Captured Shadows (10 page)

It was almost a week before Mr Everett told us he was ready to take the photographs, and in all that time Archie only spoke to me when he had absolutely no choice. While we were working during the daytime he was flawlessly polite and formal, as though we were strangers; but at night-time, on the evenings we were obliged to spend at Chester Square, the familiarity he displayed around Percival made me angry enough not even to feel pain any longer. The two of them seemed to take great pleasure in trying to torment me, kissing and fondling one another every time we were all in a room together until eventually, fearing I might end up on the end of a rope for murder, I learned to leave them to their games and began to spend as much time as I could manage in Mr Whitlock's library, sometimes alone, staring out of the window or pacing the carpets fretfully, but more often with Mr Whitlock, grudgingly reading to him from those obscene volumes or listening to nostalgic tales of his five years playing Percival's uncle in public and something very different behind their locked front door. Against my will I began to feel rather sorry for him, forced to live a life of strange lies; but his repulsive manner in his relationship with Percival still baffled me and almost frightened me until I found the occasional touch of his hand on my arm unbearable. Even worse was the way he watched Percival and Archie frolic together; the two of them always seemed to notice and became even more intolerable, giggling and whispering together like a pair of little schoolgirls until the gleam in Whitlock's eye and upon his lips when he wet them with his tongue made my skin feel as though it
were
crawling from my bones.

We returned to the studio that night with half of Mr Whitlock's payment for the photographs as a deposit, and in the carriage Mr Everett divided our portions and counted the coins into our hands. Out of habit I added the sums to our calculations and marvelled at the small fortune we had amassed between us; and I wondered whether Archie intended to take Annie away after all, or was he so caught up in his new world that he had forgotten his reasons for entering it?

This time Mr Whitlock's instructions said I was to be a boy, so I stayed in my usual clothes and helped Mr Everett set up the camera and move the couch in front of the backdrop while Archie vanished behind the screen in the corner to change. When he called for me to help him – my surname, of course; I was no longer James to him – his voice was stiff and uncomfortable as though he wished there were another person he could ask. I went to him and laced his corset loosely, then Mr Everett called cheerfully, "Don't bother with the drawers, you'll only be taking them back off!" and Archie frowned.

"Your Mr Whitlock's insane," he muttered, and stamped past me in his stockinged feet.

"
My
Mr Whitlock?" I challenged him, following him to the couch and standing over him as he lay down on his front the way Percival had done on that first evening we met him. Even in my anger the sight of his nakedness, the pale swell of arse between ivory corset and black stockings, held me like a trap and I tried not to stare until Mr Everett had disappeared out of the room to fetch something. "He's not
my
anything, I despise the man."

"Despising him never kept you out his bed, did it?"

The time between hearing his words and understanding them was a mere fraction of a second, yet it felt as though it lingered on for an hour or more while my anger rose and rose within me like the fire inside a bursting volcano. "Is that what Percival told you?"

Archie was silent then, resting his chin on his arms and refusing to twist back and look at me until I could no longer resist the urge to grasp him hard by the corset strings and drag him to his feet to face me.

"Did he tell you that?" I said again, and Archie shook my hands off his waist, giving no response except to look at me curiously. I let him look, staring back and willing my rage down to a simmer so I wouldn't feel compelled to strike him.

"He said..." Archie started, then his voice faltered and he brought his arms up across his middle with his hands cupping his elbows, a gesture I recognised as one he made unknowingly when he was nervous or agitated. "Don't lie to me. It was so obvious. All that time you spent together.
A
nd
that night at dinner when you said you don't like being in the pictures,
before we left
John
even
said he
'd seen
you
fucking in the library
."

"Well, if
John
said it then of course it must be true," I said, trying to sound scornful but only sounding incredulous. "Whitlock's three hundred years old, he couldn't fuck me if he tried, and if he did try I certainly wouldn't let him. I bet he's got cobwebs where normal men have hair."

For a moment Archie's mouth broke into that familiar merry grin I had come to love so well, then it faded and he merely looked wounded, as though I had shot him in the stomach. "John said he done it to him only last night."

"Stop saying
John said
," I cried, then glanced quickly at the door and lowered my voice, hoping that Mr Everett wouldn't come to see what all the noise was for. "Perhaps he did. I expect it takes two weeks of watching you and Percival slobber all over each other for him to be ready to do more with his parts than piss in his trousers."

