Divers authorial commentary here

Léonie Alastair, Duchess of Avon, had been so much younger than her husband the Duke that none of their acquaintance had imagined that he would outlive her.

Yet so it was. At the age of fifty-one, that lively and self-willed lady had insisted on riding to the hunt, had fallen from her horse on a jump she had made safely countless times before, and was taken up insensible. She never woke, though several prominent members of the medical faculty examined her, and rubbed their chins wisely over her case. Not a one of them could help her; not a one but was glad to leave the sickroom dominated as much by His Grace's icy gaze as by the dying woman's laboured breath; not a one but felt lucky to escape with his life from the Marquis Vidal's fury at their inability to heal his mother.

Between them moved Mary, Lady Vidal, calm and courteous, self-controlled and gentle. She brought food and drink to Avon, where he sat in his wife's chamber; she cared deftly and affectionately for the still, thin body that had housed such a vital spirit; she soothed her husband's rages, gave him to eat and drink, and led him to his rest of a night; if she grieved, it was in private.

At last the Duchess' struggle was ended. Many were the mourners who gathered at her obsequies, French and English, young and old. The little churchyard at Avon was a field of unrelieved black, wavering with each knell of the death bell like grain bowing in the wind. Lady Fanny Marling, the Duke's sister, clung to her son John and hid her face in his shoulder; Lord Rupert Alastair broke down and sobbed like a child. Indeed, little Barbara, Vidal's daughter, wept more because her great-uncle did than for her own grief for her Grandmama, the loss as yet incomprehensible to her. Mary used her own black handkerchief sparingly. She could not yet afford to let her sorrow show. Lord Vidal had so adored his mother that he could scarcely bear to speak to those who ventured to offer condolences, and was useless as a host to those of the family who were staying at Avon.

His Grace the Duke, however, was very nearly his usual self. He spoke to this one and that, switching with well-bred ease from English to French. As usual, he gave orders to his major-domo and conferred with Mary over the allotment of bedchambers. He drank neither more nor less than was his habit, and his mien was ever cynical and remote. Even now, as mourners moved in his drawing room and consumed his sherry, their voices could be heard hissing the consonants of his old nickname: Satanas. Indeed his composure seemed scarcely human.

At last, the guests who lived in the area or were staying at local hostelries departed. The Saint-Vires and Alastair connections went to their elegant beds. Mary, with a deep sense of relief, left Hugh Davenant sitting with Avon in the library and led her husband to their chamber. At last. She could take her hair down now; she could loosen the stays that dug into her body; she could remember the dead woman, who had been more than friend to her, and much better than the phrase "mother-in-law" could suggest. She sat at her dressing table and put her hands over her eyes, able at last to weep. As if her tears gave a permission he had needed, her husband knelt beside her chair and wound his arms round her, pushed his head into her body, and began to cry as well. It was a dreadful, whooping noise he made. But, she thought as she cradled him in her arms, better that he make this sound than that he keep silent and let it toll and echo all within.

She wondered if the Duke had yet allowed himself to mourn. Unlike the guests who had been shocked by his cool manner, she knew how he had adored his wife. Davenant, the best friend the Duke had, might be able to bring him some comfort. Mary prayed it might be so.

"Justin," Hugh said quietly, not for the first time.

The tall, lean figure in the opposite armchair stirred. In the dim light of the fire he might have been the far younger man whom Hugh had first known: he had worn powdered wigs then, but now his hair was white whether he powdered it or no; the stillness that had once been affectation now was weariness. The slender hands that lay upon his lap were thinner, the knuckles larger, and the skin if seen in daylight was as translucent, as flecked with tiny dark spots, and as full of faint wrinkles as Indian gauze ... but they had always been just as white, and the ruby ring upon one finger burned with the same fire as ever.

So did his Grace of Avon's eyes, when they focussed on his friend.

"My dear Hugh, did you speak?"

"I did. You are fatigued, and no wonder. Let me call Gaston."

Avon put his hands on the chair arms, set his jaw, and pulled himself to his feet almost smoothly. "I may, as unlikely as it always seems to me, be seventy-five years of age," he said, "but I am yet able to ring a bell unassisted. Pray, Hugh, do not consign me to my dotage for one moment of abstraction. I shall call my valet when I want him, and not before."

"As you wish." Hugh remained seated.

Avon took the few steps to the hearth, leaned upon the mantle and stared down into the fire. Hugh cast about for an unexceptionable topic of conversation.

He said at last, "How very large Armand Saint-Vire has grown."

"Every time I see him, he is more obese," Avon replied. "I thought when he came to Vidal's wedding that he—Armand, I mean—could grow no more gross, but now he makes the whole of the Hanoverian cattle-byre seem positively lissom in comparison."

Hugh was long accustomed to ignore anything Avon said which could be construed as political comment. "His son Bertrand is a comely youngster, though."

"Oh, he takes after his mother. Too much so. Not one of my female connections has such airs and graces."

Unaccountably, Hugh felt stung. "He seems a good-hearted creature. That manner is mere fashion." He felt as though he reached out and straightened his composure by force. "In any case, Justin, the court manner in our own day was amply full of airs and graces, if of a slightly different kind."

"Mine was," Avon admitted. "Yours, beloved, was not. Ever."

If anyone else had spoken with that curling lip, Hugh would have known himself insulted, but now he smiled quite genuinely. "Shall I ever forget your chicken-skin fan? Gad, you flirted with it, Justin."

"Dear March. He wrote begging me to use it, as I am certain you remember." Avon shook his head a little, his mouth in a reminiscent curve. "Even after my marriage he sent me gifts until it was a positive embarrassment."

"You, Justin? Embarrassed?"

But it almost seemed he was, for the long white fingers sorted through the objects on the mantelpiece, moving a figurine, opening and closing a box. "I rarely admit to error, as you know," he said at last.

"Indeed," Hugh said dryly.

Avon threw him a glance. "Indeed. But I was wrong .... I feared my L-, my little Duchess would find the situation an embarrassment. But instead it amused her. She must always see the packages March sent and laugh over his letters."

Hugh put a hand to his forehead, shading his eyes, a prey to conflicting emotions. He could see in his mind's eye the merry face which he too had loved, though not as Justin had. He wondered whether Léonie had known how her amusement forestalled what might well have been a danger, for all Justin's disdain for the gifts themselves. In the rôle of Satanas, Avon had ever been one to take what was offered him.

"March," Hugh said, heard roughness in his voice and swallowed before continuing, "March had an uneven taste."

"Precious. He would have adored Bertrand."

In fact, March's manners had been a good deal as Bertrand's were now; this reflection made Hugh smile though his eyes were still lowered.

"Your memory is far too exact, dear Hugh—" Justin appeared to read his mind. "Allow me this one privilege of age: to waste my meagre remaining time deploring the follies of the young."

"But you have always deplored folly, Justin. It is your chief charm."

Hugh remembered how that remote amusement had drawn him before he even knew the name of Justin Alastair. Fresh from the country, baffled by the quick, allusive talk and the rainbow-hued clothing of the ton, Hugh felt trapped in an aviary: everywhere a flapping, screeching, ruffling, squawking din. Almost he agreed with his brother, Lord Colehatch, who had bidden Hugh stay at home or go into some decent profession such as the army, rather than waste his energy and endanger his virtue in the city—but no, Hugh had no aptitude toward a profession and refused to remain under Colehatch's thumb forever. But the social whirl was confusing, he had to admit. Avon was the one still point in the chaotic storm of this first party.

The man stood to one side of a black marble mantel, one hand placed upon it as if to show off its graceful, pallid shape. White hand, white lace, white powdered face and wig—against this fashionable pallor his brows and lashes seemed nearly as dark as the marble, and the black satin patch on his cheek shone. On a girl, the patch and the indentation it rode would have been coyly flirtatious. On this man, it was sardonic. The wide-lapelled and -skirted coat was the colour of dried rose petals. Its sleeve rippled as the man lowered his arm, the muscles under the cloth as obvious as a lazy lion's.

Hugh's own hands and feet were suddenly twice their normal size and made, evidently, of wood. He could almost hear a hollow clop as he moved. The man in rose-pink watched, lids drooping over eyes the astringent colour of tea. Hugh bumped into a small inlaid table, jostling a vase of flowers and a porcelain figurine.

"Perhaps," said a quiet voice as if they had already been talking for some while, "you could contrive to knock that simpering shepherdess off the table entirely. It would be a great relief to me."

"I don't think," Hugh responded, "that I could bump into the same table a second time. Not with convincing innocence."

"No?"

The syllable was uttered indifferently. Hugh had the strange impression that he ought to feel abashed or offended, but he did not. The pause which followed was also odd in that it was not so awkward as might have been expected. If this silk-clad and obviously high-ranking gentleman, some years older than Hugh, did not want an introduction, Hugh was obliged to accept the snub and move on. Yet he stayed.

Nor did his companion seem at all discommoded. Instead of turning away or offering a set-down, he took a step toward Hugh and made an elaborate bow, sword as high behind him as a cock's tail, one hand waving a lace handkerchief that bore a pleasant, spicy scent. Hugh, rather stunned, bowed in return.

"Permit me thus unceremoniously to solicit the honour of your acquaintance." But the man fell silent after that. He evidently was of high rank indeed.

Hugh bowed again. "Your very obedient servant, Hugh Davenant."

"I am Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon."

"Your Grace." Hugh was surprised, began a third bow, and caught himself, not wanting to seem servile. "You honour me."

"Not at all." The response was pure convention, but it was with a sort of elegant mischief that Alastair continued, "As there will be many to inform you."

Indeed there had been many. Previously all but invisible, Hugh was now besieged by interlocutors whose conversation turned inevitably to the Duke of Avon. Even the hostess, who after all must be acquainted with the nobleman, asked eagerly if Avon had seemed pleased with the company, wanted to know what they had spoken of (Hugh forbore to mention the shepherdess), and chattered about what a rakish, wicked creature the Duke was.

"Then I wonder you invite him." Hugh's irritation at last made him blunt.

"Oh, all the world invites him. An Alastair, after all! I am sure one may meet him anywhere!"

An attitude such as this was exactly what Hugh had scorned a few short weeks ago, in the country. He longed for that clarity of vision now. He wanted to believe that either a gentleman's behaviour showed his principles and made him a profitable acquaintance, or ... or bad behaviour made him unworthy of society's notice. But he felt Alastair's fascination himself, far too strongly to deny.

He knew exactly why the bright birds chirped to each other about the lion but feared to approach too near his jaws.

Hugh had no engagements the next evening, and after supper his rooms seemed dark and close. At last he gave up trying to choose a book, rang for his man, donned tricorne and cloak and gloves, stowed purse and card-case in his pockets, grasped his cane, and went out to walk the city streets.

The sky was still all alight with the long rays of summer evening. He told himself he missed the countryside, and indeed the London air was 'fresh' only in contrast to the smoky chimney in his sitting room, or the bedchamber which seemed dusty and unlived-in though he had been there a week already. The streets were foul; the river fouler. Still, it was this ceaseless bustle he had sought, and he looked curiously at carriages and shop windows, street-vendors and errand boys and pages, windows full of flapping curtains and area railings where men bent to talk to maids stealing a moment at the kitchen door. He caught a glimpse of green ahead of him and thought he had reached the park, but it was St. James's Square.

He skirted the railed-in garden, its ordered rectangles of blossom, its shapely topiary. Ducking down one side street after another, he looked at the blank white faces of the houses. Then all at once, some yards before him, he noticed a white, bell-like skirt floating down the sidewalk, a tall powdered head, the whole figure bright as a flag under a red cloak. She could not be a lady, not out alone at this time of the night; she did not look to be a whore, and in any case this was hardly the neighbourhood for such. Hugh, curious but cautious, followed her. Had she looked over her shoulder, just then? Was that little smile meant for Hugh? She turned a corner; he turned after her; she was just vanishing into a doorway under a hanging sign. As it was now nearly dark, Hugh had to walk nearly to the door himself to read the painted words: The Royal Oak. A public house, then.

He was, by this time, thirsty enough with walking—and excited enough by the intrigue—not even to pause before he went in.

Inside was a bustle and chatter even fiercer than at the ton party. The white and red figure was clasped in someone's arms, being thoroughly kissed. "Princess!" someone else cried, from farther inside the room. "Fie! 'Tis far too long since you have come to us to be married. Have you taken the veil?"

The kiss broke off as both participants began to laugh—and the high-dressed head of the creature in the white dress tilted back until Hugh could see a working adam's apple as a deep roll of laughter came out of the rouged lips. "Never, my Polly!" said the man in woman's clothing. "I'll never give up all the pretty gentlemen!"

"Ah, Seraphina," said the taller man whose hands were still clenched in the fabric of the red cloak. "You've been too long away. What'll we give your Highness for it, eh?" And he playfully slapped at the skirt over the Princess's buttocks.

"Why," Seraphina wriggled provocatively in the man's arms, "will you punish me for my own misfortune? And when I've led a new young gentleman to our pleasures here?"

Suddenly Hugh was the centre of attention.

"And who is the cub, eh? Who can vouch for him?" Seraphina's partner broke free at last of their embrace and came a step nearer, towering over Hugh now. A carter, he might be, or even a blacksmith. Hugh, a tall man himself and no stranger to self-defence, felt he might yet be outmatched. He clutched his stick and stood his ground, not even asking himself whether he might not just slip back out the door and away.

"Oh, but Sweet May, is he not a lovely little gentleman?" Seraphina swayed, sending the skirt back and forth with a swishing sound, pouting. "La! Look at those shoulders, that shapely leg, that fresh complexion! He must be a country Cupid. May, my dear, my pigsnie, don't hurt the pretty fellow. I want to dance with him."

When May lifted his chin it cleared the top of Hugh's head. The big man glared down and said, "Who are you, then, and what do y' here?"

Hugh swallowed. "I am a gentleman. Is this not a public house? I came for a pint."

There was some laughter. "Ah, Princess Seraphina, he scorns you."

Seraphina came closer to Hugh, leaned in. The scent was a woman's; the planes of the face were, on closer inspection, plainly a man's, and a middle-aged man's at that. Hugh thought he should pull away, but did not—could not. The so-called 'Princess' fascinated him, held his eyes, and when the lips parted that were nearly as red as the cloak, Hugh took a swift breath as if he could do so only when they gave permission. That mouth was so near his own, now. He could see grains of powder and the pores of the skin beneath. Seraphina kissed him, lightly. He did not return the caress but did not recoil.

"Not an informer, then?" May asked.

He answered, but dully, looking still into Seraphina's eyes. "No ... informer?"

"Precious plum," Seraphina cooed. "It wants a pint? Shall have one. I picked you up and I shall give you to drink."

It was like a dream. As they came to the bar, May kissed his cheek, and so did at least two of the others; they called him "Sukey," gave him a seat at a heavy, scarred table which could have stood in any pub, and set a foaming pint before him. When he had drunk it, Seraphina coaxed him to pull his chair out and then perched in his lap, thighs sinewy and hard. The weight was heavy. The others talked vociferously of people they knew and things that had happened to them while Seraphina laughed and joked and kissed all over Hugh's face. All the voices were deep though Seraphina's were not the only skirts spilling around the sides of the chairs. Half of what they said sounded like fairy stories. Miss Beatrice of Bath had got herself a green gown and sat in the stocks. Letty Swift danced at a masquerade with a Magistrate. A soldier and Jenny Tailor had been nearly caught in the choir stalls of St. Paul's, and only their shirts hanging down covered their pindles. Poor Lady Harriet had gone to Battersea. "Bad news for Miss Clover—has anyone seen the lady?" asked one man, and "No, methinks he knows his days are numbered, for he's tedious poxy already," another replied.

Hugh's head was spinning as if he'd been drinking far longer than he had. Seraphina leaned to one side and slid, nearly falling but that Hugh caught the trim waist, and for that he was kissed much harder, a hand burrowing through the skirts of his coat and finding his confined penis.

This was sin he was committing. Allowing to be committed ... on his own person. And it was vulgar as well, lewd and public and wrong, wrong, wrong.

And his yard was engorged with blood already, Seraphina's fingers only teasing it further, until Hugh moved in his chair despite the other's weight. He groaned, unable to say no or yes or stop, or even to ask where a bed was, a question that seemed more urgent to him every moment.

"It isn't time to be married yet," Seraphina spoke in his ear, still stroking. "Oh, how strong, how lovely. It's hard, sweet and hard for me, just the way I like it ... Lud! Sukey, you are a wonder, you are."

Remotely, Hugh heard a fiddle tuning, scraping, and then furniture being pulled this way and that ... rhythmic sounds and music ... men were dancing, just as Seraphina had predicted, but the princess did not rise from his lap, just went on murmuring obscenities into his ear and loosening his clothing, feeling everywhere as if to rob him.

But the only thing Hugh was losing was his soul.

That, and the spendings he left in Seraphina's hand.

He went back. Every day he told himself that he would not; he rode out in the mornings in the fashionable parks and played until evening with the fashionable people, from breakfasts to soirées. The days were filled—should have been filled beyond thought of more—with theatre and opera, balls, salons, and card-parties of the ton where Hugh played the part of a young man of some name and fortune. It was the truth, yet it seemed he covered himself with it like clothing, like a masquerade dress.

Still, he made acquaintances and liked them well enough. And he saw the Duke of Avon from time to time, lean and elegant on the periphery of these festive gatherings. They talked but little, always as if resuming a conversation rather than beginning one. Hugh felt the danger Avon represented more and more, for without distinguishing attention, the older man left an elusive sense of intimacy between them.

It was most often after speaking to Avon again that Hugh went back to the Royal Oak. There he was still mainly an observer. Seraphina had eventually danced with him, and still called him extravagant pet-names whenever they met, but Hugh had danced with others too, observed their sports and even joined in some of their less involved conversations. He was growing used to the way the 'mollies'—for so they called themselves—fondled and made love in plain view of each other, and the way that he, in particular, could hardly sit down without another man taking up residence in his lap.

Once, out of sorts and half-afraid even to lay eyes on Avon from across a ballroom, Hugh tossed an invitation card aside at the last moment, and though dressed for high society, betook himself to low instead. As it happened (or perhaps he had remembered it a little) this was one of the mollies' Festival Nights, of which they had been talking for at least a week beforehand. Hugh arrived in time to see a formal 'lying-in,' something he had heard mentioned but had not believed in.

A man called Long Jess had his hair undone and falling down his back, and was dressed in a woman's night-gown with a cushion under it to mimic pregnancy. He reclined on a rough bench that had been covered with more cushions and a blanket; several others clustered round making much of him, as if he were indeed about to be confined and suffering with it. They held a mug to his mouth to give him drink, petted and spoke low to him. Eventually the 'midwife' reached up under the gown and felt about for some time, Jess' movements growing more and more frantic until he bucked so wildly that the others had to hold him on the bench. The cushion was pulled out and a jointed doll extracted from underneath, wrapped in a cloth and given to Jess to hold and make much of. Everyone chattered excitedly, exclaiming about how pretty, how like Jess, the baby was. There was even a christening, two of the mollies standing as godparents to the doll, and a feast afterward with Jess looking rosy and well-satisfied.

Baffled, Hugh turned to Sweet May, who stood near him. "Poor Long Jess's been so low there 'uz no cheering her," May said. "Her favourite cast her off, another old beau took a wife, and the chandler has been talking of another man to serve the counter. Jess is afeared the chandler knows he's here o' nights, or is a molly, any road, and hardly knows whether to wait to be let go or to leave of his own accord. By God, if ever anyone needed a lying-in, Long Jess's the one." The big man wrapped hamlike hands round his own mug, and drank. Then his low growl came to Hugh's ears again: "'Tis a hard world we live in."

Hugh knew that well enough.

One of May's hands lifted carefully, slowly, as if he feared to hurt Hugh or was waiting for a rebuff; Hugh felt a rough fingertip brush along his cheek, around his ear, dipping under his wig. "What a rich gentleman you be, all in silk and powder," May rumbled. "A hug would break you. In a week more, a month, a year, you'll be gone back to your great world."

This Hugh hoped desperately was true, so he could say nothing —shamed though he suddenly felt by the very shame he had been feeling.

"Little painted doll," and the tone was a caress though the words were insulting, "sweet little marzipan manikin. Will you marry me?"

Hugh shook his head. He'd now seen this ceremony more than once, too, when two mollies said an altered version of marriage vows and then coupled, naked, with the door of the 'marriage chamber' ajar. It was nothing he could imagine himself doing. Not in such a public place.

May drew his hand back, and Hugh reached out and caught it, squeezed as much of it as his own could hold. "Are there no rooms where we might close the door?" he asked in a rush, not wanting to hear his own voice speak the words of his desire. But his blood was burning in him; to go home now unsated was impossible.

A few teeth glinted as May smiled. "There are," he said. "Upstairs. Follow me now, m'lord, and I'll be your link boy there."

So Hugh was initiated to the mysteries of the mollies at last, opened and fucked by May's fingers, made the receptacle of another man's lust. It was a pleasure Hugh had never imagined, something even apart from the rise of his yard, for he was half-limp the whole time May moved within him. Apparently another man lived in Hugh's skin, a wanton creature whose voice rose with the flaring pleasure in his arse, who pushed back and gripped so hard that May's arms bore the marks of his painted nails afterward. His stockings were ruined on the floor of the room May found; his silk breeches were wrinkled and stained; his shirt was soaked with May's pungent sweat as well as Hugh's own. His wig they found afterward under the bed they had not used, filthy with dust. Hugh rose, debauched and laughing, full as a mug of beer with a warmth and foam of emotion he could not catalogue. He pulled clothes from his own body and from May's, and they lay down on the bed and did everything all over again. May was like a force of nature below Hugh, like a cart-horse ridden to the hunt, like a rough ocean under a bobbing row-boat. It was nothing like fucking a woman. It was more like making the world again. Hugh gloried in it.

When neither could move a muscle more, they lay drowsing in the filthy sheets, May's big hand tangled in Hugh's hair. "Do you think this wrong?" Hugh asked at last.

"My lord asks me that?" May's low voice seemed to vibrate in the bed. But then, after a pause he answered, "Nay, there's naught I can see that's truly wrong in it. Is this not my own body that I use? Have I no right to seek pleasure in my own way? I hurt no one. I fuck no one who does not say aye to it."

