Note: This story takes place in the universe of YUKI Kaori's Earl Cain. The series is Gothic in spades, set in the Decadent version of late Victorian England that, mutatis mutandis, JET's werewolf Holmes and vampire Watson also inhabit. (Representative figure: Jack the Ripper- which is more or less what Akai Hitsuji no Kokuin /Mark of the Red Ram is all about.) Instead of zombies and ghouls, Cain's world runs on hidden social crimes- really cheerful stuff like incest, adultery, pedophilia, child abuse, prostitution, insanity (a social crime in the Victorian world), hints of cannibalism and definite patri- matri- fratri- and sororicide. (Well, not the latter, unfortunately, though one wants to murder Cain's little sister when she comes bouncing in and interrupts the tender scene happening between Cain and his valet Lifere.) Revivified corpses, family vendettas and murder are the stuff of daily life. Secret societies and obscure cabals abound. No family is without its skeleton in the closet or its mad wife (brother, whatever) in the attic (basement, whatever). Cain himself is the child of incest, has a good stab- uhh, not literally- at killing his mother and father, and is a connoisseur of poison. And he's the sympathetic hero. Makes the JET world look like a sunny Sunday afternoon by comparison. I love it.
Fair and Foul are Near of Kin
Grey and greasy, the London sky, the London streets, on the eve of our return. The carriage bounces over cobblestones, bumping unexpectedly and throwing us about inside. We stop at last in front of the house in S-- Square and ease our cramped bodies out onto the pavement. Up the narrow stone steps and into the front vestibule where the housekeeper curtsies her greeting to the master. I take his coat and hand it to the footman.
"Merry is in bed?"
"Yes sir. But she's sure to be awake still, waiting for your return."
"I'll go up and see her now."
"Yes sir. When will you be wanting dinner, sir?"
"I won't. Send some biscuits and cheddar to my room, and a bottle of wine. That will do me." Already he is halfway up the stairs.
The housekeeper waits until he has gone to ask, "Shall I keep you some dinner, Mr. Lafitte?"
"No thank you, Mrs. Easton." She curtsies and goes. Another woman might have fished for an explanation but our servants- I should say, the other servants in our house- know better than to question me about the master's doings. Here all is well-ordered and seemly; here is peace. It breathes from the Turkey carpeting of the stairs and the well polished bannister, the newly arranged flowers on the hall table and the clean muslin curtains hanging in front of the stairway windows. We have come home.
The kitchen maid had been crying. That was what started it. Kitchen maids may have good reason to cry, but our cook is a kind enough woman, not given to scolding and temper. It was she who mentioned Liza's distress to me, without naming the probable cause: some smooth-tongued delivery boy, a few lies and promises, and an unwanted child on the way. As I said, she's a kind woman. I interviewed Liza myself. Her story was not what I expected. Her story was a little curious. I mentioned it in passing to the master. A few days later he told me to prepare for a trip to his cousin's house in Sussex.
Mrs. Morrell greeted us in the parlour. Her gaze flicked off me and away. I am, variously, the master's steward, his manservant, and his bodyguard. He never introduces me by rank, and so I disconcert his acquaintances who have heard that I am one or the other of those things and must reconcile that fact with my middle-class diction. Most handle the problem as Mrs. Morrell did, by ignoring me.
"Dear Cain, how good to see you." She was a well-favoured woman in her late twenties, whose imperiousness owed as much to her blond beauty as to her aristocratic birth. Clearly she was one who had turned men's heads from an early age. Her dress was a thing of wonder, all tucks and bows and flounces and frills, designed perhaps to give an impression of feminine frivolity and helplessness. That impression was heightened by its somber colour, a reminder of that she was alone in the world since her father-in-law's death over a year ago. But I couldn't help noticing that the dark purple highlighted the gold of her hair better than any other colour would have done, making her look rich and ornate like Venetian brocade. "And your dear little sister Merriweather, is she well?"
"Well enough, thank you. A slight cold, or I would have brought her to see you." He bent to kiss her hand. In fact Miss Merriweather was perfectly well, bar a little nervous depletion resulting from the tantrum she'd thrown on learning she was to be left behind.
"Oh, such a pity. She would have made a wonderful playmate for Roger." Roger was her son, a pale-skinned tow-haired angel of six with dreamy eyes. He stood by his mother's side, holding on to her skirt as he surveyed the guests with an uncertain expression. "I see so few people since I went into mourning and I know the poor boy suffers the lack of little friends."
"I'll bring her another time. A young boy shouldn't be alone," the master said.
