Bonds of Earth (4 page)

Michael noticed that the lunchtime ritual was repeated once more, with Abbott taking a similar tray up the steps and down the hall. After the door had closed behind the old man, Michael remarked, “I’d have thought the master of the house would dine on caviar and roast duck, not brown bread and cheese.”

Mary took Michael’s plate from the table before he could stand to do it himself. “He eats the same as the rest of us,” she said, her voice carrying an edge that surprised him. When he offered to help with the dishes, he was gently but firmly rebuffed. At a loss, he bade them good night and climbed the stairs while Sarah stared after him silently.

Used to working until the wee hours, Michael lay in bed for some time, restless and disoriented. He finally rose and quietly made his way down to the kitchen, where he shrugged on his coat and slipped outside.

The night was warmer than he’d expected, and he soon shed the coat once more. Guided by the bright moonlight, he found himself among the shrubs in the front garden, wandering from plant to plant. Touching the branches with gentle fingertips, he felt for the hard, round buds, then broke off an end and sucked at the wound he’d made, tasting fresh, new sap.

As he turned back toward the house, he felt an odd prickling sensation crawl across his skin and raised his head instinctively. The front of the house was dark, but he caught a brief flash of movement in one of the second-floor windows. Michael looked up and fired off a smart salute before continuing on his way, the tip of the branch still clamped between his teeth.

W
HEN
Michael awoke the next morning at dawn, Mary was already downstairs cooking thick bacon and what looked like a dozen eggs in a cast iron skillet. She was being helped by Sarah, who flitted back and forth between table and stove and icebox like a restless moth skirting a campfire.

On her next run, he reached out and plucked the heavy coffeepot from her hands. She gazed up at him, her round eyes startled and faintly angry. He merely stared back at her steadily, holding her gaze until she turned back to the stove.

Half an hour later, he was on his knees in the first bed carefully pulling up weeds when he looked up and saw her standing at the opposite edge. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again when she too dropped to her knees and began copying him. He watched her for a couple of minutes, but she picked out the weeds easily, pulling up the whole plant with the roots and avoiding the perennials. They worked together without saying a word to one another until Abbott called for her.

She stood up and brushed the loose dirt from her skirts. “I can help you after school,” she said in a high yet strong voice.

“I’d like that,” Michael said carefully. “Thank you.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied with his answer, then ran off toward her grandfather, who was waiting for her beside the motorcar. Michael stared after her, feeling humbled by her simple and inexplicable display of trust, as though a wild animal had just emerged from the forest and taken a crust of bread from his open hand.

B
Y
S
ATURDAY
at sunset, Michael had weeded and mulched the flowerbeds surrounding the back and sides of the house and prepared a new vegetable and herb garden near the kitchen. On Monday, he would see if he could drive into town—by himself, he hoped—and place orders for seed and fertilizer. Mary had told him Hudson, a few miles to the south, had a feed and grain store with a wide range of flower and vegetable seeds available, and that she would telephone ahead to let them know he could charge whatever he wished to the household account.

Saturday night found him lying in his bed yearning for the distractions of the city. Millie had given him every other Saturday off, and he’d spent it as he wished, usually in the bed of someone warm, willing, and well heeled. The week before last he’d had a beautiful young man who’d claimed to be a playwright. He had a huge flat in the Forties, a bar stocked with very fine cognac, and a mouth that was made for cocksucking. They’d agreed to meet again tonight, and damn it all, Michael had completely forgotten to get in touch with him before leaving.

He felt a small twinge of regret, because it wasn’t likely he’d have another such opportunity at any point in the near future. In addition to every Sunday, his current job afforded him one weekend a month completely to himself, but by the time he took the train back into the city and found a likely prospect, it would almost be time to head back again. No doubt he’d go when he got the chance, but it almost seemed more trouble than it was worth and a taunting reminder of all that he was giving up. He didn’t want to be another yokel visitor to New York on the lookout for a fast fuck; he wanted to walk its streets and know that he belonged there.