Hugh sat up. May's warm touch lighted on the small of Hugh's naked back. "You're the one been to university," May said. "If there be sin in this, do you not know it?"

"Aye, I know it," said Hugh. His arse ached and he was sticky all over, dirtied in every possible way. But he knew he would not leave before making an assignation to meet May again.

"You are a moralist, my dear Davenant." The look Avon shot from under his lashes could have meant anything.

What was this racing along Hugh's nerves? Fear? Did Avon have only to look at him to know his sordid secret? Gulping, Hugh looked ahead, between his horse's ears at the broad pavement before him.

He was riding in the park, had joined Avon by chance, and they had gone one full length from gate to gate and turned to go back. A couple who were definitely not of the haut ton had emerged, dishevelled, from the narrow covert between this stretch where the horses passed back and forth and the slope to the Serpentine. The man had his hat in one hand and a fold of the woman's skirt in the other, and she batted at him and laughed; Hugh had turned away, his face heating, and Alastair had caught him doing so. And called him moralist.

No, Avon could not have guessed. He always looked knowing; only this time, the irony was unintentional. For the night before, Hugh and May had found a spot in that same bank of bushes, and Hugh had learned what it meant to 'get a green gown'—the grass stains would probably never come out of his clothes, and whenever the horse moved, Hugh's tender fundament reminded him exactly what he had been doing.

Shifting uselessly in the saddle, Hugh looked once more at his companion, who was now directing that sardonic smile at a group of ladies mounted but chattering instead of riding. The same wave of feeling washed over him, but now he knew there was no fear in it. He spurred his horse, rode off, heard the other horse follow, his mind still full of that moment's vision.

The slender hands rested casually on the horse's neck, the reins threaded through long fingers. The Duke's wig was unpowdered and lay wood-brown against his neck, where the skin was pale as milk. The shadows Avon's hat cast on his cheek, the dots of stubble there from a beard that must be nearly black, the grip of his thighs against the saddle, the slight movement of the nearer elbow, were bright in Hugh's eyes as if he still were gazing at them. How could he have overlooked till now that he desired Justin Alastair? Now it was a conflagration in his body, a storm in his mind. He could neither outride nor ignore it.

It was a bumpkin's trick to ride so fast in the Park. He slowed, and Avon caught up to him. "Are you well? Hugh?"

And now of all times, Justin must needs use his name. Hugh forced his voice to work. "I—I fear not. I must go, Justin—I m-mean, Avon—your Grace—"

"Nonsense." The horse moved closer, Justin's hand gripped Hugh's sleeve, and the variable eyes looked for once direct and clear. "Hugh." Then some consciousness of their surroundings seemed to return; Justin backed off but said, "I shall ride with you. You are not fit, my friend. The streets are busy." And then with a glinting smile, a resumption of the urbane manner, "Pray allow me to exercise a solicitude for which I seldom have occasion; to provide opportunity for such a rare virtue must be counted to your eternal favour as well as to mine." He waved one of those strong, white hands.

Hugh smiled despite himself. "A new sort of good deed. I have not heard of it before."

"Perhaps I am inventing it." Justin smiled. "It would please my sense of irony to invent a virtue. And for you, my moralist."

For someone who consistently presented himself as dégagé to the point of rudeness, Avon could be solicitous, and proved it when he insisted not only on accompanying Hugh to his lodgings but on going inside and waiting until the manservant had been apprised of what Hugh was forced to call a moment of faintness and a queasy stomach. Avon returned later in the day as well. On that occasion he did not refer to the park incident, but as he had never called on Hugh before there seemed no other way to understand it than as a desire to see that the indisposition of the morning had gone.

He also invited Hugh to supper, promising "a rather more quiet evening than my reputation would suggest."

"Don't put yourself out for me," Hugh said, mouth curving in another smile he could not stop.

"I never put myself out for anyone, my dear Hugh. I do precisely as I wish on all occasions."

So that evening, Hugh did not go to The Royal Oak. He supped at a gleaming table from delicate porcelain plates and drank a light, expensive wine from a crystal glass. The food included fowl in a cream sauce, new potatoes and asparagus but lightly seasoned, and bread which Avon promised was two days old already. The sweet was junket, and Hugh laughed outright. "Do stop coddling me, Alastair!"

"Then," and his host's eyes glinted, "we shall play cards after our port. I doubt you shall not accuse me of coddling you at the card table."

Hugh lost quite a bit of money that night, but did not mind. Avon was good company, and Hugh had never felt such a wit as when he succeeded in making his Grace of Avon laugh. He laughed a good deal himself, learned even more about the ton and the strategy of the card games they played, and felt happy every time Avon said, "my dear," though he knew it was more a mannerism than anything else.

He did not miss the mollies. Coming home, he did not feel dirty, and his clothes were very nearly in the same condition as when he had left. Nor was this like homecoming after one of the society balls, tired and unaccountably lonely.

This, he told himself, was the life he had come to London to lead, and he was well satisfied by it. Sexual congress was not the only thing he needed. Of course it was not.

Every new day as Justin Alastair's friend reminded him of what he had gained by giving up the satisfaction of his carnal appetites. Avon seemed charmed by what he saw as Hugh's innocence; often he brought up one conversational topic after another in order to invoke his own demonic nickname and ask Hugh what the proper moral stance was on this or that subject. Hugh became used to pontificating on these matters without ever losing the sense of how very ironic the habit was.

Almost every hostess seemed to eye him askance, as if asking herself what the wicked Duke saw in the sober Mr. Davenant. Avon's flighty sister Fanny and his scapegrace brother Rupert twitted Hugh even more than Justin did upon his moralities and lack of high spirits. He grew fond of them both, however, and sincerely wished Justin would show them half the warmth he showered upon Hugh himself. Visiting the family seat at Justin's invitation, Hugh hunted and fished and went to the little country-side church; back in town, he danced and rode and went to coffee-houses and clubs; a day in which he never saw Justin was unusual ... though not unheard of.

At one point toward the end of the Season, Alastair vanished for over a week. Even calling on the younger members of the family produced no news. "Oh, fie," Fanny said, "are you come only to speak of my brother?" and pouted until Hugh attempted to flirt with her, though it was obvious from her responses that he was not up to her exacting standard. She let him go as soon as another, younger gallant arrived.

The week was curiously empty, though Hugh went to all the gatherings for which he had been sent invitations and spoke to everyone who approached him. He even made more of an effort than usual to make his own advances, asked some new ladies to dance and invited a few gentlemen to a supper party of his own. He thought of The Royal Oak but did not go. He need not, now. He had put all that behind him.

So he would have been at a loss to explain what he was doing in St. James's Park one evening, on foot, looking at soldiers and dressed-up Cits and wondering if Sweet May or Polly Red Pennant or some of the other mollies were anywhere present.

Strolling back and forth, he could not quite force himself to catch anyone's eye, and at last walked nearer the bushes, half from memory and half from wistful desire. The leaves were fresh and moist between his fingers; the scent of flowers came to him in gusts, as the breeze brought it. He heard scuffing sounds in the dried leaves under the branches, and hesitated, wanting to see and wanting to retreat. And then, not quite behind him but beyond the range of his sight, a kind of gasp. "Oh, it is Hugh Davenant! Whatever are you doing here—how did you stray so far from your accustomed paths of virtue? Come away this instant, my dear conscience." He turned toward the voice and the touch on his arm, and found Avon standing there, his face all alive with cynical amusement at Hugh's naïveté. "Come," the voice dropped, "you will not like what there is to see here."

The words unlatched something in Hugh, and he grasped his friend's other arm. "You don't know what I will like. You— Avon, Justin, what is your business here? What brings you to a sodomite's walk at this hour of the day?"

"What but sodomy?" The voice had grown harsh; the dark eyes were lidded, the chin raised. Avon wrenched his arm away and brushed where any wrinkles might be, the picture of lordly disdain and anger. "Have you not listened in all of this time? Why do you think I have such a name as Satanas? For shady dealings at cards? For using whores as any gentleman does?" He turned away, raised one hand to his face, as if ... Hugh couldn't quite believe the distress he seemed to see ... "Begone then. Go, Hugh. Say nothing. Go."

"Justin—"

"Go!" One hand was flung out, pointing.

Hugh caught it in both his own, brought it to his face, took the glove off and kissed where the tendons stood out stiff as blades. "Justin." The man did not move. Hugh reached, pulling on the arm he held, and though Alastair could have thrown him off, he did not; he turned into Hugh's palm on his cheek and stared as their tense bodies came closer together, within each other's heat, near enough to really see even in the twilight. Justin's eyes seemed darker than ever Hugh had seen them, full of a compunction stranger than the colour. Hugh brushed the long mouth with his own, licked at it, sipped the taste of this man, so different to any other, from lips parted in pure astonishment.

"I'd rather be your temptation than your conscience," Hugh said, low but clear, thrusting both hands under Justin's coat and pulling their bodies together as tightly as he could.

And now the two long hands held Hugh's shoulders, hard. Now the eyes blazed, and Hugh could not tell what colour they were. A hard-muscled leg thrust between his own and he practically lost his footing, but gloried in his own unbalance. Justin's teeth were bared. Hugh's hands reached for the trim curves behind. And faster than an echo, he felt an iron grip upon his own buttocks. "No, no-o," Justin's voice was molten, flowing, hot, a seduction all by itself. "No, my fallen angel, if you are here for me, then it is this beautiful angel's arse that is going to be fucked. And if you are not, if you have lost your country-bred mind, say so this instant, by God! Say so!"

"Fuck me, Justin," Hugh said straight into his mouth. "Satanas. Now."

Justin's fingers were like steel, the nails sharp, and he used his teeth even when he kissed. Hugh would bear the marks of this night for many nights to come. And then, with luck, he would have new marks to bear.

His back was against a tree-trunk, and he was not entirely sure how far they had moved. Coat, waistcoat and shirt were hanging open—his hat seemed to have been lost entirely—he couldn't understand why his small-clothes were yet buttoned. Justin held him there and stared. Then let go, stepping farther back.

"If you have been but teasing me," Hugh said, his voice shattered, "then I shall agree that Satanas is your rightful name."

"No, I—" and Justin laughed a little. "No, Hugh. But for the momentous meeting of angel and devil in sexual congress, surely there should be ... sheets."

Without thought, Hugh grabbed at Justin's wrist and said, pathetically, "You'll change your mind."

Justin twisted his hand, caught Hugh's in return, raised it. "Oh, no, I shall not," he promised, and set his open mouth upon the soft skin of Hugh's inner wrist. The edges of teeth pressed in, but Hugh did not flinch.

The promised sheets beneath him, Hugh lay knowing himself in the lair of the lion, overpowered even without a touch. And then Justin did touch him, fiercely, possessively, more as if to devour him than to make love to him. It hurt more than it had with May, perhaps because the bigger man had known he must take more care. And yet, looking up at Justin as he rocked, muscles pulling across biceps and chest, sweat making spikes of his brown hair and dripping from features no longer composed—while being shoved and tugged back and forth and glared at by eyes as feral and yellow as the candle-flames that lit them—Hugh had no thought of trying to get his demon lover to slow down. His whole spine felt on fire, and every inch of skin not currently rubbing against Justin seemed wasted. Hugh arched his back, pushed his calves against Justin's sides, slid both hands up the stiff arms, and squeezed the intruding cock.

Justin grunted, and pounded harder, faster, racing to a finish line Hugh could feel as well, though his own little death seemed far off yet. The hair on Justin's belly chafed Hugh's yard but could not enclose it—not enough to push him over, though it was enough to keep him stiff. Then, above him, every muscle in Justin's body tightened, and he gave three short cries almost as rough as coughs and certainly as wordless. Then sagged, slumping down, and Hugh pulled on the sweaty shoulders until he cradled Justin between his legs, on his still-unsated body. It was something just to hold him.

But even that lasted only a few minutes, before Justin mumbled, "Hugh—beg your pardon," and fell to one side, his eyes shut. Hugh licked thoughtfully at his own palm where the salt of Justin's sweat lay, and then took himself in hand, since Justin seemed to have fallen asleep. Brandling with his muscles aching from sex, the smell of it all round him, was an odd sensation. Hugh closed his eyes, to better imagine his lover in action, that short time past. But that made the other man's weight beside him in the bed more rather than less acutely present, and when Justin began to shiver, Hugh knew it at once. With a sigh he let go his turgid member, got to his feet, and tugged at the bedclothes.

"Eh? Uh?" Justin said, and that made Hugh grin widely.

"I knew there must be something that would stop that wicked tongue of yours," he said.

"Hugh?"

"Get up, Justin, for pity's sake, and let me —ah, tuck you in, it seems."

Justin stood, then got back into bed, brushing Hugh's hands away—and then grasped one, hard. "Is this your farewell, Davenant?" He was awake now, the lean face inexpressive, the eyes wary. Hugh could not tell what reply was wanted.

In the end he said so: "I can leave if you wish it. Or stay if you—"

"What do you want? Do you suppose I did this only for my own pleasure?"

Hugh could not think what else he was to have supposed.

Justin sat up. "I'm damned—oh, I suppose I shall be damned in any event, but let it not be said even among the devils that I did a friend such a bad turn as that—" and he gestured to Hugh's flagging erection. "Come back to bed, Hugh, and let me give you ease."

When they lay together and naked in the bed, when Justin's nearness and his scent and the touch of his long body was making Hugh hard all over again, he could do nothing but put his face into Justin's neck and sigh, almost groan. He licked there, where the taste was the same he had found on his own hand, took deep breaths and asked for nothing.

"Aye, you shall break my heart, is what you shall do," Justin murmured. "For all that I am rumoured not to possess such an organ. Give me that," and at last the long fingers Hugh had been thinking of, dreaming of, wishing for were touching him. He pushed into them, and the other hand stroked his shoulder and upper back; he clutched and sighed and spent himself in a few bursts, foolish tears rushing to his eyes.

He was laid upon his back, but he didn't dare try to see. He only hoped the light was too low to show the unsteadiness of his traitorous lips, and perhaps it was. Justin said nothing before he kissed them, stilling their trembling with the pressure of his own firm mouth. Afterward the deep voice said only, "Sleep," a command easy enough to obey.

Hugh's eyes opened when there was but a dim, underwater light making its way through the drapes at the window, and he looked up, only slightly bewildered, at a ceiling he was certain he had never seen before. Swags of fruit and blossom were worked in fine white plaster all round the edges, and in a lozenge in the centre was a little fresco, or perhaps a painting merely, of flower wreaths and cupids. He remembered going to bed with Alastair—he felt he never could forget that—but he did not recall so much as a smudge over Justin's shoulder that could have been all this decoration.

But then, he hadn't noticed the rough-planed floor in the private room with May until afterwards, either, though it had left splinters in his knees.

Across the room, near the window, was a washbasin and ewer, and Hugh sat up slowly, preparatory to going over to it.

"Ah," Justin's voice was as urbane as he had ever heard it, "you're awake, my dear."

A true gentleman, Hugh thought, getting to his feet and feeling like a changeling. He could never have managed urbanity himself, naked and smelling of the spendings of their bodies. In fact, he could scarcely bear to look at Justin's face, but forced himself to turn.

One lean white hand lay in the space Hugh's body had just occupied; Justin was staring down at it, propped on one elbow. His mouth drooped just a little, giving him an unwontedly pensive look.

"Good morning," Hugh said gently, but Justin seemed to have nothing further to say. After a moment Hugh went to wash, jumping only a little as the cool water bit at his skin, especially where Justin had bitten before. "May I use this towel?"

"Do."

But then, all Hugh's ingenuity showed him only the two options of resuming his clothes or going back to the bed, and Justin's manner had still not given any clues as to which choice would please him best. Hugh folded the towel, for something to do.

"I think," Justin said, "that I shall go to Avon, spend a few days there. I ... have had a letter from my bailiff."

"I hope 'tis nothing—"

But before Hugh could choose a suitable adjective, Justin was speaking again: "Do not concern yourself, my dear Hugh. I'm sure it is nought but triviality, and the country is too fatiguing even to consider at this time of year."

Hugh set his lips hard. It was not as though he had been angling for an invitation. He began to pick up bits of clothing and to put them on. Underwear. Hose. Small-clothes. Justin watched but did not speak. Hugh felt humiliated. He tucked his shirt in with jabbing, angry movements, turning over comments in his mind, discarding them.

"Hugh."

Justin was sitting on the side of the bed, still naked but looking far more poised than Hugh would have expected. And still so attractive that Hugh wanted only to take these clothes back off and ... but there was no point in thinking of that.

"It would be out of character were I to make a pretty speech at this moment."

"Yes," Hugh conceded, "I suppose it would be."

"You are too good, my dear, to hold a grudge."

These rôles Justin lived by were sometimes simply tiresome. Hugh took a breath, let it go. "I know your sentiments, I believe," he said at last, "so I suppose I do not need to hear you state them."

"I knew when I saw you in the undergrowth at St. James's that you must be omniscient." Justin smiled, almost naturally.

So beyond these immediate choices—clothes or not, stay or go—Hugh must always have in his mind that he could only suffer Justin Alastair to assign the rôle of Good Angel to the faulty man he knew himself to be—or he could leave the Alastair stage, probably for good.

He decided to stay as long as he might.

Justin went to the country, then came back. He did not call upon Hugh immediately, and Hugh worked hard to seem only as friendly as the duke could find unexceptionable. With Avon, he became more and more the dull man full of propriety that his friend seemed to expect; he played the part elsewhere and found it useful. It pleased his brother, certainly, when he visited town. Though Colehatch would not have liked to hear Hugh say so, the moral rôle functioned in a way quite like Justin's devilry, in fact, in that it provided an identity apart from the vagaries of fashion.

And for his other needs, there were always the mollies.

There was something he made very sure that Colehatch did not guess.

That French-bred Scotsman, whom Hugh thought of as Charles Stuart and Avon always spoke of as King Charles the Third, tried and failed to take the English throne. That Avon had been somehow concerned was obvious to Hugh, but the duke confided nothing. Presumably, whatever he had been doing, he did not feel his friend could have any relevant moralities. There was horror enough for the most bloodthirsty in the sights and stories one could not avoid. Perhaps Justin was protecting Hugh from further horrors. Hugh wished he would not, but there seemed little to be done about it.

Fanny married; Avon played deeper and grew wilder, and Hugh looked on in despair. Admonition was useless. Now he saw the worst drawback of the part he played: it was the very nature of Satanas not to listen to the good angel's advice. Justin smiled, called him "my dear," told him he was omniscient, and pursued his own way to perdition.

And the women ... actresses and girls from the country, maids and dancers and women of the streets, young gentlewomen of little fortune—two of those, Avon ruined and left with some monetary provision but no reputation, and Hugh found himself tracking down an obscure girls' school in Edinburgh and a mantua-maker's in Lyons, so that the young women would have lives in which to use the money Avon had provided. Alastair, of course, laughed at Hugh's efforts, claiming he should found instead a Home for the care of cast-off ton mistresses, "Something prettier than a parish poorhouse, but just as beneficial to Society."

"You'll be calling the girls who sell lavender off the streets next," Hugh said.

"Not such a bad idea, my dear," the Duke replied, wrinkling his brow as if in thought, turning his hand to see the sparkle of a new emerald ring upon his hand. "They would be no affront to the nose, at least."

"By Gad, I wonder you have no nose for the moral stink you leave."

"If you are begun to pass personal remarks, I will leave you, beloved," Avon said, and did, though it was nearly his normal time to go, so Hugh did not feel too snubbed.

It had been fear that Hugh had seen in Justin's downturned face, that morning under the painted cupids. Fear of his own passion; fear of Hugh's; fear for the life he was used to and the part he knew how to play. But now Hugh was the one who was afraid, for it seemed Alastair was actually trying to destroy himself.

Mistresses meant nothing, Hugh told himself, furiously. Indeed, Hugh himself kept rooms for the use of whatever young man he was most taken with at the time; there had been a number of them, all in their twenties or early thirties and most lean and dark-haired, with some education and often a drawling manner. Hugh understood his own compulsions, and had never touched a young man who did not already have a similar inclination to Hugh's own. As Justin had said in the park, that long-ago night, to have a lover—a mistress—or use a whore was only what nearly every man in Society did. But Justin seemed driven to more and more risk. When he chose a light-o'-love, she was the most demanding, the one most likely to make a loud scene in some place she did not belong; when he flirted with a well-born girl, it was the one who was most foolish and unprotected. When he returned to the practice of sodomy, which Hugh knew he still did from time to time, it was in the most public venues, as if he thought being an Alastair placed him beyond the reach of the law or of scandal.

Hugh came to the point that he could no longer bear to watch. He moved out of his London lodgings and broke with the current young man, bade goodbye to his other friends and wrote Justin a carefully-considered, much-revised note saying that he would be staying with his brother in the country for a few months and then would probably go to Paris, and he was Justin's very obedient servant and fond friend.

Thus matters stood when Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, cast his eyes on Jennifer Beauchamp, a woman who would have none of him, even when he tried to abduct her.

In unaccustomed defeat, Justin had fled all the way to Paris. To Hugh, who tried not to let the triumph of that absorb him to the exclusion of the help he wanted to be to his friend.

Avon had attempted an evil thing, but the outcome had hurt him so deeply that it would have been cruel to chide him. There was scandal enough to have given three noblemen ugly nicknames, though Avon's had already been secure. Colehatch wrote; Hugh destroyed the letter. Fanny wrote what people were saying to Hugh rather than to her brother, so intensely did she feel their disgrace, and as she was herself at the Marlings' country home, the worst of it would never reach her in any case. Hugh forbore to mention most of it, but one piece of ton news he was forced to give: "Fanny tells us that Jennifer Beauchamp has married Anthony Merrivale."

"Has she indeed? I cannot say I am greatly surprised. It was he, you will recall, who rescued the lady from my clutches."

Avon's voice was the same, or only very slightly rougher. His mannerisms had not changed, though he was perhaps gentler, especially in his dealings with women. But his eyes were dark and tragic as tarns, the lighter glints in their hazel hue gone. Anyone who knew him could see his grief. A few Parisians had already asked questions of Hugh. Shortly they would begin to ask Avon, if they had not begun already. Lady Fanny and Lord Colehatch were not the only ones who would write letters.

Hugh made a decision. "I weary of Paris, Justin. What say you to travel?"