"Oh yes. It's such a worry to me. Roger's always been so delicate." She spoke with no sign of consciousness, even though Roger's delicacy was Mrs Morrell's own doing. She'd taken a whim to go up to London two weeks before the child was due, and the jolting of the carriage had started a premature labour. She'd been brought to bed in a country inn before a doctor could arrive, with only her maid to attend her during the birth. "He's given to odd little fancies and games. Nurse says he has a make- believe friend he pretends to play with. I'm sure it's not healthy."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry. It's just the pastime of an only child. I know those fantasies well." He smiled at her, ambiguously since it was plain she didn't relish the implied comparison. "And thank you again for having us to stay on such short notice. This business of the Sussex holdings shouldn't take long, but I do loathe country inns."
"Of course," Mrs. Morrell said, having rearranged her face to smile back at him. The combination of his youth, his looks and his sinister reputation make him attractive to many women. They see his delicate frame and dark beauty and the twist to his mouth, they remember the whispered rumours of his interests and his exploits, and they allow themselves the same frisson their grandmothers felt about Lord Byron- vice incarnate in a pleasing form. Some, confident in their age and experience, court the possibility that the monster will say something shocking in their own drawing rooms; others, less secure, are terrified that he will. Mrs. Morrell was definitely of the first party.
The footman takes the master's small travelling trunk to his room while I instruct the maid to prepare the bathwater in the adjoining bathroom. I myself light the three gas lamps in the bedroom and the fire laid ready on the hearth. The parlour maid brings the cheese and wine, which I instruct her to put on the drum table next to the master's armchair. In the gradually returning warmth I unpack his personal effects, his toiletries and suits. His linen and small clothes are banished belowstairs, to be sent to the laundress. He enters as I am hanging up his jacket in the large wardrobe.
He throws himself into the chair and sits gazing at the fire. I pour him a glass of claret and put it at his elbow. He takes a sip, eyes far away, and for five minutes or so all is quiet. Absently he stretches out a leg. I kneel to undo his laces, and remove the boots and the socks beneath. He likes the sensation of being barefoot and the room is now warm enough that I needn't fear he will take cold. He drinks more wine, looking beyond my bent head at something only he can see. There is a small tightness about his mouth. The boots go into the corridor. I come back and wait.
"It was an arranged marriage," the master told me that evening as I dressed him for dinner, "after its fashion. Morrell's father wanted him to marry and my cousin Eva wanted to be married, and so the matter was settled to their satisfaction and that of the families involved. I never knew what Phillip thought of it at all."
I remembered Phillip Morrell from our one previous meeting in London- a fair-skinned man with pale yellow hair and pale blue eyes and a slightly foolish expression. It was years ago, just after he'd secured his colonelship in India, and I'd wondered how that complexion would fare under the burning tropical sun. "I suppose he made his own conditions. Old Morrell bought him his commission, but it was Eva's money that paid for it. Phillip made sure an heir was on the way and then he took off for Delhi, and he hasn't returned since."
"And if it had been a daughter?" I asked, removing his walking shoes.
"I suppose his father would have called him back to provide a son. Eva has no objection to heiresses, of course, but the Morrell lands date back in a direct male line to William Rufus, as old Mr. Morrell was in the habit of telling everyone." He grimaced briefly, and I could imagine him listening in a well- concealed agony of boredom to the old man's obsessive recital of his family's history. Family pride and family property, the cornerstones of the family prison.
"The father was a man of strong will, I take it, sir?" I held open the patent leather dinner shoe and he thrust his right foot into it.
"Very, though somehow it didn't get passed on to his son. You saw the old man's portrait downstairs? That was how he looked at forty-four, when he married again." I finished with the laces and picked up the left shoe. "The children of the first marriage all died one way and the other, and he could barely wait for their mother to die too so he could begin getting a new brood. But in the end there was only Phillip from the second bed. His mother was barely eighteen, and not up to the demands of a virile husband." His eyes glinted at mine as I looked up from the laces of his left shoe. "The pictures are a matched set, him and her, but not very many people notice her."
I remembered clearly the portrait of the gentleman. Dark- haired and determined, he dominated the room with his fiery brown eyes and a sense of animal energy held precariously at bay. But as for the other-- "True, sir. All I registered was that it was the picture of some young lady, fair and pretty. I thought her perhaps a half-sister or a cousin of the Colonel's."
"And what did you think of her?"
"That her picture seemed out of place in the main living room."
"That should have made you notice it more."
I bowed my head, rebuked.
He stands up. I remove his jacket and waistcoat. Impatiently he begins undoing his own buttons. I wait until he has finished and draw his shirt from him. The scars across his back are tinged with pink. After all these years they should be an unchanging silver, but when he is troubled or disturbed they take on the pale tint of blood. I place his dressing gown over his shoulders and his arms slide in, covering the scars and wrapping his frail torso against the danger of drafts. I unfasten his belt, unbutton his trousers, slip them off him.
