Miss P's Own...

[dira]

Happy 15-days-belated birthday, misspamela!

I, uh, got a little over-achiever-ish, hence the lateness. But it's all tidied up now, with a few new scenes and something like an honest-to-God ending, so I hope you can forgive the delay.

For people who aren't Miss P, a little explanation: what follows began as a series of emails to missmollyetc, describing a sprawling historical AU I wasn't going to write (because if I did write it, it would be 500,000 words long, require massive quantities of research, and not get finished until 2013, sometime after My Chem had swapped out the entirety of their membership or left on their first interplanetary tour via stargate). There wound up being a lot of it, some parts more narrative than others, and I happened to show it to a few people, including misspamela, who fell in love with it right about the time I got terminally stuck about 15,000 words in.

So this cleaned up and tied off version isn't a proper story, and this also isn't the entirety of the saga of Gerard and Frank and the Chimerical Romantics--but I think it's enough to be more or less satisfying, so I'm posting what I've got. Caveat lector.

Many many thanks to missmollyetc for being the first audience for this story, to iuliamentis, strangecobwebs, fairestcat, and everyone else who's heard way too much about this for way too long. Extra awesome thanks to stele3 for invaluable and speedy beta help!


Chimerical Romantics
Gerard/Frank, 19th Century AU. 22,315 words.
Warnings for explicit sex, dubious historicity, vodka, sodomy, and the lash.




Chimerical Romantics


While the house is heavy and silent with the recency of their father's death and the imminence of their mother's, Michael intrudes upon Gerard's solitude to find him puzzling over a ledger with a wine bottle open upon the desk. The bottle is only half-full, but the glass beside it is still clean and untouched. Michael ignores the clear signs that Gerard does not desire conversation and comes over to perch on the edge of the desk.

"Chimerical Romantics," Michael announces, in the portentous voice he always used when naming his and Gerard's imaginary pirate ships and gypsy acting troupes.

Gerard does not look up, but Michael knows Gerard has heard him, for his shoulders hunch higher and the furrow of his brow deepens.

Michael nods to himself, pleased with the sound of the words in the stillness, and repeats it for good measure. "Chimerical Romantics."

Gerard scratches some figures down on a scrap of paper, but a quick glance at the ledger tells Michael that they are utter nonsense. Gerard has no head for figures. Michael nudges him, about to offer an explanation of the accounts, but Gerard jerks away and says, "Yes, yes, chimerical romantics. I don't even know what that means."

Michael shrugs. "Neither do I, but I mean to be one. We both shall. We shall be Chimerical Romantics someday."

"We shall be buried in the churchyard someday," Gerard snaps.

Michael is silent for a long time, stung. It is his father's grave as well as Gerard's that the earth is still fresh-turned upon, and it is his mother who lies in a bed upstairs while the whole house holds its breath, waiting for her to be carried out feet-first. It is not Gerard's grief alone, but he refuses to share it with Michael as they always shared their troubles before. They shared everything, once, but that was a long time ago, and that time has not come again just because they have both returned to this house where they were boys together.

At last, when he has mastered his voice, Michael says, "Carve it on my tombstone, then. Here lies Michael Way, beloved brother, Chimerical Romantic."

Gerard shudders, but does not object to the word beloved; Michael gives up and goes out, to sit with his grandmother at his mother's bedside. His grandmother, at least, will look at him, and listen when he speaks.

When the door is safely closed behind Michael, Gerard reaches for the bottle and drains it, drowning the image of Michael's tombstone in wine. For that hour he is victorious, but the words return to him often, carried by Michael's fearless voice. We shall be Chimerical Romantics someday. We shall.