Avon shrugged. "What destination had you in mind, my dear? I can walk to and fro about the earth with the other devils, but you ...."

"Rome," Hugh said.

"Ah, perfect. Decadent Rome ... Rome of the Holy Father." Avon thought, and laughed a little, softly. "The contrast is a pleasant echo of the two of us, Davenant. Yes, Rome is the very place above all others that I find myself longing to visit. I am right to call you omniscient."

Hugh strove for the expected moral observation, and could do no better than, "Rome may be good for you; I hope it will be. I think it may. For though Jennifer would not marry you, Justin, I think she may have made you."

"I doubt I am not so plastic, but I am willing to try your Roman remedy, my dear Hugh."

Some weeks later, Hugh sipped chocolate and watched Justin over the edge of the cup. The other man looked tired still though he had emerged from his bedchamber but a half-hour past. He raised his quizzing glass to look upon an inoffensive dish of bacon, his mouth set in a discontented line.

"Surely," he murmured, "Italians cannot eat this ... burnt offering ... in the morning."

"No, I fancy this is meant to be an English breakfast." It was the same they'd been served since they arrived. "Have a roll, Alastair. They are fresh." Hugh wondered if Justin were suffering the effects of too much wine the night before, but drunkenness seemed unlike him. The trouble was probably elsewhere. "Were your losses so heavy, then, last night?"

Justin regarded him for some moments under half-lowered lids, the pause speaking more frankly than his words: "Pray excuse me from the labours of calculation, this early in the day."

If the duke could be stared out of countenance, Hugh had no desire to do so; he put his cup down and took up knife and fork to begin on his own rasher. He could see in his peripheral vision how Justin sat back in the gilt chair, arm outstretched to lie casually upon the table. A metronomic clink of silver to china announced a rare restlessness.

"There certainly seems to have been some cosmic mismanagement." Justin's voice sounded merely thoughtful. "According to the proverb, I ought to be lucky at cards."

A sudden exasperation choked Hugh, unfair though he knew it was. "Self-pity does not suit you, Justin," he admonished before he could stop himself.

Justin's brows rose. "I beg your pardon," he said stiffly. Then, after a pause perhaps meant to let both their tempers subside, he went on, "Indeed, I fear I am a poor companion of late, my dear."

"If you would make amends, Justin, eschew our social invitations and accompany me among the antiquities today. If you please," Hugh added belatedly.

But the duke saw fit to be amused. "Shall I bring my sketching-book? Watercolours? Oils?"

"Your company is all I ask." And that was all too true.

They rented a donkey for the day—not to carry sketching equipment, which neither brought, but for their luncheon al fresco and for the services of the donkey-boy as guide. He was a charming youngster, like a shepherd in a painting, or even a young David—his hair in tumbled dark curls, his skin brown with sun and rosy with good humour and the effort he expended, climbing the slopes and stairs before them while chattering over his shoulder in broken English. He led them far afield from fashionable haunts, and Hugh was glad to go.

Late in the afternoon they stopped on a hillside that overlooked a pretty pattern of red roofs and white walls. Heated with their walking, by common consent they both stripped to shirt-sleeves, and half-reclined on a blanket, between them wine and bread, grapes in a bunch and a dish of oil. They tore and dipped the bread like peasants, drank the wine from glasses that the hôtelier had wrapped in napkins with many admonishments to the boy to keep them safe. Hugh praised him for doing so, and he wandered off to climb a nearby tree and have his own, still-humbler meal. Cicadas whined, their high voices loud and soft and loud again as if the wind played them, a discordant Aeolian harp.

Justin was wearing an informal wig, short and unpowdered like Hugh's own. A drop of sweat had escaped it, slipping down from temple to chin and hanging there for an instant, above the open neck of the linen shirt, then dripping into it as Justin leaned forward to pluck a grape. Then he looked up, and was for a moment very still, his eyes an amber better than richest gold.

Hugh forced his gaze away, down to the little hills and valleys of the blanket where the food lay half-immersed. Justin straightened. Hugh extended his hand toward the bunch of grapes and then, nervously, stopped as Justin cleared his throat.

"What are you thinking of, Hugh?" Justin spoke as quietly as if he thought the boy could hear them. Hugh's eyes flicked over involuntarily, but the crotch of the tree was empty, the boy absent—he must have wandered off somewhere.

"Hugh—"

So, surprised out of his composure, compelled, Hugh blurted, "Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuuenti—"

Still softer, the indrawn breath and exhalation. "A Catullus scholar ... I never thought it of you, I confess, my d—" another breath, a swallow.

Hugh was looking now, and what he saw made him sit up, make an awkward move around the food and say, "No more words, then, Justin, pray you—" and kiss him. Mouth. Eyelids. Brows. Cheeks, and then eyes again. In spite of his request, Catullus' words tumbled through his mind, humming louder than the cicadas: Your honeyed eyes, Juventius, if I could kiss them three hundred thousand times, I'd seek them over and over again ... and there was the mouth once more, tasting of olive oil, garlic, wine, and Justin, Justin himself. The grass crunched faintly under the blanket. Hugh moved his hand and clutched a few grapes by mistake; they burst in his hand. He raised his head.

"That is but ten," Justin said, breathlessly, "and they count only if I am the boy." He rolled them off the blanket altogether and set about evening the score.

"Speaking—" Hugh said, had his mouth stopped, and loved it, but held onto the train of thought— "of—mm—the boy—"

"No," said Justin, undoing the tie of Hugh's shirt, "leave me some illusions, beloved. Not the boy."

"No, no," Hugh laughed, trying to pull his shirt free and simultaneously to undo Justin's, "I meant to ask where he'd got to."

"I—" Justin pulled his own shirt off over his head with complete disregard for his wig, which fell askew over one ear— "care not a whit, my dear Hugh. Not a farthing. Let him look on. It will be—" he paused, looked down at Hugh's bared chest and stroked it, absorbed for a moment— "an education." Hand and gaze moved slowly up from rib to pectoral to collarbone, onto the neck that Hugh could not help but stretch out for the touch, around his jaw onto his cheek and back into his hair, pushing his own wig back and off completely. "You've oil on your cheek, Hugh," Justin half-whispered, "here," and licked him.

Hugh's eyes closed as he savoured the caress, and Justin's hand pressed down as his body lifted. "One moment—" the low voice reassured before Hugh could panic, and it was no more than a moment before Justin was back, heat and weight against Hugh. One wet touch after another dotted his skin, cool, and then hot in the same places. Hugh looked, saw Justin sucking where the oil was, and shut his eyes again. A slippery hand stroked his ribs, the other opened his breeches deftly, and then he felt the rough prickle of the grass beneath him and the soft slick touch of the oiled hand upon his swollen yard. It felt so creamy, so silky, that he felt as if he were somehow inside Justin's mouth as well as his hand—"My God!" he cried.

Justin chuckled, the laugh itself as rich as if oiled. "Hardly."

"Don't stop!"

"No, no, I shall not stop," and the callused, slippery thumb swept across a vein, then up the length, and Hugh yipped a little as it rubbed his crown, felt a bubble of his own oil escape. Justin rubbed again, round and round, slid down to the base and up, squeezed and gentled—Hugh made more sounds, purrs and gasps and sighs.

"How you enjoy this," Justin murmured, "I had no notion ... what a love-tooth you have, my dear, my poppet. You work in my hand so ... I am almost afraid to see you ... erupt."

Hugh begged again, "Justin, don't stop!"

"And these soft plums, these alchemist's stones," Justin fondled them with the other hand. "Ah, good, they're drawing up—"

Hugh wanted to laugh, but was too excited, could not spare breath for it when his whole body was wrenched with lust. But Justin would ever be perverse—ask him to be silent and he spoke! Hugh loved the words; they were lifting him farther, pushing him faster, but it was just like Justin to give them only now. "Hold—" he gasped— "hold—" meaning squeeze, don't squeeze, keep me here, let me die in ecstasy ... let me hold you ... "Damme! F-fuck me."

It was the oiled hand that skimmed his perineum, circled the clenched muscle of his anus—that too felt as silky as a tongue, amazingly good. "The oil—" he said, and Justin rubbed with the flat of his palm and all his fingertips before two went in and stretched Hugh wide. Oil and fire both—Hugh gasped again. Justin hung over him for what seemed a long while, nibbling and sucking the skin of his torso, handling his yard, working in his arse. "Now, now, now, now, now," the desperate voice could not be Justin's, so it must be Hugh's own, and then at last Justin was pulling his legs apart and kneeling between them, hoisting, wriggling, until the blunt end of his cock was there, and the whole slid in with ease deeper than Hugh had ever taken it.

Above Justin this time was the sky, clouds blowing and the deepest blue beyond. Beneath them the grass crackled, poked, stung—this was no dream. Justin stroked Hugh still. He stared down, fascinated, as if Hugh were a stranger, or perhaps truly an angel, something wondrous, unexpected. When Hugh came, Justin was still inside him, still holding him—Hugh shouted with joy, and heard Justin's voice murmuring low, puffing out the syllable of his name as he pulsed within: "Hu-Hugh, Hugh ... Hugh."

A long time afterward, half-dressed again and lazing on the blanket eating grapes and drinking the last of the wine, Justin said suddenly, "I believe I must give up piquet."

Hugh began to laugh, and pushed a grape into Justin's opening mouth. "Yes. And whist. Quadrille. Loo. Commerce. And—" he leaned over until their faces were perhaps an inch apart— "Beggar My Neighbour." And kissed that famous gamester, Duke of Avon, until the grape-skin caught between Hugh's teeth instead of Justin's.

Now Rome was all transformed, drowned in honey, and the days they passed went by as unnumbered as those in Elysium. They visited up and down the Spanish Stairs in hotel parlours, strolled through galleries and studios, stood admiring the Pantheon—where Hugh faced the statue of Mars and shot surreptitious glances at Justin, who stared through his quizzing glass at Venus with a critical expression on his face. They walked the seven hills amid wildflowers trembling with the wings of the bees that ravished them. They traversed St. Peter's Square and looked upon the Trevi Fountain, throwing in their coins like skipping stones.

They even drew some sketches to have something to show for their expeditions. Justin had, when he pleased, a neat hand for drawing; he especially excelled at quick cartoons such as the one of the boy pulling the donkey up a narrow passage between buildings, or another page of the child's facial expressions. Hugh's favourite drawing, however, was a more leisurely study, a nude entitled 'Sleeping Adonis' drawn as a statue in the process of being restored. On a low pedestal, the body was stretched out, even to the penis which lay upon one carven thigh, and one arm was flung up across the face ... it was Hugh, whom Justin had apparently sketched as he lay in one of the hôtel beds. For the first several days after their al fresco lovemaking, they shared them: Justin's one night, Hugh's the next. Justin's valet Gaston and Hugh's man Topsell passed each other a dozen times in the hallway every morning, fetching what had been left in one chamber or the other.

The valets knew. The chambermaids must know, and the hôtelier most likely did. The donkey-boy knew.

His name, Hugh found, was Vittorio. He was fourteen years old, and had been guiding foreign ladies and gentlemen about Rome for two years already. He couldn't read, but he could remember what people told him about the places they wanted to see, and then—he said with naïve pride—he could tell those things to the next people. Someday he hoped to be a guide in one of the inside places, such as the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel ... he wished he could have a red uniform as the men in the Holy City did, but he thought one might have to be a priest for that. He cast a flashing gaze at Hugh under outrageous lashes, and denied any calling to the priesthood.

Quite untempted, Hugh laughed. "'Pon rep, boy! The girls are scarcely born who would weep if you became a priest." Then he gave Vittorio a coin and dismissed him. It was a pretty child, certainly, but no more than a child still. And even were the idea of debauching one so young not revolting in itself, who would eat bonbons when one could have a whole feast? Pet a little dog when one could tumble and wrestle with a lion?

His lover Justin was still in many ways the Justin Alastair the world knew: wary as a wild animal, facetious, mannered, cynical, arrogant, and proud of his own vice. He still tended to begin each session of lovemaking as if amazed that Hugh could possibly allow it, much less enjoy it, and once or twice even apologised afterward; perhaps he was being sarcastic in some subtle Alastair way. From time to time he would vanish of an evening—he had not, in fact, given up playing cards. Hugh missed him absurdly but did not want to cling.

Justin acquired an odd habit of snubbing Hugh verbally, unexpectedly, both in public and when they were alone. At last, Hugh said indignantly, "You take me up for nothing, Avon!" and surprised a flash of something like satisfaction on Justin's face before he strode over and took Hugh's hand in his own.

"You do right to chide me, beloved." He bent to kiss Hugh's fingertips, one by one, as if they belonged to a fashionable lady or an expensive light-o'-love. That argument ended in bed, but at other times they merely snapped at each other for a time before the conversation wound down, starting again after a pause as if the other, harsher words had not been exchanged.

Still, that dreadful dark pit in Justin's eyes was quite gone, and that made Hugh happy whenever he felt any qualms. And the sex was glorious, a meeting of equals such as Hugh had dreamed of without ever hoping to find, so fierce and tender and passionate that Hugh told himself that what Justin did outside their bed mattered little: surely the truth of what he felt was in his lovemaking.

Then, one day when they had no plans to go out—for the weather was unusually grey and the ground still soggy from a night's rain—Hugh saw their little friend's donkey outside the hotel as he was returning from a morning call. He went into their rooms, saying, "Avon? Are you here? Say, Vittorio must have a commission in the hotel today, is that not amusing? Perhaps some lonely lady with matern—" but he got no further, for the door of Avon's bedchamber was ajar and he pushed it open only to find Vittorio there, kneeling naked before the duke with the man's cock stretching that tender young mouth. The dark eyes rolled toward Hugh, and it was impossible to tell whether the boy was in pain or fear or simply surprised, but he started violently, fell backward on his arse on the carpet, and sat there, silent, as Hugh turned toward ... Satanas.

Avon moved not a muscle to cover himself, his yard bare, still stiff, and gleaming wet. His shirt was on but his breeches off, and he sat with knees apart in a brocaded armchair. His fine hands held the carved wooden arms in a tight grip. His head tipped back; his eyes burned.

Hugh stood still too. He felt as though a blade had thrust clean through him, and when it was withdrawn the pain would come. His heart beat hard in his throat, twice, and then he took a breath. Without moving his eyes from Avon, he said, "Vittorio, put your clothes on," and wondered at how ordinary his voice sounded.

"And if I say—" Avon's voice was silky, contemptuous, the voice he used to kill pretension— "that the boy is here at my invitation and under my orders, and dare not do your bidding rather than mine?"

Vittorio, who had risen to his feet, froze.

"I am a duke, after all," Avon said, and he had never looked so kingly as he did then, half-naked in the chair.

"You—" Hugh caught himself. He would not rail like one of Avon's discarded mistresses. "Indeed, your Grace, you are a duke. You ... have rank on your side, but I believe in this instance ... I have ... "

"Virtue," sneered that deadly voice.

And it had come to this again. Hugh turned, snapping the invisible cord that had tethered him to Avon, rubbed his face in despair, held tight, squeezing his own mouth lest some uncontrolled sound should escape it. Had it only been this game all along, Justin playing with him as he had played with men and women over and over while Hugh had known him and before? They were all commoners alike to His Grace of Avon, all pawns.

But poor Vittorio was the most vulnerable pawn here, and whatever happened between the two older men must not harm this shining child. Hugh went to him, stood between him and Avon, put a gentle hand on the bare shoulder. Vittorio looked up shivering, but he seemed unhurt. His skin was unmarked. Hugh looked down at him, but spoke to Avon. "Will you let the child go, Justin? Since I ask it?"

It seemed a long while before Justin said, "Oh, very well. Dress yourself, boy, and you may have the money on the table, since—" the edge was in his voice again— "it is not your fault you did not earn it."

Vittorio moved like a mouse, darting, freezing, but he got into his smock and pants and grabbed the coins—they lay out of Hugh's sight, since he did not turn, but he heard the chink of them in the boy's hand—and then scurried out leaving the door open. Hugh went to shut it, then faced the Duke.

Justin had arranged his shirt tail over his genitals by now, and managed still to be as poised as if he were dressed for the Court. "Such ceremony, my dear!" he mocked.

"It was you who made such a great matter of your rank, just now." Hugh felt unutterably weary, wanted more than anything for this to be over—or, in fact, never begun. If only he had stayed longer at his call, he would never have known of this, and though he was ashamed he still wished it had been so. "If," he could not help but ask, foolish as he knew it was, "if you wanted to be sucked, Justin, why did you not tell me?"

"You?"

Something broke free then, and the words tumbled out: "I! Gad! Who but I? Have I ever said you nay, Justin, ever hesitated, ever been but joyful to touch you in any way you like? I'faith I would do anything for you, anything with you—how can you not know it?" Hugh managed at last to shut his mouth, on the verge of sheer pleading, so very near to saying how much he was in love.

And Avon said nothing. In the end, Hugh had to say, "Speak to me, Justin, I pray you."

"That you .... My friend, dear to me even when I seem to show you that you are not, that you are willing to debase yourself is no reason I should demand it."

Hugh looked away again, this time at the window where grey light still came in but no rain spattered the glass. "I shall never understand your ... principles."

"I must say yours are more than a little obscure to me as well."

After another pause, Hugh tried again. "What shall we do, Justin?"

Avon rose from the chair, walked over to where Hugh stood with measured steps. He touched Hugh's cheek, and was the man Hugh loved again, until he said, "I suspect we would do best to part."

Hugh closed his eyes. He felt a light, terrible kiss upon his forehead. So Judas must have kissed, he thought, that gently. "Did you whore that boy to bring us to this?" he asked. "Did you mean all along for me to find you?"

The fingertips on his cheek quivered slightly, but Avon made no verbal reply.

Even a moment such as this had to, at last, end. Hugh opened his eyes, and saw the nobleman he knew putting on his breeches with his customary aplomb. The lover was already gone.

Justin went to Vienna, and Hugh back to London. Fanny Marling invited him to parties, and he attended them; he resumed a fairly normal, though not terribly busy, social life amongst his peers, and felt little impulse to pursue sexual liaisons. The fire within him had burnt up so high, he told himself, that it was only natural it should fall to ash for a while. In time he would find ... someone. He might even marry, as he knew Justin would do if only to ensure the continuance of his name.

Over the holiday season, Hugh visited his family. He reflected that if Justin thought Hugh too moral, it would be better if he and Lord Colehatch never met more than was absolutely necessary. Colehatch deplored the travelling Hugh had done and his life in London, such as my lord knew it. And he knew so little. Hugh thanked his stars for my lord's dull young wife, who kept him in the country to tell her exactly how to go on in all contingencies.

Thus it was simple bad luck that brought Lord Colehatch and his lady to the metropolis just as Hugh became enmeshed in an Alastair family crisis.

Hugh's involvement began on an ordinary morning—save for the presence of his brother, who had arrived while Hugh was still eating breakfast to tell him all about the tasks Colehatch had come to town to do. Hugh was eating, drinking coffee, and making sounds of agreement, but not paying a great deal of attention. Then Hugh's man came in to give him a billet and to tell him that a lady wished to see him.

"A lady!" Colehatch exclaimed. "What lady would call upon a gentleman? Damme, send the female packing, my good man!"

Fenning bowed to Lord Colehatch but did not leave the room.

Hugh, meanwhile, had been attempting to read the billet, which was crossed as if a single sheet was all the writer could obtain though it was not enough to hold all that must be communicated. There seemed to be a good deal about Hugh's past good deeds, his aid to an unnamed person, but in the vertical lines a scrawling shape recurred that Hugh tried to make into another name, but was too evidently "Avon" to mistake.

"I'll see her," he told Fenning. "Please ask her to wait in the sitting room." Then, to his brother, "Thank you, Frederick, for your care for my reputation, but I suspect it is not my own actions that are come back to haunt me but—ah, another person's."

"Alastair's, I suppose. Stap me! Why you must always jump to his bidding I do not know, and he such a wild rake. What is it they call him? Devilus, something of that sort?"

"Something of the sort," Hugh agreed. "I shall give myself the treat of calling upon you and Lavinia later, if you will allow me. You do see that whatever, er, unpleasantness might be brewing, I don't want to see you mixed up in it."

"Most improper," Colehatch said.

"Probably," Hugh murmured.

In the sitting room, Hugh found a woman whose aspect was vaguely familiar. Her dress looked new but not fashionable, and was far too modestly cut to be worn by a nobleman's mistress. On seeing him enter, she rose from the settee and deftly scooped the small child who had been perched beside her to his feet. Hugh was no judge of children's ages, but this one was certainly very young, still in infants' skirts. Yet when the woman curtsied, the child bobbed a creditable bow, and raised eyes of a curious amber-hazel colour to look at Hugh.

Unmistakeably, he was Justin's son. Aside from the eyes, the curve of the brows was exact; moreover, Hugh well remembered the shade of brown hair hidden under Avon's wig, and the child's was the same.

"Mr. Davenant, I am that Madame Bernard whom you knew as Daphne Chattermole."

"I remember you perfectly, madam," said Hugh, who now did. She was the clergyman's daughter Avon had ruined and Hugh helped to find work in Lyons. "In what way may I serve you? I am afraid I had not the time to read your letter thoroughly."

"You were so kind, when we met, as to help me escape from His Grace the Duke of Avon," she said. "Now I am come to beg your help again on behalf of my son Paul."

Hugh would not, himself, have called her flight an escape from Avon, who had already lost interest by the time Hugh had first known about her. The suggestion that a child as young as this—and Justin's own son besides—needed to escape from the Duke was simply appalling. He hoped he had misunderstood; meanwhile, he turned to greet the child. "And you are Paul?"

Paul stared, holding his mother's hand.

Hugh tried again, "You have had a long journey, my child."

No reply. The woman who had assumed the name Bernard said, "He speaks seldom to strangers."

"That is as it should be, at his age. Pray be seated, madam." Hugh took a chair himself, and crossed his legs.

"I must tell you, sir, that the Duke's money and your kind offices have secured me a position as partner to Mrs. Jessaby, another expatriate Englishwoman in Lyons. The shop sells mantles, hats, parasols, and such ladies' things. It is seldom a gentleman comes in, but sometimes ... it is he who will pay, and therefore he wishes to see the things tried on, by the ... female under his protection."

