Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: An instructive story in which vice receives its just reward. Inspired by true and scandalous tales of the Gaslight aristocracy, we present the most moral and improving tale of Lady Rosamond Wolfram. Weep, reader, for the plight of our heroine as she descends into piteous ruin in the clutches of the notorious Phlogiston Baron, Anstruther Jones. Witness the horrors of feminine rebellion when this headstrong young lady defies her father, breaks an advantageous engagement, and slips into depravity with a social inferior. Before the last page is turned, you will have seen our heroine molested by ca

There Will Be Phlogiston

A Prosperity Story

Alexis Hall

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

There Will Be Phlogiston

Copyright © 2018 by Alexis Hall

Cover art: Simoné

http://www.dreamarian.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

About There Will Be Phlogiston

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Dear Reader

About the Author

Also by Alexis Hall

About There Will Be Phlogiston

An instructive story in which vice receives its just reward.

Inspired by true and scandalous tales of the Gaslight aristocracy, we present the most moral and improving tale of Lady Rosamond Wolfram.

Weep, reader, for the plight of our heroine as she descends into piteous ruin in the clutches of the notorious Phlogiston Baron, Anstruther Jones. Witness the horrors of feminine rebellion when this headstrong young lady defies her father, breaks an advantageous engagement, and slips into depravity with a social inferior. Before the last page is turned, you will have seen our heroine molested by carnival folk, snubbed at a dance, and drawn into a sinful ménage à trois by an unrepentant sodomite, the wicked and licentious Lord Mercury.

Reader, take heed. No aspect of our unfortunate heroine’s life, adventures, or conduct is at all admirable, desirable, exciting, thrilling, glamorous, or filled with heady passion and gay romance.

A lady is reputed so much the better dancer or waltzer as she obeys with confidence and freedom the evolutions directed by the gentleman who conducts her.

Thomas Hillgrove, Hillgrove’s Ball Room Guide: A complete practical guide to the art of dancing (1864)

1

“That one,” said the Phlogiston Baron. “I want her.”

Lord Mercury gently lowered the man’s arm. “It’s rude to point.”

“In your neck of the woods, it’s rude to breathe.”

“Well, yes, if you do it loudly and offensively, and in a way that could be considered frightening to ladies.”

“And I suppose I do?” Anstruther Jones stuffed his hands in his pockets, ruining the line of his otherwise exquisitely tailored evening wear.

Lord Mercury compressed his lips on a smile. “On occasions, but perhaps I find such occasions rather invigorating.”

“You mean—” Jones leaned in “—when I’m fucking you.”

The blunt words travelled all the way along Lord Mercury’s spine like the caress of a rough hand. Heat swept upwards and, more worryingly, downwards. He did not dare turn his head. The man’s eyes would be too full of knowledge, too full of purpose, and Lord Mercury would be able to think of nothing but how it felt to be the object of such a gaze. “Please don’t. Not—”

He didn’t know how to finish, or if he even meant what he was saying, but it didn’t matter because Jones pulled back immediately, his attention returning to the woman who had initially caught it. “Tell me about her.”

There was absolutely no reason for Lord Mercury to feel . . . what? Disappointed? Was that what it was? These thorns in his heart? He had been the one to curtail whatever it was Jones had been trying to do. Taunt him. Flirt with him. Unravel him in the middle of a ball, a notion at once terrifying and strangely enticing, all his filthy secrets spattering to the pristine floor. The last scion of Gaslight’s oldest family: nothing but a catamite and a whore. And even his ruin was incidental, for Anstruther Jones needed only one thing from him. Anything else was mere diversion.

Lord Mercury swallowed his pride—what little he had left of it—and gave the Phlogiston Baron what he wanted. As he had from the beginning, little knowing where his compromises and his capitulations would lead. “That’s Lady Rosamond, Lord Wolfram’s daughter.” His voice echoed in his ears as though it belonged to a stranger’s. “She’s insipid. A china doll. I don’t know what you can possibly see in her.”

“Something I like,” was the Phlogiston Baron’s only answer.

“Acquaintance will likely cure you of that.”

Jones laughed—an ungentlemanly burst of mirth that made people stare at them. It should have made Lord Mercury uncomfortable. It did make him uncomfortable. Immoderate laughter was uncouth, as he had explained on several occasions, but Anstruther Jones would not be curbed. On any matter.

He laughed when he felt like laughing.

And there was something frighteningly pleasing in that.

He set off towards Lady Rosamond, trusting Jones would follow. She was standing demurely at her mother’s side—a diminutive creature, golden haired, rose-cheeked, decked out in a three-flounced, pink silk ball gown with skirts so wide it seemed a light breeze might sweep her into the sky as if she were made of nothing but light and air.

She had only recently made her debut, so Lord Mercury knew little about her. Like all young ladies, she was said to be charming, amiable, and lovely to behold. Her family was good, her portion was good. She was greatly admired by gentlemen, but not—he thought—by the other debutantes.

He knew well enough that there had only been pique in his dismissal. Her beauty was striking. It would have been, even if delicacy had not been the current mode. Picture-perfect womanhood: soft, yielding, fragile, rosebud pink lips formed in the shape of a kiss to be taken.

He bowed to her. “Lady Wolfram, Lady Rosamond, will you allow me to introduce to you my—” the word caught a little in this throat, a lie in so many ways “—friend, Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, Lady Wolfram, Lady Rosamond.”

“Of course you may.” Lady Rosamond’s voice was a sweet, ladylike trill. “Introduce him, that is.”

Jones performed something that was probably a bow (if you happened to have your eyes closed while he did it) and then recited, “It gives me great pleasure to form your acquaintance, Lady Rosamond.”

Her eyes, which were blue—not like Jones’s eyes were blue, but bright and hard-glazed like the willow pattern on porcelain—slid past them. “I’m sure.”

Her tone had not wavered, but it was not the response Lord Mercury had told Jones to expect Nevertheless the Phlogiston Baron only shrugged.

Shrugged. In a ballroom. In front of a lady.

“Do you want to dance?”

“No,” returned Lady Rosamond.

It was all Lord Mercury could do not to put his head in his hands.

Jones glanced his way. “Is she allowed to say that?”

This was rapidly becoming unsalvageable. He appealed in silent desperation to Lady Wolfram, but the woman only laughed the strangest laugh, and murmured, “Charming, how very charming.”

“Perhaps,” he tried, “perhaps Lady Rosamond does not feel like dancing tonight?”

Lady Rosamond tossed her head like a wilful horse. “I do not feel like dancing with Mr. Jones.”

“Then—” he sketched another bow “—we should take our—”

“Why not?” asked Anstruther Jones.

“Because I am too good for you. Good night, Mr. Jones.”

And, for the second time that evening, the Phlogiston Baron laughed.

Lord Mercury had not initially been receptive when Anstruther Jones turned up on his doorstep, sans invitation, introduction, or even calling card, wanting to “cut a deal.” But he had a way of getting what he wanted, and Lord Mercury was, frankly, running out of things to lose. For all he could trace his line back at least a century—high royalty for Gaslight nobility—the only thing it meant in real terms was a hundred years of gambling, drinking, and ill-advised investments. Jones’s offer had been simple, if galling: he would repair Lord Mercury’s fortunes in return for his assistance in entering society.

“I want a house,” Jones explained, “like this house. For my children to call theirs and give to their children. And family. I want to have a family.”

Lord Mercury could still remember the arrogant way the man had sprawled across his Chippendale sofa. The tatty brown duster that reeked of tar and phlogiston. His weathered face, his harsh mouth, and his eyes, grey-blue, restless and protean like the sky.

“You don’t need social acceptance for that.”

“No, but I’ll damn well have it.” Of course what he said was ’ave it—those broad Gaslight As. “If not for me, for them as follow.”

“You can’t buy Gaslight.” Lord Mercury mustered all the hauteur of his name. “And you certainly cannot buy me.”

Anstruther Jones said nothing, his silence somehow no less forceful than his words, and reached deep into the pockets of that dreadful coat. He began to pull out paper after paper after paper. Debts, all of them: vowels, bills, promissory notes.

Mortified, Lord Mercury turned his head away. It was one thing for a matter to be generally understood but never admitted to or spoken of. Quite another for an ill-mannered commoner with ideas above his station to scatter the undeniable truth all over Lord Mercury’s last Axminster.

“What do you want?” he asked, hating how weak he sounded.

“I told you.” Jones ticked his ambitions off on his fingers. “Home, position, family. Your help.”

“You can’t afford me.”

The man’s mouth curled into an unexpected smile—a little bit wicked, a little bit sweet. “Try me.”

Lord Mercury named a sum so outrageous it embarrassed him to utter it aloud.

“Done.”

“I . . . I beg your pardon?”

“Done.” Jones spat into his palm, and held it out.

Lord Mercury stared at the other man’s hand blankly and bleated, “Oh, what are you doing?”

“Sealing the deal.”

“Well, consider this a . . . a . . . preliminary lesson, but in polite society we do not spit on ourselves, or each other. Or at all, as it happens.”

“So what do you do with cherry stones?”

“We transfer them politely from our mouths to the spoon and then—” It belatedly occurred to Lord Mercury that he was being laughed at.

Jones’s eyes were full of light as he wiped his hand on his trousers and extended it again.

It was surely a devil’s bargain.

But Lord Mercury had a household to manage, factories to run, appearances to maintain, and debts to pay, so many debts. He had been intending to marry money—a devil’s bargain of a different kind.

He stared at the hand, then at Jones.

The man’s gaze did not waver.

The truth was, Lord Mercury could no longer afford the luxury of pride.

They shook. The rub of the calluses on Jones’s palm sent sparks all through Lord Mercury’s skin. Made him feel tender in comparison.

It was faintly humiliating, but also . . . not.

The next few months were difficult. It was not that Jones was stupid, or that he did not take well to instruction, but he questioned everything. It was not enough for him to simply know a thing was, he had to know why it was. And Lord Mercury was increasingly conscious that his answers amounted to little more than “Because that is the way of it.”

Nevertheless he tried.

He instructed Jones on etiquette, taught him how to bow, how to choose wine (though not to enjoy it), traced for him the lineage of all the major families, talked him through their fortunes, their histories, their scandals. He did his best to smooth the Gaslight from his voice, but the raihn in Spaihn stubbornly rehned on the plehn, and attempts to educate the man’s taste were similarly unsuccessful.

It was not, Lord Mercury had to admit, that Jones had bad taste. Merely that he made no distinction between, say, the music hall and the opera, and formed his opinions without giving consideration to what others might think of them. Opinions, as far as Lord Mercury was concerned, were derived from social context. They were like a well-chosen hat: framing one’s elegance of taste, and proving that one both knew, and could afford, the right sort of hatter. But, for Jones, they were a round of drinks at a common tavern: selected purely for personal gratification and shared liberally with all and sundry.

Effort to convince Jones to engage a valet also failed. He said he had no interest in hiring a grown man to ponce round him with a clothes brush. Lord Mercury would have tried to explain the vital importance of proper attire but, as it happened, Jones dressed well. Or rather, he dressed badly, in clothes more suited to an airship than a drawing room, but he wore them with ease and conviction. And, once Lord Mercury had introduced him to a proper tailor, he looked . . . oh, he looked . . .

A well-cut frock coat and some made-to-measure trousers didn’t precisely transform him miraculously into a gentleman. If anything, they just framed more completely who he was. No rough diamond, Anstruther Jones. He was coal, through and through, coarse and strong, possessed of private lustre.

But everything had only truly started unravelling when he tried to teach Jones to dance. He had feared the potential for gossip if he hired a master, so instead he had purchased a copy of Strauss’s Liebesständchen on wax cylinder and set up his mother’s phonograph in the ballroom. As he pulled the curtains back from the windows, grey light sloshed over the unpolished floors and the tarnished mirrors, making the dust motes gleam like broken stars.

It had been a long time.

His mother had glittered here, more brightly than the gilt, more brightly than the jewels she wore. He remembered the scent of her perfume, the sound of her laughing. He saw her every time he looked in the mirror: he had her eyes, her hair, her skin. He had learned later that she was profligate, degenerate, a reckless gambler, a shameless sybarite, but she had been his world. She had taken him to Paris at the age of six, to Vienna at eight. He had tasted his first champagne at nine and developed a taste for it by eleven. He had shared her box at the opera, dined with poets and revolutionaries, waited for her in artists’ studios while she reclined upon tiger skins and was painted.

Everyone said it was no way to raise a child, but he had never been a child. He’d been her acolyte, her companion, her confidant. And, a little after his fourteenth birthday, she had fled to Italy with one of her lovers, leaving him with a broken heart, a crumbling house, a name he could not afford, and a note that said, Sorry darling.

“Are you all right?” asked Jones.

He flinched. How had he not heard the man approaching? Jones was hardly the quiet sort. “Yes. Of course.”

To his horror, Jones reached out and swept something from his eyelashes. It glinted on the tip of his finger, a tear, already disappearing into Jones’s skin, becoming nothing. “What were you thinking about?”

“The past, I suppose. It’s not important.”

Jones shoved his hands into his pockets, and Lord Mercury bit back an urge to tell him not to. It would be futile, anyway—it was almost as though he had magnets in them. “This place could do with a bit of work.” He nodded towards the green stains marbling the plasterwork. “I think you’ve got some rising damp.”

“I will have it seen to.” Even though he now had the resources, Lord Mercury found himself oddly reluctant to plan the work the townhouse required. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to living this way. Or perhaps he had simply grown tired of laying increasingly elaborate façades over broken things.

Jones turned, too bold, too vivid, for that time-washed place. Smiled his crooked smile. “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale. You just need some briars growing round your cursed castle.”

“Well,” returned Lord Mercury sharply, “I am in no need of a handsome prince. I am waiting to teach you the waltz.”

“All right.” Jones shrugged. “What do I do?”

Lord Mercury set the needle against the wax cylinder he had already placed in the phonograph. There was a crackle, and the opening notes of Strauss’s waltz slipped quietly into the ballroom. The delicate pizzicato seemed to echo the anxious quivering of his nerves. Old grief, he thought, and irritation at Jones. Who was still standing with his—

“One does not waltz with one’s hands in one’s damn pockets.”

“One offers one’s most sincere apologies.”

There was a comedically well-timed orchestral boom from the phonograph, as if Strauss had deliberately written the piece to make Lord Mercury look silly in front of Anstruther Jones. “Position,” he said, “is very important. Under no circumstances should the dancing couple stand vulgarly close. That is for Europeans. You should clasp the lady’s hand, and place your own hand at her waist thus.” He demonstrated on himself. “Neither any higher nor any lower, certainly not embracing her, and you must only touch her lightly. You are not, under any circumstances, to press your hand upon her.”

“Why?” asked Jones. “Will she break?”

“No, but she would probably find you pawing at her with barbaric enthusiasm deeply unpleasant.”

Jones tilted his head, the mischief still in his eyes. “Are you friends with many women?”

“I have many female acquaintances. Now, please attend me as I demonstrate the basic steps.” Lord Mercury’s heels clicked far too loudly as he made his way to the centre of the dance floor. Knowing Jones was watching him made him aware of himself in peculiar ways: the flow of his coat over his hips, the cling of his trousers to his thighs. “The gentleman begins like this: on the beat, left foot, as so, then the right, and another step with the left, like this. And no galloping, Jones. Remember you are dancing with a lady, not a racehorse. And, after that, you simply continue, left-right-left—are you attending?—for the next six beats.”

“I’m attending.”

It was . . . It was . . . beyond strange, dancing with an imaginary partner in an empty ballroom for Anstruther Jones. Lord Mercury knew he was a good dancer—he was renowned for it, in fact—and, as a general rule, he enjoyed it. But now he wasn’t sure what was wrong with him. Light-headed and hot and absurdly exposed.

“And then the . . . then the . . .” He had no reason to be out of breath, but nevertheless he was. His heart was beating hard enough to choke him. “Then the gentleman reverses his steps, like this, in order that the couple may continue about the room.”

“I think I can manage that.”

“Good.” Relief rolled through him. It was only dancing. It shouldn’t have felt as though he knelt naked at the man’s feet. “Now to put it into practice. Take your posi—” And that was when Lord Mercury realised precisely what this lesson entailed. For some reason—perhaps self-protection—his mind had slid away from the reality of it. Or perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps the part of him that was weak and fleshly and traitorous had wanted this all along.

“Do you want to lead?” The gentleness in Jones’s voice was mortifying. Magnified, somehow, too, by the silence as the cylinder reached its end.

“No. You need to learn. I will . . . I will take the part of the lady. On this occasion.”

“It’s just a dance, Arcadius.”

“I am well aware of that.”

Lord Mercury went to restart the music. Came back slowly, almost reluctantly, fearful of what it might have meant had he been otherwise.

Jones stepped close to him. Vulgarly close. It had to be vulgarly close because why else would Lord Mercury be so . . . so conscious of him? The shape of his body, the heat. Except, when he opened his eyes (oh, when, why, had he closed them?), he realised Jones was standing entirely properly and upright as directed. “I’ll try not to barbarically paw at you,” he promised.

A dreadful breathy sound issued from between Lord Mercury’s lips.

And then Jones tried to take his hand, and Lord Mercury jumped away like a startled rabbit. “We . . . You . . . would most properly be wearing gloves. I should fetch some.”

Jones gave him a look, exasperated but softened by affection. “I washed my face and hands before I came. I don’t have the skypox.”

The man was right. He was being a fool, and his foolishness was more revealing than indifference could ever have been. He grabbed for Jones’s hand—ignoring the rough kisses of all those calluses against his tender palms—and yanked him back into position. Then he realised he was going to have to put his other hand somewhere. Tentatively he rested it on Jones’s shoulder. He didn’t want to be so physically dependent on him, but at the same time it felt so vulnerable to be led, and it was all he could do not to cling.

“You look good when you’re dancing.” Lord Mercury’s head jerked up at that, and God, Jones was far too close. He could see the patterns of lines in his lips, the radials in his irises . . . “Happy.”

“Start on the left foot,” he said.

“I remember.” Jones stepped, and Lord Mercury stood on his foot. “Ow.”

He felt the blush burning on his cheeks. “I’m sorry, I’m not accustomed to doing it this way.”

Jones grinned. “Starting on the left . . . one, two, three . . . step.”

They managed six beats, not entirely disastrously, but then Lord Mercury forgot he was meant to be transitioning into travelling step rather than pivot step, and they collided. For a moment they were flush, carnally interlocked, thigh-to-thigh, chest-to-chest, and Lord Mercury startled so violently that he tripped over Jones’s leg. Thus the most graceful man in Gaslight ended up on his arse on the ballroom floor, Jones staring down at him with astonishment, and incipient hilarity.

Lord Mercury put his head in his hands. “Don’t laugh at me. Please don’t laugh.”

“Never.” A pause. Perhaps Jones was willing himself to sobriety. “Are you hurt, pet?”

“Just my pride,” he mumbled, too stricken even to chafe against what was surely an inappropriate endearment.

“Only one cure for that.”

“I didn’t think there were any.”

“Stand up, head up, try again. Besides, I think I was just starting to get the hang of it.”

Lord Mercury had rather been hoping for spontaneous demise, but Jones was right. He peeled himself off the floor, reset the cylinder, and stepped once again into the man’s arms.

Just a dance. Just a dance. Just a dance.

The light brush of fingers under his chin made him look up.

“I’m not an expert,” said Jones. “But I think it might be easier if you stopped trying to lead.”

Lord Mercury could not quite repress his shiver of response. It felt so strange to be touched in that fashion, romantic in bewildering, impossible ways. Gentling him. “It . . . It . . . It’s difficult when you . . . can’t see where you’re going.”

“I realise I’m new at this, but I’m not going to walk you into a wall.”

“I know but—”

“Can you trust me?”

“Yes.” Oh God. Was there anything more terrifying than the truth, uttered without thought?

Jones smiled. Such a smile, his eyes all sky. “One, two, three, and . . .”

And they danced.

For about thirty seconds, Lord Mercury let another man hold him. Protect him. Whirl him round the room where his mother had once danced and dazzled.

Jones’s arms were strong, his steps certain. He smelled of the cold morning, fresh and clean. And Lord Mercury—

Pulled away, just managing to avoid another humiliating stumble. Tried to steady his breath, his heart, his voice. Ignore the hollow ache that rose up like some unspeakable leviathan from deep inside and . . . and . . . wanted. “I think you have mastered at least the basics. If you need more practice, I suggest you engage a dancing master. Good day.”

He turned on his heel and left the ballroom. He considered it to his credit that he did not run.

He did not see Jones again for the best part of a week. Business had called him to London, and Lord Mercury had time to half-convince himself that his responses had been exaggerated, his feelings imagined. A fevered moment born of simple physical proximity.

But then Jones came back, and Lord Mercury knew he had only been lying to himself.

Tucked under Jones’s arm was a neatly wrapped parcel from Henry Poole & Co of Number Fifteen Savile Row, London, the tailor to whom Lord Mercury had introduced him. “For you,” he said. “They already had your measurements.”

“I . . . What is it?”

Jones stuffed his hands into his pockets. “You’ll see if you open it.”

It was a waistcoat. Lilac silk, so fine that holding it made his hands feel rough. The most opulently beautiful thing Lord Mercury thought he had ever seen. Also the most inappropriate.

Perhaps in London. For the pre-Raphaelite set.

But in Gaslight? For him?

How did Jones know? Could one tell? Had he heard something?

God, that dockhand . . . but how did he know? How did he know Lord Mercury was Lord Mercury? He had offered the man nothing more than coins and his body, all other traces of identity carefully removed before he left his house, fittingly enough by the back passage. Unlike others of his acquaintance, Lord Mercury was discreet, so very discreet, and he rarely surrendered to his inclinations. Only when the hollowness of his flesh and spirit became too much to bear.

“Is this a jest?” he asked, with what he thought was admirable calm.

Jones shrugged. “It’s a present.”

“I’m not . . .” That sentence was absolutely impossible to finish. “Not your mistress.”

There was a look on Jones’s face that Lord Mercury couldn’t read. “Just thought I’d like to thank you.”

“I am not what you think I am.”

Lord Mercury turned away in what he thought was obvious dismissal. But while he was fairly sure Jones could recognise a hint, he had never been able to persuade him to actually take one.

Jones’s arms came round him from behind, pulling him against that tall body, all heat and strength and work-made muscle. The man’s breath was hot against his ear. “What are we, Arcadius?”

“Using my given name without permission again.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be an exchange, a necessity, an imposition, a sacrifice for his family name.

“I came to you because I needed you. I stayed because I liked you.” Soft words from a hard man. Lord Mercury had prepared no defence against such things. A blunt-fingered hand pressed against his erection. Nearly made him groan with the longing to be touched. For the terrifying vulnerability of skin. “Say no, and I’ll stop.”

Lord Mercury twisted helplessly like a heretic on the rack. Unable to utter the word that would end his torment. No, and he would be a gentleman again, and Anstruther Jones would be nothing but an upstart. His unshapeable Galatea. A sordid fantasy for endless solitary nights.

Jones gripped him. Even through fabric, he could feel the warmth of the man’s hand, and it was beautiful, horrifying, blissful. Then he stilled. “Say yes, and I’ll continue.”

He shook his head frantically. He couldn’t say that either. One thing to have this happen, in darkness and in shame, an act perpetrated between unaccountable strangers. Another entirely to ask for it. Be part of it.

“I don’t bed the unwilling.”

Lord Mercury couldn’t quite restrain the pleading tilt of his hips. He wasn’t unwilling. He wished he was.

“Or people who don’t know what they want.”

Jones was going to let him go. Let him go and walk away. Leave him like this.

And it didn’t matter . . . It didn’t matter . . . because he would go out tonight. Find a Jack tar or a soldier or airman. Acts, they were nothing but acts, the things he craved. It would be the same.

It wouldn’t be the same.

He wouldn’t be held like this. Or touched like this. It wouldn’t be Jones. With his grey-sky eyes and his smile-hiding mouth, his certainties and convictions, his heedless kindness.