***

It began with two boys, brothers, peculiar even in the peculiar place where they grew up. Gerard loved to read books, and to play elaborate adventurous games, and his brother Michael always played along, no matter how outlandish the pursuit. Michael never batted an eyelash when Gerard decided that they would do amateur theatricals and he, Gerard, would in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice play the lady's part. He did not demur even when Gerard decided they would be pirates and they commandeered a ship they didn't know how to sail--the boys capsized and nearly drowned in a stiff breeze half a mile from shore. They were rescued by fishermen, and Michael could not remember any other occasion when Gerard was whipped for any transgression; ever after that, though Michael loved the island, he feared the sea.

Their father was English (their mother and her mother were Jersey, and taught the boys to speak the language of the island, as well as French) and he insisted that his sons be properly educated. He sent them away to the foreign land of Essex for boarding school beginning at the age of eleven--Gerard left, in fact, not long after the incident of the boat. Michael refused to come even onto the dock to say farewell to his brother, but stood safely on the shore holding his grandmother's hand and bravely pretended that he was not crying.

Gerard had always been odd in Jersey, but he was odder in England--they called him French, and he was beaten three times in one week for lapsing into Jersey in school, twice by the teachers and once by other boys. While he soon learnt to avoid the teachers hitting him, the boys were not as easy to evade.

His misery was only compounded three years later when Michael (who had always been Michel when they were little boys, as Gerard's name had always been pronounced in the French style--but no more, after they went away to school; they were Englishmen thereafter as their father wished) joined him, for Michael's misery only compounded Gerard's own. For every mistake Gerard had explained to Michael how not to make, there was another Michael invented on his own, and he could not escape the stigma of being Way Minor, no matter how he might try.

It never seemed to Gerard that Michael tried very hard.

But in time Gerard escaped, first to university and then on his grand tour, traveling aimlessly about Europe, painting and writing wretched poetry and drinking, pretending that it meant something to him to be Seeing The World. He did meet Ramon Toro y Ortiz, a fine steady fellow who made beauty with his two hands, while Gerard simply reproduced aspects of despair. Gerard liked him very much, and though he could tell Toro's patience with him at times wore thin, their friendship remained constant.

Eventually Gerard returned to Jersey, being as eccentric as he pleased in between his father's brief lessons on how one managed an estate and household. The parts about how to determine the allowances of lackaday sons were certainly interesting. Gerard learned better how to angle for more money for paint and precisely how much of that he could spend on wine--alcohol, he told himself cheerfully, was a solvent.

Michael finished university and embarked on his own grand tour, scrupulously overland apart from a few harrowing incidents aboard ships, though never in rough weather, and never more than a few days' voyage. Every venture upon the sea was detailed to Gerard in long letters written in a shaky hand.

One such is an ode upon the kindness of a common sailor, near, Michael thinks, to his own age. He goes by the name of Frankie Ro, or perhaps Roe; Michael does not think he is very good with his letters. He seems rather heathenish to Michael's Church of England sensibilities, but he was kind to Michael and looked after him when he'd gone nearly mad with the fear of drowning; Gerard reads this and sends up rueful prayer of thanks for Michael's aptitude in attracting kind-hearted protectors.

***

Gerard's father's death is sudden--he clutches at his chest and falls from his horse one morning, and is dead before he strikes the ground. Gerard isn't out riding the land with him, isn't even yet awake; what he later remembers of his father's death is his own wine-sodden incomprehension as the steward--the new, young one, Bryan, scarcely older than Gerard himself--tries to explain to him that his father is dead, that Gerard is now master of the house. Gerard grew up watching Bryan's uncle manage the estate, and in his stupor he forgets the older man has been pensioned off, and cannot quite believe that Bryan is in earnest, that it isn't all a boy's prank upon the heir of the house.

Gerard's mother is inconsolable through the funeral, and even from his own retreat into a succession of wine bottles, Gerard can see himself in her, or her in himself. She drinks only sherry, but enough that her fall down the stairs might be accidental; Gerard stares at her, lingering senseless in the wide bed, and thinks only that she was braver than he has ever been.

