Captured Shadows (13 page)

He was saying my name, a stumbling sort of whisper as his breath caught in his throat and he tried to count seconds at the same time as laughing, a single begging cry escaping him as he flooded my mouth with his taste. I coughed, collected myself, looked up at him expectantly and said, "Well?"

"Nearly three minutes. That's about two and a half minutes longer than I thought so I reckon I'm the winner." He was leaning over me, hand braced against the back wall of the bathing machine as he found his breath, and I put my arms around his waist: partly to tuck his shirt back in, partly just to hold him. "Move over, let me sit down before I fall."

The bench was wide and deep, enough to accommodate a lady's skirts so more than enough for the two of us to sit side by side. Archie had my hand clasped in his, long fingers closed around mine like he thought I might fly away. I watched him, head tilted back to rest against the corner of the box, chest heaving as his panting breaths slowed back to normal. He caught me looking when he finally opened his eyes, and he smiled wide, bringing our hands to his mouth to kiss my enclosed fingers.

"Feel like I just run about ten miles."

"Sorry."

"You better not be. I ain't sorry, never."

I rested my head on his shoulder and he kissed me again, his warm mouth on my chilly fingers, as we watched the morning break through the open doorway.

We lingered too long on our last day in Margate, not wanting to leave the others in the idyllic little house and return to the smoke and problems of London, so that by the time our train reached the city we had no time even to take our luggage home and had to take it with us in the cab to the studio.

I had enough time to wonder how strange it would feel to see Archie and Percival together as lovers, not merely acting it in order to please Mr Whitlock and hurt me during that strange time of lies and confusion before, and Archie must have read it in my face somehow because he tilted his head toward the door to make me follow him up to the platform set in the roof. There he felt in my pockets for my cigarette case and lit one for each of us, leaning against the wall and looking at me through the plumes of smoke rising from his nose and mouth.

"What are you thinking?" he asked, and I went to lean beside him.

"About Margate and how much I wish we were still there."

"If we keep doing them mucky pictures we'll be able to save enough money to move there for good," Archie said; there was a considered sort of nonchalance in his tone, one that almost but not quite managed to hide the wistfulness underneath.

"Are you having second thoughts?"

"James, I'm up to about
fifty
-second thoughts," he said dryly, and made me laugh, not because it was particularly amusing but because I knew all too well how he felt.

"If it helps at all, I'm going to try my hardest to light him badly and make him look like a goblin," I offered, and then it was Archie's turn to laugh and nudge me hard with his sharp elbow.

"And make me look like a goblin-fucker. That's charming."

Considering our circumstances and the thing we were about to do, the silence that fell between us then was a strangely peaceful one. After our few days at the seaside, every last lingering bit of doubt in me had vanished like smoke; I felt no jealousy, nor even any real anger toward Percival the way I had before. I merely felt sorry for him, too frightened of the unknown to leave a life he clearly despised, and my own happiness with Archie made my dislike of Percival feel rather cruel.

"Are you ready?" I asked, when Archie threw his cigarette end over the wall and into the street to follow my own, and instead of answering me in words he took my hand and kissed me there between the knuckles and the wrist like a secret.

I remembered the kiss later in the night, standing to the side with my hands clasped and my thumb pressed to the place where Archie's lips had been while he and Percival followed Mr Everett's directions. Watching the two of them together was less uncomfortable than having to look at the greedy gleam in Mr Whitlock's eye where he sat in a leather armchair behind me, so I never looked away. I watched their hands and mouths and pricks, the heat flaring and fading in their cheeks, the white splash of Percival's spendings on Archie's wrist and stays; and when Archie reached that same point I saw the way he searched for my eyes and then smiled, spilling into Percival's mouth and across his chin but never looking away from me, as though I were the cause of it instead.

The strangeness of
not
finding our new situation too strange to bear was not lost upon me, but it felt the sort of thing one ought not to examine too closely, as though doing so might break it completely. Archie and Percival had two evenings together in front of the camera that week, and I spent the following days developing the negatives and making the prints as though they were any other portrait. With Archie's family still safely miles away at the seaside he was free to spend all of his time with me, sneaking in and out of my rooms while I kept my innocent landlady busy in conversation. Those nights together felt endless, partly a trick of our minds due to having too little sleep but also because we filled them with what felt like entire lifetimes' worth of plans and dreams. We span out ever more fantastical ideas about our photography studio – "We'll ask the Baltimore Gun Club to shoot it to the moon," Archie suggested with a smirk on his mouth and I told him I wouldn't let him read my Verne books any longer if he only meant to tease – and made the greatest effort to wear out Archie's last scrap of stamina as though to cleanse him of Percival's poison. Every night he lay there after, panting and still shuddering with his skin sheened in sweat and glowing pink in strange flushed patches, and the knowledge that he was mine for hours yet and we didn't have to rush our clothes back on and leave one another for our separate homes was dazzling.

Several weeks passed in much the same way: taking photographs, posing in photographs, spending evenings with Archie and with his family when they returned rejuvenated from the seaside, and forcing myself to tolerate Whitlock and Percival's presence in our lives in the knowledge that every flash and every plate took us closer and closer to the day that we might afford a studio of our own and leave Mr Everett's strange and sordid underworld behind for good; but on the Friday of Archie and Percival's seventh session of photographs, something happened that shattered our new peace into splinters. The fear of it had always been there lurking underfoot to trip me at my happiest moments, and a part of me always knew it would happen sooner or later, but I had managed to shove the trepidation so far away that the danger of it in those few golden days seemed distant and unthreatening until the very moment it was upon us.