Light was beginning, slowly, to dawn. "And his Grace accompanied a lady into your shop?"

"Not a lady, sir! But yes, he came in quite unexpectedly, one day, and recognised me as I served the young woman. He ... spoke to me, quite jokingly, but I did not like to be reminded, and the young woman did not like to see another noticed. It was quite unpleasant."

Hugh could imagine it. Avon must have been amused.

"I think he liked to see me made nervous. Perhaps he was punishing me for leaving him before. In any case, I saw him in the street when I was going home, and when I took Paul to play in the park, he was there. He was ... different with Paul, not so ... smiling ... like a shark, and I let him talk to the child. And then he writ me, sir, at my very home, demanding that I allow him to see Paul, to educate him, perhaps to adopt him in time. He wants my boy, Mr. Davenant. He wants to take my Paul away from me!" She raised a handkerchief to her face.

Now Hugh remembered that he had found Miss Chattermole extremely tiresome. "Did you tell him that you did not wish him to acknowledge Paul? That you preferred to raise the child yourself?"

She looked at him in horror. "Deny my lord of Avon what he demanded? My experience of him has not been such ... ah ... no, I could not. Could not face him. I thought only of flight, but sir, how shall I do now? All my capital is tied up in the shop, and poor dear Mrs. Jessaby, what will she do without me?" She used the handkerchief again; Hugh heard her sniff.

Evidently, Avon had truly put her in fear—which would please him, Hugh expected. "So you came directly to me?" he asked, wondering what had possessed her to do so.

"No," she said, "no, I tried ... I have been to see Lady Fanny as well." Indignation overwhelmed her, to judge from her flushed cheeks and flashing eyes. "She would do nothing to help! Nothing! She, she laughed at me!"

This was not the first time that Hugh felt the Alastairs deserved their fates. As did this excessively silly woman. The boy, though—he deserved to grow up in what peace he could find. Avon might tire of him. Hugh could not imagine Satanas as a father. Paul would be better without such generosity, and certainly Madame Bernard would be better off back in Lyons selling fichues to women of fashion than wandering the English landscape stirring up scandal-broth and dragging a child in short-coats after her.

"I shall see what I can do, madam. I have not Avon's direction, but when I have it, I will write to him on this head, and ask him to let you be. I doubt I have little influence, but I shall use what I have." He stood. "Pray give me your own direction in London, unless you plan to return to Lyons immediately?"

After getting rid of her, Hugh paid a call at the Marlings', at a wholly unfashionable hour. Lady Fanny scolded him for that more than for his involvement with the Bernards.

"Oh, that! The woman is a fool!"

"She is," Hugh conceded, "but she could do some damage for all that. Miss Chattermole had friends, family—"

"Fine friends, to let you busy yourself sending her to Lyons and never lift a hand themselves!" She nibbled the end of one finger, thoughtfully, a gesture which had been much admired before her marriage, and which Hugh hoped Edward Marling could persuade her to drop. "Lyons, Lud! What can Justin have been doing there?"

Hugh shrugged.

"Well, it was another woman, I suppose, and madam milliner more jealous than afeared, belike!" Fanny tittered, angrily.

"Fanny, need I remind you that Miss Chattermole is not the only woman Avon has been known to ruin? Or to attempt it? Yes, her story is not terribly dire; Justin seems to have teased her but meant nothing but good to the boy—"

Fanny interrupted again: "If he meant to oversee his education, 'tis near as much as he did for me, or Rupert either!"

Now who was jealous? But Hugh would not venture to touch such a sensitive subject. The younger Alastairs' sentiments for Justin were more tangled even than Hugh's own. "People will say," he said evenly and slowly, striving for patience, "that Madame Bernard is but another Jennifer Merivale. Would you have that scandal revived? Would you do Jennifer that disservice? I believe she is even increasing—would you have the ton look sideways at the baby?"

Flouncing, Fanny looked away and bit her lip, her colour heightened. It took a moral cudgel to get through to the Alastairs, but eventually the façade would crack. "I don't know what you think I have in my power to do," she said.

"Don't you know where Justin is now?"

"Still in Lyons for aught I know, or gone to somewhere even more obscure! Perhaps he means to make scandal in every city in Europe! Have you not heard what happened in Vienna?"

"Vienna?"

"Yes, he went there after Rome, I know that much, as, Lud! I am sure you do too, for it was you he stayed with in Rome, was it not? He had not a feather to fly with then, could not even have hired an hôtel. In Vienna he put up in a common inn, until he fell in with—bother, I have forgotten the sprig's name! 'Tis not a great one, thank goodness. Rich, but a new title, you know, and making the noise they all will make, carriages and new-built houses and oh! Everything one can imagine! He took up Justin—a dozen people writ me of it, and Justin himself as well. You know how his letters are. They were everywhere together for a time, and played so deep that strangers were warning me of it! I do not know what business it was of theirs! Or mine, forsooth! I had a deal of trouble to keep it from Edward, for what he would say an' he knew ...."

Her voice was well-trained, and flowed musically enough, and Hugh focussed on its fluid notes as he stared down at his own hands, one on the arm of the chair and the other in his lap. He wondered if the nameless sprig had found the days golden and sweet, if he had quoted poetry to Justin and felt the heat of that mobile mouth, the grip of those hands. Hugh's teeth clenched on bitterness; the juice burned his throat.

"...won his whole fortune, Hugh, the whole of it! The poor young man was so crushed, they say, he could scarce hold up his head as he left the hell, and what came to him—well, I've a dozen stories of that too, for every letter and whisper has it different. But this I do know, the boy's shot dead. By his own hand, or in a duel, or by accident, but he's dead and Justin is rich as Croesus again. Faith, one must believe his nickname, for he has the devil's own luck!"

"With cards," Hugh said, his voice a croak, but he cleared his throat then and Fanny seemed to take no notice.

While he was wrestling his emotion, however, Fanny had one of her moments of shrewdness. "Oh, Hugh," she said, "with all this money coming to the estate, the lawyers must be busy. You should go to them an' you want Justin's direction."

This was such plain good sense that it concluded their interview, or nearly. Hugh bent over Fanny's hand, taking his farewell, and she said with a little laugh more natural than any he had heard all morning, "It's kind of you, Hugh, but so strange. What do you care for the Alastairs?"

"Justin is my friend," he said, as he had answered Colehatch so often. But then, as he would not to his staid brother, he burst out, "But by Gad! Why must he do these things, Fanny?"

Her blue eyes opened wide, and she seemed genuinely astonished that he should ask. "Why? Why, Hugh, because he can."

Fortunately for Hugh's peace of mind, Avon did not advance any such excuse when he responded to the letter which had apparently reached him with some speed though in a circuitous manner. He said he was desolated that the effects of his indiscretion had troubled Hugh a second time, and authorised any reasonable promises Hugh cared to make to the former Miss Chattermole to put her mind at rest, "and you are ever Reasonable, my dear Friend, so Sure you will give her such assurances of my Indiff'rence as she seems to Need. But pray do not give her any further Moneys, for my Lawyers have been Busy about the Matter and Gain 'd the lady's Consent to an Allowance, her Apprehensions of Me notwithstanding."

Thus began a correspondence that Avon seemed to value—to Hugh it was invaluable—and that followed the duke's peripatetic travels over the next year. Avon went to Holland, where the fields of tulips fatigued him and all the women looked, he said, like milkmaids; then down the Rhine and through the Black Forest, "Picturesque as a snuff-box painting, tho' far less trouble, my Dear, to peer at it in one's Hand than to Lose oneself looking up and Thinking the Sky gone forever"; crossed the Alps "Wrapp'd in furs and yet Near Frozen, so that I agreed Far too Eagerly to be sledg'd down a Mountainside like so much Firewood and still near lost the Tips of my Ears to the Cold. Had they been Bobb'd, what a new Fashion I might have Establish'd!"—arriving at last in Venice where he won yet more money in the ridotti of various Venetian nobles and dallied with masqued ladies "and some who might have been Ladies had their Births suited them Better." Hugh puzzled over that last, wondering whether Avon had meant men dressed as women or merely women of little fortune or name.

These letters were like a distillation of the Justin Alastair whose friendship had made London festive, without the troubling physical magnetism. As he read, Hugh felt the sense of humour by which Justin mocked himself as well as the rest of the world, without seeing the sneer and lifted eyebrows that conveyed a contempt his words did not; his letters showed a sharp mind, observant eye, artistic spirit. The little sketches jotted into the margins of the letters were vivid, though Hugh did not, perhaps, appreciate them as they deserved. They reminded him too much of Justin's Roman sketchbook.

Avon himself appeared to have forgotten, or did not consider worth recalling, their carnal affections. He made those sketches, as if he had never made or had never shown Hugh the "Sleeping Adonis" drawing. He sent little gifts—a wooden box carved with flying bees, an amber-beaded mask, a copy of the poems of Catullus—each oddly reminiscent of their affaire but accompanied by notes that never mentioned it.

Hugh could not forget, but in time the memories ceased to give that pain which had kept him away from Avon. In time, as well, his own ardour began to return, and he looked with pleasure at the forms of those around him, storing up a particularly fine leg, hand, shoulder, hindquarters, or set of privates as he noticed them, to recall later as he handled himself. He remembered the men he had kept with fondness and lust, and began to consider hiring rooms for that purpose again.

Meanwhile, Hugh's valet Topsell gave his notice. The new man, Lewis, was far younger, so Hugh said plainly to him, "I hope you have no great ambitions, or in the long run we shall not suit: I do not follow the extravagances of fashion, will not study embroidered stockings, drape lace past my fingertips, or wear patches on half my face. I am no Puritan, but these are all the jewels I like to wear, all the heel I like to stand on, and if you try to coax me to dress more, I shall grow cross."

Lewis' eyes were wide, which made him look still younger; he bowed and promised faithfully that he did not dream of dressing the most fashionable gentleman of the haut ton.

At first, Hugh noticed Lewis no more than any other valet he'd ever employed. He stepped into the offered breeches and stockings, stood for the adjustments of his jacket, was powdered and brushed, had his shoes buffed, in the same all-but-somnolent state in which he had stood for such treatment since childhood. The figure moving round him to do these things was nearly invisible. Lewis was quiet, as Topsell had been, and Gage before him. He was neat-handed. Hugh's clothes and trinkets were always in order. These things he saw and praised, as he might have noticed a footman who was especially deft.

The footman, however, would have accepted with wooden composure anything Hugh chose to say to him, while Lewis was perceptibly pleased, even colouring and fumbling a little with whatever his hands were occupied with at the time. It dawned on Hugh gradually that his other valets had not straightened his coat across his shoulders and back with quite such close attention, smoothed his stockings as thoroughly, or lingered so long over cuffing them on his knees just so.

One morning he looked down at the neat brown head as Lewis knelt over those stockings, running his hands up Hugh's calf yet once more and tugging the cuff another fraction of an inch, the other hand cupped warmly on Hugh's ankle, and Hugh thought for the first time how those hands might feel elsewhere. "I shall want a bath this evening, Lewis," he said.

"Yes, sir," Lewis acknowledged. "The footmen will bring the water after supper, if you wish."

Hugh reached out and just touched the sturdy cloth on Lewis' shoulder. "You will bathe me," he said, though as a rule he bathed himself.

The curve of Lewis' mouth relaxed and curved a little, and he licked his lower lip as if nervous. "Certainly, sir." Hugh swallowed at the glimpse of pink tongue-tip.

He was no Earl of Castlehaven, whose debaucheries among servants and his own family were still notorious. Hugh could not force, and would not even overpersuade, for his own pleasure depended on the eagerness of his partner. Yet while the bath was being filled he had to turn away, stare sightlessly out the window, fiddle with the tassels on the drapes, for the ringing of water against the tin sides of the bath was making him so hard that he feared everyone in the room would know what he wanted.

Lewis' fingers brushed Hugh's neck as the wig lifted from his head. Hugh's coat and waistcoat were tenderly removed from behind. He looked up at the carving over the lintel while Lewis untied his neckcloth, unfastened his shirt, then knelt to take off shoes and stockings. There was no concealing Hugh's turgid yard now: Lewis rose, undid the waistband button, opened and skinned down the breeches, but Hugh said nothing and Lewis was as impersonal as if there were nothing unusual about his master's excitement. Perhaps there was not, Hugh thought with sudden compunction. There was no telling what any previous employers had required of the young man.

So Hugh held back. He did not touch Lewis even to steady himself as he lifted one foot, then the other, and was bare from the waist down. He pretended that there was no bobbing phallus between them. Lewis took off his shirt and put the clothes away. Hugh stepped into the tub. They had not spoken since the footmen left the room with the empty water cans. The dull sounds of Hugh's movements against the tin, the swish of the water, seemed louder than the cries and rattles in the street. He leaned against the back of the tub and closed his eyes. Breathing in the scents of the bath oil and the nearby fire, he tried not to think.

Soft sounds and movement next to the tub made him look. Lewis had taken off his own coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves, collected sponge, cloth, dipper, and soap. There was a can of clean hot water left for rinsing, and into this Lewis dipped the cloth, soaped and lifted it, dripping, to Hugh's shoulder. Hugh inhaled sharply at the first touch of wet heat on his skin, the slight roughness of the fabric as it dragged down onto his chest, leaving a cold trail. He stared at the man's hand and furred forearm. The candle was across the room, and the fire was behind Hugh. Lewis' arm moved in Hugh's shadow, the rolled fabric bluish against brown skin. Hugh watched the muscles move, the water run down Lewis' wrist, and jumped as Lewis' other hand touched him, pushing his back away from the tin.

Hugh raised his head, tilting it slowly back and letting his eyelids sag shut. He was held between the bare hand cupping his shoulderblade and the cloth rubbing his hardening nipple. The hand in back moved, stroked down nearly to the waterline. He opened his eyes again. Surely Lewis was redder than the firelight alone could make him? His lips were slightly parted, air puffing in faintly audible breaths. His lashes shaded his eyes. He washed Hugh's stomach over and over, hand moving into the water and out again, the back bumping Hugh's erection and the water swirling around it. Hugh's hands clamped on the edges of the tub, held hard.

The washcloth was withdrawn. Hugh heard its wet slap against the side of the water can as it was draped there. A voice that sounded young and strained said, "Sir?" and the hand that felt so assured settled on Hugh's wrist. Moved up to his elbow and down to the base of his fingers. He let go his death-grip on the tub and let his muscles soften under the touch. Lewis' mouth was trembling. He would not meet Hugh's eyes.

"Touch me," Hugh said, "only as you wish ... but in any way you wish."

"Oh," said Lewis, and immediately reached for Hugh's yard.

Hugh's hand followed Lewis', toyed with the fingers that gripped and fondled him. He held Lewis' wrist, smeared the oiled water up to the rolled edge of his sleeve, slid back down, gripped the bones of the wrist again. "Faith, I want this in bed, if I may have it. But I—I want you to wash me. Everywhere. I've thought of it all day long." His other hand, damp but not dripping, moved up to Lewis' face. The side of Hugh's thumb swept to the corner of Lewis' mouth and onto the rougher cheek, then back.

"Kiss me," Lewis whispered. "Please ... sir. This cannot be real."

"It is," Hugh said and leaned as far as he dared without upsetting the tub. Lewis met him halfway, however, and they kissed. He tasted as clean as fresh water, and Hugh stopped feeling at all like Castlehaven, under the passionate clutching of his valet's hands.

It was a very long time before the footmen were summoned to take the water and the bath away again. Hugh began to spend much longer getting dressed and undressed. Lewis bloomed, showing a happy sense of humour and acquiring a propensity to hum or even sing softly about his work.

"Do the other servants notice how different you are?" Hugh asked one day, watching him.

Lewis met Hugh's eyes in the mirror, then turned and kissed his cheek quickly. "With them I am no different," he said.

Hugh asked no more.

Avon wrote that he had bought a house in Paris and called it Hôtel Avon. His butler was, amusingly, an Englishman named Walker. Mutual friends had asked after Hugh; Avon extended an invitation "to return that Hospitality of Yours, for which I never Express'd sufficient Gratitude." The charms of Paris, he wrote, would be immeasurably increased by Hugh's presence.

So Hugh went. He could go anywhere now, for Lewis came with him; he could lay eyes on Justin Alastair and see only the friend in his letters.

If he did have a twinge of feeling from time to time, found himself occasionally wistful, he also greatly enjoyed reacquainting himself with the French nobility and gentry whom he had known and who had been quite kind to him. De Salmy, Château-Mornay, de Châtelet, D'Anvau—they all seemed glad to see him. Hugh thought it was not just his friendship with Alastair that made him more popular here in Paris than he had been in London. Perhaps he was different here.

Before his arrival, Alastair had begun a liaison with Henriette Louise de Verchoureux, a woman of tempestuous passions and opulent charms. Her husband was rarely in Paris, yet rumour said she rarely slept alone. Certainly His Grace of Avon honoured her with many visits, though these grew fewer once Hugh settled in, and they spent evenings in the library of the Hôtel Avon, talking and playing chess or cards, as well as out in the Polite World.

One night, however, Justin was gone to la Verchoureux, and Hugh sat reading Catullus, partly to remind himself how ugly a thing was jealous spleen. He had been reading the libels of Gellius, which accused him of incest and of literally bursting the testicles of a man whom he sucked. Hugh's mouth twisted and he paged back randomly in the volume; his eye fell on the opening line of a far earlier poem: "Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire..." and settled to read this poem which began with the poet telling himself not to be a fool. Had not the sun once shone on his perfect love? But now she did not want him, so "uale, puella. iam Catullus obdurat—" oh, no, Hugh thought, it is not so easy as that—say goodbye, and be cured—but then, the questions at the end of the poem gave the lie to the indifference of the middle. Who would invite Catullus' former love? Who would praise her beauty? Who would bite her lips in kisses?

Hugh was distracted by memory, of Lewis nibbling on his mouth as if it were pastry, and of himself laughing and kissing back, the sensation both silly and pleasurable as they writhed together. He was smiling at the book as the door opened, and raised his head to direct the smile at Avon. "Well, Justin?" Then he saw, a half-pace behind his friend in the shadows, a shorter, much dingier figure, smudged face bent a little and a crumpled hat in its pale hands. "Faith, what have we here?"

"You may well ask." Avon came to the fireplace, put one hand on the mantel and one foot above the guard as if to warm it. "A whim. That dirty and starved scrap of humanity is mine."

"Yours?" Hugh looked again, and it was a child, in torn hose and shabby trousers, a stuff coat swallowing the small frame, hair every which way, yet gleaming copper-red even in the dim light. "What mean you, Alastair? Surely—you cannot mean—your son?"

"Oh, no!" Justin's teeth glinted. "Not this time, my dear Hugh. I bought this little rat for the sum of one diamond."

"But—" Hugh swallowed—"but why, in heaven's name?"

Justin answered in his lightest, most mocking voice. "I have no idea." He beckoned, languidly. The rare, lavender-tinged pearl on his hand caught the light as his smile had, a moment past. "Come here, rat."

Though he had spoken in English, the child came, and as Justin took the narrow face in one hand, Hugh had his first glimpse of Léonie Bonnard, then masquerading as the boy Léon.

His first response was that the child was older than he had thought; in fact, scarcely a child. The second was that the boy—for Hugh did not guess Léonie's secret for some time—looked hungry and tired, the droop of the mouth and smudges below the eyes betraying more than one lost meal and broken night. He took the small hand, which lay quiescent in his own, and led Léon to sit where the duke's supper had been laid ready. The youngster was as tractable as if both body and soul had indeed been given up to the new master's bidding. That phrase "body and soul" was repeated until it made Hugh deeply uneasy, but however often he asked, Justin would only evade. Satanas seemed intent on painting himself as black as might be, and yet grew irritable when Hugh reacted within his moralistic rôle. When it came to a suggestion that Hugh's friendship was due to Justin's wealth, Hugh first flushed with anger and then had to laugh. "Oh, go to bed, Justin! You are quite impossible!"

"So you have often told me."

So he had often felt, but he could not remember voicing the sentiment before.

Justin said, "Good night, my dear," but was not all the way through the door before he turned back for one last word: "A propos, Hugh, I have got a soul," though he had denied having one not five minutes past. "It has just had a bath, and is now asleep."

"God help it," Hugh said. Had Avon sent Léon to bed as he would have sent Paul to a ducal nursery? Or as he would have housed Vittorio for the duration of his desire?

"I am not sure of my cue. Do I say amen, or retire cursing?" The door shut. Alastair had gone.

Hugh shook his head and picked up his book. Perhaps the next day, Justin would give more of his reasoning. Or Hugh, watching, would deduce it. He would not let his friend do harm to that child, as much for Justin's own sake as for the boy's. Léon's.

Despite several scares, as when Avon insisted on taking his page to the Maison Chourval, Hugh gradually realised that no harm would come to the child.

And he also saw that the boy was ... not a boy.

Oddly, he made the discovery only after Léon saw something of Hugh's own secret. One morning, Hugh saw as Lewis was leaving the bedchamber that the back of his collar was turned unevenly, certainly not as it had been when he entered. Thinking there was no one in the hallway, for there never had been at this hour of the day, Hugh grasped a shoulder and murmured into his valet's ear, the other hand on the rumpled collar—and Léon walked into his line of sight, then froze. For a moment they all stared at one another.

Hugh let go and straightened. "Come in for a moment, child," he said shortly.

They all three re-entered the bedchamber and Lewis closed the door. Hugh walked restlessly the length of the room, then turned back. The valet stood motionless with fear and the page looked on, curiosity on the piquant face.

"You have us both in your power, young Léon," Hugh admitted.

"M'sieur?" The youngster seemed sincerely puzzled.

If Léon did not know what the intimacy in the doorway implied, then it would—ironically—be Hugh who would harm that very innocence that he had wanted to protect. He rubbed his mouth, unsure how to proceed.

"M'sieur Davenant, what is it that you think? Would I tell ce Walker-la anything that was not absolument nécessaire?"

"Or any of the other servants?"

"It is nobody's business, I think. You—" The long lashes swept down, and up again. "You are kind to Lewis. He smiles," and Léon cast a sunny smile at Lewis, who returned it a little shakily. "I do not wish to make him sad."

Hugh began to feel relieved. "Where did you learn such radical notions, young Léon?"

