirror countless times over the last year and a half. The look of someone who has wakened into his own nightmare.

He watched Elijah now. His guilty air and the mutinous set of his mouth were familiar to Solomon from countless confrontations with their parents. The black despair in his eyes was not. If anyone else had brought that look to Elijah’s face, Solomon would have wanted to rip his throat out.

He tore up the note. Elijah stared at the pieces as if they’d been his last breath of air. “For God’s sake, Li, take that look off your face,” Solomon said. “I don’t need this note to remind me that you’re my brother. You don’t need to worry that you’ll lose me. You never did. There is no wretched thing you could ever do that would make me want to be without you.” It was true, and at that moment Solomon resented it furiously—resented that Elijah could have killed a man and Solomon would have burned him and dissolved his bones in vitriol to keep Elijah from the noose. And Elijah still didn’t trust him. Had never trusted him. Solomon had paid a heavy price for that lack of trust, this past year and a half, and yet he’d let it go by the board, had welcomed his brother back without question—and this was his reward.

“‘A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city,’” Elijah whispered.

“I can’t do without you and you know it,” he said curtly. “You knew it a year and a half ago when you gallivanted off to France.”

“I told you, I thought you would know.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“I wanted you never to know. I tried so hard—I can’t do without you either, Sol,” Elijah said desperately. “I was so afraid I’d lose you. I’m losing you right now. That look on your face, like I’m some leper you’ve never seen before—”

Solomon tried to clear the anger from his expression. “We’ll—we’ll figure this thing out,” he offered.

The blood rushed into Elijah’s face. “There’s nothing to figure out. I like men. I always have and I can’t stop, not even for you. I’m not diseased, or mad, or wretched, and neither was what happened between me and René tonight. It was—” He looked at the mussed bed. “Well, I expect you know what it was like.”

Solomon’s eyes narrowed. How dare he make the comparison? “Sacreval is a—” Elijah shot a warning look at the door, and spy died in Solomon’s throat. “Why did you go?” he asked instead.

Elijah sighed. “Remember Alan?”

“The blacksmith’s apprentice? Of course. You lived in each other’s pockets for—” He blinked. “Wait a minute, you and he—you—?”

“Yes,” Elijah said defiantly. “We were. For years. And then he let his father marry him off, and he told me it wouldn’t change anything.”

Solomon scrubbed at his face. “He’s a drunk now, you know.”

Elijah stared at him. “Really?”

Solomon nodded. “His wife has to take in boarders because people don’t want to go to the smithy.”

Elijah’s mouth twisted. “Poor girl.”

“So—you’re not interested in Serena, then?”

Elijah laughed incredulously. “Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, it’s plain as a pikestaff she’s only got eyes for you.”

Solomon swallowed and looked away. “I need to think about this,” he said abruptly. He stood up. “I need to sleep.”

Elijah nodded and went out silently. Solomon lifted the lid on Serena’s pot and saw that it contained chocolate. It was rapidly cooling, but he poured himself a cup anyway, not bothering to add sugar. He’d just taken his first bitter sip when Sacreval walked in. His jaw was set and he was very pale.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“I came to talk to you about your brother.”

“You ought to be ashamed to speak of him,” Solomon said viciously. Dissolute Frenchman.

A muscle jumped in Sacreval’s jaw. “You ought to be ashamed to say so,” he said quietly. “You want your brother to repent of what he is? You want him to crawl through life apologizing for existing?”

“Why couldn’t you leave him alone?” Solomon was embarrassed by the childishness of it the moment it left his mouth, but he couldn’t help wanting to blame the whole mess on Sacreval. He turned everything he touched to ashes. Look what he had done to Serena—what would he take from Elijah when he was through with him? What had he already taken?

The marquis smiled crookedly, something sparking in his eyes that Solomon told himself was just lust. “Because he shone,” Sacreval said. “From the first moment I saw him, there was a glow around him like our Savior in a painting.”

“How dare you speak our Lord’s name, you filthy—” The marquis sucked in his breath sharply, and Solomon shut his lips on the slur.

“You English,” Sacreval said furiously. “As if speaking it were the crime. You were happy for him to sin as much as he liked so long as he did not speak of it to you. So long as he felt properly ashamed and you did not have to hear it, you did not care.”

Solomon surged to his feet. “That’s not true,” he bit out. “I didn’t know! He never told me. He never told me anything.”

“Because he knew that you would do exactly as you are doing. Last week he said to me, ‘René, we cannot ever again, because it would kill me if he knew.’ And his voice was shaking.”

That was a lie, Solomon thought. Because he couldn’t say, ‘You’re a spy and I must kill you.’ But Elijah had said, not three minutes ago, The best lie is a half-truth.