The bell above the front door rang while I was searching for something in our office, and I would have ignored it and let Archie greet the customer had he not made a startled sound and then yelled my name in a tone so frantic that I dropped the inkwell I was holding and ran to see what was wrong.

It was Sally, and she was bleeding.

"Get her out of here!" Mr Everett roared from somewhere behind us, having come to see what the shouting was for, but there was nothing I could do. She swooned in my arms when I rushed to her, blood spreading across the old blue silk of her dress, and I remembered that night in the Seven Dials and the number of petticoats I'd had to remove until I found her skin; I felt a sickening jolt of horror then, thinking about how badly she must be bleeding for it to have stained through all those layers.

"Please, sir
, we can't turn her out on the street, she might bleed to death."

"If she bleeds to death in here there'll be trouble!"

"Won't you help?"

"Jim, I can't have her here in this state."

"What state?" I said fiercely, rage for his heartlessness suddenly seeming to burn within me until I lost all sense of propriety. "Needing kindness? No, you only want her when she's naked and being fucked raw to benefit your pockets."

Archie made a startled sound behind me and Mr Everett actually took a step backward at my outburst, a moment of weakness which seemed to enrage him even more; his face turned red and he looked at me with a hardness in his eyes that I had never seen before, not even the one time he whipped me for stealing some of his photographs and hiding them in my room when I was a boy.

"I'll send a message for a doctor, but he will come in the back door, and she will leave through it, and you will pay every last farthing of the expense. If there must be a scandal here, I refuse to let it be about a bloody whore with a bleeding womb!"

Before he had even left the room I made myself ignore him, focusing instead on lifting Sally in my arms to carry her through to the office and then lowering her to the floor as gently as I could. The colour of her skin was terrifying, pale like cheese and beaded with sweat, great dark circles beneath her eyes and vivid smears of blood around her mouth – whether she had bitten herself badly in the effort not to scream or had somehow transferred the blood from her skirt to her face with her hands, I couldn't tell. Archie brought a pillow for her head from a couch in the studio then stood far back against the wall, mute and scared, while Sally gripped my hand so painfully tight it felt as though she would break my bones.

"Did you hear what he said?" I asked her gently. "Is that what's wrong?"

"I done it before and it's never bled like this." She started crying then, stricken with fright and pain and the sight of so much blood; it was even on my shirt by then, and she stared at it in horror until I put my hand to her face, cupping her cheek and trembling jaw, and made her look at me instead, although she seemed to be having trouble focusing.

"Done what?"

"Got rid of a baby." Perhaps she saw something in my eyes, the tangled mixture of revulsion and pity and sorrow and a sudden terrible fear that this was my fault, because she almost smiled then and put her bloodied fingers over mine. "Don't worry, Jimmy, it weren't yours."

"Of course it weren't," Archie said in a tiny, cracking little voice that was almost a sob. "Jim, she's delirious, if that doctor don't come soon—"

"You put it in the wrong hole," Sally mumbled, still almost smiling as she lost her vice-grip on me and fainted. Behind me Archie was silent; but it was a strained and desperate sort of silence that made me know he had heard and put the pieces together and understood exactly what she had meant.

All he said was, "We have to stop her bleeding else she'll die," and we worked in brittle silence to stop the flow with her clothes and some old sheets from the studio until Mr Everett returned with the doctor.

Things became confusing then, a blurring jumble of movements and quick commands as the doctor examined her; I stood back beside Archie, glancing once at him but his eyes were staring hard at the floorboards and he flinched when I gently touched his elbow with my own.

The doctor was saying in a hushed hiss, "Everett, what in the blazes are you doing with this girl in your place?" and I saw the anger in Mr Everett's eyes when he replied.

"If you don't know exactly what I'm doing with this girl in my place then I shall have to take
back
all those photographs from you."

"You know what I mean, man – in this
condition
? Is this your doing?"

"How dare you speak to me so!"

"If they start punching each other in she's gonna die," Archie said flatly. "Make them stop."

Then Mr Everett looked up as though he had forgotten we were there and said angrily, "For God's sake don't just stand there, lock the front door and go and do some work."

"Work?" I repeated incredulously, looking from him to Sally's unconscious form and then to the doctor, hoping to be able to read her chances from his manner; then Mr Everett seemed to change his mind, coming over to where Archie and I stood and taking each of us firmly by the elbow to steer us in the direction of the door.

"Marsh will either save her or he won't. You pair won't have any effect either way so there's no need for you to be here. Jim, go home. Archie, take Whitlock his damn pictures and tell him we'll meet next week instead. Go at once or neither of you will have jobs to return to."

Once we were in the front he shut the office door on us and I heard his voice raise again in argument with Dr Marsh. Archie and I stood there in the late afternoon sunlight, silent and staring at once another, until eventually he flung his hands in the air in exasperation and stalked off to the stairs leading to the darkroom. I followed him, of course, although I had no plans for what I might say to fix things.

"Let me explain," I begged him, but he shook my grasping hand from his arm and carried on walking.

"What needs explaining? I seen how it works for myself."

"It's not the same. You must listen to me."

Then he turned on me, and the hurt in his eyes was worse than the anger I had thought would be there. "I don't care who you've fucked before me but I care it happened recently enough she had to tell you that mess ain't your fault and I never knew."

Again he shook off my hand, and when he was through the door at the end of the hallway he slammed it hard behind himself.

There didn't seem to be much I could do then except go home.