"At—in that past Monseigneur tells me I must not mention. Among those who stayed at ... an inn ... there were men who came ... a few très gentil with their friends, but others—they were cochons! I do not want to remember them."

"They did you no harm, I hope. Léon, if any did—"

"But no, M'sieur, it was not I. They brought their menservants, or found boys in the streets. Jean would not let them touch me—but I say too much. Peste! I forget the orders of Monseigneur."

"That must not be," Hugh said soberly.

"Mais non, M'sieur."

Hugh dismissed Léon, but kept Lewis for a moment. The comment about cochons and their menservants had cut a bit too deep. "Lewis, do you ever—if you—ah, damme!" He cupped the younger man's cheek in his hand, and said, "You must know, if you ever should wish to stop—"

"No! No," Lewis said, covering Hugh's hand with his own, pulling it to his mouth to kiss it.

Hugh petted his cheek. "You are very young. I forget that sometimes. But do not you forget what I say: you are free, Lewis. I would not keep you an' you ever wished to go."

It was only after Lewis also left, collar straight and colour still high with emotion, that Hugh registered what his eyes had recorded during the scene just past. He stood at the window, looking down at a rather spindly tree and a portion of the garden wall, and saw again how Lewis and Léon had looked, side by side.

Lewis, Hugh knew, had turned twenty just before they had left London. Léon, according to Alastair, was nineteen. Hugh had never before seen the page near anyone of comparable age, and was struck now by the difference. Lewis was hardly brawny, but he was taller and broader in the shoulders than Léon; his hands were far larger, his legs thicker. Lewis had a prominent adam's apple and shaved a scraggly but persistent beard; his voice was not basso, but it was a man's. In comparison, Léon seemed far more delicate than even noble (if perhaps baseborn) blood could account for. Léon's voice was sweet and a little fluting, apparently still unbroken. The page's neck was swanlike and smooth, the white hands deft but small as a much younger boy's; above all, where Lewis carried a fine package even when flaccid, there seemed almost nothing between Léon's legs.

Once he had seen, it was amazing to Hugh that he could ever have been deceived. And could Avon's sharp observation have missed the clues? Hugh thought not but feared to bring the matter up for discussion. Alastair's record with women was far worse than with men, Vittorio notwithstanding.

The day after Alastair took his page to Versailles, Hugh received a letter, which he stuffed into his pocket as he left the breakfast table—in rather a hurry as he had dawdled too long with Lewis that morning—to ride with D'Anvau. By the time he had returned, Alastair had gone out, so Hugh settled in the library to read the letter. It took some puzzling out, and then he needed to speak to Justin before he could reply to it.

Fortunately, the duke returned shortly, and came into the library brushing his hands as though he had soiled them. "Ah, Hugh, about some good work, no doubt!" He sat in his accustomed chair beside the fire.

"Perhaps. Justin, I have a letter from Madame Bernard."

Avon looked blank.

"Daphne Chattermole," Hugh clarified, but Avon's face hardly changed.

"I trust you can make it out," was all he said.

"Gad, it's not easy. But the matter is more important than the manner. She has fallen ill."

"An ailment of the stomach, perhaps," Avon said with sarcastic solicitude. "Or spleen."

Hugh smiled, but said, "No, Alastair, she writes as though it were serious. Perhaps even consumption. Now of course it may be no such thing, but surely she'd not venture writing to me if she had anyone else from whom to seek recourse, and there's the boy to think of."

Avon shook his head. "My dear Hugh! She writes to you because you gave her money and did her service before. You are gullible, beloved."

"There's the boy," Hugh repeated. "'Pon rep, have you no concern for him? He is your son."

"He is hers," and the duke's voice held no kindness. "I would have played the father two years ago—"

"Less," said Hugh.

"—no matter." One white hand waved, languidly. "She declined. If she chooses to raise a milliner's son rather than a duke's—"

"A duke's bastard."

"Hugh, really. May I speak?" Justin frowned, and may have been truly irritated.

"My apologies."

"If she chooses to raise a bourgeois rather than a baseborn child, it is perhaps—" with a little bow that, even seated, was gracefully done— "not a poor choice, but now she has made it, I do not fathom how the child could again become my affair. And you should feel no need at all to become entangled in the matter."

"You have reason, Justin," Hugh admitted, "but I cannot let this go so easily. I saw the child—well, so did you, of course, but ... I cannot explain. I do not want him to suffer for his mother's foolishness, I suppose that is the beginning and end of it. I want at least to know that she has provided for him. If indeed she is so ill that it is necessary."

Justin was looking at him, an oddly gentle half-smile on his face. "What a good man you are, beloved."

The expression plucked at Hugh's heart, and the sensation was unwelcome, so he responded gruffly, "No more than you, taking in young Léon."

"You know my motives there."

"No, Justin, I do not, for you have not told me all of them."

"True." But he said no more.

After a few moments' silence, Hugh inhaled slowly, and said, "I suppose I must go to Lyons, then."

"Yes, I suppose so." Alastair stood, took a step or two forward, and stretched out his hand so that two fingertips just brushed Hugh's face, then fell away. "If she has the pox, pray take care. Your fresh country face too nearly matches your heart; I would hate to see it marred."

"Is this your blessing?" Hugh was a little breathless.

"My blessing? Say rather that it is my farewell."

"I don't go instantly. I shall write first. Perhaps a few direct questions will entice a fact or two out of her."

Avon nodded. "Pray remain as long as you wish, and return as soon as you may. You are always welcome."

"Thank you, Justin. That means a great deal to me, you must know."

Avon's powdered head inclined graciously.

But later the same day, Justin asked Hugh to assume Léon's care for a few days while the duke went onto the French countryside himself. It was in fact a week before he returned, and he did not say whither he had been bound or why his errand had kept him so long. He did admit to Hugh that he had fathomed his page's secret, and revealed a plan to restore her to her rightful sex and to make her his ward. Hugh was, at first, outraged, and expressed himself with all the force he could muster, remembering that what calm admonition never accomplished was sometimes at least furthered by sheer emotional excess. Justin, however, merely told him he looked like an agitated sheep.

For once, apparently, Satanas needed no guidance, a situation with which a friend ought to have been well pleased. And Hugh might be needed in Lyons, if he was not here.

Over a month later, Hugh sat rubbing his temples in the small sitting room of a rented house in Harrogate, while above him feet pounded back and forth and an occasional shout echoed down the stairs. Paul was an energetic child, and for all his small stature, his footfalls were heavy. Hugh supposed he ought to be glad that the little boy was able, even briefly, to forget the loss of the mother that he had loved, but the truth was that this headache that pounded in time with the boy's feet made it very hard for Hugh to feel any sympathy at the moment.

It had not been a pleasant journey from Lyons to Harrogate. And, of course, the previous days had been a great strain, as Madame Bernard coughed out her life and the child swung between bewilderment and grief.

On the way north, they broke their journey at an inn not five miles from the Davenant family estate. Hugh had not even tried to avail himself of his brother's hospitality on this occasion. He had tried to shield Paul as much as possible from Colehatch, but the older man had demanded to see the child he thought was his brother's by-blow, and so Paul's French nursemaid had brought the child into the private parlour where Hugh had been submitting to Colehatch's rage for at least twenty minutes already. Hugh was on edge the whole time, afraid that Paul's resemblance to Justin Alastair would be obvious to other eyes than his own, but Colehatch had not seemed to guess anything.

"I thought you were a better man than this, Hugh," was Colehatch's parting shot. "If you will not marry, for God's sake cease this whoring before you have a pack of brats such as this one to find lodging for."

Hugh wondered if this admonition would have made any impact on him if he had committed the sin Colehatch imagined, instead of pursuing the vice that he preferred. Still, Colehatch had given him the needed direction from the estate agent's files: their old nurse, now living with her widowed daughter in Harrogate. Hugh had known only the city and was glad to be spared the task of tracking down Mrs Flagg.

Harrogate, with its steep hills, ought to have been the perfect place to tire out the most active child. If all went well, perhaps he would be running up and down the walks soon, and Hugh would be ... he was not sure. Léon—no, Léonie—must now be at Avon. Alastair would probably spend most of his time in London when he was not personally overseeing his ward's education.

Perhaps Hugh would travel. He sat daydreaming of places more interesting than Lyons, knowing that in reality he would no doubt settle in London for the foreseeable future.

The sitting room door opened, and Lewis, looking tired and vaguely dishevelled, came in and bowed. Outside the bedchamber they were always master and servant, and in fact the past days had been without any carnal play between them.

"Yes?" Hugh asked.

"The child is in bed, sir, but he asks for you."

The thumping of Paul's feet had ceased without Hugh's even noticing it. "For me? Aye, very well, I shall come." He pulled himself out of the chair.

Paul looked shyly up at him from the bed, which was adult-sized; the expanse of linen made him look tiny, his face very rosy and his hair very dark. Hugh sat on the edge of the bed, for lack of a more conventional seat, and said, "Paul? What did you wish to say to me?" —which, he supposed, was a ridiculous inquiry to such a young child.

"Dites bon nuit," said Paul. He could speak some English, but Hugh had not heard him do so all day.

"Bon nuit, mon petit. Dors bien," he said obediently. He smoothed the curls that Paul must have from his mother. "Sweet dreams."

"Êtes—" the child hesitated, then yawned, then began again, "Est-ce que vous êtes mon papa?"

Hugh was surprised, though he had expected the question at some point. He planned to tell Mrs. Flagg some of the truth: that Paul was the son of a young gentlewoman to whom Hugh had been some help after another man had ruined her. It was quite probable, however, that she would not credit the story and would tell Paul the untruth that she believed, so he would grow up thinking himself Hugh's bastard no matter what Hugh said. Still, to lie to Justin's son was unthinkable, even now when the child was scarce breeched.

"Mais non, petit, mais je te protégerai." It was all the child needed to know now. No, Hugh was not his father; yes, Hugh would see him cared for.

Justin's eyes regarded him gravely from the small face. Then one of the little hands emerged from the covers and patted Hugh's own, in an odd reversal of rôles. "Dormez-vous bien aussi," the child said.

Hugh leaned over and kissed Paul's forehead.

But the child was not as easily settled in Harrogate as Hugh had originally supposed. Mrs Flagg had aged a great deal since Hugh had seen her, and although her daughter Mrs Josephs was hale and strong, she was also run off her feet caring for her mother, her daughter Norah, and the house, as well as taking in washing and sewing to supplement her inadequate means.

Hugh could relieve her of the necessity for the odd-jobbery; he could hire a maid to assist with the children; but he could not make the tiny house the Josephs family lived in large enough to accommodate two more people. It was necessary to negotiate with Mrs Josephs, to find another modest but larger house, to hire the maid and to set up the legal machinery to properly administer Paul's inheritance from his mother and the supplementary moneys from Hugh. The Josephs family also took some time to move. Meanwhile, Hugh made unavailing efforts to find a tradesman who would agree to apprentice Paul when he was old enough—all to do again in a few years.

When at last all seemed done, he made what was to be a farewell visit, and while Paul sat on Mrs Flagg's lap, Hugh stood beside her chair and talked to her of old times. The child reached out and took a handful of Hugh's coat-skirts, staring up at him.

Hugh said, "Yes, Paul?" but Mrs Flagg made a soft exclamation of dismay and took the thin little wrist in her hand to coax the boy to let go. Paul looked at his own hand in silence, uncurled his fingers one by one without further prompting, and then did not lift his head. Hugh stepped back, really meaning to go, but there was something in Paul's attitude ... something familiar and painful ... for the first time, Hugh saw himself in the child, empathised so intimately that the emotion left his own stomach in a knot. He crouched down and ducked his head until he met Paul's eyes.

"I shall come back tomorrow," he promised. "Now say goodbye, Paul."

"Au revoir, m'sieur," Paul murmured, still solemn. Hugh laid one hand on the boy's cheek, covering it, and the soft, infantine skin moved under his hand as Paul smiled.

Hugh, feeling gullible, went to extend his lease and to tell Lewis to unpack once more.

The notion that Léonie, resuming her girlhood, might gain yet more of Avon's affections was not a great novelty to Hugh by the time he joined the Duke, his relatives, and his ward in Paris. Nevertheless, the extent to which Justin revealed his feelings did surprise Hugh. As he told Marling the very night of his arrival, "When last I saw Léonie—Léon she was then—it was 'Yes, Monsiegneur' and 'No, Monseigneur.' Now it is 'Monseigneur, you must do this,' and 'Monseigneur, I want that!' She twists him round her little finger, and, by Gad, he likes it!"

If there lived a man with less imagination than Edward Marling, Hugh had yet to encounter him. Now Marling's brows rose and he said, "Oh, but there's naught of the lover in his manner, Hugh! You have heard him with her, scolding, correcting."

Hugh restrained himself from pointing out that not every woman was as spoilt and high-handed as Lady Fanny, nor every man attracted by such behaviour. How could Marling see that tender light in Justin's eyes and not recognise it? Hugh did, and remembered when an expression like it had been turned, momentarily, on him. Now perhaps he knew why those moments had been so brief; now he could admit the reason, to stolid Marling: "I would not give Justin a bride his own age. I'd give him this babe who must be cherished and guarded. And I'll swear he'd guard her well." When Marling protested that Léonie worshiped Justin, Hugh could only say, "Therein I see his salvation."

Brave words. Hugh knew he'd not be asked to give Justin any bride, even Léonie; if worship would have saved Justin, then why had his done so little?

In the end, no-one gave Léonie away; she left Paris thinking herself Henri Saint-Vire's by-blow and returned as his legitimate child and Avon's duchess. After a few days being swarmed by callers, they all retreated, exhausted, to England, where it was all to be done again. Avon married! And to someone completely unknown in England! It was far more than a nine-days' wonder.

Hugh could not get away to Harrogate without drawing attention to himself, and thus to Paul. He sent Lewis instead, on the grounds that Paul knew him from their trip and had liked him.

And two months later, Hugh did so again.

London was stifling. The drawing rooms felt small and hot, the ballrooms and parks hardly larger. Hugh felt he had told Léonie's story (in a somewhat expurgated version) thousands of times. He took restless walks, day after day, but the bustling streets did not comfort him; he rode to Hampstead Heath where he could gallop, the horse's sweat spattering back and mixing with his own, and still he felt idle, his body unused.

On the way back from one of these rides, he had seen a couple of children playing battledore and shuttlecock, and that reminded him that he had meant to buy Paul some remembrance. So he rode back through the streets looking for a shop where such things might be sold.

His search was not systematic, and he rode for a long while, turning here and there, looking where children clustered at the shop windows and finding several bakeries, dismounting where a matron led a group of no fewer than six children from a shop door, herding them rather like sheep. But when he looked in that window, set far back from the curb, it proved to be a butcher's shop. A man in a white apron looked up from the counter, hams and rabbits hanging on either side and a great side of beef behind. The cloth on the man's chest was smeared with blood; Hugh stood back.

It was a pleasant little mercantile street, however, and so Hugh left the horse where it stood and walked up and down. Baker, chandler, chemist, tailor, potter, silversmith—like a tiny slice of village—printer, stationer—what was that ahead? Something swinging inside the window, a wooden foot, and as he got closer he could see it was a jointed puppet hanging from the top of the window frame; below it sat a drum and two dolls; leaning against the side wall were a kite and a cricket bat. Hugh went inside.

He wandered for some time among the playthings, picking them up and thinking of his own nursery. Eventually, toy soldiers, a ball, and a kite lay on the counter to be packed, and still he hesitated. The bell over the door rang, and he glanced over; the man who had just come in nodded in a friendly way. Hugh bowed very slightly and stiffly, then turned back to the shelf.

"Are you a father, then, sir?" asked a voice he knew, close behind him. He jumped. Turning slowly, he looked again at the man who had followed him into the shop.

"Come, come," said Princess Seraphina, quietly, with a slight smile, head a little bent.

Hugh would not have recognised the princess by looks, did not even now, though he catalogued nose and chin and wide-open eyes, and all were exact. That was the mouth he had kissed, those the hands he had pressed into, spilled himself in. That was the waist he had clasped, as Seraphina sat in his lap. They looked so different clad in neat brown cloth—beige for the gloves, dark for the coat. Seraphina's hair, which Hugh had never seen unpowdered, was tied at the nape of the neck and was a light honey-brown, about the colour of Hugh's own.

"I—er—no, I am not a father. These are for ... a friend's child."

Seraphina looked over at the toys, raked another look up and down what could be seen of the attendant behind the counter, and then turned back to Hugh. "He'll be spoilt."

How was it that every word from those lips sounded amorous?

"Wrap them for me, please," Hugh said, barely glancing at the attendant.

He paid for the toys, picked up the package, and Seraphina said, "There is a coffee-house down yonder, or a pub a little further."

"I must get my horse."

This was so plainly not a refusal that Seraphina smiled, a dimple appearing in one cheek. "And I must tell the boy to keep the butcher's shop a while longer. Walk with me," with a flutter of eyelashes that Hugh remembered well.

He found himself back out on the street, and Seraphina's hand touched the inside of his elbow as if to take his arm, but then did not. "'Tis a long dreary while since I've seen you, Sukey-my-love."

"It is long," Hugh admitted. "I ... made some other friends, I am afraid."

"I don't reproach you," the butcher princess said. "How could I? Needs must when the devil drives, and I never knew just what devil drove you, my dear gentleman."

Hugh surprised himself by laughing, caught his breath, thought of Avon—Satanas—again and laughed the more, Seraphina's surprise only feeding the paroxysms that felt so cleansing, like a purge.

They talked long, and met again, and yet again, at the coffee-house and at the pub that was no molly-house, but the resort of tradesmen and workmen of the neighbourhood. Seraphina—called John Cooper here—seemed well liked. There was no offer to take Hugh to the butcher's home or to whatever molly-house the princess now frequented, and neither did Hugh offer more than their talks, drinks, and card-games.

Cooper was an enthusiastic but poor card-player. After yet another disastrous score, one afternoon, the beige gloves turned palm out in the air and the sultry voice said, "You've won near all my worldly goods! I must offer another forfeit," and the princess winked as plainly as if they were back at the Royal Oak.

Hugh smirked a little, shuffling the cards and thinking for a moment of Alastair in Vienna. Then he said, "Take me with you to the Vauxhall masquerade," rather surprising himself. He'd been listening with no more than half an ear to his opponent's eager talk of the upcoming festivity. Seraphina had ordered a new gown and meant to dress a head to go with it that would be the envy of all the gentlewomen who attended. Hugh had been to Vauxhall and found it insipid with the ton party in their supper boxes, but he would not at all mind seeing Seraphina in dress and domino.

"Ah, but if I go with a great strapping gentleman like yourself, I'll not be able to pick up another." And with a wicked grin, "Unless ... I'd make you a fine rival, my lady."

Hugh had to admit he had wondered what woman's clothes would be like to wear. "I doubt you would not be able to find cloth enough to cover me." He put the deck of cards down with a little snap.

"You're hardly Sweet May," said the other. "I can find something if you can find the ... conviction ... to wear it."

Hugh hesitated. The eyes he looked into were kind. Little wrinkles at their corners caught in the light that fell diagonally to their table from the many-paned window. "I do not know," he admitted.

"Then whom shall we ask to find out?" But Seraphina patted Hugh's arm, smiling. "Come to my rooms on the night, and if you dare we'll essay it. If you find you do not want to, well, then, we'll go to dinner before the masquerade and save a little of the money you won from me."

This assured that Hugh would in fact try. He wondered, afterward, if Seraphina had known as much.

On the night in question, he could hardly bear for Lewis to dress him. The valet had only recently returned from a journey to Harrogate, and Hugh had not told him where he had arranged to go. Lewis laid out ordinary evening dress, maroon and cream, and Hugh let him put it on in near-silence. At the last, touching the young, smooth cheek, Hugh said gently, "Do not wait for me tonight."

Lewis' eyes flicked up, then down. "Yes, sir."

John Cooper's rooms were small and low-ceilinged, but what would have been a second bed chamber was set up just for dressing in. The door was opened for Hugh by invisible agency; as it shut he turned to see his host only partly dressed. "Sukey, poppet, do you need me as valet?" asked a being half-butcher and half-princess, with a woman's stays and panniers above, long stockings and ribboned garters below, and his yard and bollocks hanging bare between. Hugh stared; Seraphina laughed. "I bethought me that you might be easier did you see me take each step before you. Now take your things off—everything but shoes must be a woman's. "

Hugh did. Despite the comment about valeting, the feeling of being laced into stays was not at all like anything Lewis did for him. The process took a long while, too, as the laces crossed a score of times down his spine. It tickled with an itchy sensuality when Seraphina's fingers tugged and adjusted, in and out of the edges of the corset, up and down, then smoothed the long lines of the stays on either side down his back. "Ye-e-es," and the voice tickled Hugh's spine even more than the fingers, "a good fit." Fingers brushed the top of his thighs, across his bare buttocks—and then Seraphina stepped away. "Turn around, poppet."

Hugh turned, feeling veritably like a doll, a marionette that Seraphina made move. His eyes fell to that turgid organ between the curving white petals at the bottom of the other's corset—it was heavier, fuller, and so was Hugh's own. "Stockings," Seraphina said, voice rough, and knelt to put them on, taking one bare foot onto stockinged knees, smoothing the thin knit fabric even more amorously than Lewis had, when the caressing fingers creeping up Hugh's calf had been his first intimation that his solitude could be over. But even now, Lewis would not lean forward and nip with his front teeth above the garter after he tied it, then kiss where he had nipped; nor would he have gone back to the second stocking as if nothing had happened. But then, after the second garter was tied, Seraphina knelt up, pressing against Hugh's leg and mouthing up the last inches of his inner thigh to the sac, and kissed there. Hugh gasped, reaching for the hard shoulder under the corset strap. He clutched the nape of Seraphina's neck as those clever fingers grasped Hugh's stiff member, massaged it, and Seraphina's forehead pressed into the whalebone, and the voluble mouth nibbled and sucked and kissed.