“The other reason I did not leave him alone,” the marquis continued, “is because if I had, they would have killed him.”

Solomon’s head snapped up. “Who?”

The marquis shrugged. “The police, who else? They raided the house we were in, in Paris. Your brother should have fled, but no, he is an Englishman, he faces three men down so that a fifteen-year-old whore can escape. By the time I reached him they were kicking in his ribs.”

Bile rose in Solomon’s throat, swamping his anger. “Christ,” he said thickly.

Sacreval shrugged again. “They thought we ought to be ashamed. It was not a barroom brawl, but it was true what I said before. He could barely walk.”

“Christ,” Solomon repeated. He looked at the marquis almost pleadingly. “Is that going to be Elijah’s life? Skulking around? Consorting with fifteen-year-old whores and their clients? Being beaten in disreputable houses? What kind of life is that?”

There was something wistful in the marquis’s smile. “As odd as it may seem, an honest one.”

Solomon laughed weakly.

“It is not all bad. I like disreputable houses. And the time I spent with your brother in Paris was the happiest of my life.”

“You’re not going to tell me you love him,” Solomon said incredulously.

“Not if you don’t wish me to. But that does not change the fact that it is true.” He laughed softly at Solomon’s expression. “What, did you think it was all unnatural lusts and depravity? Perhaps you should have read the sonnets of your Shakespeare more carefully.” He stood there a moment longer, but when Solomon said nothing, he shrugged and walked out of the room.

Solomon thought about booted feet in Elijah’s ribs. He thought about the tight knot of revulsion in his chest, and about anybody else looking at Elijah and feeling it.

Solomon vomited chocolate into his basin. He wanted more than anything else in the world to talk to Serena. But she’d looked so scared, so trapped. He’d told her he wasn’t asking her for anything. He couldn’t go running to her now.

Besides, even though he thought he understood, he was angry. Angry that he’d told her he loved her and she’d all but chewed off her own arm to get away. He gargled water until he could no longer taste the tainted acidic sweetness on his tongue.

Serena opened her eyes. Sunlight was streaming cheerily in through her window. She groaned and glanced at the clock. Quarter to eight. She sat bolt upright. How had she slept so late? Why had Sophy let her? She swung her legs over the side of the bed—and froze mid-stretch, paralyzed by the soft sound of water lapping against a metal hipbath.

Solomon was taking a bath.

Just a few inches of oak away.

Naked.

Hellfire and damnation. She had worked to avoid exactly this eventuality. It hadn’t been difficult, precisely, because he usually rose at seven, and she rose at five. But she had made sure to know that when he had water brought up for his bath it was invariably at half-past seven, and had taken pains never to be in her room before the tub was carried back down the stairs and the water thrown in the rear courtyard. It was bad enough that she herself struggled to be perfectly silent as she took her own baths, so that she would not wake him, so that he would not come through the door that no longer locked and find her naked. It was bad enough that every inch of her skin burned at the knowledge that he could.

She did not want to listen to the faint lap of water against a metal tub in the next room, or hear a splash and picture Solomon pouring water over his shoulders and arms or, God forbid, lathering his chest, or brushing wet hair back from his forehead—

Memories flooded her, memories of Solomon’s hands on her breasts and Solomon’s mouth on her skin, of his darkened hazel eyes fixed on her face. Memories of him inside her. Memories of feeling so intimately connected to Solomon that being separated from him by the space of an inch would have killed her.

With the memories came the panic. Sheer, overpowering, throat-closing fear at the strength of her own emotions. She was drowning in him.

Moving in desperate haste and equally desperate silence, Serena washed her face and neck and ran a comb through her hair. She heard the rush of water when Solomon stood, and she heard the creaking of the floor when he stepped out of the tub. She dressed with trembling hands, putting on her short corset and a gown that buttoned in the front so she wouldn’t need help.

She slipped out of her room and hurried down the hallway, but she was too late. As she passed Solomon’s door, it opened.

Serena stopped and turned to look. She stood there, rooted to the spot.

His pale hair was wet, and he was running one hand through it. The indigo stain on his finger that she’d noticed the night before had faded to a faint powder blue.

He was back in the Arms livery. He looked as delicious as the Italian sweets they’d ordered for the Brendans’ Venetian breakfast. And he was staring at her every bit as hungrily as she was staring at him.

He said he loved me. All I have to do is say I’m sorry, and he’d let me— She couldn’t form a coherent thought. Her tongue was cloven to the roof of her mouth.

Solomon watched her, his eyes gold in the morning light. “Good morning,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

His eyes narrowed. “I still love you,” he said evenly. Then he brushed past her and went down the hall. Her heart pounded in rhythm with his boot heels on the stairs.