The under-drawers follow. He wraps the robe more tightly and heads for the bathroom. I follow to take it from him before he enters the bath. He no longer notices when I stand behind him there. It was years before that happened, and I'd believed it never would. I expected always to feel the small tensing of his body, the wariness in his soul, when he was naked in front of me and knew I could see the whipmarks on his back. It wasn't shame,
I knew that. It was because I had been and was still the witness to a horror. Everything else had changed in his life. The darkness of his childhood had vanished like a bad dream on waking, but the scored flesh remained to show that the nightmare was true. He would never now be able to believe the consoling lies of philosophy and religion: that the world is a sane and good place, that men are rational creatures, that the wicked are cast down in their sin and the meek inherit the earth. His very flesh proved otherwise. Like many another he could have pretended it was not so. He could have chosen to believe a pleasant lie, but there I was, at his back morning and evening, a witness to the truth. The proof of the world's monstrousness was there for me to see, and he knew that I saw it. Almost I could have wished myself blind, so that I need no longer be a daily confirmation of the evil that we both know too well.
Then one day I realized he was no longer aware of me, as he dropped his robe and got into the bath. He was talking about a series of mysterious deaths in the Edgeware Road and the possible poison involved, and his attention was all on that, not on my traitor's gaze. I stood still for an instant, keeping my face motionless, holding the shattering happiness at bay lest it destroy me. I was no longer Other to him, no longer something that he registered as a separate presence. I had become a part of himself, taken for granted and no more deserving of special notice than his own arm or leg. No longer a detached witness, but as near to him as his own eyes. I have never been so happy as in that moment. And since that time I find that I too can forget about his scars- and my own- for long periods at a time. They are behind us now.
I made my way to the kitchens. For this occasion my rank was that of valet and so dinner for me was in the servants' hall. I didn't attempt to speak to the servants of the house. They were shy of me, as always. A gentleman's gentleman they could cope with, but a gentleman's gentleman is beyond their experience. I sat in silence, was carefully polite to the cook and deferent to the housekeeper and butler, and seemed immersed in my own thoughts. The conversation began to loosen about me, and the lower servants at least returned to something like their usual bantering style. If the housekeeper hushed them more often than she might have otherwise, I pretended not to notice.
Dinner finished, I turned to her and, begging her pardon, asked if there was any place I might smoke without disturbing the others.
"Come out to the vegetable garden," Tompkins the butler said.
"The gardener likes his pipe in peace too."
He took me to a potting shed. McNabb the gardener wasn't the only one who enjoyed an after dinner pipe. Mr. Tompkins and I lit up, and sat in silence watching the rows of cabbages and beanstalks out the door of the shed.
"Your household is well-ordered, Mr. Tompkins," I said. "I wish I could keep our maids and footmen in line so well."
"Ah well," he said, pleased and embarrassed. "Country servants- it's easier than London, I dare say. Not nearly so many distractions and temptations. I expect we must seem a little slow to you after the city."
I shook my head. "I like it here. I was brought up in Surrey, and I find London too busy a place to be comfortable in."
"A Surrey man, are you?" he asked, warming a little. "Which part, then?"
"Reigate," I answered. "And you?"
"Ah," he said with a smile. "You can still tell, then. Out Aldershot way."
"It's a good place, Surrey."
"Aye, that it is." After a bit, he said, "You didn't keep your Reigate accent, then?"
"I lost it at Cambridge, and sorry now I did. My brothers meant to train me for a doctor and I had some stupid notion that a medical man shouldn't sound like a countryman."
"A doctor, was it?" He looked uncomfortable.
"They had their ambitions," I said sombrely. "And ambition had its fall. There was a fire at our house- a hideous inferno. They lost their lives and the place was turned to ashes-- and I discovered that they'd spent all our father had left us in trying to be gentry. I was alone in the world, penniless, with no way of making a living. In the end an old patron of my father's had pity on me and took me in to wait on his only son. And here I am."
"Ahh-ah," he said. Clearly the little morality tale of
Fortune's reverse had pleased him. "That must have been hard on you, sir."
I gave him a sideways smile for that 'sir' and after a moment he smiled back. "No," I said, answering his question. "No, not really. I think we're called to a certain station in life and by hook or by crook we find ourselves in it. This was what I was meant to be. This is where I'm happy."
"Ohh?" He chewed that over. "But your master- is he a good master?"
"The best," I said.
"I've heard he's a little-- eccentric," Tompkins pressed.
"The Hargreaves are all eccentric. It's been my good fortune.
A more conventional man wouldn't have offered me the position in the first place or kept me on afterwards."
"Ahh, and that's true too, isn't it? The Hargreaves are all eccentric, you say?"
"In my experience. The nobility- they're different from us."
He nodded his head again. "True, true. The mistress now- she's a good mistress. But wilful? Oh my, yes. While the old master was alive he kept her some in bounds, but since he died she's done just as she pleased. Mr. Phillip should come back, that's what. Or she should go out to be with him. A wife belongs with her husband, don't you think, Mr. Lafitte?"