Jones’s other hand came round him, brushed the edge of his jaw. Found the piece of skin above his collar. Stroked him there.

Where it shouldn’t have meant anything.

“Tell me,” he whispered. Not command, not demand, not plea.

And Lord Mercury was undone. “Yes. If you must know. Yes.”

To his bewilderment and his quick-flaring horror, Jones let him go. It had been a trick, nothing but a trick, some further mortification, blackmail perhaps, or—

“Where’s your bedroom?”

“That’s . . . that’s not necessary.”

Jones laughed. Leaned down and—of all things—pressed their brows together. “I’ve spent most of my life on airships, making do. You can be damn sure it’s necessary.”

Lord Mercury was never quite sure why he allowed it.

But, somehow . . .

In his own bed. With Anstruther Jones.

It was not like it had ever been before.

He thought of pleasure as something to be snatched from whatever was done to him, but Jones lavished him with it. Made him wanton.

And, afterwards, Lord Mercury hid his face in the crook of his elbow and cried with shame.

“You’ve done that before? I didn’t hurt you?” Jones’s fingertips skated lightly down his sweat-slick spine, the sweetness of his touch spreading a kind of sickness in their wake.

Lord Mercury shook his head.

The bed shifted as Jones settled on the coverlet. “That good, eh?”

“No . . . I mean . . . It’s just now I am truly your whore.”

There was a long silence. Even muffled by his arm, Lord Mercury could hear his own breaths, too loud and ragged. “Well,” said Jones, “this is awkward because I don’t remember agreeing to pay you.”

Lord Mercury sat up, feeling more naked than his nakedness warranted, and tugged a pillow over himself. “You already bought me.”

“I didn’t buy this. You asked me for it.”

Heat gathered horribly under his skin—it burned in his cheeks, spilling down his throat, over his chest, a spreading scarlet brand. “I . . . I know.”

“And I didn’t buy you either.” Jones stretched out, unabashed and magnificently naked, sweat glinting on the dark hair that curled across his chest and thighs. “Trade is trade. I don’t see the rush to make it something filthy.”

“But I’m a gentleman.”

“And my mothers were whores. I don’t think any less of either of you.” He reached out and pulled the pillow away from Lord Mercury’s body.

He thought about resisting, but it would have been undignified. Covered himself with his hands instead.

Jones grinned at him. “You’d think you’d never been naked with a man before.”

It was hard to manage hauteur when he could smell sex on his own skin, but he tried. “As it happens, I am not in the habit.”

“You’d better make the most of it, then.” Jones held out his arms, and Lord Mercury, without entirely realising what he was doing, tumbled into them.

The shock of intimacy hit him like cold water, and made him gasp. After the sins they had just committed, a simple embrace should have been nothing. He stared helplessly at Jones’s still-smiling mouth, so close to his own that he could almost taste his breath.

If he . . .

If Jones . . .

He jerked his head away, and Jones’s lips grazed his cheek. When he turned back, any trace of softness in the man’s expression was gone.

Lord Mercury had intended his coupling with Jones to be a one-time aberration—a moment of weakness they could both pretend had never happened—but his will proved unequal to the task. Unlike his furtive, back-alley encounters, Jones could not be boxed away and ignored. He was there, present and inescapable, his clothed body a constant reminder of his naked one, even the most innocent movement of those big hands sufficient to reduce Lord Mercury to a quivering ruin of lust and need.

He always had to instigate.

Every single time, he told himself it would be the last.

But he came to pleasure like an opium addict to his pipe, and Jones broke him with ecstasy. Made him sob and scream and beg, utter the most unthinkable obscenities, disport himself with unspeakable wantonness. But he never held him again. Or tried to kiss him.

And it was never quite the same as that first afternoon.

2

Rosamond was not enjoying the ball.

Not that anyone would have been able to tell. She was too good for that.

It was not that there was anything wrong with the ball itself—unless one counted a regrettable lack of care with the guest list—but she had been to several balls, and they were all the same.

The dresses were the same.

The music was the same.

The guests were the same.

Sometimes the very idea of attending another ball—or another soiree, or another card party, or another opera—made her want to cry. But she had her pride. She danced, she smiled, she said the right things to the right people.

She was sure she was perfectly enchanting.

And she absolutely did not pay any attention to that dreadful Anstruther Jones. Of all the nerve. She enjoyed a private shiver of outrage at the man’s temerity.

Asking her to dance indeed.

But . . . why her?

She was not the richest debutante here, nor the most connected, nor—bleak candour forced her to concede—the most beautiful. And from across a room, one could not judge her perfect manners, her dulcet tones, her many ladylike accomplishments.

Nothing that would lead the most talked about man in Gaslight to single her out.

Unless he thought her the sort of woman easily swayed by a lot of money, and a few scraps of fame.

Well, he was mistaken. As he would surely discover to his cost. Somehow. In some way.

Perhaps when he saw that she was dancing with a marquess.

A proper southern marquess, who owned land, and a great estate, and could trace his line back twelve generations. Who knew nothing of factories, or airships, or industry.

That was the sort of man she could aspire to wed.

The sort of man it was her duty to wed.

Rich, noble, and—if she was fortunate—malleable. She had no wish of turning into her mother.

If she married the Marquess of Pembroke, perhaps he would take her to London. Perhaps the balls would be different there. Perhaps life would be different.

She glanced up at him from beneath her lashes. He was young, and handsome she supposed. Certainly younger and more handsome than the Phlogiston Baron.

Who had stood up with several, less discriminating ladies after she had turned him down. Not that she’d been watching.

He danced well. Unexpectedly so for such an impertinently large man. With ease rather than with grace, but there was something just a little thrilling about the way he moved.

Or not.

No. Certainly there was not.

But would it make one feel fragile to be held in such powerful arms? Or powerful too?

And fuck. The marquess was talking to her.

“Oh yes,” she breathed. “I am enjoying the ball so very much.”

“Quite,” he returned.

After a moment or two, she offered, “I think it is not too warm tonight.”

“Quite,” he returned.

That would probably do. She let her gaze slip past him to the other dancers, noting with some pleasure that Lady Mildred (Lord Copper’s second daughter) was wearing a deliciously ill-advised gown: blue silk taffeta trimmed with so much Chantilly lace that her bosom looked like a badly iced cake.

There was, however, no sign of Anstruther Jones.

Only his friend, Lord Mercury, who was standing by a potted palm, looking as bored and miserable as Rosamond felt.

Men were so fortunate. They could do that sort of thing, and everyone admired them for it. A grumpy-looking woman, however, was inelegant and inappropriate, and nobody would want to marry her.

Rosamond adjusted her smile. Deployed it briefly at the marquess.

Most of the other debutantes were in love with Lord Mercury. He had a lineage as old as Gaslight, and he was beautiful. Too beautiful for Rosamond’s comfort. What control could she possibly maintain over a husband who surpassed her?

When the dance was done, the marquess thanked her for the honour, and asked if she would like to walk with him a little.

“Oh yes,” she said again, “I would like that so very much.”

They walked.

“You dance divinely, Lady Rosamond.”

She had perfected several useful social arts over the years. She could cry prettily and swoon on demand, but she had never quite succeeded in mastering the blush. She dipped her head as though she were, which was almost as effective. “You are too kind.”

They walked a little more.

A breeze from the terrace rustled her flounces.

The marquess paused by the open doors. “Would you . . . It’s terribly forward of me . . . but would you care to take the air?”

It was, indeed, terribly forward, but the marquess’s attentions towards her had been quite marked. He always made a point of dancing with her, and he had called upon her twice. Twice. She couldn’t remember a single word he’d said—or anything she might have said back—but they’d been seen together, and that was the important thing.

She cast a swift glance round the ballroom, wondering if her absence would be noted. She knew she shouldn’t dally (or at least be observed dallying) with gentlemen on moonlit terraces, but she wasn’t going to let a marquess slip through her fingers for the sake of propriety.

That was how spinsters happened.

She faux-flushed—faushed, as they’d called it at Miss Githers’s Finishing School—again, and pretended to hesitate. “Perhaps . . . perhaps just for a few moments? It is rather stifling with so many couples . . . and I am a little faint.”

“Please, let me help you.”

Solicitously, the marquess guided her outside, and Rosamond took the opportunity to cling to his arm, allowing the edge of her skirts to brush very lightly against his legs. Once outside, however, she quickly revived. The line between sensitive and sickly was itself rather delicate, and men did not marry inconvenient women.

“That is much better.” She presented a dazzling smile, hoping the marquess would be able to admire it properly in the uncertain light.

“Quite,” returned the marquess.

Rosamond stifled irritation. Truth had lent her words an unseemly fervour, something she would have to be more careful with in future.

But it was much better. The ballroom had been hot and crowded, loud and bright, and it had reeked of sweat and phlogiston. The night was cool and empty, and smelled of jasmine and wood smoke. She stretched her neck—largely to demonstrate its swanlikeness—but was surprised to see a couple of brazen stars floating in the oily Gaslight haze.

“May I say,” went on the marquess, “how beautiful you look tonight?”

She did something charming with her fan. “I suppose you may.”

“You look very beautiful tonight.”

“Thank you, my lord. You are very kind.”

“Your gown is most becoming.”

“Oh . . . this little Parisian trifle? My dear mama picked it out for me.” Like hell she did. “I would not dream of having an opinion.”

He gazed at her, and she suddenly realised she had no idea at all what he was thinking. That she never had any idea what he was thinking.

It was . . . disconcerting.

She peered back at him, trying to see past the pattern of shadows that fell across his face, but his composure was a wall she couldn’t breach. His eyes revealed nothing except that he looked at her. His mouth was the place that dispensed his words. Perhaps it was simply the lack of the light, but just at this moment, the set of it troubled her. There was something not quite . . . kind about it.

“If I were to speak to your father, Lady Rosamond,” he said, “do you think you could perhaps rouse yourself to an opinion of my suite? I know it is a little precipitate, but you see, even in this short time, I have come to adore you. If you were to do me the honour of accepting my hand in marriage, you would make me the happiest of men.”

The dallying strategy had been far more successful than Rosamond had planned for.

She felt a little dizzy—genuinely dizzy. Surely she was supposed to feel joyous, or at the very least relieved. This was, after all, the moment she had been raised to engineer. This was the point of . . . of . . . well, everything.

The point of her.

He had said all the right things. Adore, honour & etc. He hadn’t knelt down, but his trousers looked expensive and the flagstones were probably cold.

Then why this . . . not even disappointment. This nothing.

She had prepared a speech. It was perfect.

And now she couldn’t remember any of it. “Y-yes.” She swallowed. “I will marry you.”

“I am delighted, Lady Rosamond.”

He stepped close and kissed her. Afterwards, he seemed to be expecting something, so she said, “Thank you. That was very nice.”

And, in response, his mouth did the thing she didn’t like.

He offered to escort her back to her mother, but she told him she preferred to wait a moment, so he bowed and withdrew. It was a little bit improper to be without a male escort at a ball, but she was afraid of drawing too much attention if they returned to the ballroom together. Of course, soon hers would be the name on everyone’s lips. She would be the future Marchioness of Pembroke, after all. But being the subject of gossip and the subject of attention were quite different things, and only fools didn’t recognise it.

And, truthfully, she wasn’t quite ready to smile and be perfect.

It was difficult to breathe, her corset pressing hard into her ribs with each too-shallow inhalation, and she felt achy, like she was coming down with a chill, except on the inside.

Just for a moment, she wanted to be alone in the darkness and the silence.

She gulped at the flower-scented air. Then she heard a rustling noise and spun round just in time to see Anstruther Jones emerging from the bushes, brushing leaves from his jacket, and holding a cheroot in one hand.

Her undergarments seemed to tighten round her like iron bands.

“Sir,” she squeaked, “a gentleman would have announced his presence.”

“And interrupt such a romantic scene?”

She had the distinct impression she was being mocked, but there was no malice in Jones’s eyes, nothing unreadable or confusing about his mouth. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I can see that.”

He came towards her across the terrace, his long shadow looming. For some reason, it didn’t frighten her. Perhaps she was simply too unsettled. She had thought him plain in the ballroom, and the moonlight did nothing to mask or gentle the irregularities of his face. It was confusing. Unhandsome men should surely repel attention, not arrest it.

And yet . . .

Or perhaps he was simply so ugly, she could not look away.

That did not entirely explain why she wanted to press her fingers to the cleft in his chin. Feel the bump at the bridge of nose. Slide her cheek against the rough edge of his.

She scowled. “It was a very creditable proposal.”

“It was. And a very nice kiss.”

“I would rather a nice kiss, than an un-nice one.” She wished she had something for her arms because his closeness was making her skin feel strange and prickly.

He relit his cheroot, cast the match aside, and blew a cloud of smoke into the still air. “No kiss should be nice.”

“And I suppose,” she asked with the haughtiest head toss she could manage, “you think you know all about kissing, do you?”

“Enough.”

A single word. And she couldn’t think of a single answer. After a moment or two, in which she felt hot and cold and cross all at once, she tried, “You know, you shouldn’t be smoking in front of me.”

He started guiltily. “Sorry, do you want one?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Do you want to?”

Nobody had ever asked her that. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to smoke—it looked odd and it was assuredly pungent—but the opportunity to do it was exciting. And still more exciting was the sweet, sudden liberty of being with someone you didn’t care about. Like her queer half brother, Anstruther Jones was beneath her and irrelevant to her. She didn’t give two hoots about him, and she wasn’t expected to. She didn’t have to think about pleasing him or impressing him or acting in a proper and ladylike fashion.

She could be whomever and do whatever she wanted. And right now she wanted to smoke a vile-smelling artefact. Because she could. “Yes,” she told him, and, without hesitation, he passed the cheroot to her. It felt unwieldy between her fingers, and even stranger against her lips.

“Don’t inhale.”

“But if I am not to inhale, what am I to do with it?”

He made an odd sound, not quite laughing, almost like a gasp. “Pull the smoke into your mouth, then let it out again.”

She did as directed, cheeks swelling and tongue burning as she struggled not to breathe or swallow. But it was worth it when she finally surrendered and the liberated smoke burst from between her lips in a thick, manly billow. She watched it dissipate into the night, felt oddly accomplished, and returned the cheroot to her mouth for another puff.

“Take care,” said Jones, smiling, “it’s a bad habit.”

“You mean unladylike?”

“No, just bad for you.”

“Then why do it?”

He shrugged. “Because it feels good.”

She handed back the cheroot, muttering, “Now I see why you have such extensive experience with kissing.”

But that only made him laugh. “Kissing is never bad for you.”

“What if you’re engaged to someone else?”

“Then—” he cast the smoking remains of the cheroot to the ground and stamped it out “—it’s their responsibility to kiss you properly.”

He was standing close enough to her now that the scent of wood and smoke and jasmine was drowning in the scent of him. Nothing she could quite describe—just the purity of skin—but somehow it made her tingle in unsuitable places. She tried to distract herself by looking at his lips instead: their generous, mobile curve, harsh and tender at the same time. “How will I know when I’ve been kissed properly?”

“Miss Wolfram—”

Heavens, but the man had no idea at all. “Lady Rosamond to you, sir.”

“Do you want me to kiss you?”

Her gaze swept up slowly to meet his eyes. Absurd, appalling creature, with his too-wide mouth and his too-long lashes, sun-streaked like his hair. “And what if I did?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “Arkady told me it was bad etiquette to ever say no to a lady.”

She didn’t really have time to wonder what it meant that he called Lord Mercury by such an intimate diminutive, because suddenly his body was pinning her against a trellis, and his frankly unnecessarily large hands were cupped against her jaw, his fingers sliding behind her ears into the tiny, shivering hairs left exposed by her clustered ringlets. Pleasure slid all the way down her spine, hot and cold and bright at once, and she heard herself make the oddest noise.

Strange things, in general, were happening to her body.

She felt heavy and light at the same time. And oddly . . . awake. As if every single bit of her was coming slowly alive, filling her with wildness and wild things, hissing snakes and clawing cats and hunger. Her hands reached for him almost instinctively, and so she rested them against his hips, relishing the taut, angular line of his flanks and waist. Her boredom-driven experiments at Miss Githers’s had lent her some appreciation for softer bodies, but this hard strength, she decided, was more to her natural taste.

Lifting her chin, she leaned all the way up his body—close enough to feel the hot, heavy thump of his heart through his clothes—and put her lips against his. His fingers tightened in her hair as though he couldn’t help himself. What a mess she was going to look when he was done, and it felt so good.

Power over a man. This man. So tall and strong and free.

Though his mouth was surprisingly gentle, sweet beneath the last traces of smoke.

The marquess had kissed her swiftly and quite hard, stamping her with his seal of ownership. Duty done.

But Anstruther Jones was in no rush to claim her.

He was . . . simply exploring her. Not conquest but seduction. And it was working.

She could feel the seam of her lips surrendering to nothing at all but the desire to draw him deeper, to have more of this. This and him, and everything. This spangling, restless joy that made her bold and rough and eager.

Things she had sensed, but only playacted at Miss Githers’s.

His tongue, at last, entered her, warm and supple and not invasive at all, but when she pushed back, he yielded back, and suddenly she was deep in his mouth, and oh, oh, it was hot in there, hot and soft, all clinging velvet. This secret, waiting place inside him, like delving into the heart of a fig. So different to his body, which was nothing but hard lines pressed against her, and his hands, one tight in her hair, the other splayed possessively over her back.

The width of his palms, the strength in his arms, the slowly developing crick in her neck all reminded her how big he was, how small she was in comparison. But she had been right in the ballroom: it didn’t make her feel fragile at all.

Especially not when he gasped. Then groaned. This deep, harsh, entirely unabashed sound. Lust and longing and all for her. Because of her. And she was left shivering like a harp string, tuned to a perfect note.

She never wanted it to end. Never wanted to play any song but this.

They kissed like signalmen, messages written in flame passed back and forth between them. And when at last they stopped, surely hours or possibly days later, it was all Rosamond could do not to dig her fingers into the top of his buttocks and drag him back for more.

Damn the man for being right.

Kissing was not supposed to be nice.

She drew in a few sharp, shallow breaths. She felt hot and squashed and dishevelled and . . . wonderful.

And she had left his lips all wet and shiny—hers hers hers.

He stepped away, leaving deep creases in her skirts, and smiled. Eyes never leaving hers. The dark slashes of his brows lifting devilishly. “You kiss by the book.”

Laughter—utterly unladylike, utterly unnecessary—burst out of her before she could moderate or suppress it, and she clapped a hand across her mouth, banishing the last traces of his taste, the echo of his stubble. “If that is true, sir—” she gathered what was left of her dignity as she pushed past him “—you must favour exceptionally improper literature. Good night.”

His answering laugh, just as warm as his embrace had been, curled around her as she made her escape.

3

Anstruther Jones was in a queer mood that night.

He accepted an invitation to Lord Mercury’s bed willingly enough, but once there, his behaviour was erratic at best. He was unnecessarily touchy, unnecessarily talkative, and kept trying to have Lord Mercury in positions in which he didn’t want to be had.

It was increasingly hard to tell if they were fucking or fighting. And, while there was something a little thrilling about being overpowered and wrestled onto his back by Jones, there were some kinds of surrender he absolutely could not—and would never—allow himself to give.

Jones’s grip tightened around his wrists. “Won’t you even look at me?”

Lord Mercury shook his head as best he could with his face hidden against his upper arm.

A sigh, and Jones let him go, cold spaces on Lord Mercury’s skin where his fingers had pressed. The bed springs creaked as he rolled away, and Lord Mercury opened his eyes to find the man sprawled out naked, his usually rather impressive cock limp between his legs.

“I’m done,” said Jones.

Lord Mercury groped for his dressing gown. He kept it close to the bed on the nights Jones visited. It was one thing to be naked when one fucked. Very much another to stay that way voluntarily, vulnerable and intimate with another man. “I thought you might be.”

“Why?”

“I saw you on the terrace with the Wolfram girl. Quite a seduction you mounted.”

Jones watched him with eyes washed silver in the half light Lord Mercury preferred for his assignations. “You won’t let me seduce you.”

“I’m a man. I don’t need to be seduced. I know what I want.”

“Really?” Something—sharp as lightning—flickered over Jones’s face. “Because I don’t think you have a bleedin’ clue.”

“Oh, go fuck your wife.” Lord Mercury got his arms into his dressing gown and swept rather magnificently off the bed.

He wasn’t entirely sure where he was going, since they were in his room, but away would serve his purposes adequately. Once he was alone, he could safely tend to whatever nonsense lay beneath his anger and felt too much like pain.

As he crossed the room, Jones caught him by the elbow and spun him round. There was purpose in the touch, but not violence. He should have looked ridiculous, standing there and still naked, but he didn’t.

And Lord Mercury should have pulled away, but he didn’t either.

“It’s not about fucking.” Like his hand, Jones’s voice was steady, certain. “It’s about family. Companionship.”

Lord Mercury flinched away from the look in the man’s eyes. “I told you, I am not your mistress, and I certainly can’t be your wife.”

“Would you? If you could?”

The silence was sudden and so deep it roared in Lord Mercury’s ears. “I . . . I . . . That is, such a thing would be impossible.”

“Why?” Jones’s hand slid down Lord Mercury’s forearm, until his fingers encircled his wrist, skin to skin. “You’re always telling me what you won’t, and aren’t, and can’t. I don’t know anymore if it’s me you’re ashamed of, or you.”

How could anyone be ashamed of Jones? Clever, fearless, laughing Jones.

Who Lord Mercury had tried so desperately to despise.

And instead . . .

“Men,” he said, wishing his voice was firmer, “do not form those kind of intimate relationships with other men.”

Jones reached out, claimed his other wrist, and Lord Mercury still wasn’t struggling. He let Jones press him to the back of the door. Pin his hands against the wood, their fingers all intertwined. “Just fuck them?” he asked.

“That’s merely an aberration of the body.”

Jones blinked.

“It means a pervers—”

“I know what it means.” There was an odd little silence, pulled tight somehow between them. “I’ve been to the deepskies, Arkady. I’ve seen—” he shook his head, and Lord Mercury felt the sweat gather on the man’s palms, turning his grip slippery “—things. Fact is, I’ve a sound notion about what’s aberrant, and what isn’t, and liking a cock in your body doesn’t even come close.”

Lord Mercury turned his head away, hiding his face in the prison of his upraised arms. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Say what I see? The only thing aberrant here is you not letting yourself have what you need.”

“I don’t need what you’re offering.”

“Is that so?”

There was a note in Jones’s voice Lord Mercury had never heard before. Something dark and hurt and ragged that frightened him far more than anger would have done. He felt the heat of the man’s breath graze his jaw, like the ghost of an ungiven kiss. It curled across his earlobe and spilled decadently down the exposed length of his throat, raising a telltale trail of goose bumps. He opened his mouth, hardly knowing what he was going to say, but all that emerged was a breathless moan, as shaky as his frantically beating pulse.

“Are you sure?”

Oh, how could he answer? He had never been more and less sure of anything in his entire life. All these things Jones said and did and took for granted, Lord Mercury had so long believed impossible—had refused to even let himself yearn for—that they were meaningless now.

Words spoken in another language.

Far easier to understand was the pressure of Jones’s fingers on his wrists. The carvings in the door digging into his spine. The familiar weight of the other man’s body. His own helplessness, the potent sickness of mingled desire and shame.

If Jones kissed him . . . If Jones kissed him like this, then it wouldn’t be . . .

Choice. It wouldn’t be a choice.

Lord Mercury let his body turn lax and supple in Jones’s grip.

Please. Please take this from me.

“Fuck this,” said Jones, letting him go so abruptly he almost slid to his knees. “I’m done with your games and your cowardice.”

He turned to gather up his scattered clothes, pulling them onto the body Lord Mercury had craved, and surrendered to, and barely dared to look at. Dazedly, he lowered his hands, and stared longingly after the long, clean sweep of Jones’s spine all the way to—

He gasped.

“Phlogiston burn.” Jones yanked up his trousers, hiding the mottled brown and white scarring that covered the left side of his body, and the top of his muscular buttocks.