She takes two weeks dying, and by the time they lay her in the churchyard beside her husband, Gerard has become a little accustomed to the idea that he is now responsible for the estate, for the household and for his brother and grandmother, who has always doted upon him. The knowledge of that responsibility only drives him deeper into melancholy, and so into drink, but Michael and Bryan encourage him to rely upon them. By winter Gerard has begun to trust Bryan, and the household is running as smoothly as it ever has, so far as Gerard can tell.

Gerard himself spends his days avoiding sunlight, drinking, and writing reams of wretched poetry. His grandmother gently encourages him to keep up with his drawing, and for her sake he does, though it is nearly as wretched as the poetry, if more technically skilled. Every day that passes leaves him more certain that he will always be this useless, hopeless eccentric in a house on a hill, leaving the land and all matters of business to Michael and Bryan--only playing at lord of the manor, and not very convincingly, either.

Nearly a year passes in this fashion before a bit of business arises which Gerard is required to handle personally, in Portsmouth, so he boards a ferry one crisp morning for the trip across the Channel. He is standing on the deck, close enough to see the docks, when disaster strikes: a powder explosion on one ship that quickly spreads fire to another.

Gerard watches in mute and helpless horror. The ferry is tacking against the wind--which carries the screams, the sounds of the flames, the smell of smoke--and cannot reach the afflicted ships.

Gerard is acutely conscious that, even if the ship could make its way there, he himself is far more a gentleman than a Jerseyman and could do nothing to help. He resolves on the spot that he must do something with his life, must get out of his darkened rooms and accomplish something other than a profligate waste of paper and ink.

He writes to Toro from Portsmouth, and speaks to Michael and to his childhood friend, Pelissier, as soon as he returned home. Within a fortnight he has assembled them all in the Way house (where his grandmother plays the grand hostess and cossets all four young men indiscriminately, so pleased is she to see Gerard and Michael keeping any company but each other).

Gerard soon swears his brother and friends into a newly-formed secret society. His first act, as leader of the society, is to beg Michael's permission to give it its proper name; Michael cedes it gladly, and so the Chimerical Romantics are born. Gerard, in fits of grandeur or strong drink, is prone to call them all "My Chimerical Romantics," but no one minds it; they all know that they would not be any such thing without him.

The aims of the Chimerical Romantics are not perfectly understood by any of them, though Gerard expounds upon them at length. The gist seems to be that they shall produce Great Art, and also be of service to their Fellow Men; Gerard read Don Quixote at an impressionable age, and played Robin Hood with Michael since Michael could toddle after him. Jersey lacks windmills to tilt at, or peasants being hanged for stealing crusts of bread, but Gerard remains convinced that there is something to be accomplished, and is determined to identify it.

In the early days this mostly takes the form of riding about at night wearing masks, undertaking feats more dares than daring, and endangering themselves more than any villain they might have encountered. Still, even if they are not strictly speaking helping anyone, Gerard feels enlivened by the sheer possibility that at some point, if only by accident, they might.

His poetry is improving, too.

***

One night, cloaked and masked, the Chimerical Romantics go into the island's only proper town, Mt. Helier. Gerard delivers a fairly lengthy speech about how they go seeking not mischief to do but to undo, and all four drink generously to that proposal before setting out, complaining bitterly that it is no longer the fashion for men to wear swords. It is already late when they set out, and by the time they reach Mt. Helier, all the respectable parts of town are quiet.

The Chimerical Romantics work their way down to the docks. When they come to places with traffic in the streets they are heckled or cheered according to the temper of the onlookers, and wave back merrily to all, so long as they are peaceable. Most are, and it seems a very dull night for the undoing of mischief. Pelissier proposes with a laugh that they should do some of their own, the better to undo it again, and Michael and Toro begin offering suggestions for how this might best be accomplished--and then, passing the mouth of an alley, they hear the sounds of a fight, and a lone voice crying out in pain.