Archie started to make some reply then, but he was interrupted by Mr Everett returning from his office and fell silent, looking at his fingernails instead of at me. Mr Everett frowned and made an exasperated comment about our not being ready yet and I moved to obey like an automaton, unbuttoning my trousers and wishing I were anywhere in the world but where I was as Mr Everett began calling instructions and Archie reached to help me with hands that were suddenly trembling.

Several times during the act he seemed to be about to say something, but he kept glancing at Mr Everett and thinking better of it. Instead we did it silently, or at least wordlessly, and I was glad of it
,
for keeping my eyes closed and my lips pressed tightly together seemed to make it easier
to forget that night with Sally
when she had shown me what to do; but when Mr Everett called for a short break while he went to smoke a cigar in the yard, Archie moved his wet mouth away from where he had been sucking me and I saw the apprehension on his pale face, fear stark in his wide eyes, and realised that forgetting Sally was the opposite of what I ought to do.

I was still furious with him, and deeply aggrieved that he would believe Percival's poisonous word without first asking me for mine after all that had been said and done between us. A raw, rotten part of me wanted to make this as unpleasant for him as possible, but how could I? A love that turns unexpectedly ugly and twisted is still love, after all, and I could no more stop loving him than stop breathing, I felt, not if I wished to keep living.

"I won't hurt you," I said softly, and he leaned his face into the press of my palm when I touched his jaw and reddening cheek. He inhaled a great shuddering breath as though he meant to make a speech that instead faded away to nothing; he only looked up at me where I stood in front of him, hard between the legs and still breathing rapidly from the effects of his touch, and the desire to bypass all of Mr Whitlock's base wishes and simply hold Archie in my arms rose through me until I felt it as the inexplicable threat of tears in my nose. Instead, fearing Mr Everett's return, I went to where my coat was draped across the screen in the corner and found the small bottle in my pocket; I thought it best not to mention that it had been given to me by Mr Whitlock for just this purpose.

"What's that?"

"Oil. I won't hurt you, at least not intentionally."

"Oh," he said feebly, and reached to take it from me to inspect when I returned to my place in front of the couch. Now, with both hands free and some extraordinary new weightless calm taking over my senses, I found I could no longer keep my distance and I knelt to him for no sordid purpose except to put my arms around his waist and my head on his thigh. I felt him laugh more than I heard it, and he made some murmured comment about his prick on my neck, then he fell silent and I tightened my arms around him, knowing no possible way of being closer to him other than what we were about to do for Mr Everett's camera.

"You have to pretend you're doing a shit," I said suddenly, hearing Mr Everett's footsteps coming down the tiled steps from the yard and dreading the thought of having to pass on Sally's lesson in his presence. Above me I heard Archie laugh again, stronger this time, and felt his fingers curl hesitantly around my shoulder.

"I beg your pardon?"

"When I put it in. Just—"

"Come along!" Mr Everett roared as he entered the room and went to take his place behind the camera. "I'd prefer to be home before dawn if you'd be so kind."

Archie gave me the bottle and a worried, questioning look, which I returned with a smile that I hoped was reassuring but instead, I imagined, looked ghastly. All I could think of to say was the thing I had already said twice. "I won't hurt you," I said again, and Archie took my free hand to steady me as I stood and said, "James, I know," so that my name spoken so quietly sounded like an apology.

I awoke early from habit, even though the activities of the night before meant that I was granted the morning off and didn't have to be at the studio until one o'clock. I almost preferred waking early; idleness was never a custom of mine, yet there was a strange and luxurious pleasure to be found in that strange place between asleep and awake, searching for a cooler place to lie in the sheets and listen half-conscious to the sounds of the mid-morning.

I drifted in and out of sleep for a while, caught up in images that were partly memories of the previous evening and partly the fantastical nonsense of dreams; then I was roused awake fully by the insistent rap of knuckles on my door and my landlady's voice calling my name.

"Jim, dear? Mr Wilkes is here to see you, but if you're not feeling well—"

"Please," I said quickly, hopping awkwardly toward my front door with only one leg correctly in my trousers in my haste, "I'm not unwell, do let him in." Then I swore, realising that she would see me in this state as soon as she opened the door, and managed to dodge back into my little bedroom before she did so.

"Are you naked?" Archie called after a moment, and I hushed him fiercely in case Mrs Bamber was close enough to hear, still fighting with my inside-out trouser leg until he came in to find me and I gave up, kicking the garment off my leg and across the room in a mild rage.