That was another impossible thing: the idea that a man like Jones could be hurt. It had never occurred to Lord Mercury to touch much of Jones beyond his prick, but perversely, he wanted to touch that rough, ruined flesh. Soothe old pain with new pleasure.

When Jones faced him again, his eyes were splinters of broken sky. “Next time you want something from me, you can fucking ask.” He strode across the room and, when Lord Mercury wouldn’t move, leaned over him, light and shadow, and strength and hurt, and a mouth full of harsh shapes. “You can fucking beg.”

Lord Mercury slid slowly down the wall in a billow of brocade. He curled his hands into fists to hide their shaking. His face in his knees to hide that too.

He heard Anstruther Jones open the door.

Close it again.

He heard his footsteps recede.

4

Rosamond was not enjoying being engaged.

It had all the disadvantages of not being engaged—one was still expected to do the same sort of things and behave in the same sort of way—and the additional disadvantage of being expected, and therefore required, to spend more time with your intended. He visited her at home, escorted her to the park and the opera and the occasional ball.

They had, with great ceremony and much consultation, chosen a ring together.

He had not attempted to kiss her again.

His mother was apparently too frail to travel, so an uncle had formally welcomed her to the family. The engagement dinner had been a small and sober affair. And afterwards came many parties.

It was all rather disappointing. Her father should have been so pleased with her—she was going to be a marchioness, after all—but he was too busy turning Gaslight inside out and upside down looking for his half-Celestial bastard son.

Rosamond rebuked herself for having lacked the foresight to be born out of wedlock.

It was hard not to resent him . . . or whatever it was. Her half brother had told her once that he didn’t like being called him. That he didn’t feel it was who he was.

Rosamond would have given anything to be a boy.

Well, not to be a boy precisely. She very much liked her hair and her trim ankles and her tiny waist, and she had seen a sketch of the Elgin Marbles once, so she was aware that there were some respects in which boys were utterly ridiculous. She had no desire to contend with one of those drooping around inside her undergarments.

But if she had been a boy, she would have been sent to university instead of finishing school, and then on a Grand Tour, and she would have been able to run away whenever she fucking well wanted to.

And her father would have cared. Would apparently have torn the city apart for her.

She could run anyway, of course. But she had no skills and no money, and she suspected life for an unprotected gentlewoman might not be entirely full of the sort of adventures she wanted to have.

She sat curled in the window seat in the pink drawing room, watching the glinting reflection of her engagement ring in the glass. She didn’t like it. It was very proper, of course, very tasteful and expensive: a solitaire diamond for steadfastness and purity and other similar qualities she did not, in fact, possess or wish to possess. It was probably shockingly vulgar, but she had so wanted a garnet. A blood-red, shining garnet, as big as her fist.

She sighed.

Lady Wolfram’s unfocused gaze hovered over her briefly like a tsetse fly. “Ah,” she said, with her blank and bitter smile, “young love.”

And Rosamond had to try very, very hard not to hate her mother.

That evening she went to a card party, and even Lady Mildred’s dress—seafoam-green with five tiers of pink and yellow flounces—was insufficient to divert her.

Anstruther Jones was there as well. Not that she paid him any heed.

She saw him—or rather she ignored him—fairly often these days. He couldn’t gain admittance to the very best houses, of course, but his money and Lord Mercury’s patronage meant he was welcome at the sort of places that gave desultory card parties on a Wednesday evening.

She had overheard some of the other debutantes giggling about him. They agreed with her estimation that he wasn’t handsome, which—surely—should have been the end of the matter. But it wasn’t. It turned out there was much to be said on the subject of Anstruther Jones. At least as concerned his mouth. Eyes. Breadth of shoulders. Hardness of chest. Ripple of thigh as experienced when dancing.

“I heard,” Lady Mildred whispered, “there’s a word they use in the undercity, for when somebody isn’t comely but they make you . . . you know . . . fluttery on the inside.”

Rosamond rolled her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t spin in their sockets.

“What’s the word?” asked one of the other girls.

Lady Mildred put a hand to her mouth, and murmured coyly from behind it, “Likerous.”

Rosamand had to concede: whatever it meant, it sounded filthy.

And it suited Jones right down to the ground.

“But,” put in Lady Cynthia, “I thought that was a lozenge.”

“You stupid goose, that’s licor—”

At that moment they caught sight of Rosamond, and fell immediately silent, five faces set into blank stares.

“Personally,” she said, “I prefer fuckable.”

And glided away, with a toss of her ringlets.

Rosamond could have ruled those girls, just like at school, but she was heartsick and weary and couldn’t be bothered.

Let Mildred have her empire of slaves.

Eventually, Rosamond excused herself from loo and retired to a corner under the pretence of giving a wet damn about the latest edition of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. It was a strategic choice and meant she need not worry about looking bookish, but truthfully she found little pleasure in fiction anyway. What was the point of reading about other people’s lives? Especially if they were better people.

Especially if they had better lives.

She turned the pages at regular intervals and watched the room from beneath her lashes.

Dull dull dull dull dull.

Even the marquess’s two southern friends did little to enliven the tedium. They were loud and polished and laughing, but they spoke mainly to each other, and then in the cant that had apparently lately become all the rage in London—and so most of what they said was impenetrable anyway.

And Rosamond suspected—though she was no expert herself—nonsensical.

Eventually card games were abandoned and the conversation became general.

“I say, what what, my boff,” observed one of the marquess’s friends, “I hear chant that the Clockwork Circus is in town. Shall we bing it thence?”

The marquess sighed. “Must we? I fear it will be but tawdry amusement.”

In case he happened to look at her, Rosamond composed her expression into one of corresponding contempt.

Lady Mildred, however, seemed to have no conception of how foolish she would look gainsaying the taste of a marquess. “Oh no”—she clapped her hands with the sort of charming, girlish excitement all of Rosamond’s dedicated practice had failed to adequately replicate—“it is quite delightful, and perfectly respectable. My father used to take me when I was young. We would eat spun sugar and candied apples, and see all the marvellous things.”

Rosamond scowled into “Railway Magic.” Not a spike wrenched from its good hold, not a tie un-tied, not a timber splintered. Bah. Why should Lady Mildred, who had no sense and no chin—well, barely any chin—get to have spun sugar, candied apples, and marvels? She tried to imagine Lord Wolfram taking her to the circus, buying her trifles, holding her hand, laughing with her over some childish nonsense. But she couldn’t. It was nothing but a puppet show, a caricature, impossible.

“Lady Rosamond?”

It was Anstruther Jones’s voice that brought her abruptly back to the party. She just about managed to suppress a physical start, and then she was irritated. She told herself she was irritated at him, but, truthfully, she was irritated at herself for that momentary loss of control.

A weakness anyone could have seen.

And perhaps Jones already had. His eyes were intent upon her. She would almost have preferred it if she had seen contempt, or triumph, or something. But there was only warmth, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking and how she felt.

“I beg your pardon?” she said icily, as though she hadn’t been distracted, and he was simply beneath her notice.

“I said, ‘Will you be joining us?’”

Joining them? They were going to the circus?

Something perilously close to excitement unfurled within her ruthlessly guarded heart. It would be . . . a change. A break. An escape. Something new to see and do.

And fuck Lord Wolfram. She could enjoy candied whatever-it-was and all the other things perfectly well on her own. She didn’t need him.

When she was marchioness, she wouldn’t need anyone.

Lady Mildred tittered. “Our darling Rosie is far too refined for such girlish pleasures.”

Oh, that odious bitch. Rosamond’s eyes narrowed wrathfully, but she was double, triple, maybe even quadruple trapped. The marquess had already made his opinion of the circus very clear. If she expressed enthusiasm now, she would not only imply she lacked refinement, but her future husband would most likely think less of her. It was, after all, her role to agree with him—at least in public. “I have no wish to go anywhere without the marquess.”

“I could escort you.” Anstruther Jones. His face the picture of innocence, the hint of laughter in the curve of his lips anything but.

There was an excitingly tense silence.

“That is unnecessary, sir,” returned the marquess, in the same tone of voice Rosamond imagined the hero of a novel might say name your friends, “as I will be escorting my betrothed.”

Rosamond ducked her head modestly.

But, privately, she was glowing. Take that, Mildred.

She was going to the circus after all. And the marquess, who usually treated her with a detached courtesy, was oddly attentive for the rest of the evening, barely straying from her side for a moment.

She knew enough of the world to recognise it for what it was: pure possessiveness. But she did not think one would wish to possess something one did not value, and so she fully intended to make the most of it.

She watched Jones slyly as the marquess draped her stole over her shoulders. She had enjoyed kissing him very much indeed—and thought about it often, most particularly when she was alone and sleepless, her hands idly touching the secret places of her body—but kissing was not freedom, or a place in society.

Kissing was not a future.

It was just . . . kissing.

She had thought his attentions—his obvious interest in her—would prove a disadvantage. But she was starting to think perhaps the opposite was true.

Perhaps he would be useful to her, after all.

5

Rosamond was not enjoying the Clockwork Circus.

She had been daydreaming about gleaming sunlight and rainbow tents, gasping crowds and magical sights.

But it was not like that at all.

Even the small dark pleasure she could have derived from doing something of which she knew her father would not have approved was swallowed up by the smog and drizzle, and the grimy reality of a sodden field and a scattering of sideshow tents, as garish as toadstools through the greyish haze. The big top itself squatted at the centre, its red and white flags crackling and snapping in the wind, and the air was sticky-sweet with roasting chestnuts and mulling wine, toffee and cinnamon and sugar. It should have contributed to a festival atmosphere, but it only churned her stomach.

Despite the weather, there was a sizeable crowd—mainly, at this time of day, the middle class, the idle, and the itinerant. Rosamond, prey to a strange restlessness that was too ambiguous to be hope, had dressed with special care that morning in a gown of dark-green moiré silk with Pagoda sleeves and a green-and-gold fringe. And now she was jostled, dishevelled, and muddy, and nobody seemed to care how fashionable and pretty she was. It was noisy too, the incessant babble around her blending into the harsh cries of the touts and the grinders, and beginning to give her a headache.

The rest of her party, however, seemed to be experiencing no such adversity. Everyone seemed so terribly gay, and that just made her feel awkward and uncomfortable and strange on top of everything else. As if she was missing whatever internal part was required for happiness.

Perhaps Lord Wolfram was not the sticking point of her imaginings.

Perhaps she was.

She had gazed, occasionally, at the image of herself reflected by the family portrait that hung by the stairs: a grave little girl, pristine in white lace, her pastel eyes revealing absolutely nothing.

She peeped up at her future husband. He merely looked bored.

How eerie it was, to be amid so many people, and to be so utterly alone.

She found herself looking for Anstruther Jones, but he had gone off somewhere with Lady Mildred. They were probably laughing together, and he would be looking at her with all that smouldering intensity and unexpected tenderness.

They should wed. Neither of them could likely hope for better and with her family (moderate) and his wealth (excessive), everyone would say it was a fine match.

And then Lady Mildred would have all his kisses.

They made an aimless circuit of the sideshows. In one tent was a flock of flying monkeys, who chittered and shrieked, and swooped about, occasionally snatching up a gentleman’s hat or tangling their claws in a lady’s hair. In another, stood a clockwork elephant, fashioned of leather and brass, who swayed his trunk and flapped his ears when his key was wound. His eyes were slowly turning cogs, from which the lubricating oil dripped like tears.

In a third—“Beware, gentle ladies, children, and those of a nervous disposition”—secured by heavy chains, a maddened thing. A writhing mass of flesh and metalwork, with eagle claws, and cloven feet, and three heads—goat, snake and lion—that would sometimes turn and savage each other. Its horns had been sanded down, the snake de-fanged, and the lion’s teeth carefully blunted, but its misshapen body was a ruin of scars, suppurating wounds, and flaking rust.

Rosamond was about to throw pride to the wind, and beg the marquess to take her home when a warbly fanfare sounded, and she found herself being hustled into the big top by rather rough-looking gentlemen. The rest of the party were already inside, and she had no choice but to manoeuvre her skirts between the tiered wooden benches and squash up next to Lady Mildred.

She wished the marquess would say something to her.

And she was not quite so reduced in circumstances that she was ready to contemplate engaging Mildred in conversation.

It was a fairly large space, but over-warm from all the bodies in close proximity to each other, and being under canvas made her feel slightly stifled. It gave the light a reddish tinge. She watched it saturate her gloves like a stain.

At last came another fanfare, a drumroll, and a man stepped into the centre of the ring. He looked, Rosamond thought, like a jolly sort of uncle, with a curling, auburn moustache and bright blue-green eyes that seemed to be twinkling at her all the way across the tent. He had a tall hat and tall boots, both very shiny, and a scarlet coat trimmed in gold.

He lifted his hands in welcome. “Ladies, gentlemen, and children of all ages, I am the Brass Alchemist and this is my Clockwork Circus.” His smile flashed, as white as a crescent moon. “In this very ring, you will witness wonders such as the world has never seen nor dreamed possible. Miracles of biometallurgy, marvels of neuropneumatics, phantoms and chimeras, the stuff of nightmare and legend brought to material and articulated life before your very eyes. Ladies, gentlemen, children, I give you Icarus, the Winged Man.”

As one they looked towards the roof, and there, standing on a narrow platform, was the slender shadow of a man. He spread his arms, and leapt, his body drawn tight as an arrow.

Rosamond nearly choked on her own breath.

She heard someone else scream.

With a crack and grind of metal, brass wings unfolded from the man’s back, pulling him from his plummet a bare moment before he hit the ground. He hovered above the crowd, a man-made angel, gold, silver, and skin.

He was so beautiful that Rosamond nearly forgot her disquiet.

But as he swept into a spin, she saw beneath his wings the ruin of his back, the deep scars and mutilated muscle.

His blood and sweat soaked the sand as he flew.

And the applause was rapturous.

Other acts followed: The strong man Samson, who bent metal bars and lifted audience members with arms reinforced by hydraulic pistons. Leda and her Swans, dancers who had the shapes of women beneath their grafted feathers. And Medusa, the snake charmer, whose hair was a tangle of hissing serpents. Clockwork clowns, a centaur, a minotaur, a lamia, four part-mechanical horses the Brass Alchemist called the Mares of Diomedes, who circled the ring at a gallop, steam jetting from their noses, oil shining on their flanks. Their trainer harnessed them together, made them rear on command, and extend their forelegs as though they bowed to him.

Rosamond wished she had not come. There were no marvels here, only prisoners.

When finally it was over and the money collected, and they were permitted to file out of the big top, she thought she had never been so glad for cold air and rain.

“How did you enjoy the circus?” asked the marquess. It was a perfectly innocent question, she knew that, and his manner was perfectly conciliatory. But his eyes were so cold, his mouth so thin.

She mustered a flimsy excuse for a smile. “It was charming, but I . . . I think I should like to go home.”

“Whatever you wish, my love.”

She let go of his arm and picked up her skirts, just wanting to get away. Away from him, and the way he looked at her, away from Lady Mildred and Anstruther Jones (who would soon be kissing), and away from the Clockwork Circus, and all its trapped and broken things.

It was unladylike to move at the pace she was moving, but fuck that, fuck everything. She skirted the edge of the big top, scrambling over the ropes, heading for the marquess’s carriage as quickly and directly as she could.

And that was when she heard the scream.

Not a human sound—it was beast and metal—but she recognised pain, she recognised fury. She rounded a corner, running now, in time to see the horse trainer struggling with one of his steeds. The black, the grey, and the chestnut had already been secured in their boxes, but the gold was fighting every step of the way, teeth bared and eyes rolling, the struts and rivets standing out on her straining neck.

She reared up, and the trainer jumped aside, snarling curses Rosamond was rather glad she could not decipher. He was holding something that looked a little like a riding crop, except it was considerably thicker and made of metal but for the handle. As he lifted it, she saw it glow red. Then he brought it crashing down.

The horse screamed again, and bucked frantically, deep black scorch marks streaking her flanks.

“Stop!” Rosamond hardly recognised her own voice. She had never in her life spoken so immoderately, so heedlessly. “You’re hurting her!”

But the trainer’s attention slid past her as though she were nothing. “Get out of here.”

Perhaps she ought to have taken the warning, but her ears were still ringing with the sound of pain, and all she wanted to do was make it stop.

Take a little hurt from the world. Do something that mattered.

She rushed forward, and made a grab for the trainer’s arm, but he was taller, stronger, unhindered by skirts, and dodged her easily. It reminded her of the way her elder brother used to taunt her, holding her things out of reach because it apparently made him laugh to remind her that she was powerless.

So she did now as she had done then.

She stamped on the man’s foot, as hard as she could. He howled, staggering, and she slipped past, putting herself bodily between him and the horse.

A foolish plan, she would later chide herself, to say nothing of physically dangerous.

Rosamond could hear the animal’s anxious weaving, her hooves thudding on the wet grass, and her heavy, panicky breaths, the click and grind of metal parts. But she didn’t bite or kick or lash out, and when Rosamond reached up to touch her neck, she seemed to calm.

She was hot to touch. A faint thrum running through skin and steel alike. Her eyes were the colour of mercury, pricked here and there by red and black, and the spittle that flecked her mouth, like the sweat that streaked her body, was mottled black.

She was monstrous. Unlovely.

And Rosamond felt strangely protective of her.

“Out of my way, you daft scab.” The trainer came towards her, step by swaggering step, in no hurry, because bullies—secure in violence, ignorance, and hate—never were.

It was hard not to shrink from him on instinct alone, a purely animal response to a perceived threat, but Rosamond would be damned before she showed anyone fear. She did not think he would dare to strike her, not in public at least. And she knew some other places men were vulnerable to a well-placed boot. “Stay where you are.” Bold words, but her voice wavered. “I will not let you hurt this creature. I . . . I am the daughter of Lord Wolfram of Gaslight, fiancée to the Marquess of Pembroke.”

The trainer just grinned, showing teeth both black and gold.

And that was when she realised just how alone she was.

She put up a hand as if she could ward him off by pure social superiority. “Sir, I warn—”

His hand closed around her wrist. A cruel tug sent her sprawling into the mud in a flurry of silk and petticoats.

And that was it.

That was all the threat he thought she posed.

It made her furious. Rudeness, anger, even manhandling she could—to a degree—tolerate. But underestimating her? Never!

She kicked out, hooked her foot round his ankle and brought him crashing down. He spat out grass and curses, which was—she had to admit—a little bit entertaining. But he was on his feet before she could untangle her hoop, and when he was standing over her, wielding a rod of still-smouldering metal, her moment of triumph seemed as flimsy as it had been fleeting.

Also the squishy bits between his legs were out of rage.

She pulled back her foot, just in case, but then he kicked her—he actually kicked her—hard in the ribs. Thank heavens for steel boning, but it still hurt.

It hurt in a humiliating way. A sharp, red pain that left her breathless and aching and small.

“Not so uppity now, you little—”

She told herself she could not have warned him even had she wanted to as a hoof slammed into the back of his head. He toppled face-first into her lap. Lay very still indeed.

The horse came slowly forward, lowered her head, and nosed curiously at her trainer. Then she ripped his arm off.

Rosamond waited a moment to see if she was the sort of woman to swoon at the sight of blood—for there was quite a lot of it, as well as other more generic gore—but, apparently, she was not.

The horse blinked down at her with its liquid, long-lashed eyes. Strips of flesh were hanging from between the creature’s teeth.

“Gracious,” said Rosamond. Her gown was quite ruined.

A new shadow fell across her, oddly cold, its edges as rough as a charcoal sketch. The horse stilled, every joint and muscle tight, like a mouth stretched in a scream. Some deeper chill went through her. She twisted, and there was the ringmaster. He smiled his wide, white smile.

“My dear young lady,” he said, “you seem to be in a bit of a pickle.”

Rosamond stuck out her chin because that was what they did in the novels. “This gentleman, who I believe to be in your employ, was . . . was mistreating . . . your . . . your . . .”

“My creation,” he finished for her. “Everything here is mine.”

“Well, I don’t think they should be hurt.”

“Pain is nothing more than the by-product of art.”

Rosamond was starting think the Brass Alchemist was not quite sensible. She nodded at the armless, partially decapitated corpse still lying in her lap. “I believe this man may need a doctor.”

“I will see to him. My talents far exceed mere medicine.”

“How lovely for you. You know, I think I should be going. My betrothed—he is the Marquess of Pembroke—and all his friends, for we came as a large party, will be wondering what has happened to me.”

She pushed at the body, but it had a clammy solidity that at once faintly nauseated her and made it difficult to move.

She supposed this what they meant by deadweight.

And the ringmaster was still smiling at her. “Rare are the opportunities to practice at the limit of my art. My dear, I owe you my gratitude.”

“Oh no!” Rosamond attempted a light laugh that came out like a cat being squeezed. “You don’t owe me a thing. In fact, if you were just to help me up . . .”

“You are a very interesting young lady.” He lowered himself onto his haunches. Up close, his coat and his eyes made her dizzy. “In my hands, all flesh is mercury, all matter mutable, all dreams possible. Tell me—” his smile surrounded her, unwavering “—what is it you dream of?”

She could have told him. It would have been so easy just then to empty everything into the blue-green nowhere of his eyes. But Rosamond had been hoarding her dreams her whole life. “The same as everyone else, I expect.” She fluttered her lashes. “A kind husband, children, a home of my own.”

His mouth was suddenly full of sharp teeth. “If you’re not careful, you’ll get them.”

Rosamond flinched away from him, wondering if now would be a good time to start screaming. Given she had already been in a fight, and there was a man—albeit a deceased one—on top of her, the case for abandoning propriety seemed to be a strong one.

She drew in a deep breath. If she was going to yell like a fishmonger at market, she was going to do a good job of it.

“Hel—”

At which point, her entire party came round the side of the big top.

She experienced a moment of profound and excruciatingly disconnection: seeing herself through their eyes—through the marquess’s eyes—on the ground, covered in blood, skirts everywhere, mouth hanging open as though to admit passing traffic.

She hastily closed it.

“Rosamond?” Anstruther Jones broke from between Lady Mildred and the marquess. “Bloody hell, what’s happened?”

She was not pleased to see him. She was not pleased to see him. She was not pleased to see him.

Or, even if she was, it was purely circumstantial. She should have been equally happy to see anyone who wasn’t staring at her as if she were a rat at a dinner party. “Lady Rosamond to you, sir.”

He was laughing, but there was a shaky edge of relief to it, as he pulled away the body, and lifted her onto her feet. She wobbled a little—purely gravitationally; she was fine—and he put an unseemly arm round her waist to steady her.

The Brass Alchemist rose with regal grace. The horse shied, steam jutting from her nostrils. His hand snapped out, caught the lead rope, and drew it tight. Rosamond stared into blood-and-silver eyes, full of pain and hate and pleading, and saw her own reflection.

“What is the meaning of this?” The marquess’s voice cut thin and sharp across her somewhat disordered nerves.

She pulled abruptly away from Jones. “It’s . . . it’s not what it looks like. He . . . They . . . they were hurting her.”

“Hurting whom?”

“The . . . the horse.” She sounded shrill and childish. Frightened. And she hated herself for it.

Mildred tittered in the silence.

The ringmaster adjusted the jaunty angle of his hat, unfurled his avuncular smile. “My lords, ladies, this is the merest misunderstanding.”

“I very much hope so,” returned the marquess. The words were for the Brass Alchemist, but his heavy-lidded eyes never left Rosamond.

She shivered. Then realised she couldn’t stop shivering. She gripped her elbows tightly, trying to bring her wayward body back under control.

Movement at her side. It was Jones, pulling off his coat. And the next thing she knew, he had flung it across her shoulders. It was an awful thing, heavy and made of—she thought—oilcloth, but it covered the mess she was in, and it was so blissfully warm.

It smelled a little of him too, reminding her of the shape of his body, the taste of his mouth. Real, solid, lovely things. Nothing like this.

It was wrong, she knew it was, but she drew Anstruther Jones’s coat tightly around her, and felt a little like herself again.