Michael leaps off his horse and rushes in, and Toro follows suit. Gerard shouts after them to think a moment; he keeps his own mount, guiding the animal carefully into the narrow alley while Pelissier stays back, keeping hold of Toro and Michael's horses and watching out for further trouble.

By the time Gerard has penetrated several yards into the alley on horseback, the fight is breaking up, men fleeing through the other end of the alley. Toro is stalking after them, shouting furious-sounding threats in his own language. Michael crouches over the single figure who remains, bloody-headed and slumped against a wall.

He is small, seeming very slight as he curls defensively away from Michael; Gerard thinks for a moment that he is a child, and then Michael pushes his ragged sleeve up, revealing the bright tattoos beneath. The man is a sailor, if a young and short one; no surprise, in an alley near the docks. Michael is already getting to his feet, turning to face Gerard with an incongruous grin.

"Gerard," he says, pushing back his mask, even though Gerard had very particularly mentioned that this venture was to be performed incognito. "Gerard, it is Frankie, Frankie Ro. He must have got lost from his ship."

Michael is already helping the man to his feet, and Gerard stares; the light is poor, but he can see that Ro is sallow under his rising bruises, his eyes glazed and his hands trembling with more than the aftereffects of fighting or drink. His clothes are dirty, though Gerard has always known sailors to be surprisingly tidy sorts, and he can barely keep his feet even after Michael has helped him up.

He only shakes his head when Michael asks him which ship he's come from and whether they can take him back to the docks, and by the time Toro has returned, he has made Michael understand that he has no ship; he is alone in Mt. Helier and has nothing but the clothes he is standing up in. His teeth are chattering despite the mildness of the night, but he is sweating: sure signs of fever, though Michael seems to notice nothing as he stands there steadying the man with one hand.

Michael asks him where they might take him, where he is lodging, and Gerard glances toward Toro, wondering how to extricate Michael from this situation far enough to make him grasp that the man likely has none, and for significant cause. Toro gives Gerard a meaningful glance, tapping the mask he wears, and Gerard realizes with a sudden flush of shame and excitement that Frank is precisely what they came looking for tonight; a genuine unfortunate within their reach to help.

"We shall take him back to the house," Gerard announces. "Michael, you can see he needs a physician."

Ro makes an alarmed noise at that, his eyes going wide; he looks up at Gerard and over at Toro--both of them masked, Gerard belatedly realizes, both of them strangers--and attempts to step away from Michael. His eyes roll up and he stumbles; Gerard nearly pitches from the saddle to catch him by the shirtfront, and then Michael and Toro are there holding his shoulders, Michael worriedly repeating his name. He makes no response, entirely lost to the world.

"Put him up," Gerard says, not relinquishing his hold on Frankie's shirt. "I shall carry him home; Michael, you can ride to get Doctor Elliday."

The doctor has not set foot in their home since the day their mother died, but Gerard spares no thought for that. Frankie is injured, and sick besides, and he needs care. Elliday is a solid fellow, for all there was nothing he could do for their mother.

Michael nods, and helps Toro to push Frank up into Gerard's grasp. He is a limp, hot weight, awkwardly balanced over the cantle, sagging against Gerard's chest. He does not move except to breathe, and even above the sound of his horse, Gerard can hear the labor of each inhalation. Toro walks at his stirrup while Michael runs ahead to the street, and once Michael is mounted and on his way, Pelissier and Toro carefully flank Gerard, riding three abreast all the way home, and helping to lower Frank to the ground and carry him inside when they arrive.

Elliday arrives before dawn, and soon determines that Frank is suffering from malaria. A little reasoning paints the rest of the picture: Frank must have been thrown off his ship as an attempt at quarantine. He cannot have contracted malaria in Jersey or anywhere nearby, so the physician opines that Frankie is one of those unfortunates who, having survived the fever once, falls ill again some time later. This means that even if he does survive the present fever, he is apt to sicken again in the future. It is no surprise his shipmates cast him out. Frank has nothing in the world now, no possessions, no work, and no prospects.

