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The letter arrived just after midnight, pressed into his hands by a messenger who disappeared back in to the rain without waiting for payment.
His name lay scrawled across the envelope in a sloping, unfamiliar hand— a woman’s, if he had to guess, written without a trace of kindness. He mused with a sneer that it wasn’t the first time it had been written so, and certainly would not be the last. Despite himself, the sight of it written thus made him wince— it was a name that would forever hang as a chain around his neck.
Arthur Guinness.
He returned to his study, closed the door and stood for a time just beyond it, turning the envelope in his hands. He had some notion of what the letter might say. After all, no joyful news was ever delivered so late and in such dreadful weather.
He wished, not for the first time, he were somehow capable of parlour magic— the kind he had seen last winter while being entertained in the drawing room of Cleveland Street, when a man had blotched a sheet with ink and, with a wave of his hand, made it clean once more. Arthur had fancied it a skill he could use in life on more than just paper.
When at last he found the courage to open the envelope, he found only a single sheet inside, the few words across it written in hurried, slanting jolts. He had never known so few words to carry such monumentally terrible news.
The fire crackled as logs collapsed in the grate, and Arthur jolted with the sound, stumbling the few steps to fall in to the nearest tufted armchair, unable to stay upright any longer.
‘An accident’, the letter said. A clumsy word written by a grieving widow— too graceless to be associated with a man such as Sir Henry Morvell.
His Harry.
Harry, whose very being was woven with confidence, who spoke with such certainty in all matters, steadfast and reliable in his opinions. Talented, too— each masterful swipe of his brush and stroke of his pen carried with a surety Arthur had long envied, ever-deliberate in perfection. Nothing in him was accidental, Arthur was sure, not even the manner of his death.
He watched the flames dance around the sides of a charred log with wide eyes, shock draping across him— a leaden shroud that seemed determined to pull him from the chair to the floor and beyond—perhaps down to hell itself.
Hours may have passed in that way, marked only by the glow of embers growing in the hearth. Without warning, a memory broke through like a sunbeam through clouds. One of Devon, and the last afternoon they had spent together.
Leisurely, as their afternoons always were, it passed in bliss and ended with Harry behind his canvas, brushes held delicately between his fingers, brow furrowed in concentration, looking positively cherubic with his cheeks all flushed, innocent in all ways except how he looked at him over the canvas.
The sun beat down through the orangery windows, baking even with the shade of fruit trees and parlour palms
Arthur, half-reclined on a chaise, watched wantonly as a bead of sweat traced a slow line and disappeared beneath his companion’s loosened collar. He let his eyes rove lower, over what he could see of Harry’s chest, following the lines of creases down to his waistband. When Arthur’s eyes flicked back up to his face, he was met with a stern look and a raised brow.
It lingered, the moment between them. Brittle with tension and painful in memory. Arthur’s composure faltered first. It always did— he could never hold Harry’s gaze like that for too long. It reached too deep. It was indecent in its intimacy.
Giving a wicked grin, Arthur shifted his weight among the cushions, stopping only when a few tumbled to the floor, ruining the composition. He laughed as Harry huffed in mock annoyance.
“You really are an overgrown schoolboy, Guinness,” Harry had said, ruffling his hair with a glare, though the corners of his mouth betrayed him. “And the most hopeless subject. I must insist you sit still.”
Arthur laughed, gleeful in the success of his provocations, even if it meant another ruined canvas. His moustache tickled his cheek as he tried to still his smile, and he uttered the words he knew would ensure Harry abandoned his work altogether.
“Make me.”
Arthur could see it now— the palette clattering to the tiles before Harry rushed toward him, knocking him further against the cushions, hands holding him down as he peppered kisses across his face so fervently they made the late summer sun feel cool.
The memory faded, and Arthur swallowed down a cry of Harry’s name, clasping a hand across his mouth, his chest heaving with the effort of staying silent. No good would come of any outward expression of grief. It felt reckless— an indulgence he could neither afford nor entertain.
The rest of London would be granted the luxury of grieving. Fashionably, of course. Rooms of society’s elite would raise their glasses, speak of Sir Henry’s brilliance in hushed tones, and assign misplaced romanticism in place of an artist taken too soon.