"Most definitely."
"And women- wilful things, women. Take the oddest pranks into their heads. They need a man to keep 'em steady." He chewed on his pipe. Clearly he wanted to tell me something, but it was too soon. I didn't press him, and we returned shortly thereafter to the house.
I take the sponge and squeeze hot water down his back. He likes that especially- hot water on the back of his neck, running down the narrow spine. He curves over and I squeeze again, a sheet of water over his shoulder blades, and he grunts a little in pleasure. At last I begin to wash his back, covering his skin in a layer of white soap like fresh plaster laid out for a fresco. I squeeze water over it and it runs away. I wash beneath his arms, where a faint tangle of dark hair goes into spikes with the foamy soap before I sluice that too. He takes the sponge from me and does his own chest and belly because, he says, my touch tickles there, but he lets me wash all his lower parts. Even as a boy he never had any ordinary shyness of me, and now that I am as an extension of himself there can be no need for modesty with me.
I soap and wash his groin, the thickness of his pubic hair, his organ and the testicles behind it, loose now in the hot water. He kneels and I wash his narrow buttocks and the shallow valley between them, his thighs and legs down to the knee. All this in silence: the master is in no mood for talk today.
Mr. Tompkins' good opinion of me was passed on, in some fashion unknown to me, to the other servants and they became more forthcoming in my presence. Next day I fell into conversation with Ellen the upstairs maid as she was mending some item of female wear in the servants' hall. She was a calm, sensible woman in her mid-twenties and had, as she informed me, been in service to the Morrells since she was fifteen. Beginning as a tweeny, she'd reached her present position a few years later when her predecessor had left.
"That wasn't a woman named Agnes Miller, by any chance?" I asked.
"Why yes. How did you know?"
"One of our underservants has a friend of that name. Young Liza said her friend Agnes had been upstairs maid to the master's cousin."
"Indeed. How is Agnes now?" she asked without real interest.
"Married, I suppose?"
I looked surprised. "Married?" and pretended confusion.
She looked at me, surprised in her turn by my attitude. "Why yes. Agnes always meant to marry well. At least a shopkeeper, she always said."
"Oh. Indeed," I answered, not meeting her eyes.
"Why, Mr. Lafitte, what's the matter?"
"Well- it's just-" I can blush at will, and I did. "Liza has never mentioned anything about a husband, but it seems Agnes has a child."
"Oh." She blushed deeply in her turn, but still looked puzzled. "That's odd. Agnes is the last person I'd have thought would- would find herself in a situation like that. She never had followers, and she laughed at the one or two young men who asked her to walk out with them. She said she meant to do better than that. To be honest, I always thought her very cold."
"Ahh," I reflected. "I must confess, I assumed- when I heard she'd left service here- I thought she must have been dismissed."
"Oh no. She left to care for her grandmother in London who'd become bedridden. I was surprised that she'd be so dutiful, but she seemed- well, she seemed overjoyed to be going. Really happy, she was." Ellen was not unintelligent. I saw realization dawning in her eyes. "Oh. Oh, do you think-"
"Yes," I said. "It does look like that. No grandmother, but a man who lured her to London with promises, and then left her."
"The beast," Ellen said with energy. "Poor Agnes. Oh, if only she'd gone with Frank Curtis here. We all knew he was sweet on her, and now he's head footman, and may be butler some day when Mr. Tompkins retires, and he'd have married her in a minute but she wouldn't even look at him. And now look what's happened to her. Oh, poor Agnes."
I knew the story would be about the house in a matter of hours. No matter. Poor Agnes was where her reputation could suffer no more harm. She'd been buried last week in St.Giles' churchyard, suffocated by a leak in the faulty gas outlet in her little two-room flat in Soho.
He lies back in the water, letting it lap his neck, and sticks out a foot for me to attend to. I clean the nails and pumice the hard skin of each foot in turn, making all seemly and gentlemanlike. His feet are very beautiful, the toes long and straight, the arch high, the bones oddly strong below the narrow ankles. The aesthetics of the everyday world provide no vocabulary for this sort of beauty. If he were a Greek statue modelled by Phidias or Praxiteles, then I would be allowed to praise the loveliness of his feet and hands in fitting phrases to an audience that understood my appreciation. But since he is my master, all I can do is observe him in silence, knowing that I gaze on beauty but not able to say how, even to myself. The knowing must be enough. No-one else has ever seen him as I do; no-one else ever will. In future I know there will be a lady of the house. The master's affections are easily moved by beauty, and his heart seeks someone to love. He will be a good father, as he is a fatherly brother to Miss Merriweather. I hope to see him in that happiness. But even his wife, whoever she may be, will never see this hidden beauty of his. It is for his servant's eyes and none other.