Gerard declares at once that Frank is to be taken into the Way household, and nursed back to health; Gerard himself does a substantial share of the minding, so great is his enthusiasm for his new project. Servants mostly handle the messiest tasks, but Gerard lends a hand when he can do so without scandalizing anyone too much, and he is chief sitter-with-patient, mopping his brow and feeding him sips of water and spoonfuls of broth. The Way household is not so grand that any of the servants can be easily spared to look after their foundling sailor, but Gerard's time is almost entirely his own. The estate runs just as smoothly whether he is drunk in his own bed or sober beside Frank's.

He learns things about Frank this way. Frank speaks a dialect Gerard does not understand when he's troubled by fever dreams; it sounds like something near to the Florentine tongue he began to pick up when he was traveling, but it's not the same. When he attempts to describe it to Toro, Toro posits that it is from further south, perhaps even Sicily or Sardinia. But another time he speaks what Gerard would swear is Toro's Catalan, and the next day he shouts in Portuguese. When he opens too-bright eyes and Gerard says, "Frankie? Are you with us?" he murmurs in weak but perfectly intelligible English that he isn't Frankie, isn't Ro. He insists that if he should die Gerard must tell sailors his name properly, so his father will know he's died--but he keeps breaking off into a mumble of his own dialect when Gerard tries to catch his name, until at last he says, "Ask Michael, I know my letters."

Gerard waits until he's quiet and still again, and then goes and asks Michael whether there is any slight chance that he's mistaken Frankie Ro for someone else, or whether he has been wildly mistaken all this time about what the man's name is. Michael says, no, he can prove it, because Frankie wrote it out for him once, to prove he knew how, though Michael doesn't think he could actually read it. Michael goes and fetches the journal he kept on his trip, and flips it to a page across which is written sideways in tall, straggling letters, F RAN KIE RO.

"I don't think he knew what to do with spaces," Michael says helpfully, and Gerard takes the book from him and strikes him gently on the head with it.

"Iero. His name is Iero."

Michael wrinkles his nose and asks what sort of name that is, and Gerard shrugs and says, Sicilian, maybe, certainly further south than Rome, and Michael says, wide-eyed, "Do you suppose he's a Papist?"

Gerard merely stares. Toro clears his throat quietly but significantly, and Michael has the grace to blush. Gerard says, "Michael, he has a tattoo of the Virgin on one arm and a tattoo of rosary beads on the other. What did you imagine that meant?"

Michael just shrugs and mumbles that he didn't know, Frank never said any strange prayers that he could see.

Gerard looks up and meets Toro's gaze, sharing the same thought. Gerard says, hesitantly, "Should we send for a priest?"

Toro grimaces, considering. There is only one Catholic church on Jersey, and Toro visited it shortly after he came to live in the Way house--but he returned quickly, white-lipped and silent. Gerard had tagged along to Mass with Toro a dozen times. Toro went faithfully, in cathedrals and tiny chapels all across the Continent, and Gerard loved the spectacle of it, the strange secret magic of the Latin--hard edged and Italianate compared to the classical Latin he learned in school--and the mysterious reek of incense and the beautiful pantheon of saints. But Toro never went back to the church on Jersey, and Gerard has never quite dared to ask why not--but Frank is very sick, talking about dying.

"I'll go and get the priest if he asks," Toro says finally. "Or if... if there's no choice." If Frank is dying and must have the Last Rites, Gerard understands.

But Frank gets no worse that night, and the next time he wakes up a bit, when Gerard says, "Frank Iero," he smiles and nods. Gerard says, "Why did you let Michael say it wrong all this time?"

Frank smiles a smile more beautiful than any Gerard can ever remember seeing and says, "It sounded nice how he said it. And I hated to tell him he'd got it wrong, he was so happy."