“My lord,” she said. “I will not stand idly by while this animal suffers.”

“Suffering is not your concern, my lady. Come, I will take you home.”

He held out his hand and she stared at it blankly. “Please. You must—”

“I must do absolutely nothing. We are leaving.” And, with that, he turned on his heel and walked away.

Leaving Rosamond frozen in mingled outrage and uncertainty. She had no wish to run after him like a child, but she had already made a spectacle of herself once today. She had no wish to compound it by flagrantly disregarding her fiancé in public. She was sure engagements were broken for far less than that.

Having secured a marquess, if she got herself jilted by a marquess, her life would be over. But what was the use of being a marchioness if you could do . . . nothing?

Less than if you weren’t.

Later, she would deny the instinct that made her look to Jones. Her faith in him. At the time, she was too shocked to really notice. And, more pressingly still, in the confusion and her distress, she had somehow forgotten that in giving his coat to her, he had been obliged to remove it.

Which meant he was . . . he was . . . in his shirtsleeves.

She had never seen a man in such a state of undress before.

But there he was, in broad daylight, with nothing but clinging cotton between her eyes and the bare skin of his arm. She could see the shape of his muscles. The indentations between them that seemed designed to fit her fingers.

She somehow managed to work her way up to his eyes. Found them gentle.

“He’s right,” he said softly. “This is no place for you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” She whirled round, and pointed at the blackened streaks upon the horse’s flank. “They were hurting her. And I wish to see it stopped.”

The oddest, sweetest smile tugged at the corners of Jones’s mouth. “I’ll make sure of it.”

And even odder and sweeter still, she believed him.

The carriage ride home was undertaken in silence.

She was summoned to her father’s study the next day. In the afternoon. Presumably because he was too busy in the morning to call her a disgrace to the family.

It was a lecture with which she was already acquainted. She had heard him deliver it to her half brother once, but she had never expected to be its recipient. She was so careful. She tried so hard. She did everything right. Why couldn’t he see that?

Why couldn’t he see her?

She tried to let the speech wash over her—not what he expected of his daughter, inappropriate, thoughtless, unbecoming, an act of unthinkable wilfulness that had brought shame on her parents and jeopardised her prospects of making an advantageous match—but it was no use. His father’s words stuck in her like porcupine quills, and they hurt.

They hurt a lot.

And she hated it. She wanted to be angry. It would have felt so much better to be angry. A cold blue flame burning inside her, keeping her safe and untouchable, instead of what she was, which was small and pathetic, and on the verge of tears.

As she was making her way back to her room—comporting herself with the composure that befitted a lady—a footman approached her with a letter. She had not seen the rough, bold scrawl before, but she recognised it nevertheless. She knew only one man who would write so carelessly. Who wouldn’t realise his hand presented him as vulgar, untutored, and practically illiterate. Someone to be despised.

All it said was: Come riding with me tomorrow—AJ.

She had declined his calling card. (He had kissed her at a ball.) She had no place accepting his invitation. But accepting the invitation of an unsuitable man would make her feel strong—wilful, as her father had claimed—in a way that crying in her room most certainly would not.

It was an act, of course. But what else did she have?

So she said yes.

It was only Anstruther Jones, but she wore her favourite riding habit anyway. It was navy cashmere, with an elongated jacket one shade lighter, fitted tight to the waist and flaring over the hips. It was trimmed in the military style, in dark-blue silk, and it made her feel . . . wonderful. Invincible.

At the appointed time, she settled her top hat over her hair, tucked her cane under her arm, and swept downstairs to meet Jones. He was waiting for her in the courtyard with two horses, one a soft-eyed bay, no doubt suitable for a lady, and the other . . .

“Oh!” She could not quite hold back her shock, her joy. “You bought her?”

Jones grinned, broad and ridiculous. “Aye. Xanthos is her name.”

Xanthos. The golden horse from the Clockwork Circus. She gave a whinny of something that might have been recognition, and Rosamond reached up to stroke her neck, a gloved hand gliding over that strange, unnatural patchwork of metal and flesh. Surely she should have been sickened, or at the very least apprehensive. She had, after all, seen this animal tear a man’s arm from his body. But she wasn’t. She simply wasn’t.

Maybe it was because she was strange and unnatural too.

“She can be ridden?” she asked.

“Not by me she can’t,” returned Jones, laughing. “I wouldn’t dare.”

What a peculiar man he was. Rosamond cast him a rather scornful look. “You’re frightened of horses?”

“I wouldn’t say frightened. There aren’t very many of them in the undercity or up in the blue.”

“Do you mean to tell me, sir, you expect me to ride her? Are you not even the slightest bit concerned I may be unable to control her? That I could suffer some fall or fright or injury?”

He shrugged. “Are you?”

Rosamond knew herself to be an excellent horsewoman. It was the only one of her accomplishments from which she derived any pleasure. “No.”

“Then why would I be?”

She was sure there was an obvious retort, but she was unable to work out what it might be. “Help me up,” she said, instead.

He cupped his hands for her and lifted her easily into the saddle. Xanthos stood steady. Oddly calm for a creature that reeked of blood and oil and burned hot beneath her. She gathered up the reins and pressed her leg against the animal’s side, urging her to move. And, to Rosamond’s surprise, she did.

It was like, and not like, riding a living horse. The motion was similar, but the sense of power was greater. She felt not the tightening of muscle, but the shift of metal parts, the creak of clockwork and the pulse of pistons.

Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary.

It made her almost want to laugh.

Jones had mounted and come up—carefully—alongside. He did not look well in the saddle at all, hunched and awkward, bundled in his coat.

She might have laughed at that, too, but she was moved by an impulse of benevolence, and didn’t.

“Where are we going? To the park?”

“How about Ashworth?”

“Sir, one might think you wished to get me alone in some secluded woods.”

“You’re riding a half-mechanical marvel that eats only raw flesh. I’m sitting on an elderly lady called Sandy. If anybody’s getting left on their own in the woods, it’s me.”

And now she really did laugh. She couldn’t help herself. “But aren’t you ashamed?” The question slipped out before she could prevent it.

“That I wasn’t born rich? That I didn’t grow up like you, or people like you? No.”

There was no rebuke in his voice. If anything, it was as kind as she had ever heard it. But she blushed regardless. She had always known that she was better than some people, and not as good as others, but she had never before realised how arbitrary it was, the flimsy tissue of wealth and position and circumstance and history. She almost wanted to apologise, but that would have made her look weak. “What if I think less of you for it?”

“You’ve already told me I’m not good enough for you.”

“Well, it’s true.” It was meant to sound dignified, but it came out huffy.

And made him smile again. (How white his teeth were in that sun-weathered face.) Damn him.

They walked on in silence. Or, at least, as close to silence as they could manage with the clopping of hooves and the clanking of steel.

People were staring at Rosamond. Moving hastily out of her way. It ought to have made her feel uncomfortable. It was not good attention. But she found she liked it. Knowing they were afraid of her and her monstrous steed.

Though Anstruther Jones, apparently, was not.

“Why are you so nice to me?” she heard herself say.

Oh God, what was happening? What was she thinking?

“Because I like you.”

For some obscure reason, she was disappointed. She had somehow come to rely on the idea that he was not the sort of man to lie. “How . . . how can you possibly like me? I have been grossly unpleasant to you.”

“You were honest. I liked that. I know you don’t want my money.”

She was unsettled, not so much by him, but herself. But enough was enough. “On the contrary, I want your money very much. It’s you I wish to dispense with.” She tried to give him an arch look, but so much of his concentration was focused on his horse that he entirely missed it, which was a shame.

“You didn’t seem to be dispensing with me that time you kissed me.”

Oh, outrageous! She was going to tell him it had been a mistake—he certainly deserved to be told such a thing—but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to utter the lie. “Well, you have some facility in that area.”

He laughed, and she thought about kissing him again. Feeling the shape of his smile against her mouth.

“Tell me what else you like about me,” she said.

“You’re spoiled,” he offered, after a moment, “proud, headstrong, stubborn, a little unkind.”

“And this is why you like me?”

“Yes.”

“You are very blunt, sir.”

“I am.”

“And vulgar and uncouth.” And kind, and likerous, and strong and clever and and and . . . “I think I should like to gallop now. Do try to keep up.”

They had reached the edge of the Ashworth Valley, a slender ribbon of green around which Gaslight sprawled black, grey, and brown. Sometimes Rosamond’s governesses had brought her here to practice her watercolours. She had only been permitted to paint the decorous scenes, the gentle slopes and the pretty hills, but she liked best the scarlet woods in autumn and the hidden waterfalls that thrashed between glistening black rocks.

She urged her horse into an easy canter and from there faster, and faster still, until they were galloping, the world falling away beneath Xanthos’s long, hard strides. It was such a visceral thing, the way the wind bit at her cheeks and ruffled her skirts, the wild scattering of leaves in their wake, the crack of branches, and the jolting thud of hooves. Her heart leapt and her breath caught at the sheer, shocking speed.

Not effortless, this power, not graceful, or beautiful. She could feel it gathering, working, struggling almost. The grate and grind of metal. The clicking of an artificial heart. And, just then, it didn’t seem like less, or imitation, or even limitation. It was triumph and freedom and hers.

She was Prometheus. And this was stolen fire.

Ever burning.

She had no idea how long or how far they galloped. Xanthos was tireless, her steps unfaltering, her pace never slowing. It was Rosamond, in the end, who reined her in, and that was only because the path had grown too steep and narrow to be navigated so quickly.

Excellent horsewoman, yes. Foolish, certainly not.

They followed the grey-blue brook as it wound its way past abandoned paper mills and lumber factories, these moss-covered remnants of Gaslight’s fairly recent past. The light was silver-edged as it slid through the trees, spreading its dusty glister over the water. And, finally, there was the waterfall, smaller than she remembered, skittering restlessly over a haphazard pile of algae-slick stone, rushing past her in a flurry of silky white.

She dismounted, looping the reins over an overhanging branch. Xanthos nuzzled at her with a rough, metal-bridged nose, and Rosamond stroked her, murmuring rather self-consciously about what a fine horse she was, so fast and strong and lovely. No matter what anyone else might think.

Then embarrassment got the better of her, and she headed a little way upstream, looking for somewhere she would watch the waterfall and wait for Anstruther Jones. She realised she was glad she had never tried to paint this. Its beauty was in its motion, its transience, the fact that every moment belonged only to itself, and then was gone forever.

She found a rocky ledge that was not too damp or dirty, and sat down on it, folding her skirts over her arm and tucking up her feet so that her boots didn’t get splashed. She was thinking about Jones and how strange it was to be liked for being unlikeable. For all the things she wasn’t supposed to be.

It made rather a nonsense of her entire life.

But, on the other hand, it felt so wickedly good, she could hardly resent it. And she wanted to be kissed again. For being Rosamond. By the uncouth, vulgar, horrible commoner who saw her.

It was a good twenty minutes before Jones joined her on the rock. What she nearly said was I would like to be kissed now. But she just about managed to be rude instead. “You took your time.”

“If it’s my pride or my neck, my neck is going to win every time. Enjoy your run?”

Rudeness faltered in the face of undeniable gratitude. “Oh yes. She’s perfect. The best of horses. Thank you for . . . for . . . saving her. I can’t . . . That is . . . Thank you.”

Good heavens, now she was blushing? How insanely infuriating. It was the last thing she wanted.

Jones shrugged. “I did it for you. She’s yours.”

“Sir, I couldn’t possibly.”

“Don’t you want her?”

Yes. “It wouldn’t be proper.”

“Why not?”

“A lady not does accept gifts from a gentleman who is not her husband or a member of her family. People would think I was your mistress.”

He made the oddest sound, almost a laugh, but too sad. “Not you as well.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me neither. People keep saying that to me.”

She didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Why?” she asked, coldly. “Are you in the habit of giving inappropriate gifts to other ladies?”

“No. No gifts.” Jones stared at the water, his eyes full of its reflections. “He was a friend.”

Rosamond’s mind whirled. He? A friend?

Then: Arkady told me.

Memory snapped into place. Images in a fresh context. The way Lord Mercury’s eyes rarely strayed from Jones. The way they stood together, moved together, unspoken intimacy in all the spaces between them. Touching in all their nontouching.

So why the fuck had he kissed her?

She swallowed fury. Bitterness. Betrayal she surely had no right to feel.

“Well.” She was proud of the steadiness of her voice. “You are one of those men who prefer men.”

“Not prefer, no.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means up in the blue you don’t turn away love. However it comes.”

“Even if it is wrong?”

“How can love be wrong?”

“Perhaps,” she snapped, “if one was kissing one person when one had already given one’s heart to another.”

There was a long silence. Jones picked up a pebble and skimmed it across the stream: one, two, three, plop. “Arkady has never wanted my heart.”

Rosamond scowled. She had intended to be very cross with him, and now she didn’t want to be. Couldn’t be. Not when he sounded so very . . . hurt. “Why ever not?”

“He doesn’t believe a man can feel for a man the way a man can feel for a woman.” He glanced at her and grinned. “And don’t sound so surprised, sweet Ros. You don’t want my heart either.”

“Lady Rosamond, if you please. And I have a sensible reason.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Well, there’s the fact you’re a commoner, and I am a lady. There’s my duty to my family. There’s . . . there’s . . . other things that are very important.”

“And happiness?”

“I’m sure I shall be terribly happy when I am a marchioness.”

“I hope so. But I still think you’re making a mistake.”

She stiffened. “Why is that?”

“Because if you married me, you’d also get a carnivorous horse.”

The mingling of their laughter felt strangely intimate. As natural as the splash of water over stone.

“You’ll just have to take care of her for me.”

“I will,” he said, grave again.

They were quiet awhile, Rosamond tossing stones idly into the pool. After a moment or two, Jones passed her a handful of smooth, flat pebbles and showed her how to make them fly across the water. It was childish sport, but she found it satisfying and grew rather accomplished at it. Her greatest attainment was seven consecutive bounces, though Jones maintained it was six because the final one barely arced at all.

“Why aren’t you frightened of anything?” It was something she had often privately wondered as she watched him (not that she watched him, most certainly she did not), but she had never imagined she might have the opportunity to discover his secret. She rather hoped it might be something simple. Something she could use herself.

“Only madmen and monsters aren’t frightened of anything.”

“But you don’t care what other people think.”

“I care what some people think.” He glanced her way, eyes holding hers for a moment, unflinching. “I don’t want to be alone.”

So she flinched for him. It was such a blunt, naked thing to say. “What do you mean?”

“There hasn’t been much room in my life for companionship. I want to know what home feels like again.”

Rosamond’s time had been spent mainly in Gaslight and a little bit at finishing school. “Does it feel like anything?”

Jones nodded. “Yes. You always know.”

She thought of her father’s house. Grandeur and the scent of roses. A library where nobody read now that her half brother had fled. “What’s it like?”

“It’s been a long time. Not since I was a nipper, back when my mothers were still alive.”

“Your mothers?”

“Aye, whores both of them. Raised me right though. Never doubted love or happiness or what family meant till the dustlung took them.”

Rosamond didn’t know what to say. All she could think of was, “I’m sorry,” but it seemed so hideously banal she barely saw the point of uttering it. The reality of his life was very distant just then, whoever and whatever had made him who he was, this man who had come from nowhere and made a fortune from the sky. It was hard to imagine he had ever been young or uncertain. Harder still to understand the things that drove him, must have driven him still: ambition, loss, poverty. Things she had never known.

She climbed off the rock and walked slowly away from the waterfall. The leaves turned under her feet, cracking like carapaces, fresh red flashing from beneath their dull-gold backs.

She didn’t want to go home.

Anstruther Jones fell into step beside her, hands in his pockets. “Did I do it after all?” he asked. “Make you think less of me?”

She stopped, turned, closed the sliver of distance between them until she was flush to his body. Gazed into eyes softened by sunlight. “You should kiss me now.”

“I should, eh?”

“Yes, and also remove your coat.”

His laugh was a little shaky. “Why?”

“You should kiss me because I want you to kiss me, and you should remove your coat because I wish to see you in your shirtsleeves again.” Her lips felt a little dry, so she moistened them. “You have very pleasing arms.”

The coat landed on the leaves with a flump. And his arms were even better than she had remembered, all the more so because she could admire them at her leisure, without fear of censure. Touch them even. She ran her fingers up to the crook of his elbow. The linen was soft, his forearms tough and sinewy beneath. She wondered what his skin would be like. Smooth, perhaps, on this side of his arm. Rough, hair-stippled on the other. “Will you kiss me after I am wed?”

His eyes had closed beneath her touch. “I . . . I don’t know.”

“Lots of married women have affaires.” She spanned her hands across his biceps, enjoying the reflexive tightening of muscle beneath her palms.

“Aye, but—”

“What? Or do you think I will belong to my husband then?”

“I think you belong to nobody but you, and that I’ll want to kiss you until the day you die.”

“Then why do you hesitate?”

“Because I think it could hurt me, love. Because I think I’d want more than your kisses.”

“If you are as skilled at other matters as you are at kissing, I would be willing to give you all that you wanted.”

“Not your self, or your unstolen time.”

Before she could answer, he tugged her chin up so her eyes met his and her mouth was vulnerable, and kissed her so fiercely that her hat fell off and half her pins sprang free. They tumbled to the forest floor, and she didn’t care, because Anstruther Jones had his mouth on her mouth, and his leg between her legs, and his fingers in her tangling hair. His breath was ragged, and his heart was thundering, and his body—revealed to her like this—felt like some extraordinarily intimate miracle, all fire and power and motion.

They broke away, gasping and wide-eyed, and she put her fingers to his lips, wanting still to claim him. They felt a little damp, a little swollen from her attention. From her savagery and his.

“I think,” she said, “I think you should remove the rest of your garments.”

His kiss-touched mouth turned up at the corners. “And why do you think I should do that?”

“Because I want to see an unclad man.” Lies. “Because I want to see you.”

“It’s a little cold, Ros.”

“I shall keep you warm.”

His tie followed his coat. His waistcoat followed his tie. His shirt. His boots. His trousers. His underthings. Until he wore only skin and sunlight.

Magnificent. A piece of the world’s wildness.

“Turn for me.” It was not entirely a request.

Laughing softly, Jones obliged, revealing himself to her: all his physical strength set into hard lines and masculine angles. His spine tempted her down to the tantalisingly muscular curve of his haunches, and the burn scars that ridged the skin there. She wondered if she should have been shocked by them, or found them ugly, but they were simply there, simply part of him. And, in truth, she almost envied him his lived-in flesh. She had experienced nothing that had marked her.

He glanced over his shoulder. “Sorry, it’s probably not what you’re used to.”

“Naked men? I should think not. I have been delicately raised.”

“I meant—”

“Your form is quite pleasing. And you may complete your revolution. Although,” she added sourly as she was confronted by the rest of him, “I have been led sorely astray by the Elgin Marbles. I was anticipating something altogether less imposing.”

He glanced down at the point of contention. “Blame your kisses.”

She rather liked that idea. It made her feel giddy and invincible and bold. She closed her hand around . . . around it. His member. And was shocked and excited by the heat of it, the way it was hard and tender at the same time, pulsing softly against her palm as though it possessed a heart of its own. “Then that makes it mine.”

He might have laughed, but she tightened her grip and he moaned instead—such a private sound, needy and harsh and entirely ungentlemanly. Presumably all his sex reacted so when they were touched, but she couldn’t quite imagine it. And she didn’t want to. The marquess was surely handsome, but her mind recoiled from the prospect of his nakedness. She knew instinctively he would never do this for her. Be like this with her.

And she didn’t want it. Not from him.

She wanted Anstruther Jones. Not just his kisses and his body and his money, but the man. His rough ways, and his soft words, and the way she felt when she was with him.

And the realisation was unexpectedly frightening.

She had wanted to fulfil her duty to her family, secure a proper match, make her father proud. But she had never really dared to want anything for herself. She had always assumed there would be time for that . . . after . . . well, after. Whatever happened after you were married. If you didn’t become like her mother, of course.

But suddenly there was a now. A forest and a waterfall and a horse and a man who had made himself naked for her.

“Are you all right?” Jones brushed her cheek with callused fingers.

Was she? No. And yes, oh yes, yes.

She nodded, took his hands, and pulled him to the ground. He came with her easily, no struggle, no hesitation, sprawled out across the leaves like some fallen god—Ares, perhaps—fearless and unconquered, the curves and hollows of his flesh brushed here and there with gold. She settled over him, soaking up skin, heat, the intensity of this physical closeness, wishing she could shed her heavy skirts, her corset, and feel nothing but him. But if she got out of her clothes, she doubted very much her ability to get back into them, and so she told herself this was enough.

This was not enough.

Her body was sticky-hot, cocooned in steel and starch and wool and chamois leather, almost entirely lost to her. She could have been a spirit, hollow, untouchable, except she wanted, she desired. She was alive with it, incandescent with it. She curled her fingers into the hair on his chest, half-expecting it to be rough, but it was soft, so soft, silky little curls that stirred beneath her touch.

His was lived-in skin. Not beautiful. He was never that. But very real. She traced the long veins that wound down his arms, feeling occasionally small pieces of roughness, scars and burns, old hurts and injuries that had healed badly or not been tended. His whole life, written on his body, laid bare for her.

If he had stripped her, she would have been pale, pristine, blank. A book without a story.

He pulled her close, cradling her between his knees. “You’re beautiful, Ros.”

“I know.”

He grinned, running his palms down her back, though all she could feel of them was the pressure of their progress.

“I think,” she said, “we should have sex.”

He nudged the tip of his nose against hers. “We are.”

“No, I think you should . . . you know . . . with your member.”

There was a silence that Rosamond thought might not have been entirely comfortable. The breeze snatched up a handful of leaves and whisked them into the brook.

“I don’t think I should do that.”

Well, how rude. “Don’t you want to?”

“Yes, but there are lots of things I want to do, and that’s just one of them.”

“What about what I want?”

He looked up at her, the shadows mixing grey into the blue of his eyes. “You want to marry a marquess. And he’ll want a virgin.”

“And how precisely will he tell?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never—”

“Well,” she snapped, “I am a virgin, and I have put my fingers inside myself, on several occasions, and I have discovered no particular barrier to ingress. So I don’t see why I should be prevented from having sex if I wish to.”

His hands swept back up to her shoulders and discovered the thin band of uncovered skin above her collar. The brush of his thumbs over it made her shiver wildly, the pleasure flooding her in heavy waves, almost hypnotic.

Don’t stop, she thought. Never stop doing that.

“And if I get you pregnant?” he asked.

Oh. A chill gathered inside her, settled over her, consuming his touch. “That would be inconvenient.”

“Just a little, love.”

She was tired. Cold. And the colours in the glade had shed their brightness. The trees huddled too close around them, cutting the light to strips. She pressed her face against his shoulder. “I want to feel something,” she whispered.

His arms came round her, enfolding her. “I don’t need my prick for that.”

And the next thing she knew, she was on her back, slightly dizzied from the speed of it, the rush of grey sky and red trees that filled her eyes as the world turned upside down. Jones was tangled in her petticoats and her hair, leaves and grass clinging to his copper-dark skin, and he was laughing.

“I thought you were supposed to have facility,” she muttered.

“I’m not used to so many clothes.”

“That is because you have disported yourself too much with whores and other men.”

He pushed her hair out of his eyes and got a knee between hers, which left her very little choice but to part her legs for him to settle between. Her skirts rucked up against his, well, his loins she supposed, outlining the shape of her lower body in a manner as blatant as it was surely obscene. Thankfully, she knew she had fine ankles, well-turned calves, and shapely thighs, even if they were currently more inclined to wrap around Anstruther Jones than display themselves to proper advantage.

He lowered himself to his elbows and kissed her again. It was different like this, more awkward and more intimate at the same time, the way they aligned and moved together, as if their bodies wished to commune in the same fashion as their mouths. There was something undeniably carnal in the silken infiltration of his tongue, the way she could feel the evidence of his arousal pressed against her even through all her damnable layers.