An announcement of his passing and details of his funeral would be printed, no doubt, nestled between obituaries of much older men in the pages of the Times. Details of his beloved’s interment would be delivered with breakfast, and Arthur would sip his morning tea and fight to keep a steady hand as he learned them.
He wondered, distantly, whether he could bear to attend Harry’s funeral. He already dreaded the sense of it— a church filled to the brim with lilies, their cloying scent pressing against the air, masking the smell of death.
Were he a braver man, Arthur would march to the front of the gathered congregation and lay bunches of heliotrope and violets at the foot of Harry’s coffin. He would press a kiss to the wood that separated him from his love, and do so with enough pride to overshadow the grief in his heart.
But Arthur was not brave. Even in the hypothetical, the heat of audacity caused his chest to ache. His ears burned with shame as he imagined the scandalised whispers that would immediately bounce around the dome of the church. His actions would soon become the talk of all the dining rooms in London and beyond. The news of his disgrace would reach his father’s ear in record time, and the repercussions that followed would be plentiful and merciless.
And so, he would do nothing of the sort. Instead, if he attended at all, he would stand in the back pews during the service, fidgeting with the brim of his hat, willing his eyes to stay dry until he made it back home.
He considered whether there would be a display of Harry’s paintings at the the wake; a macabre appreciation of talent lost. Arthur doubted whether his own portraits would be among them.
His favourite, painted the previous spring at Harry’s insistence, would be lost to him forever. He had never arranged to have it hung in his own house, and so it had sat untouched beneath a cloth in the Devonshire manor dining room for months. Arthur doubted he could bear to look at it now in any case. Even then, it had been a study in devotion, surely clear to anyone who gazed upon it that painter and model had known each other intimately.
How carefully Harry had painted Arthur’s features, having learned the shape of them over months filled with kisses. Harry would style his hair, would reach over and push it back from Arthur’s forehead again and again. The last touch would always end the same way: a slow sweep down the line of his jaw, thumb resting beneath Arthur’s chin as if to test the measure of his obedience.
When satisfied, Harry had reached for the the symbolic prop— the scarf. How tenderly he had draped the soft band of silk velvet, black as the drink Arthur’s family was famous for. He could still the faint drag of the fabric against his neck and the warmth of Harry’s fingers as he adjusted it. The scarf had begun as a costume for the portrait, but Arthur found himself more and more reluctant to remove it once the sessions were over.
The night Harry had announced the painting complete, Arthur had stayed with him long after the sun had set, watching as the lamplight gilded the wet sheen of the finished canvas. They sat together, lounged among cushions and draped, admiring the portrait, hands held together as they drank in the accomplishment. Arthur hadn’t realised until the next morning, shrugging off his overcoat back in his own countryside house, that he was still wearing the scarf.
For the briefest moment, he considered sending for a boy to return it, but the idea passed as quickly as it came. He folded it carefully instead and told himself he would return it in person the following week—though he knew, even then, that he would not. It had made its way in to his belongings and returned to London with him.
He had it still, stashed in the bottom drawer of his desk. He had never removed it, lest the essence of his time spent with Harry—rosewater with a hint of linseed oil— fade from the fabric. The scarf had been precious to him before and now it was priceless. It would now be, Arthur realised, the only tangible proof that their love for one another had ever existed.
He wondered whether Harry had meant for him to keep it. Whether he had known how desperately Arthur clung to whatever pieces of him were offered. As ever, he had longed for something that would never be his to keep, and now, would never be his to touch again.
Arthur recoiled violently at the thought and stood to fix himself a drink to hide the taste of bile in his throat. The decanter rattled against the rim of the glass, and brandy dripped over his hand and on to the table below. He barely cared, downing one swallow after another as if the next might burn the ache from him entirely. By the fourth, his hands betrayed him, trembling too much to hold the decanter. It dropped from his hand and shattered against the floor between his feet.