Gerard looks at Frank, his sweet smile and his fondness for Gerard's brother, and with a crystal clarity Gerard knows that he is falling in love.

***

Frank's convalescence is slow, and Gerard keeps him company through much of it. Frank is a surprisingly good patient, perpetually good-natured, turning frustration that would have Gerard throwing wine bottles (after draining them) into infectious laughter.

Gerard asks him how many languages he speaks, and Frank can't answer. It is partly because he knows his numbers only a little better than his letters, partly because he's still sleepy and confused between bouts of fever, but mostly because he's never thought of it that way before. He answers people the way they speak to him. His English is distinctively accented but clear, and he can speak Jersey with Gerard if Gerard doesn't go too quickly or use too many peculiar local expressions, though Frank picks up more of them all the time. Gerard quickly realizes that Frank is a natural at making out what people mean from the way they look and speak, and language follows swiftly after.

He asks Frank where he came from, how he's had occasion to learn so many languages, and Frank shrugs. His father was a sailor, Frank was born practically on the docks; he's been working on ships since he was "so high," and he waves a hand vaguely off the side of the bed. Gerard guesses he must have been six or seven years old, running powder and messages.

In the brief interim that constituted his childhood, Frank lived, "Here and there, different places." It seems unimportant to him, scarcely remembered.

Gerard, who is sitting with Frank in the house where he was conceived and born, and where his mother was born and died, a short stroll from the churchyard where his parents and grandparents and countless generations are buried, cannot quite fathom so rootless an existence.

"People said my mother died when I was born," Frank explains. "But my father told me the true tale: my mother was a fearsome lady pirate, and when I was born she left me at the church door nearest the docks with my father's medal of St. Francis around my neck to know me by, and sailed off after her next prize."

Gerard spends several long seconds trying to absorb this and then says a bit faintly, "That's the true story?"

Frank scowls and says, "Are you calling my father a liar?" and Gerard makes a clumsy, frantic attempt to take the words back.

Frank looks away, weary, and shakes his head. "Sailors tell thousands of stories, all of them true," Frank says. "Even if none of them happened. And anyway if she did die to give me birth, she must be in heaven, and I cannot think of a better heaven than sailing my own ship."

Gerard thinks, privately, that dying in childbed with a sailor's bastard son is not normally considered a sure route to heaven, but then he's no Papist. Frank would know better than he.

***

Gerard can tell that Frank doesn't usually wear a beard; Gerard himself makes do without a valet (his father's man had made a game effort at being inherited, but as he'd already been passed down once, there simply wasn't much wear left). Gerard likes to be let alone in the mornings, and if it means he frequently looks a bit rumpled or mismatched, well, he and Toro are cultivating an image of careless country manners. Michael, Gerard thinks, actually does not care. Pelissier has a valet, or rather a succession of them; he fires them regularly, and as hiring new ones is a great bother, the unstaffed intervals have grown longer and longer.

So there is no one to whom Gerard can delegate the task of shaving Frank, and though his own hands are as steady and clever with a razor as with a brush or pencil, the combination of Frank's rather heavier beard and his periodic fevered thrashing make Gerard cautious. He waits until Frank is well enough to give some small evidence of dissatisfaction with his new beard--nothing so overt as a complaint, only a small frown creasing his forehead when he itches at it--and then Gerard announces that he is going to give Frank a shave.

Frank's protests are only that Gerard shouldn't have to do that--none saying he doesn't need or want it, and only one foolhardy claim to be able to manage a razor himself, when he can't yet even sit upright for more than a few minutes at a time. Gerard is sure of his ground then, so he plays lord of the manor and marches right over Frank's weakening protests.

He's never shaved anyone else before, though he's been barbered himself a fair number of times. He wanted to do it--with a giddy hot feeling, the same he felt stealing glimpses of some schoolboy crush--but he never thought it would be quite like this. Frank keeps his eyes closed, lashes fluttering on his cheeks, almost holding his breath. He's propped up on pillows, but still mostly reclined, so Gerard is perched on the edge of the bed leaning over him, his own face close to Frank's to watch what he's doing. He can feel how Frank is scarcely breathing, holding so still--nervous of being cut, Gerard thinks, but all the stories Frank tells show he's quite blithe about facing danger.