"Oh," Hugh said, pulling and kneading honey-coloured hair, "oh, Gad, use your mouth, I beg you—" but Seraphina would not take the organ inside, only sipping the skin here and there. Still the sensations were wild and surprising, wet soft touches combined with such a firm grip, and Hugh staggered as the lust spilled from him. Seraphina wrapped his hips in a strong embrace, laughing, and when Hugh found his balance the princess rose like a molly Aphrodite, foam still spattered on one cheek and on the pale throat. "Come here," said Hugh, and kissed the man's mouth soundly. Still kissing, Seraphina lifted both hands and reached into the low neck of the corset. Hugh thought it more love-play, murmured into the kiss, but felt instead a grasping, lifting motion. Seraphina stepped back again and looked hard at Hugh's torso, wiping absentmindedly at the smeared cheek.

"Yes, that will do well enough. Pity you aren't fatter."

Hugh stared down, where he had acquired something not totally unlike a bosom. Most of it was the curve of the whalebone, but his own flesh rested higher than usual within, and the pectorals were pushed up. "As well I'm not hairier."

"Oh, I would have shaved you." Then the princess swept off, the movement so regal it was hard to remember that there were no skirts as yet. "Petticoats."

A little splashing in the background, then a rustling of agitated fabric that went on for some time. At last, Hugh turned, to see a cloud of white settling, smoothed down from the waist, tugged into place on the panniers.

"Lace me?"

So Hugh did. The little ties were like strings in his hands, and his fingers felt large, clumsy. "Now who is valeting whom?"

The smile he got over Seraphina's shoulder was as bright as the clean cloth. "Turn and turn about."

And they did, getting on Hugh's petticoats, both their chemises, both their underdresses, both their overskirts. Seraphina bade him sit down while she placed the woman's wig on his head, arranged the curls down his neck and over one shoulder. It was the heaviest wig Hugh had worn this age—since his last visit to Versailles, he thought, and then it had been a long-tailed wig, not this topheavy object. "And yours?" he asked.

"Ah, mine! I must do mine. Go into the other room, Sukey, love, and have a glass of something." Seraphina was pulling on a dressing gown.

"Shall you be poudrée?"

"So I am always."

Hugh squeezed through the doorway, took a few awkward steps as what seemed miles of cloth swayed and dragged the very air round him. Eschewing the wine, he took turn after turn around the room, trying to move naturally, feeling confined, floating, the air draughty round his private parts and his ribs held tight and warm. Every step, every breath, was contradictory. He looked in the glass over the fireplace and saw his own familiar face framed by the tall wig and the deep-cut neckline. The overdress was sky blue, which changed the colour of his eyes until he could have sworn them blue as well, instead of grey. It was embroidered with little blossoms in darker blue; ribbons in the same forget-me-not colour decked the edges in front, against the white underdress. A white gauze fichu tucked into the neckline concealed how little flesh was there. His eyes slipped to the room reflected behind him—that must be his domino, draped over the back of a chair, likewise a purplish-blue. Seraphina's was the same red as the cloak Hugh had seen so long ago.

He wondered whether anyone would lay eyes upon him tonight without knowing his secret. But, he reminded himself, this was a masquerade he was going to. Of course everyone there had a secret identity.

Remembering Léon's boyhood, Hugh had wondered if he would feel like a woman once he wore a woman's clothing. Perhaps Léonie had felt herself a boy; Hugh had no notion how Seraphina felt; but as he shifted from one foot to the other and his cock swung against his thigh, he felt a centaur, a merman, some half-and-half creature ... unreal again ... but that unreality was what he had anticipated and wanted. He would be Seraphina's doll tonight.

And there she was, in the doorway, perfect as a picture. "Admiring yourself, poppet?" The lips that spoke were red, the cheeks nearly as rosy, a patch high on one cheek and another near the mouth on the other side. A white lacy fan snapped open, waved languidly back and forth. The head that Seraphina had bragged of was indeed wonderful, puffed high and curled at the sides as if a perruquier had spent a week upon its creation. The princess stepped forward and sank into a low curtsey, skirts spread, slow and graceful as thistledown descending, then wafting up again on a breath.

"You need a new maiden name," said the soft, low voice. "Sukey is too common. Come, we shall consider whilst I paint your face."

They went back into the dressing room, and Hugh sat where he was told. A haresfoot moved lightly over his skin, barely touching, like eyelashes fluttering, like hair draped and dragging. Hugh's eyes sagged closed and he simply felt, stroke after stroke.

"Narcissa," Seraphina suggested. "Queen Margaret. Aurora ... tush, should be a pink and amber dress for that. Bellissima."

"No Italian."

"As you wish." Seraphina did not react in the slightest to the curtness of Hugh's voice. The light caresses paused, but after a slight rustle returned, over one cheek and then the other, for the blush. Another pause, and then the same stroking over neck and upper chest. Hugh's lips parted and he breathed through them. "You look ..." Seraphina sighed, a quick intake of breath that had no guile in it. "Danae. Or Leda, an' you prefer."

Danae, whose tower room was flooded with gold ... "Lady Danae it is, then."

Scarcely had he spoken than the touch came to his lips, fingertips now, and the coloured salve slick upon them. "Keep your mouth ajar ... yes, like that ... what a pretty thing you are, indeed." From one corner of his mouth to the pillow of his lip, and again, and again; then the other side the same. He kissed gently at the fingers, and Seraphina chuckled. "Hold still, my dear."

Hugh's eyes flew open; his body stiffened. Seraphina froze too, and looked at him with concern. "What ails you?" Then the heel of one hand pressed Hugh's jaw, the knuckles of the other smoothed his brow. "Come, sweet lady, forget whate'er would distress you. There, there—" light kisses fell on Hugh's upper lip, still unpainted, and he relaxed under them. His eyelids sagged again, the dark behind them warm and safe. "There." And his upper lip was painted, Seraphina crooning all the while, "Sweetmeat, poppet, what a fine lady, what a darling dandle doll. Now, Lady Danae, now look at yourself."

Hugh did. He should have looked ridiculous, or at any rate not much different than he had in the other room, but he was amazed at the womanish face that stared back at him. The coating of grease upon his lips felt odd, and he found they were still a little parted, a little pouting, with the sticky feather-weight. The rose on his cheeks drew the eye away from his jaw, and painted pallor covered his normal skin tone. "I have just the patch for you, lovesome," and Seraphina placed it while Hugh looked into the mirror, a little heart up near his eye, and that too made him look unlike himself. Not himself. It was Lady Danae who regarded him.

Seraphina stepped back and Hugh rose. He wanted to curtsey but knew he had better not try, so he ducked his head a little, and Seraphina smirked and gave him a blue silk fan with tassels. He flicked it open as he remembered Avon had done, and that was easy, so he fluttered it and brought it up to his face, cutting his eyes over it at the princess, who laughed. "Aye, let us go. You are ready."

Not much happened that first night. Hugh danced but once, and found he had been right that he had no notion how to curtsey—his partner laughed and mocked at him, not very unkindly, but Hugh felt foolish. Lady Danae's skirts swept up and down the walks, and he saw ton people he knew in the supper boxes looking on, and dominoes aplenty that perhaps covered other acquaintances. He spoke but little. He lost sight of Seraphina, spotted the red domino again after his dance, followed it until it ducked into an alcove with another figure, and then retreated.

Save for one drunken man who clutched at the blue domino as Hugh passed, but fell to his knees when he tried to bow, Hugh was not approached for dalliance.

Yet he went again, not a month later, and returned at irregular intervals. He learned to curtsey and to speak in a voice which, while not high, sounded possible for a woman. He learned that Lady Danae liked ratafia and little sugar cakes, that the rouged lips made kisses moist and tacky, that if he flirted in the dark first and then under a light, the chances were that the man would guess Hugh's sex, and would either stammer and flee or kiss again, harder, and then if they found an alcove the absence of any confining cloth round his privates was a convenience.

Lewis was unwontedly quiet these days. Though Hugh washed the paint from his face—and swabbed at his privates too, after each visit to Vauxhall; he had rarely been so fastidiously cleanly in his habits—his valet seemed to suspect an indiscretion of which he was not told. While feeling that Lady Danae's adventures were wholly separate from his relations with Lewis, Hugh did feel enough guilt to effectively seal his lips.

Meanwhile, The Duchess of Avon was seen to be expecting un petit paquet—and as she grew larger, Léonie grew more vocal about the inconveniences of her pregnancy and her skirts, until the Duke declared (though glowing with pride) that he must take her to Avon for the sake of the whole ton's peace of mind. Hugh wondered whether the Duchess wore trousers in the seclusion of her home, and whether she had to have them sewn specially for her, and altered as the weeks passed ... on her small frame, pregnancy loomed large.

Hugh himself went to Harrogate. He would be happy to see Paul, did not wish to hear people titter at Léonie's improprieties, and needed a rest from Lady Danae. Just the previous morning, Lewis had hesitated as he was shaving his master, bent his head to stare at the corner of Hugh's mouth, and then set his own jaw, scraping as carefully as ever with the naked blade of the razor, but in sudden, chill silence. Then he washed Hugh's whole face, scrubbing at the hairline and wiping all along the lips, regardless that there had been no shaving soap there. Hugh still did not explain.

The first night in Harrogate, however, Lewis grasped Hugh's hand at bedtime and kissed it, then again, grasping tight. Hugh pulled the man to his feet and kissed his mouth. They took off the nightshirt Hugh had just put on and made love, toying with each other's bodies for what seemed like hours, and yet they hardly spoke.

It was the next day that Lewis gave notice. He twisted his hands together, looking anguished, and explained, "When I was here before, when you sent me, I met ... a tradesman ... and we took drink together and, well ...."

"You need not tell me," Hugh said, gently. "I meant what I said, Lewis, that if you ever wanted to go, I would not seek to keep you."

"And you have a lover too, sir, do you not?" Lewis blurted.

"I?" And despite the sex he'd had, Hugh felt genuinely surprised. He had not had a lover; the men who tupped Lady Danae were not her lovers. Lewis, hearing the surprise, stared.

Such a guileless young face. Hugh cupped it in both hands. "My very dear, go in goodwill. I wish you happy. Indeed I wish you all good things."

"And I you. Oh, Hugh!" Thus at the end, Lewis used Hugh's name for the very first time—hugged him, as well, and shed tears into his neck. They held each other close a long while.

And then Hugh let go.

When Dominic Alastair was four years old, the Duchess took herself to London while her husband went to visit March. Hugh visited Léonie, finding her glad enough to be excused from the Queensberry house party, yet vaguely unhappy and fidgety. Lady Fanny was pregnant with her second child and, though still in town, disinclined to attend routs, balls, or other recreations; this, unfortunately, was exactly what Léonie had come to town to do. Hugh readily offered to be the Duchess' escort, and she brightened.

They went together to the Opera, to hear a few plays, and attended a few balls and card-parties. Léonie seemed still discontented, however, and one evening as they came back from a dinner—Léonie, on being informed that the daughter of the house was going to play her harp after the meal, had suddenly been stricken with a headache which appeared to go off the moment they got into the carriage—she cast a sideways glance at Hugh and said, "Cher M'sieur Davenant, I have a gr-reat fancy to go to a masquerade! Pray escort me!"

"No," said Hugh automatically.

"But why?" Léonie's sapphire eyes opened wide and round.

"Where is the party, my dear Duchess?" Hugh asked, hedging. Perhaps, if a private masquerade were at a respectable enough house ....

"But no," she said, "I know of no party. I mean the public masquerades, that on dit are so very amusants. There is one at Haymarket Theatre, is there not? Where we heard a play—peste, which one was it?"

Hugh didn't recall either; in any case, that was hardly the point. "Léonie, you cannot possibly go to a public masquerade. It is not fit for you. Especially not for you, Duchess of Avon, but i'faith, 'tis not fit for any lady, and I wish those who do go would refrain."

"I? I have been to le Maison Chourval, 'sieur Davenant, pray remember it."

"No, indeed you have not. Léon the page went there, and that was bad enough, by Gad! But you have no notion of the scandal it would cause an' you were recognised at ... Haymarket ... or anywhere of the sort! Truly, Léonie, you must not."

She coaxed further, but Hugh would not be cozened. Avon's 'babe who must be cherished and guarded' should not come to harm, bodily or socially, through Hugh's connivance—on that he would stake his soul.

He still went to masquerades himself, of course.

Hugh's new man Soames had come recommended by John Cooper, and was a middle-aged man whom Hugh found personally unattractive. Still, Soames knew all about Lady Danae and proved as deft a lady's maid as he was a valet. Hugh had even, by this time, bought proper ladies' shoes for himself, and Soames had re-dressed the wig more than once and refurbished the dress before it became too unfashionable. The masquerade things were always convenient when wanted and invisible the rest of the time; Hugh could not ask for more.

One evening, Lady Danae stepped out in the Centre Cross Walk at Vauxhall. In general this was not so good a place to pick up a companion as the Lover's Walk, or the even more remote areas of the gardens, but it was prettier, with the trees less ruthlessly cut back than the ones nearer the Orchestra, which looked to Hugh rather like huge feather-dusters. Here branches were allowed to trail more romantically, the arched stonework at one end resembled an aqueduct, and under those archways were many opportunities for those who did not fear pickpockets. Nearer, too, was a pretty little half-fence, and beyond it some wild-looking undergrowth, including flowers. In the spring there were daffodils and bluebells; now there were lilies and some other sweet-smelling things. Hugh trailed one gloved hand along the top rail of the fence and looked at his fellow guests here.

Some were in character as monks and knights, medieval princesses and milkmaids; others in the finest dress they owned, smothered in dominoes or wearing flimsy masks. Hugh had chosen only a mask tonight; in fact, he was wearing the carnival mask Alastair had sent him from Venice years ago. The air was warm; Hugh's bodice and wig were hot; his legs under the skirt felt free and light, after being smothered in knee-breeches all day long. Arranging his skirts carefully behind and to either side, Hugh perched on the rail and plied his fan, the breeze welcome on his lower face and neck.

Past him went a pair both in tradesman's suits, and whether they were absorbed in each other or merely hunting in tandem, Hugh could not tell. Then, one after another, three prostitutes, a gentleman of fashion dressed as a courtier of Henry VIII, two young ladies followed by a watchful footman, and a young man and woman whispering together—country sweethearts, or Hugh was not country-bred himself. Soft voices and laughter wafted with the notes of the orchestra; nearer, a couple were engaged in pleasant sport somewhere out of sight, sighing and moaning low.

Rested, Hugh rose again and made his way toward the arched stonework. Suddenly a slim figure burst out of the shadows, half-running, and Hugh put out a steadying hand in time to save them from a collision. The suit this newcomer wore was old-fashioned in cut and a rather rusty black; over the forehead and eyes was bound a dark cloth mask, more like a footpad's than a masquerader's.

"Oh!" said a breathless voice, and perhaps it was the sound—or the figure—or even the suit, which Hugh had probably seen before—but he hauled the creature under the nearest lamp by main force. The light glistened and danced in a riot of copper-coloured curls, spilling from the tie that could not hold them at the nape of the white neck.

"Léon—!" Hugh barely stopped himself from speaking the full name, and was far too surprised to disguise his own voice. And then the Duchess of Avon pulled off her makeshift mask and stared hard.

"H-Hé!" She swallowed, then grinned. "Hélas, Madame Davenant, how do you?"

Hugh shook the thin shoulder he still held. "You—you—"

"I? I?"

Hugh put one gloved hand across Léonie's mouth, bent forward until his eyes were only inches from the blazing blue ones before him. "If you tell me again of the Maison Chourval, I shall ... I shall leave you to the mercies of whoever chased you out of the archway."

The rage drained from those expressive eyes; when it was gone, Hugh let her loose.

"Who did affright you?" he asked.

"Mais non, bien sûr," she said. "I was not frightened. 'Deed, we ought to find the man again," twinkling wickedly, "Maman, for I doubt he was more what you are looking for than I."

Of course, Léonie had been privy to Hugh's relations with Lewis, and there was no reason she should have forgotten it. "I'll find my own gallants, thank you, kind sir," Hugh said, snapping the fan open and curtseying.

"'Pon rep!" Léonie exclaimed. "But you do that so much more finely than I!"

"Nonsense," but Hugh was absurdly pleased.

"Now, Hu—ah, what shall I call you?"

"Not 'Maman,'" Hugh warned.

"As you wish," and Léonie bowed neatly, as she had always done when she had played the page.

"I, er, I am called Lady Danae."

"Bien! Let us walk then, cher Milady." Léonie crooked an arm and Hugh, shaking his head, took it and suffered her to lead him back toward the Grand Walk. The little Duchess threw herself into her rôle, strutting like a courtier at his grandest, one hand outstretched in the absence of cane or stick. She even bowed slightly to one of the prostitutes Hugh had seen earlier, who simpered at them both.

"You need a quizzing glass," Hugh said.

"I need a grander dress altogether, du vrai," she responded.

Hugh sighed. "You need to be at home in your chamber, minx."

Léonie sighed in her turn, but smiled too, shaking her head. "Ah, but it is so long since I was 'minx' or 'imp' or 'babe'! J'en ai manqué."

Feeling he understood this prank better now, Hugh squeezed the arm he held, a little, but asked only, "And how did you get here? Surely not in Lady Fanny's carriage?"

"No, no, I took a hired chair. I was discreet, me," and she gave that old sideways glance through her dark lashes.

"Oh, yes, circumspect, I am sure," Hugh said in Lady Danae's voice. "La!"

Léonie laughed. "Milady, pray grant me a dance."

So they danced a quadrille, a country dance, and a minuet, one after another, and Hugh enjoyed it more than he would have thought possible. They made a ridiculous couple, he was sure, for even when Léonie wore a high head and heels and he a modest wig and a flat shoe, he was considerably the taller; as a woman he—or Lady Danae—was quite enormous, while Léon still looked a boy. Moreover, even though the blue dress was no longer new, still it was far grander than the page's black suit, and Léonie had lost the hat as well. They were only as acquainted with the figures as one could be from the other side, and both kept turning the wrong direction or holding out one hand, only to pull back and offer the other. Hugh took off his mask to see better, but he was not sure it had any effect on their dancing. At least they never actually ran into anyone. Still, the couples near them looked on in dismay.

After the minuet, Hugh dragged Léonie out of the set, panting in the restrictive stays while she giggled. He leaned against a tree and Léonie collapsed onto the ground, dragging her fingers through her curls to try to order them.

"The services of a lady's maid would certainly be in order," said an extremely dry, deep voice, "but I am at a loss to decide who needs them more."

Léonie gasped audibly; Hugh froze. Avon sauntered closer, then used his stick to prod Léonie's thigh. "Get up, my page," he said. "An' you dress so, you must act the part."

She scrambled to her feet and bowed, said "Mon-Monseigneur," but he cut her off.

"Be silent."

And she was. It might have been five years ago, but for Hugh's skirts.

"My carriage is at the gate," Avon said, voice still cold. "Go there. Find it. Get into it."

"M-must I go alone, Monseigneur?"

"Did you come here in company?" Avon put one hand to his ear as if she might whisper, but she just shook her head. "Then you may depart in similar solitude."

She left with dragging step, looking over her shoulder, but she did go, and Avon kept silent until she had.

"'Pon rep, you're casual with her!" Hugh blurted.

"I am casual!" Avon took one step closer, then another—Hugh should have moved away from the tree but felt all but bound in place. The hazel eyes blazed, as he had seen them seldom before. The walking stick thudded against the side of the tree-trunk, and Hugh jumped. "Had I my horsewhip with me, you'd discover the limits of my casual behaviour!"

He did have his sword; he always did. Hugh waited to hear the scrape of the draw.

But Avon simply stared, his nostrils dilated as he panted with fury. "I ought at least to send my friends to yours," he said at last.

"For dancing with your wife," Hugh answered evenly. "For finding her here, unprotected and alone, and staying with her afterward."

"Fine protection, in that!" The stick poked into his skirt, jabbing his leg through the cloth.

"We are not arguing about Léonie," Hugh said. The conviction was so clear in his mind that it never occurred to him that Justin might still be too angry to admit anything of the sort. "You are not so enraged as this about her dressing up one last time in her breeches and coat, walking in the gardens and dancing rather awkwardly amongst bourgeois who will never connect her with the august Duchess of Avon."

"Are you to tell me now for what cause I may be angry?"

Hugh shut his eyes, tilting his head back against the trunk. He was crushing the back of his wig but did not care. He was exposed to the rage and scorn of a man he still, in defiance of all sense and hope, loved, and he could scarce find energy suddenly even to care for that.

When the Duke spoke again, it was closer, lower, but the rage still simmered in his voice: "I do not know you. You are a stranger to me. A woman no better than she should be, encountered in the lawless night. And what should Satanas do, enraged with a woman who means nothing to him?"

Hugh stared into the eyes so near his. "Have your will of me, then," he said. "Throw me to the ground, here. And after, call the constables an' you will, and give me up for sodomitical practices. For I—" his voice broke unaccountably— "oh, Justin, I weary so of this." Biting his lip, he turned his face away ... not that he could hide. He felt more naked than Justin had ever seen him. If the other had not been so close, Hugh thought he might have slid to his knees.

Time inched past, enough that the tear Hugh tried to keep back, stretching his eyelids open wide, fell anyway onto his painted cheek. Defeated, he let the lids drop shut and the other tear slip out.

"Gad, must you still look so!" Cruel hands seized Hugh at the jawline, close enough to the neck on each side that the grasp was still more than half threat. Hugh's head was forced back and Justin took his mouth so fiercely that he must be drawing blood where his teeth cut; the long body crushed Hugh's against the tree. There was nothing to do but surrender, even had Hugh had any will to resist.

Instead he moved his feet apart, letting Justin in as far as the skirts would allow. He put both hands into Justin's coat, resting them against the embroidered waistcoat and remembering how the skin of the waist felt when this body was bare, eager, moist with sweat, moving over him. Hugh groaned into the biting mouth, positively sobbed when the kiss broke, before he could clamp his jaw shut against just that sound.

But then he found himself pulled forward, wrapped in Justin's arms, his face pressing against collar and stock and neck. They shuddered together while the orchestra played, Hugh could not tell how long, and they did not speak at all. Justin's hand clenched and released at the nape of Hugh's neck.

At last, Hugh was struck with compunction to think of poor Léonie waiting in the carriage, and he kissed the artery under his lips and stepped back. Justin let go at once. Hugh's nose was full. Justin pulled a kerchief from his pocket.

"Persons in skirts never seem to have one of these."

And why was his voice rough?

Hugh blew his nose, then got out rather slowly, "Persons in coats with pockets do not know how difficult it is to carry one."