The hunger of it, the eagerness, and the vulnerability of that desire was . . . frankly . . . thrilling. She made an immoderate sound against his lips, and he swallowed it, returned it, just as immoderately, her wanting echoed and multiplied. She curved her hands over his shoulder blades—how satin-smooth his skin poured over that ridge of muscle and bone—and tugged him down, harder, closer, relishing his weight, his rough strength, until all their desperate sounds were one.

His hand had somehow found its way under her skirts and petticoats, and was fumbling with the fastenings of her breeches. And then sliding into her drawers, the heel of his palm nudging the unnameable place that ached for him.

“If that’s your intention,” she said, a little breathlessly, “I can very well do it for myself.”

“It’s different when it’s someone else.”

She scowled. “I don’t see how. It is a perfectly simple motion.”

“That so?” He parted her, not roughly at all, but with a surety that was, in its own way, just as startling. “What sort of motion?”

It was hard to think with strange fingers—his fingers—touching her so intimately. It made her almost unbearably conscious of her own heat, her own dampness, how soft and swollen and eager she was. “I . . . that is . . . I have discovered . . . a particular place, not inside but towards the top of the—ah, yes.”

Her head fell back against the leaves, her spine arching. She had long believed this intense sensitivity a secret peculiarity of her body, but Jones had somehow managed to locate the area unerringly.

“What sort of motion?” he asked again, his voice husky with passion and a hint of something that might have been laughter.

“I usually— Oh.” She tried to catch her breath. “I— Oh. Oh.”

How did he know? The way he touched her, gently at first, tantalising but not teasing, like the opening notes of a melody just before you recognised what it was going to be.

“Perhaps I could just do this?”

“That would . . . that would . . . be acceptable.”

She lost all track of time, of everything in fact, that wasn’t her body, and the ecstasies it learned. Jones had been right, of course: with him, it was not the same. With oneself pleasure was the destination. With a lover it was the journey. And, although it was disconcerting, at least initially, to be unable to exert much direct control over the pressure or the pace, she found she could nevertheless influence it almost unconsciously through sound and gesture. For Jones was quite remarkably attentive, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on her face, his breathing just as helplessly uneven as hers, his sinewy forearm sweat-streaked and flexing as he worked between her thighs.

It was a provocative contrast, to feel at once so powerless and powerful, exposed yet safe, as though one gave, and was taken, in the same handful of moments. But it was also hard to dwell on such matters—intriguing though they were—because she had an incipient climax to attend. He had coaxed her carefully to what seemed like the brink of one, on several heart-squeezing occasions, only to reveal some new variation of bliss he wished to wring from her. The physicality of it was quite wondrous. Truly, it was. But more than that was how dazed he looked, how frantic, as if it were his own pleasure he sought, not hers.

It filled her with a kind of possessive tenderness. And that, strangely or not so strangely, that was what took her in the end. Drew her tight like a falcon on the brink of flight, and then set her free in a flash of heat and joy. Her wild scream vanished into the roar of the waterfall, and for a moment the world was jewel-bright in her eyes—almost more beautiful than she could bear. And then there was just the dark rush of rapture, as different to whatever satisfaction she had found with her own fingers as the sun to the moon, the phoenix to the sparrow.

It was almost irritating.

Almost.

Somehow, he had seemed to know exactly the moment to cease his more intimate attentions, and there was something rather lovely in having instead his arms to hold her through the unseemly violence of her dissipating ecstasies. His ardent mouth to press kisses into the burning skin of her throat. It should, surely, have been mortifying to be witnessed in such a state, but instead all she felt was safe.

And whatever was the opposite of lonely. For which, just at present, she could not find a word.

Trembling still, and breathless, she abandoned herself to Jones’s embraces. It was, she discovered, more difficult to trust him with her comfort than it had been to trust him with her pleasure. The need, though just as great, was not as sharp, or as urgent. But this was her afternoon. Hers. She would deny herself nothing that she wanted. And Jones was as generous in this as in everything else. His body surrounded her, still rigid, and flushed with arousal, and she pressed her cheek against his chest, breathing in the scent of his skin.

He smelled of the cold air, clean and sharp, fresh sweat, and some deeper musk, heavy with salt, that she thought was probably male desire.

She wasn’t sure how long they lay together tangled in satiation and want, but the slight movement of his arm made her open her eyes. He had his still-glistening fingers pressed to his mouth. Shocked and perversely delighted, she watched him slowly lick them clean.

“Sir, that . . . that is not gentlemanly.”

He grinned at her, as lazy as a lion in sunlight. “I don’t give a damn.”

His erect appendage was pressed against her hip. While it may have born very little visual resemblance to the Elgin Marbles, in rigour at least there was some comparison to be made. “Should there be some fashion of reciprocity?”

“It’s not necessary.”

“What if I wished it?”

He made a rather lofty gesture with the hand that had previously pleasured her. “Then I’m told it’s a gentleman’s duty to always oblige a lady. What do you wish of me?”

She felt that damnable, telltale blush heat her cheeks. “I wish to watch you . . . bring yourself to crisis.”

He rolled carefully away from her, settling on his back on the leaves, reaching down to encircle his own prick. His expression was a little abashed as he muttered, “It won’t take long.”

For some reason she found the notion pleasing. “Do I stir you so?”

He nodded. “Always. But specially like this.”

“Sweaty and rumpled and—”

“Pleasured, aye.”

She smiled. Not like ladies were supposed to smile, but like some monstrous thing, all teeth and satisfaction.

As Jones had warned, it was not a lengthy process, though nevertheless fascinating to behold. He was all tight muscles and unexpected physical openness, his head thrown back and his face naked in bliss. It was a strange and powerful intimacy to see all these secret, forbidden things. The glide of skin between a man’s fingers as he caressed himself. The pearly moisture that gathered to his touching. The helpless curl of his toes. The hitch of his breath. The closed door of masculinity thrown wide, just for her.

“Oh . . . God . . . Ros.”

His voice was little more than a scratchy growl. Exhilarating. Stirring reactions in places that should surely have been replete.

Wanting to kiss him, but not wanting to miss a single moment of his climax, she touched her hand to his lips, and that was how he found completion, his groan smothered against her palm like the roughest, sweetest of kisses.

She gazed at him, absurdly, helplessly enamoured. Slightly stunned by the realisation that she did, indeed, find him beautiful. Or that the word itself was lacking if she could not apply it to Anstruther Jones. A man of scars and wounds and gold, garlanded in the pearls of his own pleasure.

“Oh my—” she swallowed a gasp of her own “—you are most extravagantly bedewed.”

He laughed, and pulled her down, tucking her against his side, her head nestled to his shoulder. And they lay there awhile in love and bliss and silence.

“You were right,” she said, finally. “We should not do this again. It . . . it would be too painful.”

He made a soft sound, frustration she thought, and longing perhaps. “Or you could be with me. However you want.”

“Is . . . is that some fashion of proposal?” She tried to make it a joke, but her voice trembled and betrayed her.

“Yes.”

“It is not a very creditable one.”

“No, but it’s sincere. I’d like to make you happy, Ros. I know you’d do the same for me.”

“What can possibly have given you that idea? We have already established that I am spoiled, headstrong, stubborn, and—”

“And I like you.”

Oh, why did she feel like crying? “I can’t. I’m engaged to a marquess. To jilt him for you would ruin me.”

“And marrying him won’t?”

It was at once a reasonable question, and terribly unfair. “You don’t understand.” She pushed away his arms, and the world felt colder outside their circle. “It’s easy for you. You don’t have anything to lose, and you only have to think of yourself. I have my family.”

“Yes.” He still did not flinch from her. “Yes, you do.”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “I did not mean . . . That is . . . I was clumsy.”

“It’s all right, Ros. I just think a family should do more than take from you.”

She tried to smooth her hair into some semblance of order. “I should like you to take me back now.”

His hands were gentle against hers as he helped her corral her wayward tresses. “Anything you want.”

It took less time than she would have imagined for them to make themselves respectable again. As if everything they’d done, everything they’d said, was already slipping away from her.

The journey back was somehow quite different.

And she rather feared she was too.

6

Rosamond was not enjoying anything.

The visits. The dinners. The balls.

They whirled around her like a carousel until they were nothing but a moving haze, the colour of the Gaslight smog.

Lack of enjoyment had somehow developed from a passive state to an active one. And was manifesting in headaches.

She was on her way to the retiring room—where she had been spending increasing amounts of her time—when voices in the antechamber arrested her retreat. She was not a natural eavesdropper, being insufficiently interested in the lives others, but she hesitated when she recognised the marquess’s southern drawl. It was surely just prejudice for an unfamiliar accent, but it was hard not to perceive an undertone of contempt when one lengthened one’s As so excessively.

“—return soon,” he was saying. “And thank God for that. I cannot abide this pissant little backwater with its delusions of grandeur.”

“Ah, but you’ll be a married man.” That was one of his friends, the Viscount of Whatever or Sir Thingamy. “Linked by ties of blood and family to this pissant little backwater.”

“Hardly. It’s nothing more than money.”

“And your wife-to-be. She’s a pretty little thing.”

The marquess gave a less-than-elegant snort. “If your taste runs to shopkeepers and coalminers, certainly. But she’s docile, I’ll grant you. She’ll be comfortable enough at the Hall, and I daresay I’ll do my duty on her.”

“You can close your eyes and think of England.”

“I’ll be thinking of the divine Angelique.” The marquess laughed. Rosamond had never heard him do that before, and she didn’t enjoy it now. “Perhaps she’ll consider my protection now since pockets are no longer to let.”

Rosamond had heard enough. Too much, far too much. She slipped away.

He had expressed nothing she did not already know. Or, at the very least, suspected. Expected. But now it was all clad in words; it seemed real in ways it hadn’t before. And, she realised, what he’d taken from her was hope.

It should not have been so devastating.

Surely it was better to have this certainty now than have to come to terms with it later.

But God. God.

She couldn’t face the retiring room. It would be full of women faffing with their flounces and powdering their décolletages. She reeled blindly down the corridor, and barged into . . . oh . . . somewhere.

What did it matter? It was dark within and quiet. And she was alone. She dropped onto a sofa, covered her face with her hands, and burst into tears.

Crying was part of her skill set. She did it very beautifully indeed.

This was not beautiful.

It was more like hiccoughing, and the tears came not in delicate droplets but in a damp and snotty deluge. And, worse still, having permitted herself this weakness, she could not seem to bring herself back under control. All she could do was sit there, gulping and wailing, and rendering her complexion blotchy and horrific.

And then, of course, someone opened the door on her, spilling light into the room. She gave a little scream and threw up an arm as if she could protect herself from being seen.

“Good God. I’m so sorry.” An elegant, masculine figure was outlined in the doorway. “I thought one of the cats had been locked in.”

Outrage briefly stifled her tears. “I do not sound even remotely like a cat.”

There was a silence.

“I do not!”

“Are you in distress?”

“No,” she lied. She had nothing to handle the full extent of her tears so she was obliged to use the sleeve of her dress. “Please leave me alone.”

The damned fellow was still lingering. Worse, he had come a little farther into the room, and was adjusting the wick on an phlogiston lamp, banishing the safe gloom into which Rosamond had fled. In the flare of orange, she recognised Lord Mercury. Poised as ever, far too beautiful, gold glinting in his hair and in the depths of his eyes. And, in that moment, Rosamond hated him. For being so lovely when she felt ugly, and for being invincible when she was weak. Oh, why did she never have any control over anything? Why did she always have to be frightened and ashamed?

“If you utter one word of this, to anyone, I will make sure the whole world knows of your relationship with Anstruther Jones.”

He started and paled visibly, slender fingers fluttering on the stem of the lamp. “I . . . have no notion what you may be implying. We . . . we were friends awhile.”

“You think me that naïve? I know . . .” What did she know? Just some vague intimation of acts considered immoral. “I know he used you as a man with a woman. You are hardly discreet, my lord. The way you gaze upon him. Your long-standing disinterest in members of my sex.”

She tried to ignore the heaviness of her eyes, the drip she could feel trembling on the tip of her nose, and glared at him with all the conviction and disgust she could muster.

And the man just broke. For a moment, she thought he might actually swoon, but then he was on his knees beside her, clutching for her hand. “Oh God. You mustn’t . . . Please don’t. . . You will ruin me. Please.”

It was the very last thing she had expected, and it brought her no consolation at all. Power, yes, of a kind, but it was joyless. Leaving her hollow and sickened. She looked down at his bowed head, his shaking shoulders. “I—”

“Don’t,” he whispered. “Please don’t. I know it’s wrong. I’m sorry, I try, I try so hard but sometimes . . . I . . . can’t, and I . . . I’m sorry.”

It was not supposed to be like this. She had, after all, operated quite successfully in this manner previously, having deployed it upon her half sibling to ensure his friendship. So more effective than confessing the pathetic loneliness that had driven her to seek him out. And, in this case, she had simply wanted to be left alone. To bury her own vulnerability safely beneath someone else’s. Not to make Lord Mercury as entirely wretched and helpless as she was.

She felt like crying again, but she managed to steady her voice. “No, it is I who am sorry. I should never have said such a thing. It was reprehensible of me.”

He lifted those extraordinary eyes to hers, and she had never seen a look so despairing and so empty. “But it’s true. I am exactly what you say. You would be right to despise me.”

She was ill equipped to offer comfort. She had never been close enough to anyone who required it. “Nonsense,” she said bracingly. “If I wanted to despise you, I could find a far better reason than sodomy.”

He cringed from the word as though it hurt him. But otherwise he was silent, pressed against her skirts. She had always believed him to be unassailable, a man with everything—beauty, birth, fortune. She had envied him, even hated him a little bit. When, in truth, he was just as hurt and lost and alone as she was.

She slid her fingers lightly into his hair. It was so soft, and full of colours, like the forest where she had lain with Jones. “Please forgive me,” she whispered. “I was embarrassed that you saw me like this, and I wanted to embarrass you back. That was all. It was cruel of me. Childish.”

For a long time, he did not answer. And then, “I’m so tired. I’m so tired of being frightened.”

Rosamond was far more shocked by that than by any understanding of what Lord Mercury might have done with Anstruther Jones. She did not know men even had the capacity to be frightened. But now she realised just how foolish it was to believe such a thing. Her father feared anything that challenged his understanding of the world. Jones feared being alone. And Lord Mercury feared himself. Feared love.

“I’m frightened too,” she said. “I’m frightened of being powerless. I’m frightened of marrying a man who has no interest in me at all. I’m frightened of nobody ever having any interest in me.”

Lord Mercury sat back on his heels, oily light sliding over the arch of his cheekbones and gilding his eyelashes. “You should marry Jones.”

Another thought made suddenly real and cast into the world.

She nodded. “I know. But . . . but I am not like him. I am too afraid of what people will think and say. And, before you chastise me for my cowardice, you are not with him either, though you could be, and far more easily than I.”

He brushed the last traces of moisture from his eyes. “Do you really think society looks so kindly upon catamites?”

“I can see—” she tried to smile, but it felt cracked at the edges “—there is little to be gained from comparing our lots. I suppose what I can’t understand is why . . . why we care so much.”

“Because this is what we know. And, without it, there is nothing.” He rose gracefully, composed once more, all that careful refinement snapping back into place like armour. Plucking a handkerchief from an interior pocket, he dropped it into her lap. “Your secrets are safe with me. Do what you will with mine.”

And, with that, he was gone. And she was alone.

7

Lord Mercury was sleepless that night. Full of longings that pierced him like arrows. He told himself it was physical, merely physical, easily conquered with forbearance and resolve. And perhaps a vulgar release bestowed by his own hand. But he might as well have been composed of air, so little satisfaction could he derive from the touch of self to self.

He abandoned all hope of rest. Rose, dressed in his plainest clothes. Found his way through the servant’s quarters, down the back stairs, and into the night. The fog crept out of the shadows, an old friend to conceal his sins. He took a horseless carriage to the docks. To a tavern he knew, where men sought each other and came together in the greasy darkness of the surrounding alleyways.

He caught the eye of a young soldier. Ended up outside, on his knees. A stranger’s hands and a stranger’s voice—“I say, do you mind awfully?”—and a stranger’s prick in his mouth.

It was everything it should have been—there would have been a time, not so very long ago, when Lord Mercury would have remembered it with shame-struck pleasure—but tonight it could not even touch the hollow places inside him.

He walked slowly away, looking for another carriage to bear him home. The fog was deeper here, dust-thickened from the factories. It had swallowed both the sky and the horizon, leaving only a handful of the world behind, but he knew his way well enough.

And then he heard footsteps behind him.

Most likely it was nothing. There was little in his garb or demeanour to tempt an opportunistic thief. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed the shapes of two men.

He quickened his pace, and their pace quickened also.

His heart jumped, fear warring with something like embarrassment. How foolish he was going to feel when he looked back on this later, allowing two strangers whose path had briefly accorded with his own, to alarm him so.

He thought about running. Away from the waterfront and the warehouses, he would be more likely to find a cab. There might even be people around, although he knew well enough, given his own proclivities, it was hardly a respectable hour to be abroad. But, then again, if he ran, they might chase him simply because his behaviour suggested he was worth pursuing.

He walked a little faster still, sweat gathering under his collar and his arms. He had just resolved to damn his pride and this uncertainty and flee, whatever the consequences, when a man in a red coat stepped directly into his path. A solider, he thought dazedly, from the same regiment as the fellow he had just—

A fist slammed into his stomach.

Shock. Then pain. It felt like he was dying. As if he might never breathe again.

A shove, and he was on his hands and knees on the ground.

A kick and he was down again, his mouth sour with spit and iron, his eyes full of smearing stars.

“Please, I don’t—”

Perhaps there were three of them now. More. Less. It didn’t matter. Everything was dissolving into a haze of hurt. He had no idea how to fight back, how to defend himself, how to make it stop. He might have begged. He knew he wept. But his tears were abstract, somehow, like the blood he could feel running down his skin, disconnected from a world that had become nothing more but the spaces between blows.

When the edges of the darkness frayed—had he been unconscious?—there was a hot weight on his back, pinning him down. Hands, impersonal now, stripped him. He was dull with fear, beyond even the effort of struggling. But this latest horror, and the recognition of further violation, stirred him slightly.

“No . . . don’t . . . not . . .”

The snick of a blade. To Lord Mercury, the loudest noise in Gaslight.

He wished he possessed strength enough to fight. And, failing that, the courage to die. His honour should have demanded it.

But he wanted to live. Above all else, he wanted to live.

So he fell silent. Lay still.

Pleaded with the God who had fashioned him and condemned him, denied him and punished him: Let these men use me, but let them spare me. Please.

The knife was for his hair.

They left him in the gutter, beaten and shorn, tattered and shamed. They spat on him before they departed, pissed on him, but they did not touch him.

And when they were gone, Lord Mercury laughed to the lost sky, thinking how strange it was, this definition of mercy.

A constable found him a little after dawn.

The circumstances and nature of the attack were such that it was felt it would be in the best interests of public decency to exercise discretion over the details.

Which, of course, meant that very soon everybody knew everything. And all of Lord Mercury’s secrets became nothing but trinkets to be passed round and picked over.

His injuries—cuts, bruises, a couple of cracked ribs—would fade and fade swiftly, but how was he to bear this? Knowing that the worst of him belonged to those who whispered of it: his soul, his heart, his needs, helpless in the hands of people who would shake their heads and laugh, or shudder in revulsion, decry his weakness and perversion, or titter gleefully at the scandal. People who would never—could never—understand.

It made him almost wish to be on the ground again, at the mercy of strangers, where pain was simple: a string of brutal moments. Not this savage and unceasing grief for something at once as fundamental and ephemeral as his public self. Perhaps he was mourning something that had never been little more than a phantasm, but now he had lost even the hope of being a different man, a better one, worthy of his name. Everyone knew him for who he truly was: a sodomite, a fool, someone with no place among decent people. Though even in the depths of his despair, he recognised the absurdity of such a thought. Gaslight cared little for decency, only discretion.

The only truly decent person he knew was Anstruther Jones.

This house, this bed, was full of memories of him. Attempts to tutor and civilise the man, all of them ridiculous, hopeless, because Lord Mercury had wanted him just as he was—untamed and free, entirely himself. Even if he did prefer coffee to tea, smoke cheroots instead of cigars, laugh too loudly, stand with his hands in his pockets and sit with his foot on his knee and . . . fuck, oh God, the way he fucked.

That first time particularly. Hands claiming every part of him, whispering things Lord Mercury should not have needed to hear.

Yet dreamed of still.

God, he needed Jones. Not sexually. That was the last thing his body, or his mind, was ready for. But thinking of him had brought the longing out of the corners, scratching him raw. He just wanted to be held, not in passion or possession, but in comfort, until he felt strong and whole and worthy again.

The first few days, he stayed in bed, numbed by laudanum and humiliation. He was not at home to visitors but, of course, none came. There were no enquiries either, no calling cards or invitations. Some of the servants left.

So this was disgrace: a slowly deepening silence.

One afternoon, he was roused from a restless half-sleep by a commotion from the hallway. His bedroom door flew open with a crash and there, flanked by two harried-looking footmen, was Anstruther Jones.

“I’m sorry, my lord, he—”

“Arkady.”

Oh, that rough, so familiar voice. It was as though Lord Mercury—bent on his own torment—had summoned the man through pure force of yearning, and, in that moment, it was impossible to separate joy from pain, the sweetness of memory tangling with the shock of recognition and the bitter sting of reality. It was similarly difficult to muster much dignity from the centre of a huddle of blankets, but he tried and nodded a hasty dismissal to the servants. At the very least he could spare himself an audience.

Although, of course, that left him alone with Jones. Who looked appallingly desirable, all hard strength framed by exquisite tailoring, the sort of man one wanted to savour and slowly unwrap, until he was nothing but heat and skin and hunger . . . and, oh God, why hadn’t he touched him more when there had been opportunity? Jones had given himself like a gift, and Lord Mercury had been too afraid to do anything but yield.

He should have revelled.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. And then, panicking, “Wait, don’t . . . It’s not—” Because Jones was coming into the room. Throwing off his hat, shrugging his coat from his shoulders.

“I heard what happened. I came to see you.” The bed creaked under Jones’s weight. He sat on the edge of it, rather as Lord Mercury’s nurse had done when he had been very young and suffering from some trifling childhood complaint that had rendered him an exile from his mother.

It could have almost been amusing—as if Jones was about to pat his hair and tuck him in—but all Lord Mercury could think was how painful it was to accept the compassion of a man who had once groaned with the pleasure of their connected bodies. Told him how beautiful he was, whispered of all the things they could do together.

“Why?” he snapped. “Are the rumours insufficiently detailed?” It seemed there was a brittle, angry place at the deepest heart of shame that felt almost like pride. “It’s all true. I was at the docks, soliciting sodomitical advances. And, afterwards, the gentleman’s friends took it upon themselves to punish me for it. Does that satisfy you?”

Jones’s fingers closed lightly around his wrist, a circle of warmth that made him remember the last time Jones had held him, pinned to the wall, threatening and promising. “What have I done to make you think I’d be pleased by cruelty?”

And all at once, Lord Mercury crumbled. Whatever that final piece of pride had been, it was gone now, shattered by a few gentle words, leaving only loss and old longing. His eyes burned with fresh tears. “It’s not what you’ve done. The last time we . . . If I hadn’t . . . I deserved this.”

“Not on my account. And certainly not on your own.”

“I should not have been there.” I should have been with you. “And I should have been able to defend myself.”

Jones laid his hand back upon the coverlet and patted it. “Arkady, if people want to hurt you, they can always hurt you. It doesn’t matter how well you use a sword or your fists, or what kind of man you think you are.”

It seemed impossible to imagine that Jones could ever have been powerless. “Have you . . .” Too late, he realised what he was asking and fell silent.

Jones laughed. “Have I ever got the shit kicked out of me? I was born in the undercity. I’ve worked for pimps and panderers and pirates. What do you think?”

Oh, what a stupid question. There was no solace in knowing that. “I . . . I apologise.”