Gerard is scarcely breathing himself, being careful of where he places his hands, and when he's finished and patted Frank's face, ridiculously delicately, with a towel, he feels as if he's just run down to the docks and back without stopping.

Frank's eyes finally pop open, and he smiles--he beams. His face is unguarded, all bare pink skin. Gerard is suddenly acutely conscious that Frank is scarcely as old as Michael, if that, for all he's lived through. But Gerard smiles helplessly back and says, "Here, have a look at yourself, I'll help you sit."

Frank is shirtless. He only had the one shirt to begin with, and it's been easier to look after him without unnecessary clothing. No one has been excessively troubled for Frank's modesty, including, since he woke up, Frank himself, so the one shirt has stayed folded on a shelf ever since the laundry maid finished with it. Gerard has gotten nearly used to the sight of the tattoos on Frank's arms, the occasional glimpse of the birds traced on his belly in sweeping black lines. Gerard doesn't think anything in particular--he feels, yes, feels a warm shuddering in his belly as though he had a bird of his own there--but he doesn't think before putting an arm around Frank to tug him into a sitting position, to let him peer at himself more easily in a mirror.

But the skin Gerard touches is unnaturally ridged, knotted, and he flinches from it, thinking he'll hurt Frank. Frank only flinches at Gerard pulling away from him, and Gerard perceives this as well as the embarrassed flush rising on Frank's cheeks even as Gerard blurts, "Did I--"

Frank shakes his head, looking confused, but says only, "They're old scars."

Gerard puts his arm back--Frank really isn't strong yet, he needs the support--and this time he settles his hand firmly, not letting himself feel along the lines under his fingers. Frank clears his throat and mutters, "You can, I don't--" and then twists in Gerard's grip, showing his back.

Gerard catches Frank's shoulder, steadying him before he can move more--he shouldn't even be sitting up, really--and stares. Frank's back is cross-hatched with old flogging scars. There are less than a dozen actual marks, but several of them are traced by tattoos--some of them cut through tattoos, marking layers of ink and blood. Many of the scars are old, thin and faint and faded, and Frank isn't much more than a boy now, which means he cannot have been but a child when he was beaten badly enough to scar.

Gerard remembers the sole whipping his father ever administered to him--not enough to leave him bleeding, and he'd cried through it more for remembered terror at nearly killing Michael and himself than from the actual pain. The occasional beatings from schoolmasters were perhaps fiercer, but even so, he bears no visible scars.

"How..." Gerard says, and cannot think what to say, how many, how old.

"I fell asleep on watch, I think," Frank says thoughtfully. "Or else stole a sip of the captain's coffee to keep awake? I was eleven or twelve."

He laughs a little, but Gerard can hear the hollow sound of it, sitting here with his arm around Frank.

"I was crying as soon as they bound my wrists. I'd seen men flogged for as long as I'd been on ships, all my life. It's worse waiting for a blow than feeling it. I'd been waiting years."

He laughs a little more, and something in the sound makes Gerard's arm tighten around him involuntarily. "I pissed myself when the first blow fell, but it wasn't so bad after that. It was never as bad, after that."

Gerard feels himself shaking, though he knows it ought to be Frank who's feeling the strain of sitting up. He's forgotten all about the mirror, and murmurs, "Here, lie down," as he eases Frank back to the pillows. Frank yawns and rolls onto his side, rubbing his smooth cheek against the pillowcase, showing his back to Gerard.

Gerard's hand moves of its own accord, to settle over the spot on Frank's back where the largest tattoo is, a grinning skull with a nexus of scars forming one blind eye. He can feel Frank's heart beating under his palm, and stays where he is until he has felt Frank fall asleep.