"I am, under my nightshirt," I said boldly, as though that might regain me a shred of my shattered dignity, and when he laughed at me in his own way instead of Percival's way it became easier to believe that perhaps the fight and the enforced making-up had begun to mend something I had become sure was irreparably cracked.

"Everybody's naked under their clothes, James. That ain't what I asked."

"Well, I don't see the point of answering when you're looking at me."

"Take it off," he said, folding his arms and watching me with an expectant look in his eye that sent a sudden flare of heat rolling through me.

"You first," I countered, and got back into my bed to watch him reveal himself, layer by layer. Even with him standing before me and baring more and more of himself by the second, the images rose unbidden in my mind of his skin the night before, golden in the gentle lamplight, and the panting cries he muffled with a pillow until even Mr Everett mopped his brow with his handkerchief and said
Really, Wilkes, must you? I almost feel as though I'm depriving myself of something marvellous
. The memory made me smile and I almost recalled it for Archie, but he finished undressing and got into bed at my side, pressed so close on the narrow mattress that I had to lean back uncomfortably to see his face properly; when I did so, he put his hand to the back of my neck and drew me
near
again.

There were things I knew we ought to talk about – Percival, Whitlock, trust, regret – but the moment was so still, so fragile, that I feared I might ruin it. Instead I settled against his body, feeling every warmth and movement and texture of him, and thanking fortune that, if we
were
destined to ruin each other's lives for good, it at least looked as though it wouldn't be within the first half a year of meeting.

I had just begun to feel as though I might fall asleep again when Archie spoke. "I did come round to tell you about Hattie," he said, "but it feels strange talking about my sister when you're prodding me in the leg with something under the covers."

"Something," I repeated, laughing without embarrassment and not bothering to move away from the contact, although I felt lazy and content as we were and not particularly like moving into it either. "What about Hattie?"

"Her sweetheart's proposed to her. There's a riot at home, Bessie and Tommy think it's the most romantic idea in the world but Bobby's threatening to bury the poor chap and my father's ready to help him, I think. My mother said sixteen is awfully young, but she was only seventeen herself when she married my father so Hattie's in a rage. I had no chance sleeping through this morning." After a moment he added, "If you stop prodding me in the leg I can have an hour or two here," then yelped out a burst of laughter when I pinched him hard on the arse.

"You'd take all your clothes off and get in my bed to
sleep
?"

"I'm tired!" he protested, but the words were half-lost in the kisses he began to press to my cheeks and chin and mouth, although things went no farther than that; I was tired too, feeling heavy-limbed and almost listless from too little sleep, and before long our kisses had slowed and stopped with Archie's lips pressed gently to my jawbone and tickling me there when he eventually spoke again.

"Do you think you'll ever get married?" he asked softly. He was holding my hand in a ray of sunshine streaking through the crack between the curtains, tracing the creases in my palm with his fingertip.

"I wish I could marry you," I said, just as softly and not quite looking at him. He was quiet then, wriggling beside me until he had his
blond
head pressed comfortably to my shoulder, our clasped hands resting on my bare chest above the blankets.

"Don't be absurd."

I'm not, I wanted to say, but of course I was. It was a stupid, unthinkable idea, and I had a sudden strange thought that whatever this tentatively mended link between us was, I would snap it like a thread if I kept on saying such impossible things. "Why should I think about getting married?"

"That's what people do. Even..." He hesitated a moment, stroking the back of my hand with his thumb. "You know, even people like us."

"Whitlock's never married."

"Whitlock's rich as fuck."

"Archie!" I said, starting to laugh, and I felt his grin against my shoulder as he kissed me there.

"Well, he is! Rich people can do as they please and say damn it to the world. Me and you, though... you want your own studio, I know you do. Don't you want it called Sinnett and Sons? Someone to pass it all onto when you snuff it?"

"I've honestly never thought about it." It was true; marriage had never featured in my plans, not once. I wondered then whether that might have been an indication of my preferences long before I knew those preferences existed at all – and then Archie's lips planting a downward line of kisses on my skin made it difficult to think of anything at all except unfurling pleasure, even through my lethargy, the heat of his mouth, the feel of his soft hair between my fingers, and when I spent deep in his throat he swallowed around me and I saw stars bright enough that I thought I might faint.

