1. The Voluptuist
Elliot Howell considered the glittering company about to assemble in the dining room below, and sighed.
This was his first night of a three day stay at Breaker House, and his only good evening wear. But even in his best blue-velvet smoking jacket, the pride of his wardrobe, he knew he would present a shabby figure. His hair, flyaway and fair, needed cutting, and his trousers were shiny at the knees and showed his clumsy darning besides.
Charles “Chaz” Mallister had already jostled him on his way downstairs, lightly teasing, “Nice threads, Professor. So very last century! It lacks merely a ruffle of antique lace at the throat. By the by, my beauty, you’ve still got a bit of pigment on your nose.”
Then, with one of his winks that never failed to make Elliot feel complicit in a flirtation he had not instigated but did not altogether mind, Chaz pushed ahead and clattered down the stairs. His glossy white evening pumps rapped against the rosy marble like pistol shots. One end of his ascot, yellow polka dots on bright apricot silk, fluttered over his shoulder, like it wanted to fly off and float gently to the floor of the main hall—to be swept up by
some knight errant, perhaps, for use as a favor. Alas, an emerald pin the size of a crocodile’s eye kept the ascot firmly attached to Chaz’s person.
“Peacock,” someone muttered savagely.
Elliot turned to address the speaker. “Chaz,” he said, “is a brightness.”
In student evaluations, his most frequent critique was: Speak up, Professor Howell! But Breaker House seemed to lock onto any whisper within its purview and then gleefully hyperbolize it. Elliot winced as his voice bounced back to him from the walls: mild and familiar—but much too loud.
“You’re too good for this world, Howell,” said Gideon. His friend was standing on the second-floor Gallery, looking down at him over the balustrade. “Be careful. Show some claw—or the gentry will drag you through the Veil and eat you up like candy.”
Elliot’s mouth twitched. “And you think your cousin won’t?”
“Ah. That’s another matter.” Sauntering down the steps at his schoolboy-on-exam-day’s pace, Gideon joined him on the landing. They stood together on that liminal platform between second floor and first, and peered over the bannister into the main hall below.
Breaker House had three floors, not including attic and basement. First thing after they’d arrived that morning, Gideon claimed his studio space in one obscure corner of the third floor, where he would not be disturbed during the day by any nosy passerby. For purposes of the commissioned portrait he was trying to finish, Elliot needed to set up his easel outside on the lower loggia, facing the sea—which he preferred anyway.
After a sideways glance at his friend, Elliot realized with some relief that he would not be the only shabby one at dinner. Gideon Alderwood’s narrow, ascetic face was irritable as he finished shrugging himself into a frayed formal frock coat. There was a ripping sound as the rotted silk lining inside the sleeves tore further. Elliot imagined those clinging silk tatters as the ghost of the tuxedo’s former owner, who suffered and degraded every time someone else donned his old attire.
“I hate this demon monkey jacket,” Gideon said sourly. “Chaz once proposed we start a tradition of dining in our bathing drawers—the only sensible suggestion he ever made. That,” he added, “was eighteen years ago. We were nine.”
Elliot smiled, but shook his head. Chaz was so playful, and Gideon… Gideon was not. He could not ever imagine the two of them being friends, even as children.
“Before my time, I’m afraid. I never met any of you until university—and just after.”
Gideon pushed a black tangle of curls off his brow. “Chaz was almost bearable back then. So was I, if you can believe it. Desi never was, of course. Not at nine or nineteen. Certainly not now. Eighteen years ago,” he muttered. “I wonder, was that before or after I…”
Elliot waited, but Gideon had trailed off into one of his pinched-brow silences, his lips pressed to fishing-line thinness.
After a dark moment, his head snapped up. He glared at Elliot, demanding, “How can you be sure of anything I say, Howell? I could be lying to you. Or mistaking dream for remembrance. My memory has holes. Or I wish it did, which is almost the same thing. The Desdemonster has a sharper recall of our remote childhood. Best ask her.”
Elliot hadn’t asked in the first place. And he wouldn’t trust Miss Desdemona Mannering’s version of the truth any more than he would the latest gossip in the society pages of the Seafall Courier. He liked Gideon’s cousin, the way one likes a tigress at feeding time—from an appreciative distance and, preferably, on the other side of a very strong fence. He changed the subject.
“Which do I prefer,” he wondered, gazing over Gideon’s bedraggled ensemble and uncombed hair, “your scarecrow finery, with that raven’s nest up top? Or Chaz’s emerald-green pinstripes and pomaded red crown? I wish I could sketch a study of both you two, side by side.”
An image of Gideon as a knight in black armor, riding a black horse and carrying Chaz’s apricot ascot on the tip of his lance, galloped across his vision. He sucked back a smile, and fought a strong urge to whip out his sketchbook, sit on the stairs, and skip dinner entirely in favor of capturing the vision.
Gideon grunted. “Catch me voluntarily staying at Chaz Mallister’s side for any length of time—and you have my permission to jab a charcoal stick through my eye.”
“Why are you so cruel to him?”
“Oh!” Gideon gave one of his jerking shrugs, surly as a paladin in ill-fitting chainmail. “As children, we were all cruel to each other. That’s how we knew we were friends. Chaz is…he’s not bad. Spoiled, like Desi. That same sandpaper tongue, that flays as it licks.”
Elliot raised his eyebrows. Gideon might have been describing himself.