"I shall take your word for it."

"And I," Hugh brandished the handkerchief, "shall send this back when it has been laundered."

Justin caught at the waving hand. "I could come to your rooms for it," he said.

But Hugh shook his head. "Better not."

He bent, then put one hand on the tree and crouched, in order to pick up his wig and mask where they had fallen to the grass. He examined both for damage and found nothing that Soames could not fix. When he stood up again, Avon had gone.

Once the Peace of Paris had been signed, it was again possible for an Englishman to travel on the Continent without the dangers of wartime, if not wholly without residual inconveniences. Hugh sought out small villages to loiter in, Alps to scale and even to ski, rivers to boat ... and in general managed to avoid the mass of travelling English and well-born French alike. He had letters of introduction, which Justin and others had insisted on giving him, but he did not use them. He read a great deal, wrote letters from time to time—mostly to Paul, now a printer's apprentice—and enjoyed acquainting himself with a parade of people of all stations, for a week here, a month there. No deep friendships, no expectations, no disappointments.

No one to ask him about the Duke of Avon or to look sidelong at him, wondering if they were really estranged and if Hugh would descend to gossip about it. That was the greatest relief.

One day, Hugh lounged in a chair, looking on while Soames packed bags in readiness to leave Frankfurt. The light came in through a generous casement, making yellow patches on the floor and up the counterpane; Soames moved in and out of the square light that leaped up to meet him. As he closed the wardrobe door, the inset mirror flashed like a signal, and Hugh thought suddenly of long-gone nursery days, when it was Mrs Flagg who moved back and forth setting things to rights for him.

He smiled. Soames, looking over, allowed a crease to settle in his cheek in response. "Near time for the coach, sir," he said.

"Yes," Hugh said, and seemed to feel a shadow lift from his eyes, a weight from his shoulders. Why it should be so just now, he did not understand, and yet it was too welcome a sensation to question. "Let us go to Vienna, Soames," he said. "There is good music there, and good pastry too."

"So one hears," the man said imperturbably.

"A fine place to spend a merry Christmas, I should think."

"If one is to spend it from home, sir."

Hugh looked at his valet, thinking. "Have you family in London, Soames?"

"No, sir—a brother in a monastery in Kent. My parents are both dead."

A monkish brother—it seemed Hugh had more in common with Soames than he had thought.

"There are famous entertainments for gentlemen and ladies in Vienna, sir, I believe. Balls, concerts, parties of all sorts ... masquerades."

"Indeed," said Hugh. "Well, if it is that amusing, we shall remain for a time."

Having completed his apprenticeship, Paul wrote that he wanted to move to London on the grounds that more interesting publishing was being done there. Certainly more books and newspapers and broadsides were available than in Harrogate, so Hugh felt this was a reasonable request. Though he was not actually needed—Paul was now twenty-one, a man—Hugh did come back to London in order to welcome his ward and to be available should Paul want him.

Paul sent a note asking to see Hugh, so soon after the coach from Harrogate would have arrived that Hugh almost expected to see the dust of the journey still upon him. But Paul was dressed formally, neatly, and the clothes he wore were obviously new. He bowed, holding his hat in fingers that pressed bone-white against the felt, and Hugh told him to sit down with all the gentleness at his command.

"How can I serve you, Paul?"

"I—I must ask you," Paul began, and Hugh was distracted for a moment by the northern burr in his speech, to think what Miss Chattermole's anxious gentility would have made of it. Admonishing himself, he listened again: " ... not a child any longer—'tis my right to know if you be my father or no."

"Paul," Hugh answered, "I have always told you the truth of it. You are not my son."

"How can that be so? How can I credit that you'd take oop another man's son, pay for m'board and breeding, educate and prentice me—for sake o' charity?"

Hugh stood, crossed to the fireplace, which had a mirror above the mantel. "Come here, Paul. Yes—" as the younger man hesitated— "here beside me." Paul came at last, stood docile enough under Hugh's hand on his shoulder—which was higher than Hugh's own, as Justin's was. "I see your father so strongly in you," Hugh said, looking at the reflected amber eyes under drooping lids, the brown hair, the jaw and brows and set of chin when Paul looked stubborn, as now. "But look, boy. Do you not remember your mother?"

"But little."

"Her eyes were grey, as mine are. How would yours be this hazel? Her hair was even lighter than mine—whence comes this dark head? And your hands—" Hugh moved to take one of them, but Paul set it on the mantel and they both regarded it—lean, long-fingered, pale, graceful—and Hugh's, beside it, fair and strong enough, but never so finely made. Hugh put it on the boy's shoulder again, patted there. "I am fond of you, proud of you, very happy that I could be of service to you ... but i'faith I am none of your blood. You must believe it."

"Then why?" Paul's eyes in the mirror had the same bottomless sadness as the day he'd first sat in Mrs Flagg's lap. Hugh rubbed the rough cloth across his shoulders, trying to take that lost look away.

"Your father was my dearest and best friend," and putting it into words made him feel a little lost himself. "There was ... little I could do to serve him, but I could help you."

"My father's dead then?" That lift of Paul's chin, the young skin so taut with emotion, took Hugh forcibly back to times he rarely allowed himself to remember: dusk in St. James's, afternoon on a Roman hillside, morning, noon, midnight in the chambers on the Spanish Steps ....

He spoke out of that grief: "The friend I loved is dead."

He wanted to embrace Paul, as he would have held him against sorrow when he was a child; wanted, so fiercely that it was like wildfire bursting through every limb, to touch Justin Alastair just once more. How fragile were the dams Hugh built against this feeling, always, always.

But it was Paul who reached out, touched Hugh's cheek. "How much you loved him, love him still, and he gone all this time," said the young, rough voice that was so unlike Justin's, frank and serious, and now compassionate.

How much the man you are, Hugh meant to say, but could not command his voice.

"The faithfulness of you! And you know, do you not, that I could never love a father more than you, dear Mr Davenant." Paul stepped back and took Hugh's hand, kissing it before Hugh could pull it away, and then gripping still.

"I think you could," Hugh said, "but I am glad for your affection." He held the young hand in his. "You'll make many friends here, I believe, but I hope I shall always be one."

"Indeed, indeed you shall."

So for a lie Paul had loved Hugh first, the lie Mrs Flagg had told her foster-child or he had imagined for himself, and for another lie he loved Hugh now, believing his father dead and buried these fifteen years or more. Yet Hugh would not disabuse him.

They met frequently; indeed, they had hardly spent so much time in one another's company since Lyons and the trip thence to Harrogate, of which Paul retained barely the ghost of a memory. They went to each other's rooms; they ate together in the older man's club and the younger man's favourite coffee house. They took walks. Paul spoke a good deal of the printing jobs he was given responsibility for, mostly broadsides. He was impatient to work more on books or journals, but Hugh's unvoiced complaint was that the broadsides so often concerned those tried or condemned for various offences, including sodomy. The woodcuts and verses on these were grim objects to contemplate, though he tried to look at Paul's workmanship rather than the matter of them.

One day in the park, Hugh had just given back a paper and was wiping his glove as much to remove the fancied stain of vituperation as the visible one of newsprint, when Paul looked up and the sound of hooves, instead of passing by them, stopped. Hugh turned and saw, gazing down from a black gelding shining with good condition, Justin Alastair.

Of course, Hugh reflected, this had been bound to happen. Any of his London acquaintance might have stopped to speak to him; add Alastair's undeniable aptitude for turning up where he was least looked for, and Hugh ought to have been marking off the days on his calendar in expectation.

Avon bent slightly, a gracious bow given his position on horseback, and Hugh made a formal leg, followed by Paul. "My dear Davenant," said the languid voice, "shall I say I now know what has kept you in seclusion? My sister is yonder, wishing to speak to you, but I came first to assure myself that such a greeting would not be ... unwelcome."

Hugh could smile at this. It was so seldom that Justin really mistook a situation. "Your Grace of Avon, I beg to present to you Mr Paul Bernard." He paused, letting Alastair take in this information. The ducal aspect changed—a little amused, perhaps relieved.

"Indeed? I am rejoiced to renew your acquaintance, young sir."

Paul, a little flushed, said, "I ... I am honoured, indeed, your Grace. Have I, er, previously had the honour of your Grace's—of being presented to your Grace?"

Justin's brows had drawn a little together, possibly unpleased by Paul's agitation; Paul's were similarly knit. Hugh looked back and forth.

"Oh," said Alastair, "this age past. I doubt you will not remember, for you were quite a baby. It was in Lyons."

"Oh, Lyons! No, your Grace, I only know I did live there for that people have told me so."

Avon nodded, then said, "Hugh, what shall I tell Fanny?"

"Why, that I am on my way. Did you think I would cut her? Really, Justin, such drama."

Paul stared to hear such familiar talk, but Avon smiled. "You do not change, my dear."

"No," Hugh said, sobering, "I never do."

After a moment, Avon nodded, and turned his horse.

Hugh turned back to Paul and told him, "It is Lady Fanny Marling over there .... Do you wish to be presented?"

"Mr Davenant, this is all too grand for the likes o'me. Pray hold me excused. We can—if you wish, sir, we can meet tomorrow, or later—"

Hugh put a hand on Paul's shoulder. "My dear boy—" but that sounded like Alastair, and he shook his head. What made the man so ... influential, that Hugh had only to exchange a dozen words with him to fall into his very turn of speech? "I don't mean to disappear, only to have a few words with a rather silly society woman. I shall meet you at the Rose as we planned, shall I?"

Paul smiled, the lightening of his expression so like Avon's just this moment past that Hugh took a sharp breath. Thank goodness the boy had not wanted to meet Lady Fanny, who might be silly but was never blind.

As it was, Lady Fanny's nose fairly quivered with curiosity. Hugh was still exchanging greetings with her son John, beside her in the open carriage, when she said, "Who, pray, was that with you on the walk? He looked such a commoner, Hugh."

"A young man I've befriended," Hugh said, striving for nonchalance. "A printer. So, yes, Fanny, I'm sure you would call him quite a commoner."

"But Hugh, why?" Fanny almost wailed. "When you scarce show your face in Society! It's so odd and monkish of you. Pray tell me you are not become a Methodist!"

"Mother, please," said John, who was even duller than his father had been.

"Oh, John, you know well that the Methodists are nothing but propriety and preaching. Dear Hugh must not go to them!"

Hugh was laughing now. "I assure you, I have not." But she shook her head still, so he went on, "I've known ... this young man since he was a child. He's a protégé of mine, merely."

"You knew his mother, I seem to recall," said Avon silkily.

"Not well," Hugh said.

Fanny pokered up immediately, misunderstanding. "Oh." She spoke faster, her only sign of embarrassment, but Hugh knew her too well to miss it. "Well, I daresay he's a fine enough young man, and it's good of you, Hugh, but really, you mustn't be a stranger on such an account."

Hugh frowned at Avon, who was gazing thoughtfully at his nephew, but then cast a look at Hugh, an ironic curve to his mouth. John must be Paul's age, almost to a day. In fact, he had a look of his secret cousin, perhaps ... or perhaps Hugh was simply seeing shadows of Justin everywhere.

"I gather the Long Vac is upon us already," Hugh said to John, to change the conversation.

"Why, yes." Unfortunately John was not so quick on the uptake as his father had, for the most part, been. "I wonder you don't know that, sir."

"It has been a good many years since I had much reason to know it," Hugh said mildly. "And is Dominic up from Eton as well, Alastair?"

"Vidal is at Avon," Alastair said. "In disgrace, I fear."

"And you see how monstrous calm he is about it," Fanny said, plying her fan with energy. "That boy will be the death of all of us, not that Justin cares a whit. Vidal put fish in his housemaster's teapot, Hugh!"

And that made Hugh laugh once more.

"There was no tea there at the time," Avon explained, patting her hand, which she snatched away. "He was very careful to tell us so. Because, he said, he did not wish to hurt the animals, and the tea was too nasty not to do them harm."

"As if that makes it any better," Fanny sniffed.

"Oh," said Hugh, "that is Léonie's child indeed."

"Say you so?" Justin's eyes glinted. "Now I think he has a little of me in him."

"Why, then Fanny must be right," Hugh said, getting a little of his own back. "The world must tremble."

Avon shrugged. "The world has time to steel itself."

The world—their social world, at any rate—did not steel itself to Dominic Alastair, Marquis Vidal, with any notable success. He seemed to attract gossip as a magnet would iron filings.

Vidal was wild, of course. When he left Eton, he moved straight into petticoat dealings; handsome with both the Alastair grace and the Saint-Vire flame, he drew women like moths to light, and seemed himself nearly as incapable of refusing their advances as they were of refraining from making them. He made friends enough, and enemies as well, with his father's sarcastic tongue and his mother's quick temper.

Even Paul knew of the scandals attached to Vidal, for he was now setting type for a daily newspaper which contained a hinting column full of "Lady K—n" and such names ... and a great deal about "the noble M. of V—l": his visits to gaming hells, his deep drinking, pranks such as interfering with the Watch or shooting out all the candles on a candelabra in the upper room of an inn, "the Privy Parlour of which was more used to other Sports." Paul showed that one to Hugh, a disapproving look cramping the long Alastair mouth.

"'Tis a trifling thing to print as news," Hugh said.

"I vow he didna go there to shoot pistols," Paul replied; his accent was always stronger when he was upset.

Realising this, Hugh looked more closely at his ward than at the paper. "What is it to you, Paul, what Vidal chooses to do?"

"Ah, naught! But he's the Duke's son, and he your friend ...."

"Vidal is Alastair's son, as you say. He may seem to bear a light rein, but I am certain he could pull the boy up should he wish." He tapped the back of Paul's ink-stained hand with one finger. "And it's no concern of either of ours."

How the passage of time had altered Hugh's perspective! For Vidal behaved as Avon had, in those wild years that Hugh had, in the end, not been able to watch. Vidal's debaucheries ought to have been worse, as he was younger; a twig so bent would make a gnarled tree indeed. Yet, somehow, Vidal seemed merely playing at vice. The nickname the ton gave him, Devil's Cub, seemed just, for he seemed unformed, waiting only for some experience to lick him into shape.

And Paul, ironically, for all his Alastair blood, was as moralistic as ever Hugh himself had been. "I've seen that cub of the Duke's again," Paul said one day.

"Yes? Have you been following him about?" Hugh stirred milk into his tea and tried to stir his brain to find another topic of conversation.

"Nay, Mr Davenant, you know it. I was in Kensington Gardens with a friend of mine—"

Hugh lifted his head; this was a place the mollies frequented, though likely Paul and his friend too had simply passed by any mollies without ever noticing them.

Evidently thinking Hugh meant to inquire about the friend, Paul explained, "Joshua Simpkins. He's son of a merchant. Henry Simpkins—we print his advertisements. He's a big man in the City, though he started small enough in a draper's shop, but now he deals in wigs, tailoring, all such things, and some imports ... never mind that, indeed."

"Indeed." Hugh bent to his tea once more.

Paul grinned in that engaging way that was all his own, not a whit of Alastair in it. Hugh had grown fond of the expression. "Any road, we and his crony Dick Burnley were a-walking, and they come to talk of the girls they're courting, for they're sisters, and neither will have a thing to do with them."

"You're growing a trifle involved, Paul. Who is it who will have naught to do with whom?"

"Mr Burnley wants to marry a girl name o' Miss Sophia Challoner, pretty as a picture but a dreadful flirt, and I doubt she simply looks too high for the likes o' him. And Joshua is set on her sister, Miss Challoner, and she was educated amongst swells, so she spurns him too."

"If she's so proud, he's well out of it," Hugh murmured idly. "What does all this have to do with Vidal?"

"Why, the ladies were walking too, and we saw them from afar. Joshua and Mr Burnley would come up with them, and I was nothing loath, but before we got near a mighty fine gentleman overtook them, playing off his airs to Miss Sophia."

"Ah," Hugh said, "now that would be Vidal."

"Aye. And away they went, with her hand that he'd kissed, on his arm, and poor Mr Burnley all bereft."

Hugh shrugged, sipping. "But, my boy, it's hardly over-rakish to walk in the park. And if the girl be virtuous ...."

Paul's long mouth twisted again. Hugh sighed, thinking that it was strange how Paul seemed almost to know that Vidal had advantages that could easily have been his own; to resent the other's riches and rakeries as if his own hard-working life was diminished by them. Or perhaps it was nothing so complicated, Hugh reminded himself. Perhaps Paul simply could get no more attention from pretty Miss Sophia than Mr Burnley did, whilst the fascinating Marquis was by.

"Come, forget Vidal. Will you give me a game of piquet? Or would you rather chess?"

"Chess, an' you please."

A careful player, Paul leaned long over the board before making each move. Hugh hoped he was not growing near-sighted, and for the first time wondered if Avon employed his quizzing glass for more than just its social advantages. Hugh supposed he would find out as they both aged. And that reminded him of a mutual friend whose ageing had been harsher already than their own. "Paul, I wonder if you would do me the honour of accompanying me to visit a friend of mine," he said as the younger man finally consented to move a bishop two weightily-considered spaces.

The hazel eyes flashed up, then flicked down again, and Paul touched the tip of the bishop's mitre. "Not His Grace of Avon," he said so neutrally that Hugh hardly knew whether it meant that Paul would prefer not to meet Avon again or that he assumed Hugh meant a different friend.

"No, another. A general; Sir Giles Challoner. He enjoys chess, and the society of young people, when he can get it. He is subject to gout, and often cannot leave his house."

"Challoner!" Paul exclaimed.

"Oh, 'tis a coincidence, surely," Hugh said. "Challoner is not so rare a name, after all."

Hugh was mistaken, as he eventually found when his servant Haines opened the door of Hugh's sitting room to General Sir Giles Challoner, puffing and blowing, his face red from the effort of coming up the narrow staircase.

"My dear sir!" Hugh leapt from his chair. Reaching the doorway, he took the General's arm in both hands, and could feel as well as see the violence with which he breathed. "My dear sir! Why did you not send to me if you wished to see me? Do sit down!"

"Thank y'," the general gasped. "'Pologies ..."

"Never mind that. A drink for Sir Giles, Haines. Water, sir? Or brandy?"

Collapsing into the armchair Hugh had just been sitting in, Challoner said weakly, "Water, 'f'y' please."

Hugh gestured without looking, and Haines went. Challoner grasped Hugh's cuff and held on tightly. "Stairs—did me in—"

"I know it," Hugh said ruefully.

"—But had to come. Need your help." Hugh waited, but when Challoner spoke again it was to complain, "Why d'y'have to live in such a crow's nest?"

"Giles."

"Oh, yes, come to it soon enough. I must find out where Avon's got to."

"Newmarket." He had asked Hugh, who had refused. The thought of the trip, of sharing a room or even, heaven forfend, an inn bed, while Justin thought of Léonie and Hugh pined for Justin .... well, he did know where Alastair was staying, at any rate.

Challoner nodded. "Ah. Went to his house, uppish man turned me off, looked at my card as if he didn't believe it." Challoner snorted, laughter this time. "As if a pigeon-plucker would have hoaxing cards printed as General Sir Giles Challoner!"

"No," Hugh smiled too, "you are too well known. Except to Avon's butler, it seems. Well, Giles, let me go, and I shall write the direction down for you." The clutching fingers relaxed; Hugh stood, and crossed the room to his desk.

"You don't ask why," said Challoner.

Hugh didn't look up from his writing. "Tell me if you wish. It is urgent, that much I can guess."

"It's my granddaughter."

"Indeed? I'faith, I never knew you had one."

"Cut m'son Charles when he married a damned Cit's daughter. But when his widow applied to me I said I'd have their elder girl educated. Quiet girl, but sharp. Reminded me of my own daughter, y'know, Pamela ...."

Hugh nodded. He did remember Pamela, a comely, quiet young woman who had died in childbirth, much mourned by her father.

"So I had little Mary to stay in Buckinghamshire, few times. She wouldn't leave her mother, though, and that woman is as vulgar as she can stare—can't have her in the house. What Charles ever saw ... and the younger girl's just like her, prettier, but otherwise ... and now Mary's been ... Hugh, it's ...."

Hugh shook the paper to dry it as he re-crossed the room. "Giles, truly, tell me only what you like. I need know nothing. Here, here's the name of the inn where Avon is; he'll have hired the whole place." Hugh smiled a little. "Playing off his consequence."

"Wonder he hasn't bought a house there." Challoner looked at the paper in his hand, thoughtfully.

"Aye, that's next, I'm sure."

"Come with me, Hugh."

It was exactly the same thing Avon had said, even blurted in much the same way, like a much younger man, too like the Justin Hugh had known .... he'd had to refuse. Or kiss Alastair where he stood.

Giles Challoner, however, was a man Hugh had never been in the least tempted to kiss. "Why on earth should I come with you?" he asked.

"To help me talk to Avon." Challoner was a little flushed, embarrassed. "Damn' proud, that man. Not that he hasn't reason, family older than the Prophets, but the matter's, it's delicate, Hugh, and I'd like the help."

"'Pon rep, it's yours for the asking. Though I'm afraid you must tell me what it's all about in that case."

When Challoner did, Hugh wholly understood his qualms. It wasn't every day one had to tell a friend that his wild son had abducted one's granddaughter. And there was always the story of Jennifer Merivale to make Challoner doubt that Avon would even think such an error worth amending.

They set out that afternoon in Challoner's own travelling coach, with pillows to cushion his gouty foot, though it was not so bad today as it sometimes was. They broke their journey at Harlow (where indeed they shared an inn-chamber and a bed, and Sir Giles was a restless sleeper), set off before ten o'clock the next day, to reach Newmarket in mid-afternoon, for Sir Giles was no racer. Hugh told him, in an unguarded moment, that Vidal had made the journey from London in three hours and forty-four minutes, to win a wager, not four days ago. Giles only snorted. "Damn' young dog," he said.