His anger flared inward with such an intensity he felt as though he might combust. He closed his eyes, heart thundering, breathing in heavy gasps around his thundering heart, but Harry’s face appeared behind his lids— impossibly alive and so clear it frightened him— and the broken sound that tore unbidden from Arthur’s throat was ghastly.
Furious at his body’s betrayal, he hurled the glass still in his hand in to the fire. The brandy hissed, and the remaining flames flared blue before sputtering out altogether. Arthur sank to the floor, legs sprawled among the shards of glass and pooled liquor and could do nothing as his tears, at last, started to fall.
He wept and silently reviled himself; what good was it to weep? It was folly. It was a feebleness, and would do nothing except prove his own in abundance. And although he told himself this over and over, until his own internal voice mingled with that of his father’s, with his tutors’, with his brothers’, still the tears came. They fell in fat droplets across his hands which rested uselessly on his thighs, dripped down to his wrists and soaked his cuffs. So lost was he in a dark reverie of his own deficiencies, that he almost forgot himself altogether, and a scream rose in his throat ready to be roared into the fireplace, only for him to choke on it.
He collapsed further then, in to the pool of brandy and glass, and on to his back. He ignored the shards scratching tiny nicks around his hairline.
The ceiling blurred through the tears, and the ornate chandelier rosette above him transmuted with every heaving breath. As if Harry’s countenance was reluctant to leave his mind, it twisted in to an imagining of his face, peering round the edge of the dark glass down on to him.
Like a fresco on the ceiling of a Catholic cathedral, it shone through the clouded gloom of its surroundings, and Arthur unfocussed his eyes and tried to breathe through the burning in his lungs.
The plaster curls softened, rounded until they resembled a smile, and Arthur could believe that for a moment, like he had been so many times before, that Harry was hovering just above him. The light coaxed new contours; the shadow beneath Harry’s lip, the line of his jaw, the furrow that appeared between his brow whenever he was concentrating.
The image was serene and luminous, painted in his mind, it seemed, by Harry’s own hand. A cherub indeed, Arthur thought distantly, daubed in the palette of memory; flushed warmth and a sweep of gold where sunlight once caught in his hair.
The vision wavered, darkening and brightening again with his steadying breaths and the movement of branches through lamp light outside the windows. He dared not move otherwise, for fear that the ceiling would revert to plaster and leave him abandoned again. Better a fragile, impossible visitation than the clawing truth.
“Harry,” he mouthed soundlessly, the shape of his name dissolving against the brandy at the back of Arthur’s throat. Had he spoken it aloud, he would have shattered entirely.
Tears finally spilled over, slipping over his temples to vanish in to his hair. He lay very still, a supplicant stretched before a private altar, as details Arthur had memorised in daylight were offered to him now in cruel, dissolving imitation.
The faintest touch brushed his throat, the memory of careful fingers smoothing velvet in to place. It was nothing, although it was everything. His chest constricted painfully.
“Please,” he whispered. The sound was barely audible, a meagre vibration in otherwise cold stillness. The image trembled and thinned like smoke. He kept himself rigid, desperate to keep it from slipping away, but his vision faltered, his unfocused eyes cleared, and soon only the rosette remained unadorned by any faces.
A hollow, keening ache surged through him, but no further tears came. His face burned, but warmth in the rest of his body fled. The brandy had begun to seep through in to his shirt, and his limbs felt entirely numb.
A fog settled, and if sense could have travelled through it, it might have made him wander toward the desk drawer and the folded scarf hidden in its depths. He might have then floated toward the letter, still lying where it had fallen from his hand, edges crisping as its damp edges dried. Perhaps another time, another version of himself would have gathered both and place them together; tuck the widow’s cruel missive beneath the velvet, slip a small blossom of violet between their folds in private reliquary. A shrine that no one would ever see.
The thought flickered weakly. He lacked even the strength to lift his hand from the floor, let alone rise and make anything of it. The notion drifted away, leaving nothing in its place.
He closed his eyes, from exhaustion more than resignation. The ache in his chest neither sharpened nor dulled. It simply... was. It existed, fixed and immovable. A stone that was set behind his ribs, eternal.
The fire was dead, the house swallowed the last of the night’s sounds and Arthur did not move.