“You get used to it. Not that anyone should have to.” Jones leaned forward, brushing a jagged lock of what remained of Lord Mercury’s hair away from his brow. “How badly did they hurt you?”

“Nothing that will not heal.”

“Those motherswinkers.”

There was something oddly touching about the glimmer of anger in Jones’s eyes, the growl in his throat. It made Lord Mercury feel slightly more capable of bravery. “Thank you, but I’m fine.”

“Are the police looking for them?”

“I’m not . . . That is—” It was still, however, hard to speak of. “I would prefer this matter received no further attention.”

“Tell me about them?”

“I could describe their boots and their fists rather well, but probably little else.”

“A few small details will do. I have resources, connections, I can find these bastards.”

Truthfully, Lord Mercury had fantasised about it. The visitation of righteous retribution on three soldiers whose faces he could barely picture. He had imagined them at his feet, weeping and humiliated, begging for his forgiveness. For a while it had comforted him, until he had realised how childish it was, how hollow and meaningless. “I don’t need you to do that,” he said, at last.

“No, I know. Thought I’d offer, just in case.”

“Well, err, thank you for offering to have some men found and beaten for me.”

Jones actually blushed. “Next time I’ll try flowers.”

And Lord Mercury laughed—the impulse catching him as sweetly and unexpectedly as snowdrops in spring. Laughter had seemed so far away from him the last few days, but it was easy now. Too easy. A sharp, hot pain as blood rushed to fill the cut that had reopened on his lip, and a far deeper one like an iron band around his ribs, and he fell silent again, stifling a gasp and wincing. Jones offered him his perfect handkerchief, and Lord Mercury had to accept it or be reduced to dabbing at himself with the sleeve of his nightshirt. “Would you really have done that? Brought me flowers?”

“Would you have wanted me to?”

It was an odd idea, not displeasing, but still odd. “I thought gentlemen only gave flowers to ladies.”

“Maybe.” Jones shrugged. “But, if I did bring you some, your prick probably wouldn’t immediately drop off. Maybe the better question is, do you like flowers?”

“I’ve never considered it. What kind of flowers would you get me?”

This was a fantasy far more potent than nebulous revenge against three strangers who had hurt him: Jones, glorious, marvellous Jones, every inch the gentleman, and not one fraction less himself, in a flower shop somewhere, his arms full of bright and beautiful things. Are they for someone special? the seller would ask him. And, he would say, Yes.

“That’s where I get a bit lost.” Jones rubbed his jaw, the stubble rasping beneath his fingers. “I’ve never bought flowers for anyone. Not much call for them in the sky.”

Foolish daydreams. “I suppose not.”

Jones smiled. “Up on the claim, there’s these storms, where water and phlogiston get all mixed up together. Leaves this residue behind, and if you don’t clean it sharpish you get . . . well . . . we call them aetherblooms. They don’t look much like flowers though. They’re sort of like—” he wriggled his fingers expressively “—tendrils that wave on the aether currents, and glow greenish under starlight.”

Lord Mercury only realised he was crying when the salt from his tears stung his cuts. He hadn’t realised how much he had missed Jones. The sex, in all its savagery, certainly, but he ached for this as well: company, shared laughter, and Jones’s strange, shyly offered stories of the sky. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, fearful of the man’s pity, but the words came tumbling out anyway. “Why don’t you hate me?”

“Why would I hate you?”

“Because of how we parted.”

“Never mind that now.”

“But I do mind. I remember everything.”

Jones shifted on the bed, looking about as uncomfortable as Lord Mercury had ever seen him. “I was angry. Hurt. But it’s in the past.” Once again, a patting of hands. Jones did it easily, as if it was simply his nature to be tactile, but all Lord Mercury remembered was the other ways they had once touched. “I’ll always be your friend, Arkady, if you’ll have me. I knew that from the first moment I saw you.”

It was a kind thing to say. Very kind. He tried to smile, but it hurt, as though there were cracks in his heart as well as on his lips. “I’m not sure friendship was foremost in your mind back then.”

“Well. No. I didn’t expect to like you. But you were beautiful, and so put together like you were this perfect gentleman, but your eyes said nothing but ‘love me.’” Jones shrugged that shrug that Lord Mercury had failed to train out of him. “So I did.”

Did. Were. “It would be disadvantageous, now, to have your name coupled too easily with mine.”

“Disadvantageous to who?”

“Whom.”

“What?”

“Disadvantageous to whom. Here ‘it’ (the disadvantageous thing) is the subject of the sentence, while the unknown person (to whom it is disadvantageous) is the object. Therefore ‘to whom.’”

Once Lord Mercury had attempted to impress upon Jones the subtleties of the may/can distinction. He had responded by tugging Lord Mercury’s legs apart and dropping to his knees between them. “Can I do this?” he’d murmured, the heat of his breath pooling in a sly caress over the tautened fabric of Lord Mercury’s trousers. “You certainly have the capability,” had been his answer. After the helpless gasp, that is. Lord Mercury had performed this act for many men. Few had been inclined to reciprocate. It had never particularly troubled him, but the idea of Jones doing it, of Jones wanting to, had made him delirious with yearning.

Yet there he had sat, barely able to breathe, his whole body suffused in heat, prickling with lust, and hearing, as if from a great distance, his own voice saying: “But in a formal context, such as a dance, one should say ‘may I’ and wait for a response before proceeding.” Jones had glanced wickedly up at him, and asked, “Do you suck many cocks in a formal context?” before covering him with his mouth. And, oh God, the heat, the heat and softness, the peculiar intimacy of being inside someone else in that way. He had come undone, in a handful of bright moments, hips thrusting, hands tangled in Jones’s hair—“Oh . . . may I please . . . may I”—and Jones nodding, laughing in a muffled kind of way, as Lord Mercury had spilled into his mouth, crying out his name as if it were the only word left in the world.

But today, Jones just grinned toothily and asked, “To whom would it be disadvantageous?”

“You, most obviously. And anyone associated with you. People would most likely believe that you . . . we . . . that we . . .”

“But I am. We did. And what’s one more thing for people to say about me? I’m already a whore’s bastard, a commoner, a prospector. You can dress me however you like, teach me what to say and how to bow, but I’ll never be one of Gaslight’s fine, upstanding industrial gentlemen.”

“You’re the best man I know. And,” Lord Mercury added sharply, “having gone to a lot of trouble to make you presentable, I shall be most put out if you throw it away.”

“But—”

“I want you to have everything you need. That family you’re looking for.” He moved, on instinct, to push back a lock of hair, only to realise there was nothing there. “My life . . . I don’t even know what my life is anymore.”

“Life is more than one street in one city in one country.”

“For you maybe. All that is waiting for me is a squalid little apartment somewhere on the continent where they look more kindly on English gentlemen with a taste for buggery.”

“My life is only what I’ve made of it.”

“And I am what life has made of me.”

Jones leaned across the space between them, blue eyes and bronze skin, and such conviction it made Lord Mercury feel like tatters on the wind. “Surprise yourself.”

“I . . . I don’t know how.”

“I came back to Gaslight because it’s the closest place I’ve ever known to home. But there’s so much else I’d be glad to see if I had someone to share it with.” There was a ragged edge to his voice now, not anger this time, but sadness, a touch of desperation. “I could show you sunrises, Arkady, that set the horizon aflame. I could take you places where there are so many stars you can’t even see the sky. Where the colours of the world are different. You don’t have to be anything to me you don’t—”

“Stop, oh please stop. You know that isn’t possible.”

“What isn’t possible?”

“For two men to be together like that. The world will never allow it.”

“Why do we need permission?” Jones’s hands curled into fists. “You know, most folk are too busy trying to get by to give a toss where other people find their happiness. Pointless condemnation is a luxury for the wealthy and the bored.”

Lord Mercury stared at him, hurting and wanting, and torn to pieces on it. “But everything you’ve worked for.”

“I worked so that nobody I loved would ever have to struggle or suffer or go without again. I want you, Arkady. You know that.” A great shudder ran through his body, and he dropped his head into his hands. “I’m sorry. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this, and here I am, making an arse of myself again.”

“You’ve never done anything that would make me think that.”

Jones looked up, dark eyed, a little wild. “Well, you try wanting to kiss someone who won’t kiss you back, and see how sensibly you behave.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your doing. I want things from you that you can’t give.”

“No.” The word burst out of him before he could properly consider. He only knew he was—somehow—being given a second chance, and that Jones still cared for him and desired him. “I do want to give them. The k-kisses and everything. Please let me give them. Just . . . we’ll just have to be careful.”

Jones blinked. “Careful?”

“Yes, we must not be seen together, and you must not come here too often, or without caution.”

“That sounds more like a conspiracy.”

Lord Mercury, giddy with terror and elation and relief, stifled a laugh. “Conspiracy to commit buggery.”

“Conspiracy to be in love.” Jones did not sound amused. He sounded . . . miserable. “I can’t do that, Arkady. Haven’t you understood a word I’ve said? There’s a whole world out there for us, and I don’t care what your pathetic little corner of it thinks.”

“But I do. I’m sorry, but I do. I realise everyone already knows exactly what I am, but I don’t have to . . . flaunt it.”

Jones stood abruptly. His height and the breadth of his shoulders tended to give him a slightly daunting presence, but right now he just looked confused and helpless. “I’m not asking you to flaunt it. I don’t want to fuck you in the middle of Lady Copper’s ball. But when I was up there on the claim, imagining having a family of my own to come home to, I never pictured it would involve a discreet twice-monthly arrangement.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God, it was all going wrong already. He’d barely got Jones back, and he was losing him. “I’m a man, Jones. You can’t marry me, and you can’t—”

“In the sky, you know who gets married? People in love. So down here I can’t stand next to you in a church and mutter some promises to a God I don’t reckon to be there. But we can still have a life together. We just have to make it for ourselves.”

“But there’s so much that you would lose in trying to be with me.”

“What about what we’d have? Oh, Arkady.” Another gesture—flying hands that suddenly seemed not to know what to do with themselves. “I know I’m a simple man, a common one, but can’t you be proud to be loved by me?”

Lord Mercury gazed up at him pleadingly, wishing he could make Jones understand. “You’re the least common man I’ve ever met. I just . . . It’s me. I don’t know how to be proud of me. And I don’t know how to do what you want me to do.”

There was a long silence. Then Jones nodded. Bent to pick up his coat. “There’s so much I want to give you, so much I want to share with you. The truth is, I want you to be free, Arkady, but I can’t make you.”

Lord Mercury’s heart turned to ash in his chest. “Don’t—”

Jones stood for a moment, looking at him, then leaned down and kissed his brow, very gently. “I love you, but you make me ashamed. And freedom is something you have to find for yourself.”

Then he was gone.

Again.

And it hurt just as much the second time as it had the first.

The days trickled by. Lord Mercury’s ribs healed slowly, his cuts closed, his bruises turned like autumn leaves, from scarlet through purple to yellow-green, though his body—rather like his life—still felt distantly not quite his own. But his sense of reality was, finally, beginning to settle: it had really happened, all his greatest fears had come to pass, and there was to be no reprieve, no change that did not come of his own making.

He had been so certain Jones would be the ruin of him, but here he was, ruined anyway. If he had found the strength to be only a little bit honest, a little bit brave, he would likely have been with him now. He could have been his lover, his catamite, his mistress, his wife, what did it matter what one called it? He would have been touched, kissed, safe, loved.

Not long before his mother had left, one of the poets had called him a beautiful Ganymede. Kissed his lips. And Lord Mercury hadn’t stopped him, hadn’t even been afraid. He had liked the way the gentleman looked at him—the same way gentlemen looked at his mother. His mouth had been sweet and soft with honeyed wine. And Lord Mercury’s body had answered. In the confusion of grief, he had sometimes wondered if that was why his mother had fled him. Because she had known he had solicited kisses from the poet. With adult understanding he had put such ideas to rest.

But the loss had remained. He had known it was all his nature could possibly bring him.

Except it had also brought him Jones.

A man he so desperately wanted, but did not know how to have. And in whose arms Lord Mercury had lain, bewildered with intimacy, wondering how such joy could possibly be wrong. But it was hard—on the brink of impossible—to find pride in such absolute capitulation to the part of himself he had always known to hate and to fear.

And so he had lost the man he loved—for what else was it, if not love?—twice over.

Compared to that, disgrace was a mere shadow of pain. And brought with it the unexpected consolation of relief, for he was no longer waiting. No longer afraid. Instead of myriad imagined possibilities, infinite opportunities for shame, for failure, for dishonour, there was only what was. A simple set of truths.

He crawled out of bed and limped to his dressing room. To the looking glass, where he found himself staring at a reflection that was at once stranger and more familiar than it had ever been. His body was still a mottled mess of marks, and without the framing of his hair, his face looked . . . starker, more exposed. He could hardly articulate what he had expected to see there, what he had thought would be revealed. But there was nothing. No particular deviance or effeminacy, not a mouth made soft for sucking cock. Only him. Pale skinned, green eyed, freckle dusted, beautiful to some and to the one who mattered, no different from any other man.

Was he really less worthy of the things that other people took for granted, or more capable of living without them? Simply because he desired other men. Found love with men. What would it mean if he wasn’t? What would it mean to be free?

As he stood there, looking at himself, thinking of Jones, he realised there was an extent to which he already was.

If he chose to accept that freedom.

What did it matter if whatever he would have with Jones looked nothing like what anyone else would consider decent or right or real? Nothing he had done before his disgrace had been decent or right or real either: it had all been pretence. Increasingly it was his past, rather than his present, that felt unreal. Everything he had believed, everything he had done and failed to do, was beginning to seem close to incomprehensible. Acts committed by a stranger who wore his skin, in flight from monsters he now realised were only shadows on the walls of a prison.

Or perhaps it was simply he was finally capable of seeing things clearly. Of seeing himself as he was, not merely as he wished to be, or as he feared the world saw him. It would take him a while to learn how to be proud and how to be free. But, for now, he could be proud of Jones, and of Jones’s love, and the fact Jones would have chosen a future with him over anything the world could offer.

Perhaps, it was not too late. And, even if it was, perhaps he could still show Anstruther Jones that he would never make him ashamed again. He could, at least, give him that. He could find the courage to trust in love, in Jones, and in himself.

It was the Copper Ball tonight. Anybody who was anybody or aspired to be somebody in Gaslight would be there. Lord Mercury had received his invitation long before his preferences for sucking off strangers in back alleys had become public knowledge.

He pulled in a breath so deep his ribs ached. Ran his hands between his injuries, feeling the skin prickle in response, fine hairs standing up to brush the pads of his fingers.

There. He lived. Breathed. Felt. Was.

Arcadius, Lord Mercury, the last of his line, the oldest and proudest of the Gaslight nobility. He had lain with other men as men lay with women. He had put his mouth upon the cocks of soldiers and sailors, dockworkers and tavern boys. He had stood in dark corners, in the drizzling rain, hot with lust, hands upon him, in him, working him to fumbling completion. He had given himself to Anstruther Jones, let him into his body and into his heart, committed with him acts of gross indecency. And he had relished them all, these sins, these perversions, these rough ecstasies, their tenderness and joy.

The last Lord Mercury met his own bruise-shadowed eyes in the mirror, and did not flinch or turn away. If he was to be damned, then he was done with shame.

8

Needless to say, Rosamond was not enjoying the Copper Ball.

As she had not yet crossed the border into matrimony, which permitted the alleviation of certain ignorances, she was not supposed to know about the fall of Lord Mercury. It was deemed too shocking, too depraved for debutantes. But she knew because everyone knew. It was all that was spoken of. An excitable stampede to outrage. Amazing, how many people had long suspected. The same girls who had swooned over him, the same gentlemen who had respected him, the same mamas who had coveted his name and his fortune. And now they scorned him, laughed at him, murmured that he got what he deserved, recoiled from his temerity in having dared to lurk amongst decent people.

It would have been her they whispered about, had they only known about Ashworth Valley and Anstruther Jones. Selfish, she knew, to think about herself in the midst of someone else’s misfortune. But every day that passed left her a little more uncertain, a little more alone. She wondered what people did after they were ruined. How badly had Lord Mercury been hurt? How much did he care about his disgrace? Would she ever see him again?

If one stopped and thought about it for a moment, there was no reason she could not have visited him at home. Or entertained him at Wolfram Hall. He was, after all, demonstrably no threat to her virtue. But there was no reason in any of this. Just fear and hate and cruelty.

And, of course, Lady Mildred and her friends were talking about him too. Exchanging pathetic little anecdotes about how he had handed one her stole or helped another into her carriage. As if such encounters represented some brush with mortal danger. It made her hot and fizzy-angry inside just to hear them.

“I stood on his toe once,” offered Lady Mildred. “It was my first waltz and he was so . . . so terribly dashing, you know, that I was deathly afraid of him.”

“Rightly so.” Rosamond was glad she could not identify the interlocutor because she surely would have punched her.

But, to her surprise, Lady Mildred hesitated before answering. “I . . . I am not sure. He was very kind. And he need not have been, for everyone admired him, and any woman in the room would have been delighted to stand up with him.”

“One kindness hardly means anything, Milly. He is still a . . . a . . . well. As they say.”

“It means something to me. And so I will not speak badly of him for a preference I believe to be none of my business.” Rosamond had always thought Lady Mildred a usefully plain opponent, but she looked . . . in all honesty . . . rather adequate when her colour was up, and her eyes were flashing. “And,” she went on, “I would advise anyone wishing to call herself a friend of mine to do like—excuse me, do you need something?”

This last was addressed to Rosamond who had edged a little too close to the group. She wanted desperately to say something cutting, toss her hair, and glide away. But she couldn’t think of anything, and she was too fragile to muster much bravado. “Oh, um, no, I was just . . . I . . . I’m sorry.”

She turned and hurried away, feeling graceless and ill composed, as if everything she tried so hard to be was flaking away like ash. Her skin prickled with sudden awareness and she almost stumbled straight into Jones. He put out a hand to steady her, his palm curving under her elbow. An innocent touch that nevertheless ignited her.

Made her remember his mouth, his body . . . his fingers. Her own had played her false ever since, proving little more than adequate for the purpose to which she nightly put them.

But now he was looking down at her with obvious concern.

She hated concern. It was too close to pity. And she would not be pitied by the likes of Anstruther Jones.

No matter how wretched she felt, or how much she desired him.

Choice had been made. And that was the end of it.

Now, if only she could stop seeing him everywhere. Like the most delicious cake she couldn’t eat.

She pulled free from his gentle grasp, and pressed into the crowd, scandalously unattended, in search of her mother.

Oh, she didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be quiet and alone, which necessarily meant her father’s house.

Could she claim yet another headache? People would think she shared her mother’s habits, and honestly, she was starting to see the appeal. She had been prescribed laudanum for a while, when she had rushed a jump she shouldn’t have rushed and been flung from the saddle, breaking her arm. The tincture had tasted bitter enough that she had protested, but it had made the world so soft that all her thoughts had just slipped away, and even pain couldn’t stick anymore.

She remembered, suddenly, her father at her bedside, his stiff-backed silhouette, and his fingers curled next to hers upon the coverlet. He had sat there all night long. And the next day he had sold her hunter, breaking her thirteen-year-old heart. It wasn’t Thunder’s fault, it was mine, she had screamed at him. Young ladies do not raise their voices, had been his only answer. The old helpless fury welled up inside her, but tonight it felt different, flimsy somehow, unimportant compared to that sombre, silent vigil, and the hand that did not know how to comfort her.

She wondered what would happen if she went to him now. Father, she would say, I am very unhappy, and I do not know what to do. But all she could imagine him saying was, Young ladies are not unhappy, and they do as they are told.

At that moment, a clock chimed the hour, and an announcement rang across the ballroom: “Lord Mercury.”

And the whole world—from the guests to the musicians to the dancers to the servants—fell silent.

Rosamond had no idea the mere absence of noise could be such a palpable thing. But there it was, a wave of nothing, sweeping across the marble floor, as heavy and stifling as heat. And, everywhere, a terrible stillness. A room of painted statues, their gazes turned towards the door.

Where Lord Mercury stood.

As elegant as ever in his evening dress, and a waistcoat of lilac silk that turned his eyes to jewels and his hair to flame. The shining auburn locks that had stirred several less well-appointed ladies to envy were gone, trimmed almost to nothing and smoothed back from his face. Such a loss should surely have diminished his beauty, but she found she liked him like this: revealed in some way he hadn’t been before. He walked slowly into the room, head held high, smiling faintly. There was a cut on his lip, bruises on his jaw, another beneath his eye.

Nobody moved. Or said a word. Until all at once conversation resumed, and the orchestra jerked into a waltz.

Lord Mercury was left an island at the heart of a spreading sea of emptiness. He even stood a little taller as everyone and everything he knew abandoned him. Rosamond took an impulsive step forward, hardly knowing what she intended, only that she did not wish to turn away from such dignity and courage, but a hand closed around her elbow. The marquess, his fingers digging into a remarkably tender spot at the crook of her arm.

The parting of the crowds had made a human corridor, bodies and crinolines and closed faces, and the marquess pulled her roughly aside as Lord Mercury walked past them, his gaze intent on something beyond her field of vision. She strained to see, and there, waiting and smiling the biggest smile, was Anstruther Jones.

Lord Mercury stopped before him, and bowed low. “Anstruther Jones, may I have this dance?”

And Jones threw back his head and laughed his fearless laugh, the sound breaking beneath the domed ceiling of the ballroom like fireworks. “Yes,” he said, “yes. You can, and you may.”

His hadn’t raised his voice, but it carried anyway. Most of the Gaslight nobility aspired to a London accent, but Jones didn’t even try, and the truth was, though she could barely admit it to herself, Rosamond adored him for it. There was harsh music in the way he spoke. It showed both the absurdity and the truth of things, and it made her long for a home she had never known.

Lord Mercury was pale and still, an odd shimmer in his eyes. Untouched by scorn, but fragile in the face of kindness. “Thank you.”

It was noisy and crowded in the ballroom, full of turned backs and cold, inquisitive eyes, but at that moment, they might have been the only two people in the world. Rosamond recognised the way they looked at each other—all that longing and hope—because she’d felt it too. It was strange, and yet not strange at all, to finally understand it in the reflection of someone else’s love.

Lord Mercury reached out slowly and took the hand Jones held out to him. Came into his embrace. Together they stepped onto the dance floor.

And they waltzed. A pair of entwined shadows gliding effortlessly through a cumbersome flower garden.

They were beautiful together.

It took a moment for society to realise exactly what it saw. And then there was carnage: muffled shrieks and shattering glass, gasps and exclamations, a babble of intemperately raised voices. Several women swooned, and only some of them were caught. More than one gentleman surged forward, reaching for a sword he was not carrying. And among the other dancers, the panic was mounting, some stumbling frantically away, despite the impropriety of doing so, some blundering into each other as they tried to see what was happening, and the rest grimly pressing on, stiff-backed and stony-faced.

And through it all, Lord Mercury and Anstruther Jones were turning gently in each other’s arms. If this was ruin, Rosamond envied them.

Lady Copper pushed her way to the orchestra, and stopped the music with a savage gesture. As the waltz died a drawn-out, discordant death, the remaining dancers fled. In the freshly falling silence, Lord Mercury bowed to his partner again, and Jones just grinned. Recaptured his hand and brought it to his lips.

Two gentlemen. Being perfect gentlemen.

To each other.

It made Rosamond want to smile at their wickedness, their joy. But as she scanned the faces of the other guests, she saw only anger, revulsion, and incomprehension. And, where there was not, embarrassment. Gazes trained upon the floor.

Someone knocked into her, tearing her skirt, almost pushing her off-balance. It was Lord Copper, whose fatherly geniality she had always rather coveted, although there was nothing even a little bit genial about him now. He was red-faced and muttering, his words catching at her like briars as he shoved past. “—bloody outrage. And in my house. They should be horsewhipped, filthy buggers.”