Hugh looked out the coach window, the tassel on the shade swaying out, then back to hit the glass, then out again, until he took it into his hand to still it. He thought of that night, when Avon had turned up unexpectedly at Hugh's rooms to invite him to White's, as in days long past. They had gambled there separately and together for most of the night, Hugh interrupted by a score of acquaintances who greeted him and asked where he had been hiding himself. After midnight they went down to eat, speaking of this or that on-dit, of Hugh's recent visit to his brother, of Paul's promotion to newspaper work. It was as the dishes were being cleared in their private parlour that Avon had begun to speak of his plans to go to Newmarket. He had pulled a chair away from the table while the servants worked; Hugh stood nearby and looked down at the negligent grace of the duke, neither slouching nor stiff, speaking evenly and gesturing with one hand. A few horses of Avon's own breeding—or, at any rate, his stable-master's—were running in this meet, one a colt as yet untried.

The servants left; Hugh moved back toward the gleaming table where decanters and candles were reflected alike in the polished wood; Avon rose and touched his arm. Hugh looked over his shoulder. And then Justin had said it: "Come with me, Hugh."

His fingertips burned through the cloth of coat and shirt—an illusion, surely. His eyes were so clear, like looking into a polished gem, deep, and Hugh could nearly taste olive oil and garlic, hear the cicadas. Three score years old, and Hugh could still find himself half that age for a moment. It was laughable. It was tragic.

It was impossible. Léonie was Justin's wife, whom he loved, and if he had a fugitive longing to relive his bachelorhood for only a few days, it would have to be with someone else than Hugh, little though Hugh wanted to think of that.

"Justin—" the name in his mouth, even that, was sweet—oh, what a foolish old man he was growing— "I cannot."

"Ah." The hand fell away from his arm; Justin walked gracefully back to the head of the table, seated himself with a flourish of his coat-skirts, picked up the nearer decanter. "Far be it from me to keep you from your social engagements," said the polished social voice of the Duke of Avon, "but surely you have none just at this moment? Sit, Hugh, and have some port."

After that, they went back to the card rooms, and Alastair played pharaoh until dawn. Rising from the table, he said, "I have a fancy to visit that new hell of Vidal's patronage. Would you accompany me thither, my dear? A short enough journey."

"Certainly. I own to some curiosity as well."

They walked down St. James's Street, its width all streaked pink and yellow with the dawn. Avon indicated a side-street by a wave of his cane, and they stepped through shadows to a modest green door. A man pacing up and down, trying to look like a mere stroller but obviously an orderly-man, gave Hugh a sharp look and Avon an indulgent one. They went up a few steep stairs and knocked, to be admitted by a man clad in unrelieved black like an undertaker's mute; Alastair raised an eyebrow but said, "My name is Avon. Your master Timothy knows me, I believe."

"Oh, yes indeed, sir! Your Grace! Come right through, Your Grace, right this way!"

The staircase was modest, too narrow to be lit on the slope, but sconces on the landing did a fair job, and as they neared the gaming rooms, the light blazed from every surface where there was no active play, as well as from candelabras at the centres of the tables; so many people were there and so many candles that Hugh felt the heat increase as they took each step. The room was rather narrow, the tables small, and what looked like several separate games seemed to have been rudely interrupted, for the cards lay scattered and abandoned as men stood staring through an archway to another room. A waiter rushed out, grabbed wildly at his confrère, and whispered; they both fled the room as if it were afire. Avon drew out of their way, looked at Hugh, and then they advanced through the archway.

Amidst the crowd of fashionable men was a cleared space. Nearest to them stood a stout man clad in black like the waiter and the porter. His stock was white as fresh snow, and so was his face; he wrung his hands. A man in officer's red was shouting for a surgeon; Lord Rupert Alastair, sweaty and dishevelled, was pushing his wig with one hand in an unavailing attempt to straighten it; a younger man, soberly dressed, knelt on the floor pressing a bloodied cloth to a redhead who looked, at this present, like Henri Saint-Vire in a drunken stupor, save that his stupor was too obviously not solely drunken.

A small sound at his side made Hugh look at Alastair; he had taken his quizzing glass from his coat and flicked it open. Raising it to his eyes, he directed it up, down, and slowly around the room, while silence fell.

Avon lowered his glass. In a shockingly normal voice, he said, "I was informed, my dear Hugh, that Timothy's was unlike other hells. And I perceive—" with another glance round— "that it is indeed something beyond the common." He raised the quizzing-glass again, pointing it this time at his younger brother. "I suppose I need not ask where is my son."

"Gone," said Rupert, voice as rough as a rasp on wood.

The man ministering to the redhead raised his eyes to Avon, and Hugh recognised him as the Mr Comyn that Lady Fanny had pointed out to him at a recent ball as being a prétendant for her daughter's hand. "I apprehend, sir, that his lordship is by now upon the road to Newmarket."

"Indeed," said Alastair, turning the glass on this new speaker, who gazed calmly back. "I fear my son has untidy habits. This gentleman—" with a gesture toward the fallen one— "this gentleman, I think unknown to me, is no doubt his latest victim?"

"As to that, sir, the late affair was in a sort forced upon his lordship." Comyn spoke as collectedly as Avon. Most of the others—Hugh looked around the room himself—were obviously drunk, including Rupert, who gulped and nodded, the sweat still beading on his face. Comyn, however, was just as he had been at the ball. "I believe, sir," he went on, "no man could swallow what was said, though I am bound to confess that neither of the principals was sober."

"So I should think," Alastair agreed. "Still, I make Vidal's apologies, for what they are worth. Timothy, come away and speak with me for a moment. Hugh, my dear, if you will, assist this young gentleman in his admirable command of this—er—situation."

"I shall be happy to," Hugh said. Avon and the stout man retreated; the others began to murmur amongst themselves, and Hugh raised his voice. "If I may suggest, there are surely other rooms to which you gentlemen may retire, to allow Mr—"

"Quarles," said Comyn.

Distracted, Hugh looked down. "Surely not. Quarrels?"

"Quarles," Comyn repeated, and Hugh pulled himself together.

"—Mr Quarles—to rest until the surgeon arrives."

The crowd disbursed, except for the military gentleman, Hugh, and Comyn. And Quarles, of course.

Hugh said, following, "I shall get you some more cloths, Comyn, and I think some water and spirits for when the surgeon arrives."

"Aptly thought of, sir."

"Thank you," Hugh said dryly.

Naturally, by the time Hugh and Avon left Timothy's, the hour was considerably advanced, and neither had done any gaming. "Whew," said Hugh, looking up at the sunlight that had now edged its way into this cross-street. "May it never be said, Justin, that an evening spent in your company was ever less than ... stimulating."

Alastair laughed. "Or a night," he said. "Indeed, my dear. My coachman must think me expired or set upon by footpads."

"If he has any such apprehension, he'll be halfway to Dover by now."

But, Hugh thought as he sat in the coach with Sir Giles, it had been Vidal who was halfway to Dover ... or, on second thought, no, Vidal had been still on his way to Newmarket then. It was the following night that he went to Dover, abducting Miss Challoner on the way. He certainly led an active life.

By the time Vidal was sixty ... Hugh shuddered to think.

Avon was, for him, conciliatory, and agreed that it was necessary to follow the Marquis and Miss Challoner as fast as might be. "For which reason," he said almost gently, "I offer my own services. My son travels always as on his race from London to Newmarket. Do you make your way to Paris, my dear Sir Giles, and—" he flicked a glance at Hugh, then seemed to change what he had meant to say— "and I will pursue them. I have, I am told, some gift in such matters."

"Gad, Vidal must look to his back," Hugh said, and Sir Giles' mouth curved slightly.

"You may spread the news in Paris that your granddaughter is living in seclusion; it is certain to be true, and she shall do so under your roof as soon as I may bring her. And then—" Avon's expression hardened; Hugh did not envy Vidal when his father found him— "then Vidal shall marry her in the greatest pomp we can arrange. I give you my word on that, Challoner." Then he recovered his usual manner and said, "I swear—what shall I swear upon, indeed?—ah—upon my reputation. Yes, beloveds, by the name of Satanas, which you know I hold dear, I swear it."

Hugh felt he had been exceedingly useless. Still, Sir Giles had wanted him there, and Avon had looked, for a moment, surprised and glad to see him, before the news had turned his expression grim.

Back in London, Hugh had begun to feel he would never hear the end of the story, when one day, Alastair punctiliously sent up his card.

"Bring him up, indeed," he told Haines. And soon Hugh was leaning forward, eager for the words that Alastair so languidly let fall ... but the reception of which he so closely observed.

He broke off mid-tale, during an anecdote about the coach's near front wheel becoming immersed in mud and then bashed against a stone, on a small side road near to Pont-de-Moine. "Hugh, my dear friend, how much I have missed the way your mouth hangs open while you listen to me speak."

Hugh laughed a little, closed his mouth, and sat back. "You were ever an engrossing narrator, i'faith, Justin. Do go on."

Laughter shook him again, from time to time, as the duke told some parts of his story: how, in the end, he had not needed to seek out his son because Miss Challoner providentially arrived in flight from that same son to the same inn in the same tiny town where Avon was staying until his carriage-wheel had a few spokes and its iron rim replaced; how Miss Challoner had explained Vidal's character to Avon, not knowing to whom she spoke (though, in truth, Hugh more than half agreed with her assessment that Vidal was more spoiled than vicious); how Miss Challoner had blurted out that she had been forced to shoot Vidal in the arm to protect her virtue ("And yet she seems to hold him in affection, Hugh, in spite of such a lack of finesse...."); how Miss Challoner had described the Duke of Avon as an unscrupulous and sinister person, nearly omniscient, and with a habit of succeeding in all his endeavours. "What a comfort to know that one's efforts to establish oneself in the public mind have not been entirely in vain," said Alastair placidly, and Hugh laughed even as his heart felt lightly struck.

"Indeed, you deserve it should be so, for you have certainly missed no opportunity to impress the world with your ... reputation."

"My moralist," said Avon, and raised the glass of wine to his lips, his eyes warm over the rim.

Hugh rose from his chair and went to the window. He looked down at the street, where the mass of London went about its varied business. "A singularly useless rôle, I fear."

Behind him, he heard the click of glass against the table. "Far from it," said Alastair. "You have long provided a necessary balance to me. Do you not remember, my dear, I said as much—" and then, strangely, the ever-collected Duke of Avon paused, as if uncertain or embarrassed.

"Just before we went to Rome," Hugh completed the sentence and leaned his forehead against the glass window pane, which felt cold and smooth and hard. "I remember." A little bark of laughter, and then he could not help but say, "There is nothing about that time that I can forget." His voice grew suddenly rough at the end of the sentence, so he held back all the other things he might have said: how those days haunted him, how he had never been so happy since .... all such useless things. He needs must be grateful that his throat would not open for such words.

"I think—" and the strangely tentative voice was nearer now, too near, "—I have never apologised—"

"Do not," Hugh interrupted, "do not, I pray you, Justin!" He moved one hand as if to push the apology away, and Justin caught it.

When Hugh turned, Justin was staring down at the hand he held. "You have never married," he said without looking up.

"No."

"Sometimes," and Justin turned their joined hands a little to one side, and then to the other, as if searching Hugh's skin for some flaw, "I feel I do not understand you."

Hugh took back his hand. "I think you might, an' you would. But it is ever easier to know the rôle than the man."

Justin moved away, took up his hat and gloves and cane. "For that I have been grateful, many a time," he said, "not least with you."

Hugh shook his head. If Justin still meant to paint himself too black to be known, how could Hugh argue? Certainly there was much of Justin Alastair that was never visible to friend or to foe. Nor did Hugh know how he might say or demonstrate more clearly than he had, what he himself was, what he felt.

Justin took his leave, friendly but cool; they did not spend any time alone together again until after Léonie's funeral.

While Hugh had been remembering, the fire had dropped low. Alastair, earlier, had sat down on a settee, and then had leaned back into it, and now had positively fallen asleep there. How out of character that was, Hugh thought, and yet how self-possessed he looked even in sleep. The satin upholstery was honey-gold and the trim a gold braid, which in younger days would have set off Justin's looks to perfection; they were shades he had often worn. Now he looked as black and white as a woodcut against the warm colour. Yes, the years had ravaged him.

Hugh was changed as well, of course. He was past sixty-five now, and though cosmetics had not raddled his face, it was lined. He could not walk so far nor ride so hard as he once had, and when he tried, he found himself puffing with a sound that reminded him far too much of old Sir Giles, or even of Armand Saint-Vire.

From Armand his mind turned back to Bertrand, and he wondered idly if that lissom youth would take on flesh as his father had. Some sons resembled their fathers so ... as Vidal did Avon, in some ways, though obviously the restraint of strong emotion was not one. As Paul did, physically, though his gestures were so different—and though he was so straightlaced in his ideas. Someday Paul would have this fine-drawn age, this skin like gauze, these still-deep hazel eyes—

Like the ones looking at him even now. "Justin," he said, startled. "You're awake."

"Evidently." Alastair sat up straighter, away from the settee's back. "Have you been guarding my rest, my dear?"

"Thinking, merely."

"Well. I believe I shall take that excellent advice you have so nobly restrained yourself from reiterating, and go to bed." He rose, his movements a little stiff. This too was the work of age—and of grief.

Hugh got up too, using both arms of the chair. They left the library and walked in companionable silence to the foot of the great stairs, rising shallowly between wide mahogany railings upheld by glimmering white spindles; at the landing the staircase split and lifted like embracing arms to the floor above; it was very beautiful. And very formidable to two tired elderly men.

"Hugh, my dear, may I ask you to give me your arm?"

It was bent and held out almost before Alastair had finished speaking; Hugh welcomed the hard grip just below his elbow. Alastair's other hand was on the railing. They went up step by step.

"I suspect," Hugh said, "that this is why you waited until all the rest were gone up."

"How well you know," Justin paused for breath, "and how ruthlessly you expose, all my little vanities. Beloved. Such—" another quick breath— "such has been my fate."

"What?" They were nearly at the landing. Then they were upon it, and by tacit consent, rested. "What has been your fate?"

"To have those I loved best puncture my ... veils. See through the rôles I play. You and L-"

Hugh hugged the gripping hand close to his body, but Alastair went on. It was the first time all day that Hugh had heard him speak his wife's name.

"—Léonie, could always see what I would hide from the world."

The sense of what Alastair was saying sank into Hugh's mind. Those I loved best. "Justin," he began with no idea how he would go on.

"Let us not remain here all night long, my dear Hugh."

They turned, Alastair on the inside, and began the next ascent. His verbal momentum checked, Hugh could think of nothing to say, and Alastair did not speak either. They reached the top and paused again. Hugh did not want to step away, to lose the touch of his friend's hand on his arm, but what was there to say or do? Alastair needed his rest.

"Have you forgotten? My chamber is this way."

Hugh's arm was still held tightly, and he was tugged willy-nilly down the hallway a few steps before he recovered and caught up. "I believe I never knew where your bedchamber at Avon was, my dear Justin."

"Ah." A flashing glance sideways, like so many Justin had cast him over the years. "My apologies for the oversight."

They went into the chamber, which had a fire lit and candles as well, but was empty. "Where is Gaston?" Hugh asked.

"In his bed, I should suppose. He knows better than to venture here unless he has some task or unless I ring for him. Which, tonight, I feel I shall not do."

"What? Justin, you could hardly get up the stairs. How are you to undress? You'll drive yourself to an apoplexy, a heart attack, some such—"

"Hugh." Justin stopped him, then paused and just regarded him for a few moments, a small smile on his lips. "You know, beloved, you still resemble an agitated sheep when you become excited."

Hugh relaxed involuntarily. "And I have always wondered what exactly distinguishes the expression of an agitated sheep from that of a placid one. You must have made quite a study of them, Justin. Now why was that?"

Justin laughed outright, though briefly. "Ah, Hugh! How long have you wanted to say that?"

"I don't know. But really, Justin—"

"Really, Hugh. I can manage to disrobe, I think, especially if you do not leave me utterly to my own feeble devices. I—" he looked aside— "er—I suppose no one can have failed to notice who has seen the man in my presence as often as have you, my good Hugh, that Gaston endures my service—and me—with a degree of inner scorn which sometimes supports me, but which tonight—" he took a breath— "tonight, Hugh, I believe I can dispense with."

This was nearly as vulnerable as Hugh had ever seen Justin, so he could not possibly refuse. "Of course, Justin. I'm sorry. I'll stay."

Neither was enough of a valet to put the clothes in their proper places, but that, Justin said dryly, Gaston was welcome to do on the morrow. Hugh made some effort to fold them and stacked them on the seat of a chair, if only to have something to do while Justin's body was slowly bared. It had been long and long since Hugh had seen a man undress, especially this man, but even observing what time had done to the body he had loved was little guard against the terrible pull of nostalgia and longing. Skin on Justin's upper arms hung loose and swung a little as he moved; he had a little belly where before had been only muscle; his flanks were lean and his ribs starkly visible; his feet were bony. Hugh's hands ached, he wanted so to touch. Feeling his mouth pull taut, he tried but could not relax it. He brought Justin the nightshirt that had been laid out upon the bed. Justin lifted his arms, and stopped halfway; Hugh took the cloth back and held it high enough for Justin's head to come through the neck, and guided his arms into the sleeves as he had done years ago, for Paul.

"You are too good, Hugh." Justin did not meet his eyes.

The humility that age had brought proud Satanas broke Hugh's restraint, and he caught the long body to his own, wrapped both arms round it, pressed his face in he hardly knew where. Shoulder, by the boney feel of it. Justin's arms closed around Hugh in return, and they held long, tightly. Hugh stroked the back and waist under his hands, fearing to do more but unable to force himself to do less. He dared not speak.

Justin sighed deeply, blowing past Hugh's ear into his collar. After a while, one hand lifted to Hugh's face, petting in short strokes back to the edge of his wig; Hugh lifted his head and one hand just long enough to push the wig off completely, and then hugged tight once more. If he was to go another twenty years before he held Justin again, it would not be he who ended their embrace. Justin stroked his hair in silence. Hugh could not measure the time that passed.

"Hugh—" the name as softly spoken as a sigh— "I am so tired."

It was a Justin Alastair completely without affectation that Hugh saw when he stepped back. The eyes were of a sudden old—Hugh wondered why and then realised that they glistened with moisture which outlined them more ruthlessly than kohl. The mouth was set a little loosely, in a downward curve, and every line of the body agreed with the words he had spoken. Justin allowed himself to be helped into bed; he also allowed the touch that Hugh could not resist, smoothing the gauze-soft cheek as Justin had petted Hugh's.

"Sleep, then, Justin."

But Justin's eyes would not close. He touched, then cupped, the back of Hugh's hand. "I have been no good friend to you, have I?" he asked hopelessly, hoarsely. "Hugh?"

Struck through the heart, Hugh dropped to his knees, looking straight into Justin's eyes. "How can you say so?" he asked. "Justin—" and perhaps his position, the ache of his bones from his precipitous descent, brought out the words, "—I would serve you on my knees if it would bring you any comfort."

"I know it ... my Hugh, I do know it."

Hugh buried his face in the featherbed.

"But—" the faint voice persisted, "there is no comfort for this. Not for her death. Not for your lost years." Then, after a long pause while Hugh tried not to weep, Justin said, "Or for my own."

The funeral guests departed, many still wondering at His Grace's composure. A bereaved husband ought not to parade his emotion, perhaps, but he ought at least to indicate that there was emotion that he might have paraded. Still, he was visibly aged, which was some satisfaction to those who searched out material for on-dits.

Lady Vidal pulled Hugh Davenant aside after luncheon, while guests were preparing to leave, and begged him to stay on for as long as he liked. He had been invaluable all morning, chatting and soothing and making sure everyone had what they needed, if possible without bothering the family or even the head servants; with her own stress lightened by putting the funeral service behind her, Mary realised that he had been doing just such little services for days, ever since he had arrived. She did not know what she was to do if his support was suddenly withdrawn, and she told him so.

He smiled. "Avon has already asked me to stay for a time," he said with that gentleness she so admired in him. "I'm glad you agree that I may be of use."

"Indeed you may," she said, and then was struck with compunction. "But I do hope—that is, I don't want you to think—"

"No, 'pon rep, don't agitate yourself." He patted her hand. "Truly, I am glad to stay. The estate is beautiful, and it has been long since I was last a guest here. 'Tis a rest merely to get out of the city, for I was bred a country boy, you know."

She had not known. "Do stay," she said again. "Indeed, if you can help me accustom myself to country life, pray live here forever." And then she felt herself colour, for she had not meant to say so much, or to reveal that she still felt a stranger at Avon though her baby had been born here and was now four years old.

But he only smiled again, and she thought that he must have been quite an attractive man at some time. When he was young—when the duke was young—so very long ago she could scarce imagine it. "Forever is no very long time at my age," he said, as if he read her thought. "Gad, it may be forever."

"I wish it may," said Avon, coming up behind her as he so often, and so disconcertingly, did.

Davenant lifted his chin; she saw that he swallowed before he spoke, and his grey eyes were suddenly full of light. "Then it will, Justin. You had only to ask. As ever."

"Yes, my dear, I know that too." A melancholy smile touched the Duke's lips.

"Omniscient Satanas," said Davenant.

Mary left them together, shaking her head at the reference to Avon's nickname, which she had always found in poor taste. But the two friends were smiling, moving to adjacent chairs to rest their elderly bones, and she thought that there were far worse follies than such nicknames. And little wisdom better than to find and keep such friends.

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Note: In this story, I extrapolate from the information given in Georgette Heyer's novels These Old Shades (borrowing some lines of dialogue as well) and Devil's Cub. I'm mostly ignoring An Infamous Army. Oh, and the novels of Georgette Heyer of course belong to her estate. I am not among the owners. This is pastiche, and not meant to divert profit from anyone to whom it ought by legal right to go. Certainly no monetary profit accrues to me.

(Sigh) Avon's eyes are described as hazel in These Old Shades, and as grey in Devil's Cub. On the grounds that hazel eyes *can* look grey, I am keeping them hazel.

I owe a great debt to Rictor Norton, from whose book Mother Clap's Molly House, I learned any actual facts that appear here about the gay subculture in 18th-century England (including the notion, very odd to slashers, that lubrication was not so routine as we like to write). There was a real place called The Royal Oak, and a real person known as Princess Seraphina and as John Cooper; they appear in English court records (in separate trials) of 1725 and 1732. I know very little else about them. Here I invoke the principle that characters in this fiction are not meant to represent any person living or dead. An original character also paraphrases the statement to arresting officers by William Brown in 1726: "...I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body." (For those interested, Norton also has several articles from Mother Clap's Molly House online at his own webpage,.

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