"I mean it." The words burst out of me as he climbed up my body, a knee on either side of my torso and the blanket around his shoulders like a cloak so all I could see from my place on the pillow was Archie, his skin as pale as alabaster against the brown wool shrouding him and his fingers curled close around his own prick. He began to rub himself briskly, shamelessly, eyebrows raised in a silent question that I fumbled to answer in words. Instead I reached for some things on the table beside my bed: a pair of scissors I had been using to trim some photographs I wanted to paste into an album, and a book of Wordsworth's poetry Mr Everett had given to me when I turned twenty-one. This had a narrow fabric marker bound into the spine with the pages, and I snipped half its length free and took Archie's hand, the one resting on my chest, to knot the ribbon around his finger. "I don't want sons, I don't care, I only want you. You and a decent camera," I added, teasing to break the sudden awkwardness I felt at my outburst, and Archie started laughing astride me, arranging the ribbon on his finger so the knot rested in the same place I remember my mother used to wear her tiny diamond. "Until death, or until you grow bored of me, whichever happens first."

Then Archie's hand was behind my neck, drawing me up until I was sitting with him in my lap, his hands on my face, his mouth against mine. "Until death, then," he said, stuttering the words between his frantic kisses and the breathless laughter he couldn't seem to stop. "Forever, James, until I die, I swear it. Or until I lose the ribbon next week, at least." He laughed into my mouth when I bit his lip gently, as bright and exhilarated as I ever heard him, and his arms around me tightened until I could barely breathe to respond in kind when he whispered fiercely into my ear, "I do love you, dear heart, please know I do."

Dear heart
. It was an affectation caught like a cold from John Percival; but Percival said it with sarcasm, turning the words into an ugly, haughty sneer every time he used them. Archie gave the words a sweet sincerity that stole away my breath and sent a thrilling rush of wonder through me, turning my skin to bumps and making the little hairs on my arms stand up. I found myself struggling for words again, as always; all I could think of to do in response was kiss him, which didn't seem enough somehow, even though the brilliant smile on his face when he finally moved away said that it was.

"I thought I'd ruined everything," he said. "I never been so relieved about anything in my whole life and I never felt more of an idiot either. That old bastard can find someone else to order about. It's just you and me now, ain't it?"

After a few moments, during which he grew impatient and pulled my hand to where he was still hard and pressed between us to the fabric of my nightshirt, I said, "I don't mind, though."

"Mind what?" he asked, steadying himself with a hand on my shoulder and rising to meet me as I slowly stroked him.

"What you said before, about being poor—"

"Oh, that," he interrupted, twisting his face in displeasure then closing his eyes tightly and making an odd wordless noise when I rubbed my thumb across the tip of him. "
I only said that cos I was angry.
James, I can't talk and do this at the same time, choose one or the other."

Later, when he had stripped me of my splashed nightshirt and we were pressed side by side on the mattress as we had been before, I tried again to explain the thing that suddenly felt so clear in my head and so difficult to portray in words.

"You're right, you know. I don't know what it's like to be poor, not the way you do. I don't have much, but I don't have anybody else to take care of. I have enough for
myself
, and I've always been content with it. But this—" I broke off, moving my hand in the air as though the word I searched for might be hanging there to pluck like a berry. "This scheme, this job, I don't know what to call it. I expect there are hundreds of people in factories and coal-mines who would think us insane for complaining, it's extraordinary money for doing something enjoyable. And you know I find Percival despicable but if Whitlock's willing to throw a fortune at you to spend an hour with your hand up his arse or whatever it is the old ghoul's planning, then don't say no on my account. Say no if that's what you want to say, not because you think it's what
I
want you to say."

Beside me, Archie shifted his position and ended up with his head tucked under my chin again so I couldn't see his face, only hear the curious tone of his voice. "All I want to do with John now is pummel his face to soup. Wouldn't you mind if I did the photographs?"

"I wouldn't
like
it."

"But you wouldn't mind?"

I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his hair, feeling how it made him smile against my collarbone. "If it's for the coins and not for makeshift wedding rings made of ribbon..." That made him laugh, and he raised himself up on one elbow to look at me, reaching to trace the fingers of his other hand up my jaw and across my mouth until I kissed him there as well. "And we could carry on doing our own photographs, of course, for Mr Everett. Not forever. Just enough to save some money."

"For your studio?" Archie asked. "Sinnett and Sons."

"Sinnett and Wilkes," I said, and he smiled in a way I had thought I might never see again.