Oh God, there was going to be a terrible scene, and Rosamond could not bear the thought of it. She did not want courage to bring ignominy, and kindness cruelty. She remembered Lord Mercury pleading with her to keep his secret. She remembered how it felt to kiss Anstruther Jones. To ride too fast through Ashworth Valley on a horse of flesh and steel.

And then she realised. She, too, was tired of being frightened.

Tired of trying to be good. Tired of trying to be perfect. Tired of waiting for someone to notice. Tired of waiting for someone to care.

She might as well have joined the damn circus. They could have called her the Clockwork Girl. See how she smiles and curtseys, how lifelike she is. A miracle of modern mechanical engineering.

Oh, to hell with it. To hell with everything.

For the first time in her life, she was going to make a fucking choice. And maybe it was the wrong choice. Maybe it was a stupid choice.

But it was hers.

She yanked herself free of the marquess.

His mouth twisted, as though he sensed her recklessness and her purpose. “If you associate yourself with reprobates, neither I nor my name will protect you.”

“I do not want your protection.” She glared up at him, hating his handsome face and his dull eyes, and yanked the ring from her finger. It was rather a pleasure to cast that banal little solitaire at his feet. “I do not want anything from you.”

Then she swept away from him, past Lord Copper and across the ballroom to where Anstruther Jones was standing with Lord Mercury—still hand in hand, their fingers tightly intertwined—at the centre of an unyielding crowd. Jones seemed as dauntless as ever—perhaps he was preparing to fight his way to freedom, or swing from a chandelier—but Lord Mercury was as pale as ice, trembling very faintly.

She could hardly blame him. She felt caught somewhere between exhilaration and terror herself. “Mr. Jones, do you want to dance?”

Rosamond actually thought she heard the flump as a nearby lady hit the floor in a dead faint. Whispers rushed away from her: what did she say, what did she say, whatshesay whatshesay.

He smiled. “Always.”

She glanced between the two men, suddenly uncertain. She had meant to come to their aid, but perhaps she had only made the situation worse. What would happen to Lord Mercury if Jones came with her? “If . . . if you are not otherwise engaged.”

Lord Mercury pressed a hand extravagantly to his heart. “I would not dance twice in a row with the same gentleman. What do you take me for?”

Rosamond laughed. She couldn’t help herself.

It all seemed so simple suddenly, and everything else so silly. It was fun when you didn’t have to care about anything but the things—no, the people who really mattered.

Footsteps sounded behind them, and she spun round, expecting the worst. Lord Copper, perhaps, with a riding crop. The marquess come to publicly humiliate her. Her father, his expression dark with disappointment.

But it was Lady Mildred, ill attired as ever in tan and lavender taffeta. She gave a high-pitched giggle that, as little as Rosamond thought of her, was not the sort of sound she would have expected her to make. Lady Mildred was many things that were annoying, but stupid was not one of them. “Well,” she tittered, “aren’t we having a topsy-turvy evening. How droll.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Lord Mercury, will you do me the honour of dancing with me?”

He offered his hand at once, his eyes full of gratitude. “It would be my pleasure.”

Lady Mildred turned, her expression so marvellously vacuous that Rosamond had to repress a flare of admiration. “Why, Mama, whatever has happened to the music? Was there not to be a mazurka after the waltz?”

It was a bold gamble. And it was met by the briefest of hesitations. Rosamond could not help but wonder what her own parents would have done. Her mother would have probably been too laudanum-soaked to notice. And her father . . . She did not dare to finish the thought, too afraid she knew the answer.

But Lady Copper gave a sickly smile and clapped her hands, the sound cracking through the ballroom like a gunshot. “Play.”

The orchestra lurched into action. Lady Copper seized her husband by the elbow and practically dragged him onto the dance floor. Other couples began to join them, slowly at first, but then with increasing urgency. A slightly desperate air of normalcy settled over the ball. A hastily transacted social covenant, allowing everyone to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened tonight. Certainly not that two sodomites and two seventeen-year-old girls had stood in flagrant defiance of everything society held to be right and proper and natural, and that they had done so without causing the sky to fall or the earth to crack.

Even so, Rosamond knew that while they might be willing to ignore what had just happened, they would not forget it. And nor would they forgive. She was dancing on the tatters of her reputation. But she was dancing with Anstruther Jones, and it was the closest thing to magic she had ever known. Even if the mazurka could not have suited him less. His waltzing made up for what it lacked in elegance with a certain . . . masculine vigour. But, unlike Lord Mercury who was lithe and as light on his feet as a cat in the moonlight, Jones was simply not built for . . . well . . . for hopping.

Rosamond could barely contain her giggles. She was sure it should have felt wrong to be laughing. She had, after all, abandoned every precept she had ever been taught. Thrown away every hope of a respectable future. She didn’t even know what was going to happen to her when the dance was done. It would have been more sensible to weep.

But she didn’t. She laughed, and Jones smiled down at her, and nothing about anything felt wrong.

As it turned out, what she did next required no thought at all. It was simply the action of tucking her hand into the crook of Jones’s elbow, and waiting for Lord Mercury to take his other arm. Which he did, a few moments later, having bid a soft farewell to his dancing partner. Despite her resolution to think better of Lady Mildred, Rosamond permitted herself the slightly spiteful reflection that the other girl would likely keep the glove Lord Mercury had kissed, pressed as a cherished memento between the pages of a romantic novel.

“I’m afraid,” murmured Lord Mercury, “I have quite ruined any hope of a respectable future for either of you. What do we do now?”

Jones began to walk them away from the ballroom. People drew back as they came near, whispered behind their fans, or stared at them in mingled curiosity and dismay. “We go home,” he said.

Rosamond squeezed his arm in sheer glee. Was this all one had to do to be happy—choose, and act, and not look back?

But in the entrance hall, her mother was waiting, frail as a ghost in rose silk, locked inside her beauty like a music box without a key, and all of Rosamond’s courage crumbled. She was a little girl again, when her mother was perfect, and her father was wondrous, and he used to kiss her hands and laugh and fill her skirts with petals. Before Lord Wolfram had been sent to fight a trade war halfway across the world. Before Lady Wolfram’s headaches and the laudanum. Before Rosamond knew Gaslight afternoons were grey, not gold, and she had learned to hate the scent of roses.

“I . . . oh, Mother . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry. I had to. I couldn’t—”

“Shhh.” Lady Wolfram put a finger to her lips. She was so pale, her skin seemed almost translucent. She came towards them, soundless as a feather, and kissed Rosamond on the forehead. The lightest brush of flesh and breath. “Be happy, my daughter.”

She pressed something hard and cold into Rosamond’s palm, turned, and slipped into the night.

Nobody saw her again.

Safely in Lord Mercury’s carriage, Rosamond opened her hand. It was a ring. Her mother’s wedding ring. Rose gold, decorated with a pattern of entwined flowers. She held it up to the window and, by the uncertain flicker of the gaslights, read the words engraved on the inside: my luve’s like a red red rose.

Then she cried, not so much for herself, but for two lovers who had lost each other long ago, and two men took turns holding her.

9

By the time they arrived at Lord Mercury’s grand but clearly neglected townhouse, Rosamond was out of tears. And she was holding his hand, not Jones’s, as a housemaid let them inside.

“My butler left,” he explained. “Because I’m a pervert.”

“Oh, my lord—” Rosamond put a wrist to her brow “—one can overlook a little sodomy between friends, but this is beyond the pale.”

His fingers tightened around hers. “Arkady.”

“J-Jones calls me Ros.”

She slid a sideways glance at him. It seemed slightly safer, somehow, than looking at Jones. Was it peculiar, or perfectly natural, to have more in common with him, than the man she loved? Or perhaps it was that—loving Anstruther Jones, and being loved by him—that truly bound them. “I was tired of being frightened too,” she whispered.

“Fear is what it is,” said Jones. “It’s what you do that matters.” He stepped close, cupping the edge of Lord Mercury’s jaw, and Rosamond felt the touch, and the shiver that ran through Arkady as he turned his face blindly into the caress.

“But I’ve been such a coward. All these years.”

“Don’t say that. It’s easy to be brave when you’ve nothing to lose.”

“And what,” Arkady asked softly, “of your losses?”

“I . . .” Jones’s voice caught, turned rough at the edges. “I have everything I’ve ever wanted.”

It was the oddest moment. Rosamond wasn’t sure how it came about, but the next thing she knew, Anstruther Jones was on his knees on the hall floor and she had her arms tight around him, and so did Arkady, and it was hard to tell who was holding whom in that sweet muddle of warmth. And all Rosamond could think was how miraculous it was that this strong, lonely man was . . . theirs. And how utterly right it felt to be there, with both of them: Jones, whom she loved, and Arkady, whom she understood.

Jones’s mouth moved against her skin as he spoke. “Ambition can be a hungry feeling. It’s served me well, made me what I am, given me what I have, but I hope I don’t need it again.”

“Indeed no.” Rosamond grinned. “Your ambitions are to be limited to satisfying what I believe may turn out be my insatiable sexual appetites and keeping me in the manner to which I intend to grow accustomed.”

“I, too,” added Arkady, “will require sexual satisfaction. And also sunrises. And also flowers.”

“And—” Jones’s partially muffled laughter made his body shake “—what do I get out of this?”

“All my love,” said Arkady. “All the happiness I can give you.”

“And mine,” said Rosamond. “Though I do not think I am very good at loving people, for I am selfish and greedy and have previously found blackmail superior to friendship. But all my governesses have noted what a quick and agile mind I have, so I believe I . . . can . . . I will learn.”

“You do all right.” Jones’s fingers stirred the little hairs at the back of her neck, making her shiver with silver-bright pleasure.

Arkady’s eyes gleamed mischievously at her as he peeped over Jones’s shoulder. “Just don’t blackmail me again.”

She sorted through their hands until she found the one that was clutching his—so different to Jones’s, with its tapering fingers and butter-smooth skin. She gave it a squeeze. “I promise.”

“I’m not sure you could, in any case. The whole of Gaslight probably knows more about my proclivities than I do.” He pressed a light kiss to Jones’s brow. “Which is something I very much desire to correct.”

Rosamond nodded. “I have had insufficient opportunity to develop proclivities.”

“I can already think of one we share.”

“Yes,” said Jones, sounding remarkably flustered for the man who had taught them pleasure, “you’re both depraved.”

“Oh—” Rosamond pulled back a little to meet his eyes “—I like the sound of that.”

There was a slash of red across the crest of his cheekbones, and she realised suddenly that he was almost shy, not of depravity as he had suggested, but love. That while he gave it without hesitation, he was as inexperienced as any of them in receiving it. “I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t ask questions about good fortune but . . . thank you. For whatever this is.”

“I’m not sure, having little knowledge of such matters but—” she let go of Arkady and pulled Jones into a bold, open-mouthed kiss that made him shudder and groan, his body stirring in interesting ways “—I think what it is . . . or perhaps may come to be . . . is family.”

One of Arkady’s arms curved protectively over Jones’s shoulder. “You know, I keep thinking of that conversation we had—the, ah, the one where you . . . the one where I said that without what we knew, we were left with nothing.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I was wrong.” He smiled at her, curling into them both. “We have each other.”

They were all a little silly after that. It was some giddy combination of relief and release, tinged—for Rosamond, at least—with a faint sense of unreality. She half feared she was going to wake up her in own bed, and discover this was nothing more than some kind of torrid, highly specific fever-dream. Although nothing of her life and temperament to date suggested that even her most aspirational fantasies would have inclined her to harbour designs on the possession of not merely one man, but two.

They crept through the darkened rooms of Lord Mercury’s house, holding hands and giggling. They smoked Jones’s cheroots on the overgrown terraces, Rosamond faring far better than Arkady, who choked on the bitter smoke. In the bare-shelved library, they drank Arkady’s finest brandy straight from his last crystal decanter. And in this Rosamond did not excel, for the stuff tasted horrible, harsh and fiery. It had been her general experience that men preferred to keep the best things for themselves, but in this case, that made no sense at all.

However, it left both Jones and Arkady dreamy and mellow, and they sat awhile by the fire Jones had lit for them, watching the shadows jump upon the wainscoting, and the flames dance in ribbons of scarlet and gold. Jones lay with his head in her lap, and Arkady tucked against her side, as he unpicked all her ringlets and smoothed out her tresses, with far more care than she had ever shown them.

Rosamond found herself wishing she had some female friends so she could share these marvellous discoveries with them. The secret to happiness, she would say, sipping her tea delicately, is a generous-hearted, sexually amphibious man who desires you, and a confirmed sodomite who admires your hair.

They swapped secrets softly in the firelight. Old hurts and unexpected joys, the dreams they had once feared to dream, the hopes they told themselves were foolish, pieces of the lost times of their lives. Though, eventually, grey seeped into the darkness and the embers faded, and they grew frivolous again. And why shouldn’t they? The night was theirs.

In the billiard room—another male mystery that turned out to be disappointingly banal in reality (it was just a room, for heaven’s sake; why the drama?)—they taught Rosamond how to play. It was clearly Arkady’s game, Jones muttering with every miscue that there wasn’t much call for billiard tables in the sky, but Rosamond discovered she could compensate for lack of skill, against Jones at least, by taking her shots in a particular fashion. Jones would, for some reason, get very distracted. Perhaps it had something to do with the way the position of her elbows squished her bosoms together?

Not to be outdone, Arkady then started bending rather suggestively over the table, thrusting his—admittedly—beautifully shaped buttocks skywards in a manner she presumed would be very tempting for a man of Anstruther Jones’s inclinations.

Jones’s took his turn, and sent the cue ball spinning nowhere.

And Arkady stood there smirking, his weight resting on one leg in a manner that shamelessly emphasised the masculine curves and angles of his body.

This would never do! Rosamond scowled at him, largely in jest, but a little bit not. Fuck billiards. This was a different game entirely, and while she instinctively recognised there could (and should) be no winner, nor loser, she wanted to play it well. She prowled around the table, as if looking for the best possible angle for her shot, uttering impatient little noises as her skirts got in her way.

She put her hands on her hips, and pouted. “This isn’t fair. I am hampered in ways you gentlemen are not.”

“Well, you should have thought of that,” returned Arkady, as he chalked his cue, “before you decided to be a woman.”

“Oh please, it is not my sex which hampers me, merely my garments. Jones, my dear, would you please help me remove them?”

He gave a bow. “Anything to oblige a lady.”

His skills had not improved since the day in the woods at Ashworth, which was fortunate indeed because she did not like to think of him having partaken of activities that would have given him practice at it. Arkady, perhaps because he was a man, or perhaps because he was simply Arkady, did not trouble her, but if any woman was going be undressed by Anstruther Jones, it was going to be her.

“These buttons were made by mice,” he muttered, fingers working somewhere down her spine.

Arkady helped in the end—though it did not serve his cause—and peeled her out of her ball gown and petticoats. He nudged Jones out of the way, and unfastened her crinoline cage. She stepped out of it, feeling at once frighteningly exposed and wondrously free. It was hard to believe that, when she had awoken, today had seemed like any other day—and yet here she was, at three in the morning, partially undressed in a billiard room, in front of two men. Truly, nothing would ever be the same again. Certainly she wouldn’t.

Jones shook his head at the pile of steel and silk. “I had no idea all you ladies were running about in armour. We should have sent you against those Russian guns, not the Light Brigade.”

“What do women wear in the sky?” she asked.

“Whatever they want. Trousers mostly. Unless they’re whores.”

Rosamond looked down her legs. “Maybe I shall wear trousers sometimes.” Jones, it turned out, was also looking at her legs. And other parts of her. She still had her shoes and stockings and drawers and corset and chemise. But the heat in his eyes made her feel naked, and she was very glad she had chosen a particularly lacy set of unmentionables with ribbons at the knees. “Sir.” She rapped on the edge of the billiard table to get his attention. “My face is up here.”

“Aye, but I’ve already seen your face.”

She knew she was blushing, the warmth of it spreading and tingling through her whole body, gathering with particular intensity in certain places. “Well, I hope you enjoy the view.”

She wriggled into position, leaned far over the table and managed a very neat cannon, even if she said so herself.

“Hmm.” Arkady tilted his head, as if considering the table. “You know, I do believe my coat is rather hindering my range of motion.”

He stripped it off with a flourish. She did not think he looked quite as impressive in his shirt sleeves as Jones, but then she did not want him in the same way she wanted Jones. His body was built quite differently, without the raw power, but, she could gladly concede, no less pleasingly. He was all clean, smooth lines, a graceful cat of a man, lightly muscled and elegant.

He rolled his shoulders. “And my waistcoat.” That came off too, more carefully than the coat. “And, for that matter, my shirt.” He whisked it over his head, and Jones made a low, hungry noise at the back of his throat.

And Arkady deserved to have that noise because he was truly exquisite, even with the bruises that cast angry shadows across his body. Jones, she recalled, was amply and excitingly befurred, but Arkady was like some perfect sculpture, a dream of male beauty Pygmalion might have carved had his tastes run otherwise. The hair that curled upon his forearms, and formed a wicked little arrow down his abdomen, glinted gold and mahogany and russet red in the flickering gaslight.

Jones dropped his cue and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I’ve lost. Or won. I really don’t care.”

Arkady laughed and bowed to Rosamond. “Well played, my lady.”

“And to you, my lord.” She dropped him a curtsey. “How do we celebrate such a victory?”

“We go to bed,” said Jones, decidedly.

It was probably already close to dawn, so that seemed like a very sensible notion, but as they climbed the stairs—Rosamond in her drawers, Arkady without his shirt, Jones walking with visible discomfort—an odd, slightly tense silence settled over them. She was not quite sure what had changed, but perhaps nothing had—it was simply that certain things had become undeniable, and certain questions had to be asked.

“This . . . this is not normal, is it?” she blurted out.

Arkady paused, one hand resting lightly on the banister. “It’s not usual.”

“Spare me the semantics. I am uncertain how it is arranged when a lady retires with only one gentleman, let alone two of them. Do we go separately, or all together? What are our roles? Is there to be a schedule of occupancy? And what if we wish to negotiate times or activities or—”

“Why don’t we work it out?” Jones swept her into his arms like the barbarian he was.

She thought about protesting, just on principle, but quickly decided that would be a silly principle because it was rather thrilling to be carried about as though she were the heroine in a melodrama. Although she supposed if she were a proper heroine, she would have fainted by now, rather than be enthusiastically participating in her own debauchery. But that, she thought, as she tucked her head against Jones’s chest, his heart thudding beneath her cheek, was a flaw in heroines, not a flaw in her.

She had never been in a gentleman’s bedroom before, but as it turned out, they slept in much the same manner as women, if under fewer frills. There was, however, something rather extravagant about Arkady’s bed with its gleaming, intricate carvings, and the lavish hangings in burgundy velvet and gold. It made her a little sad for him, imagining him every night, restless and alone in all that space and grandeur.

“You had better help me with my stays,” she said, as Jones lowered her onto the pillows. “Or I may suffocate.”

It took both of them, for Jones was once again inept, but it felt so good to be out of her corset. She stretched her arms above her head, filled her lungs to their capacity, and let the luxury of being able to move freely rush all the way through her, until she felt even her toes uncurling.

Jones closed a hand around one of her ankles. Drew it slowly upwards over her stocking-covered calf, a sweet-rough drag of heat and pressure, at once arousing and comforting. Arkady sprawled out next to her on his stomach, watching her lazily, his lips curled into a half smile. She had always thought his eyes quite cold in their beauty, too bright, too perfect, like glass, but in this light they were mossy-dark, and soft with something she thought might be contentment.

All her half-formed fears fled. Fuck normal. She wanted this, exactly as it was, a secret shared between three people who had always been alone. It was hard to believe she had ever thought Lord Mercury remote. She had dismissed him as a perfect gentleman, a distant star, but he was her Arkady now, and Jones’s. She had held his hand, and seen him smile, and shown him—on more than one occasion—the worst of her. And in return, he had dried her tears, and played with her hair, made her feel beautiful, and trusted her with who he was.

Made brave by the steady warmth of Jones’s hand upon her, she reached out and traced a careful path down the bridge of Arkady’s nose. He did not flinch, only lightly kissed her finger as it passed his lips. His mouth did not feel like Jones’s mouth, but she could not have articulated why or how it was different. Perhaps it was simply because he did not stir her in the same way, though it pleased her to touch him, and be touched in return.

He quirked a brow at her. “I’ve never had a woman in my bed before.”

“Does it meet your expectations?”

“It far surpasses them. I’ve never been able imagine a situation in which it wouldn’t have been miserable for both of us.”

“You’re not miserable now?”

“No, I’m . . . oh God . . .” He pressed suddenly into her arms, trembling. “I think I’m happy.”

Rosamond held him, as tight as she could, for she knew his bewilderment and his trepidation, and then Jones let her go, crawled up the bed, and enfolded both of them. After a moment or two, Arkady pulled free and rolled onto his back, looking up at Jones with such naked longing that Rosamond felt a little breathless for both of them. With an unsteady hand, he caressed the side of Jones’s face, and the hair-shadowed jaw that Rosamond found so terribly vulgar and appealing.

“Please,” he said. “I need you to kiss me. Please, oh please, will you—”

Jones’s mouth came down on his.

Needless to say, witness two men kissing was also on Rosamond’s list of Things Not Previously Experienced, along with brandy and billiards, so she lacked sources of comparison, but it indisputably seemed like a highly satisfying endeavour for both parties. She was not at a good angle to see their faces, but the way their bodies moved together, Jones falling into the cradle of Arkady’s opening thighs, and the intermingling sounds they made, soft gasps and helpless moans, communicated a mutuality of pleasure in a manner that required no further explication.

She was not entirely sure what she might have expected. She had been taught that it was a man’s character to conquer and a woman’s to yield, but her own experiences with Jones had already proven this to be arrant nonsense. Nevertheless, since men were supposed to be creatures of flesh rather than creatures of spirit, she wondered if the way they kissed each other would be different, perhaps even a little brutish.

But it was not like that at all. There was nothing in it of aggression or subjugation. It was an effortless union, simply a lover’s kiss, an exchange between equals, like their dancing. Just as lovely to behold. What shook her, as it turned out, was not the fact they were two men, but how vulnerable they were to each other when they came together in pleasure. How much power you granted another person when you let your body tell them things as frightening and wonderful as I need, I want, I love.

She had felt something similar that day in the woods. And she could see it now in the way Arkady’s fingers were curled too tightly in Jones’s hair, in the straining of the muscles down Jones’s back, in the shuddering curve of Arkady’s naked throat, and in the sweat that gleamed at Jones’s brow. All their truths made manifest in the desperate entangling of their interlocked bodies.

Jones pulled back, breathing hard, lips kiss-dark and slightly swollen. “Arkady, oh my Arkady, you don’t need to ask me for anything.”

“But I want to. I want to ask you for everything.”

They kissed again, softly this time, a simple touch of mouths. “It’s already yours.”

“That’s why I am not afraid to ask.”

There was some current between, at that moment, that Rosamond could not entirely understand, but she did not need to. She understood enough, and anything else would have felt like imposition.

Arkady tipped his head back to look at her. “Are you shocked? That I would seek this?”

“It would be somewhat hypocritical for I seek it myself.” She lifted her chin, and pushed back her shoulders, assuming what she hoped was a lips-accessible position. “Jones, you may kiss me as well, if you wish.”

“I do wish.” His rose onto his knees, still straddling Arkady, and pulled her to him. His palm curved tenderly around the back of her neck, finding all those magical, tingly places that lurked beneath her hair, and then he kissed her, opening to her. His mouth was hot and harsh like the brandy—maybe she had misjudged the drink—and it could just have been her fancy but she thought she tasted Arkady. She wondered, albeit only briefly, if it should have troubled her. But it didn’t. It didn’t make Jones any less hers, or his kisses any less delightful. She clutched his shoulders, venturing deeper, the glide of his tongue against hers reminding her suddenly—and shockingly vividly—of his fingers moving intimately upon her. Squeaking, she pulled away, scalded with desire and blushing.

“Are you all right?” asked Jones, a faint frown creasing his brow.