His first time comes when he’s fifteen. He’s been slipping away to the fairy dives for nearly a year, avoiding the roving gangs of Irish, Polish, and Italian boys that troll the streets of the Bowery at night and sneaking in through the kitchens to watch the drag shows, the parades of color and life and laughter. The waiters recognize a young up-and-comer and allow him to mooch off the half-empty plates before they’re cleaned, looking the other way when he downs the warm dregs of a beer glass.

He falls helplessly in lust with one of the waiters, a tall, strapping Polack with the palest blue eyes he’s ever seen. It takes him months of careful observation and study—not to mention the time to grow into his skin—to feel confident enough to approach him. Sebastian is reluctant at first, but Michael convinces him with his hands and his mouth and his eager, responsive body that he knows exactly what he wants.

When Sebastian shoves him roughly against the brick wall out back of the music hall and pushes inside him, Michael knows there’s no way he can go back home to Paddy’s beatings and that cramped tenement stinking of cabbage. For better or for worse, this is his life now.

Frustration shoved his hand under the sheets, and within moments his fingers were wrapped around his hardening erection. Breathing shallowly through his nose, he closed his eyes and thought of the playwright’s soft skin under his hands, the taut thighs and tight ass, the sharp little incisors that bit the inside of Michael’s wrist as Michael fucked him.

While memory was a poor substitute for reality, it did have certain advantages. For example, he could conveniently forget the annoying grunts the young man had made while Michael had plowed into him; they’d been entirely too porcine for his taste and had been less than arousing. In his fantasies, though, only soft sighs and breathy moans emerged from that pale throat, and in no time at all he was close to coming from only a few firm strokes.

He was careful to keep his movements slow and steady, never jostling himself so far as to excite the creaky bedsprings, not with the Abbotts sleeping almost directly below him. But when he rolled up and over the first cresting wave, he nearly gave the game away, for without his consent his body jerked and stiffened, toes clenching in the sheets as he spilled into his handkerchief, and the bed rocked and squealed in protest.

“Fuck,” Michael whispered, the sudden tension in his muscles swiftly draining the dregs of his pleasure. Concentrating on his body, he gradually relaxed each part of himself bit by bit until he lay still and boneless, then wiped himself with the handkerchief and set it aside. That was one piece of laundry Mary wouldn’t be seeing.

It was not much different from his situation at fifteen, living in his first rooming house and muffling his moans with his fist so as not to wake the landlady, imagining how it would feel to have a rough, strong hand wrapped around his cock. It had taken him eleven years to come full circle, and now he was right back at the starting place, hiding his desires in the dark like a frightened boy.

Just as sleep finally claimed him, beckoning to him with clawed white hands from beneath a rain-soaked tarpaulin, he thought,
Not quite like the beginning after all.

S
UNDAY
was entirely his, but as Michael had no use for prayer and even less for leisure, he decided to start on his study of the gardening books. By late morning, when he heard the motorcar putter up the driveway, he had already finished one, its margins filled with his scribbled ideas and plans.

Setting the book aside, he descended the stairs for dinner. Sarah was no more talkative than she had been the first day, but he fancied that she did seem a little more at ease around him. He was growing curious as to the cause of her silence; it seemed to run deeper than simple reticence around strangers and more shallowly than a fixed component of her character. Something told him she had once smiled a great deal more than she did now.

Although they had never exchanged words in the presence of others, Michael risked asking her a question as they helped her grandmother dry the dishes and her grandfather sat smoking his pipe at the table. “I thought I’d survey the woods this afternoon,” he said. “I wanted to find some seedling trees we can replant in the gardens. Would you like to go with me?”

She looked up at him, seemingly startled, and Michael cursed himself for making her uneasy again. When the silence stretched, Mary saved the situation. “Sarah has a lesson with Mister John,” she said calmly. “She spends every Sunday afternoon in his company.”