***

All the servants call Gerard's grandmother Madame, though she has always been Grandmother to Gerard and Michael, not Grandmere. The lady rarely leaves her rooms anymore, especially now that Gerard's friends are in apparently permanent residence. They exchange weekly dinner invitations--she hosts the boys in her suite, quite grandly, and comes out to the formal dining room when so called--and she is at home to the boys in the afternoons, and at home to callers in the morning.

Toro flirts quite outrageously with her, painting endless portraits of her and asking for her hand in marriage at least once a week. She always defers to Gerard's judgment, as head of the household. Gerard always flatly refuses to give his blessing to such a match, when it is clear that Toro (who is, Gerard is vaguely aware, some sort of aristocrat in Spain and certainly never out at pocket) only wants her for her money or, alternately, will force her to convert and whisk her away to foreign parts, never to be seen again by her loving family.

Michael visits his grandmother faithfully, regularly losing track of whether he is supposed to come in the morning or the afternoon, and thus occasionally being made to endure the attentions of many of the hopeful mamas of Jersey, to say nothing of their pretty daughters. All the ladies on the island have worked out that if Gerard continues in his peculiar rakehell unmarried fashion, it will be Michael who eventually inherits the property--sooner than later, if Gerard continues on his present path, many gossips murmur--and Michael's wife will then be quite comfortably placed indeed.

Matthew has known Madame all his life, and is made rather uncomfortable by her advancing age and increasing infirmity (Toro rarely troubles to ask her opinions of his paintings, for it is clear to all of them that her sight is going--Gerard only shows her the sketches he makes in charcoal, stark black on white, which she is still able to make out). Matthew is always polite, but never easy with her, and in turn she never quite ceases to treat him as though he has just come in from playing in the garden with dirt on his face.

Gerard calls upon her daily, and the others always contrive to give him time alone with her. Gerard is always careful to come in the afternoon and not the morning, because his dread of the island's mamas is eclipsed only by his certain knowledge that, should he find himself cornered by them in his grandmother's sitting room, she will instantly develop a terrible headache and dismiss all her callers at once with scarcely a pretense of politeness. She acts with the impunity of a widow in her seventh decade, but really, his grandmother's protectiveness is mortifying, and Gerard does not like to imagine what polite society makes of it. Of course, so long as he stays in his own home--or in the homes of bachelors even more wild and eccentric than himself--polite society's imaginings touch him very little.

He spends his time with his grandmother in conversation; Gerard tells her everything, as he has since he was too young to know this sort of thing wasn't Done--he tells her his hopes and, more often, his hopelessness, his struggles in running the estate, all the doings of the secret society (which the others, as subtly as a street pantomime, pretend to conceal from her). He reads his poetry to her, sometimes, the verses that are not too unbearably secret.

When Gerard's hour with his grandmother is stolen from the time he spends at Frank's bedside, he speaks to her a little, shyly, of Frank. There is never much to say--he knows very little about Frank, and he is fairly certain that all that the servants know about his condition, they report to her directly. Still, Gerard reiterates the very latest news: always, especially early on, that Frank is resting quietly, and seems a little better, for that is the only way Gerard ever leaves him.

There is more he sees, more he feels, more about Frank--about sitting in a dim room, watching him breathe, about brushing the sweat-soaked hair off his forehead, about the strength of his grip when he grabs Gerard's hand in the midst of some fevered nightmare--but those words come out only in poems where nothing seems to rhyme. He locks them away or burns them; they are worse than secret; they're dreadful, mad and rambling. He sketches instead, birds and beads and rays of light and a stylized flame, and when his grandmother asks him what he's been drawing, he shows them to her and to her alone. They're just sketches, they don't say anything where anyone else can hear.

It never crosses his mind that the servants might have passed on to her anything so vulgar as detailed descriptions of the ink buried in Frank's skin.

***

Part Two