Arkady pushed himself onto his elbows. “I can leave you. I have no wish to trespass.”

She almost said yes, just so she wouldn’t have to worry about what he might think of her. But then got a little bit cross. Had she not spent enough of her life preoccupied with the perceptions and expectations of other people? What was the point of running away with an ineligible commoner and his male lover if one was still stuck giving a damn? And besides, Arkady was a sodomite, what right did he have to judge her a wanton? She opened her mouth to say as much, but the words failed to emerge, and she realised what was holding them back was the fact she liked Arkady too much to protect herself by hurting him.

And that was . . . unexpected. Hurting other people first was the most effective method she had found for stopping them hurting her. But how could she repay Arkady for his trust and his honesty, by denying him hers?

He was already wriggling out from under Jones, so she put a hand on his arm. “Stay. I was simply afraid I would shock you in return.”

His lips turned upwards. “Wouldn’t that be hypocritical?”

“Well, yes. But such considerations rarely carry the weight they ought.” She sighed. “The truth is, I rather enjoyed watching you kiss Jones. It was very . . . aesthetic. Is that peculiar?”

“I find it preferable to the alternative.”

“As do I, but I’m . . .” she hesitated, hating to say it “. . . scared.”

“Of me?”

“Of me . . . and of the things I want. I fear the loss of some fundamental part of me that I lack the experience to understand.”

Jones left Arkady—dismounted, she thought, with a slightly hysterical, internal giggle—and came to her, wrapping her up in his arms. “There’s nothing wrong in what you want, but there’s no wrong in waiting until it feels right either.”

“I’ve spent my whole life fearing what I want,” Arkady told her. “I feared I would lose myself the first time I put my mouth on a man. The first time I took a man inside my body. I feared I would lose myself if I kissed a man, or if I loved one.” His eyes flicked briefly to Jones. “But I’m more myself than I have ever been.”

She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding brittle and unpleasant. “What lives we lead, spending them in fear of love.”

“No—” Arkady’s smile was bright and fierce “—I am done with that. I won’t be ashamed or afraid anymore.”

She touched her fingers to his shorn hair, letting what remained of the red-gold strands slip between her fingers. “I don’t want to be either.” She was silent a moment, lost and thoughtful, confused and wanting. And then she knew exactly what to do. “Show me,” she said. And then, remembering she was trying to be a better a person. “I mean, would you show me? If you please.”

Arkady spluttered. “And to think I was concerned I would shock you with a kiss.”

“I think I should like to see you together if it would not discomfort you. I would like to see these acts you speak of, that are performed in love and bring no shame nor loss of self.”

“What?” Jones was laughing against her neck. “All of them?”

“Yes,” she said proudly. “All of them.”

“Well, perhaps some of them?” To her surprise, Arkady was grinning too.

She blinked at them, mildly irritated by their sudden reserve. “I promise I won’t be shocked.”

Jones kissed her under her jaw, making her pulse leap beneath his lips. “Love, there are limitations on what a man can do.”

“With another man?”

“No. Limitations on his pleasure.” Her expression must have reflected her incomprehension because he went on, awkwardly. “A man can only come once, and then he has to wait a while before he can, uh . . .”

“Seek satisfaction again,” finished Arkady helpfully.

Rosamond gazed at them, stricken. “Oh, you poor things. How awfully disappointing for you.”

“We contrive to make do.” Arkady settled back against the pillows, and ran a sly finger along Jones’s thigh. “Now, why don’t you come and make love to me, as the lady suggests?”

“A gentleman never says no to a lady.” Jones leaned down and kissed him again, and this time Rosamond was close enough to catch the details—the cling of skin to skin, the helpless look on Jones’s face, the gilded flicker of Arkady’s eyelashes, the way a kiss was not really one thing at all, but a succession of moments, tender and passionate and intimate, flowing into each other.

She noted rather ruefully that she could probably learn something from this. Her own habit was to dive right in, as she was also wont to do with sweets when nobody was looking. She had once in a single sitting eaten an entire box of the rose-flavoured lokum her father sometimes brought back from his trips. But watching Jones and Arkady she realised giddily she was never going to run out of kisses.

“You know,” she said, since they seemed so amenable to counsel, “you might find it more comfortable to be naked as you proceed.” And, then, because being a more honest person was probably necessary to being a better one, she added, “I enjoy the sight of unclad men.”

Jones grinned at her and stripped off the remains of his evening wear with gratifying alacrity. She was pleased to discover he looked as marvellous as she remembered, especially with the gaslight flickering like adoring tongues over the hard bands of his muscles and the deep hollows between them.

Arkady met her eyes somewhere in the region of Jones’s abdomen (for he was especially rough-hewn and rippling there) and murmured, “As do I.”

“And I.” Jones leaned over Arkady to relieve him of his shoes and stockings, and began slowly to ease his trousers down.

For all the thrill of Jones’s willingness to shed his clothing at a moment’s notice, there was something quite tantalising about this gradual revelation, dark fabric giving way to pale skin, all of Arkady’s beauty laid bare before them.

“Oh, you’re exquisite,” said Rosamond. “You make me wish I could paint something other than pissant little watercolours of meadows.” She traced the sharp lines of his collarbones, erratic colour rising beneath her fingers, like the pattern of lights at the heart of opal.

“Aye.” Jones crawled on the bed with them. “Beautiful.”

Arkady’s knees came up to embrace him, and Rosamond thought it must have been instinct alone, for he also flung an arm across his eyes, the flush spreading down his chest, and curling up his throat. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Tough.” Jones spanned his hands possessively over Arkady’s hipbones, half-pinning, half-caressing, holding him there between his palms. He glanced at Rosamond, smiling a little, his eyes bright with some still-uncertain joy. “He hardly let me look at him, before.”

Arkady made a soft noise and writhed, eyes squeezing tightly shut in the shadow of his forearm. “I love the way you look at me. I love the way you touch me. Please touch me.”

His physical parts clearly concurred. It was hard—difficult, that is—not to heed the urgent, slightly pleading way his member curved towards his stomach. Had Rosamond been Jones at that moment, she would have curled her hand around it, to know the weight and texture of all that taut, rose-and-ivory skin, and it was almost as if Jones read her thought because he did exactly that, a few droplets of pearly fluid spilling over his fingers in greeting. Arkady’s spine arched, his whole body straining like his desirous manhood.

Having two men present did rather lead one into a comparative frame of mind, but it did neither of them disservice. It was fascinating, really, the variation between what ought to have been two very similar anatomies. Arkady, she thought, was the more sizeable, but the dense dark hair from which Jones’s still rather imposing appendage sprang lent it an air of drama. Typical, really, of the man to possess a vulgar cock.

Nevertheless, it seemed her own anatomies were quite responsive to such contemplations. She shifted a little on the bed, oddly conscious of the brush of her nipples against her chemise, and the heat gathering in her drawers.

“Like this?” The bone ridges on the back of Jones’s hand flexed and the knotty blue-ish veins writhed as he tightened his grip, manipulating the other man with quite some vigour, the sound of slick skin sliding against itself a peculiarly visceral counterpoint to all their ragged breaths.

Rosamond would have imagined such a touch might be painful, but Arkady’s wild cry was the very opposite of pain. “Yes. Oh, fuck, yes.”

The raw obscenity, clad in Arkady’s usually so genteel voice, both shocked and excited her. It was the worst word, she knew, and consequently her favourite, and she loved to hear other people swearing. She had long thought it the epitome of personal abandonment. But that was before she had spent an evening in the company of two gloriously deviant gentlemen, who were now sharing her bed, lost both to each other and to advanced, glistening priapism. It was filthy and wonderful, and Rosamond devoured them with greedy eyes.

Abruptly, Arkady seized Jones’s wrist. “God, stop, or I’ll come.” They both stilled, wide-eyed and panting, sweat making silver patchwork of their skin. “I don’t want to come without you inside me.”

Jones grinned, showing a flash of gold from one of his back teeth. “That’s easily fixed.”

“Not yet.” There was a flurry of movement, so many limbs, pale skin and darker, and now Jones was underneath, and Arkady astride him. “I never touched you enough.”

They moved into another kiss, quite different to the last one, rougher and deeper, to match the harsh sounds they made against each other’s mouth. Jones’s hands slid all the way up Arkady’s spine, curving over his shoulder blades to pull him closer, and Rosamond realised she hadn’t touched Jones enough either.

She had always rather prided herself on a well-developed instinct for self-preservation, and she had recognised what she had done that day in the woods was dangerous—to her virtue, certainly, but more pressingly her heart. It turned out that when a man made himself naked, and knew how to kiss properly, it had rather a way of moving one. And had she learned also how it felt to command a lover’s pleasure, and make it her own, how then would she ever have let him go?

But now she didn’t have to. Not ever, unless she wanted. And there would be plenty of time to explore Anstruther Jones at her leisure, to make him groan and shudder and come just for her. But now Arkady needed that freedom more, and she wanted him to have it and to glory in it, as she fully intended to do. Besides, it could not hurt to gather a little advance information about the . . . lie of the land, to speak. The human body was rather intimidating in scope, and there seemed so many aspects to it, so many intriguing configurations to stroke, and taste and claim and perhaps even . . . bite?

Oh yes, biting seemed entirely acceptable. Arkady’s lips had slipped from Jones’s and were tracing a shining path down the man’s throat, and sometimes he would pause, openmouthed, over some tender spot, until Jones groaned, the sound of his pleasure so deep and rich that she half imagined licking it from his skin. Arkady was thorough, learning the other man by taste and touch, his body covering and revealing Jones in enticing flashes like the shore beneath the sea. Her favourite moments, though, were when Arkady would discover some place, some way of touching, that would draw some naked, needy sound from Jones, make him shudder and writhe, and clench those strong hands helplessly around empty air.

She would never have guessed men could be so sensitive, so full of secrets, not when their arousal was so overtly and specifically made manifest. But she loved to know that the lightest graze of teeth against his nipples could make Jones gasp. Or his hips would buck when Arkady ran his thumbs up the crease of his pelvis. That the interiors of his forearms were paler than the rest of him. That he was slightly ticklish towards the tops of his hips. That passion made him beautiful, and there was nothing of himself he was not willing to give.

Like the tide coming in, the boundaries between who was touching and who was the touched slowly dissolved until they were simply locked in each other’s arms, moving together, skin to skin and breath to breath.

Arkady turned onto his back and reached out to Jones, drawing their faces close, gazing up at the other man with such wonderment that Rosemond stared at the shadows of their pleasingly aligned cocks in order to give them the privacy of their moment. “Now,” Arkady whispered, after a second or two, “please now.”

“Yes. God, yes.” Jones glanced up, quite unexpectedly meeting Rosamond’s eyes. “Ros?” It could, perhaps, have felt a little odd to hear her name in such a context, but it pleased her to know she was just a thought away from him. “In the bedside table, there’s a vial of oil. Can you pass it to me?”

Oil? But she nodded, and twisted round to tug open the top drawer. It contained a jumbled and slightly peculiar collection of items—among them, a battered copy of Melmoth the Wanderer, and a rather beautiful glass object shaped not unlike . . . oh. Was it intended for private use? She imagined Arkady’s elegant fingers circling it, and then a further thought occurred to her.

She looked up frowning. “What exactly is sodomy?”

Jones’s laugh was full of the wickedest joy. “Find the oil, and we’ll show you.” She rummaged about until she found a stoppered glass bottle, and when she held it up, Jones extended a hand towards her. “Pour some for me.”

She felt the ripple that ran through Arkady, pulling his body tight with anticipation. This was all very intriguing. She made a neat pool of oil in the centre of Jones’s palm, and he closed his fist, spreading the liquid liberally over his fingers with this thumb until they shone like the tip of Arkady’s cock. Like they had in the woods after he’d brought her to crisis.

His hand vanished between Arkady’s thighs, and the man made a soft, delirious sound, his head falling back against the pillows and his hips arching wantonly. She had to admit, he looked rather splendid like that, abandoned to whatever lovely thing Jones was doing to him.

“Is this sodomy?” she asked.

“It’s about to be.” Arkady dug his fingers into Jones’s biceps, hard enough that his nails left pale crescents in Jones’s tan. “Darling, enough. I want to feel you.”

“More oil.”

Rosamond was glad to discover that all those tedious lessons in how to properly serve tea had finally come to something—it turned out, she was very good at pouring oil into her lover’s hand so he could make love to his lover. This time, however, his hand went nowhere more mysterious than himself, and her eyes followed because watching Anstruther Jones make his delightfully hard cock all slick and gleaming was quite stirring. Her interest in the proceedings had been temporarily diverted towards more intellectual considerations, but the sight of Jones kneeling between Arkady’s legs with that frowning, focused look on his face garnered a far more bodily reaction.

Arkady reached down, caught hold of his own knees, and pulled them back, exposing himself in a manner so bold it was probably far beyond wanton. “Damn it, Jones, will you fuck me?”

Jones grinned wolfishly, all teeth and a flash of gold, and stroked a possessive hand along the unprotected underside of Arkady’s thigh, making the other man shudder uncontrollably. His left hand was still on his cock, and as he pressed forward, Rosamond quite abruptly learned what sodomy was.

Admittedly it was a little startling. She would never have imagined such a thing was possible, let alone pleasurable, but they both seemed to enjoy it immensely. There was even something a little bit remarkable about it, the way Arkady’s body was coaxed with gentle pressure and rocking thrusts to encompass Jones, and their gradual progress to a completeness of joining that made them groan in unison. After a moment or two, Jones came down onto his elbows, Arkady’s legs curled around him, and they lay like that, chest to chest, wrapped in each other, exchanging increasingly frantic kisses, almost as if neither quite believed that what they did was real.

Rosamond was truly baffled. This was the terrible, unspeakable sin?

She would probably not have wished to participate in it herself, but then she would probably not have appreciated it overmuch if Jones stuck his finger in her ear. But what was one appendage and one orifice over another? Why was this particular combination outlawed?

Especially when it seemed to her a rather beautiful union.

They were moving now, still entwined, the sweat-glossy muscles of Jones’s back undulating delightfully and his buttocks flexing as he claimed Arkady’s body in long, steady thrusts.

Oh heavens. How very fine he looked. How strong and . . . Rosamond shifted, unable to help herself, all her most secret places alight with longing. Had she been in Arkady’s positions she would have— His hands curled over Jones’s hips, pulling him greedily against him, harder, deeper, the sound of skin against skin mingling with their rapid breaths, the moans of pleasure that seemed to ripple between them like an unending echo.

Jones rose onto his knees again, his hips moving to a different rhythm, slow, shallow, and lingering. Rosamond was certainly no expert at the act they were committing, but she could recognise a tease when she saw one.

Arkady, too, his mouth parting on a laughing gasp, as he wriggled frantically and arched after Jones’s cock. “You bastard.”

“That any way to talk to a man inside you?”

“Yes, if he’s not insi—” Jones drove forward, and whatever Arkady had been going to say was lost to a sharp cry of mingled pleasure and gratitude. “Oh God, yes. Like that.”

Jones had that intent and ferocious look again, his eyes stormy as he gazed down at Arkady and at the place their bodies met. It made Rosamond shiver. She enjoyed being the subject of Jones’s attention herself, but at the same time she was a little envious. Not because she wanted Arkady the way Jones did, but because he yielded his body so completely, and revelled in it, unabashed. And because his surrender did not look like weakness. It looked like joy.

Jones wrapped a hand about the other man’s cock, inspiring another spill of liquid, and a harsh, almost-pained groan from Arkady.

His head tossed on the pillows, moisture caught on his hair and on the tips of his eye lashes. “No, don’t . . .”

“No?”

“Just you.” An unsteady breath, something close to a smile. “Is enough.”

Jones made one of his likerous, growly noises and shifted his hold from Arkady’s powerfully rigid member to his legs. He lifted them up to rest against his shoulders, and began to move afresh, thrusting deep into Arkady with quite remarkable vigour. Rosamond wasn’t sure if she wouldn’t have found such enthusiasm a little punishing, but Arkady seemed to relish it. And Jones looked wonderful that way, all feral passion and straining muscles, with the sweat streaking him like starlight. The sounds of them together had become profoundly and gloriously animalistic, colliding flesh, and ragged breath, and other more intimate noises, the slick and wicked kissing of secret places.

Arkady stretched his arms above his head, hands clutching frantically at the carved rail, his whole body drawn into a trembling harp string of need and incipient ecstasy. There was nothing gentlemanly left in him. He was as wild as Jones, as heedless. His mouth opened and his eyes fluttered, and he babbled something that might have been Jones or I love you or God or Fuck or some combination of all of them. And for some impossible fraction of a second, he was the still point in a universe of skin and sex: utterly vulnerable, utterly exposed, taken and loved and free. Then he was all movement, full of shudders, his cock jerking as jets of pearly fluid spattered across his chest.

“Oh Arkady, my Arkady.”

He blinked up at Jones, his eyes slumberously soft, and murmured. “I want to feel you. Come for me.”

Jones threw back his head, eyes closing, lips pulling back from his teeth in something close to a snarl. He made an equally unrestrained noise, which, for some reason, rippled across Rosamond’s most favourite particular place like a stone thrown into a pool. She watched him, as avidly as she had that day in the woods, as the pleasure took him, wondering what star-strewn skies he found in the savage darkness of his release. And she tried not to feel too disappointed the outcome was received by Arkady’s body, for she rather enjoyed being able to witness the sudden violence of his rapture.

Arkady was as supple as a cat in sunlight as Jones came down over him again, purring with languid satisfaction as Jones licked the evidence of their activities from his skin. Then Jones mumbled something incoherent and collapsed completely, and Arkady’s arms flopped over him in a clumsy embrace. They lay entangled, spent in each other’s arms.

“Oh my,” said Rosamond, “sodomy is magnificent.”

Arkady wheezed out something she thought might have been a laugh, and beat his palms against Jones’s shoulder.

Jones grunted and rolled off him with all the grace of a felled oak. Lay in a lax-limbed sprawl, breathing hard, and grinning. Rosamond gazed at him in some concern—men really did have substantial physical limitations.

She had almost decided he had died of sodomy when he cranked open one eye, threw an arm about her waist, and pulled her down on top of him. “I love you,” he mumbled.

It took her entirely by surprise. She had known he did, of course, otherwise his behaviour made no sense at all. Only a man who loved her would have treated her as he had. Or like as much as he claimed to. She was under no illusions that she was a likeable person.

It was probably not the context most young ladies would have dreamed of hearing such a declaration. But Rosamond was not most young ladies, and she found it was exactly what she needed to hear, when she needed to hear it.

All the same. Her own delight embarrassed her.

“How kind,” she managed, with admirably calm.

And Jones laughed, and said it again—“I love you”—so she tucked the words into some pocket of her heart to take out and look at properly later.

He eased her into the crook of his arm and Arkady curled into her side. It was very warm, and a little sticky, and both men smelled very pungently of their previous activities. But she had never felt safer, or righter, or more loved in her entire life. Arkady slid a hand over her waist, and Jones reached over her, and they held hands, and held her.

Arkady nuzzled his head into her shoulder. “I’m too extraordinarily well fucked to be worried, so I’m just going to assume you didn’t think less of me for that . . . and thank you.”

“Thank you for trusting me.” She pressed a kiss against his brow. “Frankly, you may do that as often as you please.”

Jones groaned. “Give me ten minutes, maybe twenty. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Good God.” Arkady gave a shaky laugh. “You may have to wait a day or so before I can permit that again.”

“Well,” Rosamond offered helpfully, “Jones will simply have to fuck me.”

Arkady was pressed so close that she felt the scrape of his lashes as his eyes closed. “I think I might love you a little too.”

They drifted in sated and companionable silence for a minute or two.

“Is it always thus?” she asked. “Does Jones always . . . and do you always . . .”

She had not realised it was a troublesome question, but the quality of the silence shifted, and she felt Arkady tense.

“I . . . have never . . . that is, I presume. I do not think Jones—”

“As it happens,” said Jones, “I’m very fond of taking a cock.”

This made perfect sense of Rosemond—clearly having an appendage up the fundament was a delightful pastime for men. But Arkady seemed oddly flustered. “Truly? But . . . are you not . . . I would not have . . .”

“Love, I’ve lived too long in this world to believe my masculinity lives in my arse.”

Arkady laughed, but his body was still restlessly anxious against Rosamond. “I have never met anyone who would permit me that. I might not . . . I might disappoint you.”

“Don’t be daft. I’d love it if you wanted to fuck me, and I don’t care if you don’t.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Arkady. In more ways than one. Rosamond was a little disconcerted as his member stirred and stiffened somewhat against her hip. But then she recalled that she had recently seen him dispense ejaculatory fluid all over himself. So they were probably far beyond the usual social awkwardnesses.

“How does it feel?” She had not intended to utter the thought aloud—but there it was.

“What?” Arkady’s voice was slurred, as though he was pleasure-drunk, already half-asleep.

“To have a man inside you.”

“Well, I rather enjoy it.” She thought that was going to be all the answer he would grant her, but then he continued. “Like you’re holding his heart in your hand.”

And then, nestled against her, he slept in earnest.

He probably had the right idea. But even though she had been up all night and—from the hazy light behind the curtains—some chunk of the day, there was a pulsing energy at the core of her tiredness that made sleep seem distant and unlikely.

A nervous feeling crept over her like a shadow, something that seemed perilously like the queerest loneliness she had ever experienced, but then she turned her head, and found Jones still awake as well, his eyes very blue just then in their secret morning. He smiled fuzzily at her, and gently untangled his hand from Arkady’s.

His fingers explored her idly, tiny, sweeping touches that sent shivers chasing themselves across her skin. It was an odd sensation, the warmth of him travelling through the shifting linen of her chemise, but strangely pleasurable, two softnesses moving against each other and upon her. She closed her eyes, letting herself be touched, floating in it, while everything else faded away. At last, his hand eased between her legs, and she was a little shocked at how wet for him she was, how hot and swollen and ready.

She shifted, opening to him, and he circled the place she liked best, this thumb gliding over her, effortless as an ice-skater. She allowed herself a breathy, unseemly moan, and basked, lazy pleasure spiralling outwards from her unmentionable regions—she really would have to ask Jones how they could be mentioned but . . . oh . . . not now—to fill every part of her. Her peak came upon her swiftly, though it was not really a peak, more a kind of gathering of everything that had happened that night, everything she had learned and felt and done, transmuted into a kind of pure physical joy. She muffled her cries in Jones’s shoulder and stayed there a little afterwards, pressed against him, soaking up his heat, his solid strength, the realness of his body, all breath and blood and skin and scars.

Hers.

Fuck.

“I love you,” she told him crisply. “And there’s no need to make a fuss about it.”

His grin was quite ridiculous.

She gave him a stern look. “I don’t want it to give you ideas above your station.”

“Unlikely.” He yawned and settled her against him. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

She was quiet awhile, watching him as he drifted close to slumber. “I have been thinking.”

He started. “Huh. Whassumatter?”

“I have been thinking of configurations.”

“Con—what?”

“Configurations for the three of us. That we may try. In the future.”

“Oh.” His eyes opened. “Oh.”

“I was thinking perhaps it would be entertaining if Arkady were to fuck you and you were to fuck me. Or perhaps Arkady could fuck you and you could pleasure me with your fingers or . . . I understand sometimes at finishing school mouths were used, so you could possibly oblige me in that fashion. Or Arkady and I could both use our mouths on you. Or I have noticed that Arkady enjoys to hold the bedrail when you enter him with particular vigour so it occurred to me—although this could be a little too depraved—that you could secure his hands to it while you laboured upon him. Do you not think he would look beautiful that way?”

Jones was laughing, although Rosamond had no notion why. Configurations struck her as being quite a serious matter. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, and yes, and yes.”

Well, that was good news. She settled down to sleep.

She thought she was going to enjoy being ruined very much indeed.

Dear Reader

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About the Author

Alexis Hall is currently resident somewhere in IDSN #2471, where he supplements his income by importing novels from more interesting realities.

For more information:

www.quicunquevult.com
ajh@quicunquevult.com

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