It took Michael a moment to process this. “John—?”

Abbott withdrew the pipe from his mouth. “
Mister
John Seward,” he said. “Son of Doctor George Seward, who built this house.”

Ah, so that was the fabled nephew. Smiling sardonically, Michael nodded and said, “I’ve heard of him, yes. Didn’t know his name, though. Do you suppose he’ll ever drop by to say hello?”

To his surprise, Abbott’s expression betrayed a hint of sadness before resolving itself into anger. “He’s above concerning himself with your comings and goings,” the old man snapped. “Just do your job.” Laying down his pipe, he rose from his seat and took his granddaughter by the hand.

Before he could lead her away, she looked up at Michael again and said tentatively, “I should be finished by three o’clock.”

Michael couldn’t help the genuine smile that tugged at his lips. “I’ll wait for you,” he promised.

Although she did not smile in return, the faint rosiness that sprang to her cheeks told him his answer pleased her. When Abbott and Sarah had left, he turned back to the dishes to find Mary gazing at him with something akin to fondness. He shot her a questioning glance, and she shook her head.

“You can’t know, of course, dear,” she said softly, handing him a cup, “but it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen her ask for anything. It’s only….” She trailed off, and Michael was horrorstruck to realize her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I’m glad you’re with us,” she said after a minute, turning back to him and patting his hand before passing him a plate.

Her words stunned Michael into silence. Taking the dish from her, he dried it with care, gliding the towel slowly over the smooth surface.

W
HEN
four o’clock came and went, Michael’s curiosity—which until now he’d imagined long dead—rose up in him and sent him off into the main wing of the house in search of Sarah. Michael was concerned that the master of the house was keeping her indoors against her will, doubtless boring her with some stuffy lecture on social graces.

He was soon drawn to the sound of chamber music wafting from a phonograph and followed its summons down a long hall to an open doorway. Cautiously, he stopped outside the room and peered around the frame.

Sarah was inside, along with a dark-haired stranger who had to be the nephew, their backs to the door. The little girl was standing, the man sitting, both of them with easels and canvas in front of them. Beyond those, a wall of wide, tall windows opened on the backyard.

The fact that the lord of the manor was teaching the caretaker’s granddaughter to paint was astonishing enough, but when Michael looked more closely, the paintings themselves surprised him even more. Both of them were dark, tangled messes, the girl’s composition dominated by angry streaks of red slashing through a black and brown background. It looked like nothing so much as the mouth of hell, and the idea that this small thing might be well enough acquainted with the place to paint it so accurately chilled him to his bones. What had she seen, what had she survived that would cause her brain to conjure up this nightmare vision?

The record hissed to an end. Sarah walked over to lift the needle and shut off the machine.

“How are you progressing?” the man asked, turning to her. Michael watched Sarah walk back to the painting, a thoughtful expression on her small face.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Would you mind looking at it?”

“Not at all.”

“Would you like me to bring it to you?” Michael watched her small hands grip the sides of the heavy canvas. He was shocked, for that was already more than he’d yet heard her say at one time.

“No, I’ll come to you,” said the nephew, and Michael received his second shock of the day when the man reached down beside his chair and picked up the cane that lay on the floor. He used it as a support as he levered himself to his feet, then walked over to Sarah’s easel.

Maximus gait
, thought Michael automatically, watching the way Seward thrust his trunk backward as his heel struck the ground in an effort to compensate for the weakness of his hip extensors. There was a slight limp favoring his left foot as well, and his right shoulder was markedly depressed, though whether that was the result of an injury to the spine or shoulder itself he couldn’t be sure.

Not a rear-echelon paper-chaser, then
, he thought, watching the body’s motions with a clinical detachment he knew wouldn’t last. And sure enough, as the other man bent over the little girl’s painting, murmuring appreciatively about the finer points of her technique, he felt the familiar nausea and churning emotion well up in his gut.