“But not bad,” Gideon went on. “Not like…”
When it was clear he would not continue, Elliot ambled closer and pointed to a spot, white as pigeon soil, on Gideon’s worn satin lapel. Gideon looked down and gave a long-suffering sigh, but did not flinch when Elliot went to scratch at the mark. Gideon did not like people touching him unexpectedly—or at all, really. But for some reason, sometimes, he suffered Elliot’s touch. Elliot did not know why. And he would never, not for all the gentry gold in the Veil, ask.
“What? Are we primates, Howell?” Gideon scoffed as Elliot worked, slowly, meditatively, to eradicate the white mark. “Will you also eat whatever you groom from my person?”
“We are primates, Alderwood,” Elliot responded affably. He’d managed to scratch off the surface crust of the plaster, leaving a pale, dusty smear. “And I wouldn’t have to groom you if you’d just look in the mirror once in a while and apply soap and water to the sticky bits.”
“Says the man with a streak of vermillion up his nostril.”
Panther-quick, Gideon stepped back from Elliot’s grooming and examined his hands. Both were speckled in plaster from his afternoon in the studio. Frowning, he held out both
arms and stared down the length of his sleeves. These, too, were smudged with white prints—more than Elliot would be able to remove before dinner. The sight seemed to tickle Gideon’s unpredictable sense of humor. One half of his thin mouth dragged up.
“Well, Howell. If people insist on interrupting my work with their little dinner parties, the least I can do is bring some down with me.”
A half-smile from Gideon was about as resistible as a riptide. Elliot returned a shy one of his own.
“Gideon, why did you accept Miss Mannering’s invitation? It’s obvious to anyone that you’d prefer to work at home, alone, in your garret—that the last place in Athe you want to be is here at Breaker House.”
Gideon grimaced, leaning his elbows on the bannister. “As to that.”
“Yes?”
“Miss Mannering’s mama, Mrs. Mannering—or should I say, ‘my dear Aunt Tracy’?—told Desi that if she did not lure me to Breaker House for Desi’s three-day natal fête, she would forthwith furnish my personal address to the daughters of her five closest friends.
Furthermore, she would inform them all that I’m always on the lookout for live models. Oh, and that I simply adore when young women ‘drop by’ to ‘watch me work.’”
Elliot laughed outright at the lightning-strike look in Gideon’s black eyes. If “dear Aunt Tracy” had been present to fall under that scrutiny, she’d have been flash-fried on the spot.
“Was she serious?”
Gideon shrugged again. “Hard to say. Probably not. Aunt Tracy’s got far more important threats to carry out. But the Desdemonster would. It’s her birthday, after all. Though why she wants me here, I can’t say. Except that she enjoys torturing me, and would consider my present torment another birthday gift to herself.”
“So…” Elliot guessed, “…you’re determined to misbehave?”
Gideon flapped a shapely, brown, plaster-spattered hand at him. “As long as Desi doesn’t make me play tennis, and leaves me my work days, I will make an effort at mealtimes. At least,” he amended, “at dinners. At least,” he amended again, more sourly, “I’ll show up. But I’ll be damned, Howell, damned and tithed to the King of Kobolds on his ever-darkening throne, if I have to choke down port and cigars afterward. Or force myself to endure H. H.’s political tirades. Or suffer Chaz Mallister’s polka dots without comment.”
“No,” Elliot agreed, in his calm, helpful, address-a-student-in-crisis voice. “How could anyone ask that of you? Instead,” he suggested, “let’s sneak out to the Milkmaid after dinner. See what summer ales are on tap. Drag Ana out with us. Poor, patient Ana! By dessert, she’ll be more than ready to escape Miss Mannering’s caresses.”
A frown like a squall line thundered across Gideon’s forehead. “Analise Field,” he growled, “should not be here.”
“I thought you invited her.”
“Desdemona invited her.”
“Miss Mannering would not have invited her if you had not introduced them.”
“So?”
“So,” Elliot explained, “you introduced Ana to your cousin because you thought she would be useful to Ana’s career. You told me so.”
Gideon shook his head, not in denial or disagreement, but like a child refusing to take the medicine he was told would be good for him. “A business acquaintance is one thing. A houseguest is quite another. Especially in Breaker House.”
“Ana makes friends easily, across all kinds of cultural and class lines,” Elliot pointed out. “You of all people know that. She is the best neighbor a misanthrope like you could ever hope to have.”
That was a direct quote from Gideon himself. Gideon hunched as Elliot began listing all the things that Gideon had ever told him (and now regretted telling him) about Ana.
“She brings you soup when you’re sick. She knits you scarves when you’re too stubborn to light a fire. She even cleans your shared bathroom, which… Well, you know my opinion. You really should pitch in, Gideon, because that’s just not fair. Everyone knows that you helped get her first novel published—and that’s no small favor—but that toilet seat, Gideon!”
“I know.”
“That toilet seat is a thing.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, you like Ana!” As much as Gideon liked anybody. Which was not much.
“I know!” Gideon’s frown slashed down with the force of a rapier. “But she doesn’t belong at Breaker House!”
With that, he bounded past Elliot and down the remaining flight of stairs, taking too many steps at a time. Elliot watched, heartbeat suspended, until Gideon reached the safety of the first floor.
When he rounded a corner and disappeared, Elliot’s heart seemed to stutter back to life. He followed his friend, sweating lightly, a sheen of dread turning him clammy inside his velvet jacket.
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