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