In Which They Behave Like Eight-Year-Olds

Erik arrived much later. Loud footfalls woke Richard – they were headed upstairs. Their direction was the room between the first guest room and the library, conveniently the one he’d picked to share between the two when Lottie got too nosy. The rookery, they called it, and it was mostly a secret. A place to be more violent, and one in which to lay low.

They had not visited it for a long time, at least not together. But Erik was up to something, he knew, what with the late nights and newer poisons. So Richard waited in the armchair by the window, dull in his senses, but not any less vicious, like an aging spider.

The door was forced with a kick, a screech of wood upon wood. Then, a man stumbled in.

Indeed it was him, albeit a drunken him, slump-shouldered, reeking of gin and sick like a workhouse boy. Perhaps that was why he suffered the mornings most of all? For the first time since taking Erik up, Richard experienced revulsion. Before, he would feel it with young girls, girls who’d love him all the more if he did not want them. Men and women alike who’d send him letters, petal-filled, peppered with kisses, which he’d toss unopened – sometimes ripped – into the fireplace.

It was helplessness that disgusted him. The shuffling of Erik’s feet rattled his nerves. Now he had backtracked and grabbed one end of the knob. It was broken. The other end clattered to the floor, to which he cursed in a language Richard could not place. Richard wasn’t sure whether it was even a tongue he knew – but the matter at hand was a different one, and he replaced the thought to the back of his mind.

Erik didn’t notice him until he shot the question, “Where have you been?”

In his surprise he stumbled, dropping a small cloth sack. It rolled to one side and back, and whined only afterwards; in it a creature lived, but barely. Erik cursed again, this time at someone in particular, “Fuck! You idiot!” But he did not look him in the face.

He gave the sack a kick. It rolled under the desk, where it resumed its agony. Then he sat, or rather slumped, in the chair opposite Richard. What a pathetic sight! He looked about to cry. As if that could have moved anyone!

He turned toward the window and said nothing.

Silence was his way of defiance, tonight.

Richard insisted. “Well?”

Nothing.

“You are drunk!”

“How English of you to hold that against me! To think you look continental enough!”

Each was now entrenched in his respective anger. Had a shared subject divided them, things would have been simpler: the words more poignant, the wound deeper, but easier to patch. It could have been a sentimental affair, had one cared more for the other’s opinion of him. Erik mistook Richard’s worry for morality. In his mind he turned him into a vicar, who, unhappy with repressing himself, did the same unto others. Saint Richard the Carpenter, the ascetic, the whipping- boy, the crying harlot. The worst of all, he appeared to preach.

Of course, this image was of his concoction. In reality, Richard was only jealous – jealous, disgusted and barely articulate. The insult shook him more than it should have, leaving his hands cold and his expression sombre. Though insignificant – it could apply to just about anyone – the tone and its source offended him. It was the first time Erik disrespected him, and it meant that until then he had been watching his step, shutting out the thoughts that, if voiced, would have torn him from his benefactor’s good graces.

Some falsehood is necessary for social niceties. The problem lies in telling how deeply it is rooted.

For the first time he noticed the sack. Inside was a small tortoiseshell kitten. The softness of its coat and the width of its haunches indicated it had been cared for, but it was rattled by fear. It even pissed itself when Richard took it out, leaving a dark stain on the carpet.

He dropped it in Erik’s lap.

“I brought him for you,” he answered the unsaid question. With that, he took the cat by the neck and shook it violently. Milk-teeth and claws cut deep into his fingers, but he seemed not to notice. To Richard’s horror, the act was an idle one. It seemed he didn’t even take pleasure in it, despite the energy expended in throttling. A new rigidity froze his limbs to the elbow, when he took a thumb to the windpipe, pursing his lips, brow a-quiver. The laziest of smiles signalled a shift in the eve’s logic, more so than the drunkenness, the fight, or the strangling. 

“What are you doing?”

Again he said nothing. The cat struggled with unnerving fierceness, but made not a sound, its fur stained with foreign blood, though it couldn't have known so.

“Stop at once. You can’t do this in front of me! Not in my –“

“Not in your house, I know.” There was a note of disappointment in his voice. Richard then realised there was not a chance he’d obey him. Promptly he turned his back – Erik tightened his grip and snapped the neck, taking his eyes from those frightened baby blues once they’d fully glazed over. “It’s not worth it, if you’re not watching. I brought him for you. You would’ve learned to skin and mount – I wanted to teach you.”

The carcass hit the wall across the room, a near miss to an idealised portrait of the third Baron.

Richard felt he had nothing to say.

Suddenly, Erik convulsed forward. Drink, bile and his last meal, a crumpet, exited his body without fair warning: out of the stomach, up the oesophagus, shooting from nostrils and mouth alike. It was too late to ask for a bucket, but it was still brought to him wordlessly. It was in preparation for times like these that Richard had placed one under the bed. What he’d predicted was nowhere near as dreadful as reality.

He couldn’t have described what he felt on the matter, had he wanted to.

But then again he was tired.

In all probability, somebody’s pet had been killed in front of him. There was nothing he could do about it, except deny all accusations, should anyone allude to Erik’s profession or temper or habits. People liked to point fingers at him, what with all those cats disappearing. For once they were correct, and it bothered him all the more for it.

Nothing reasonable had happened since he’d come home today. Especially not this tantrum. So he decided not to think about it, and he tried not to look at the vomit, which was thin with froth around the edges – what ghastly business! He’d spent enough nights with young stags to tell his friend had been eating very little as of late.

His shell having cracked, Erik dozed off very quickly. Richard undressed him and put him to bed. Afterwards he rung Lottie to clean up.

He Turns into a Child Butcher

It is said of the Baron Wellesley, one of our better heads of state, that as a child he was blamed for the death of his brother, and that this was, if not the sole, at least a principal cause for his various compulsions. This is only partly true. He did justify his behaviour with childhood tragedies, most of which he had read in books and adapted only later to fit the official histories.

The Baron Wellesley – or Richard, to those he liked – wrought the stories in gold, knowing that they would be unbelievable. He snipped off the edges, as some women do to their faces, and dabbed on the rouge like a Parisienne. None but a few thought his lying abnormal for a man of his station, who had lived in the continent and returned with a troupe of German performers, some of which stayed as his guests.

While there had been a younger Wellesley, named Bertrand and drowned in the bath aged two, nothing suggests that Richard was treated unfairly because of it. His widowed mother loathed him for other reasons, namely that she’d never wanted children at all. But she had married the son of an only son – a titled one at that! One without cousins or sisters or nephews, even an elderly uncle.

Rich in her own right, she had joined a dying house for the prestige, but nobody told her of the fates of those old families, and that the graves would keep on filling.

The cry of War rang clearly to Richard’s father, who had been raised on Homer, guilt, and patriotism. As a young man, enlisting was a duty to the King but more importantly to himself: he was to be a hero. He saw himself before a mirror, adjusting the medals on his chest to achieve the perfect glint. And this was to be due to his own successes. 

No more reaching into his wife’s purse, or beginning conversation with “You knew my father.” He would dine with well-known figures he’d have met in his own right. And he, like those men, would have played a part in history, and be not a flatterer but an equal.

The killing of youths had the least to do with it, in his mind. He was not cruel per se, merely careless: what was it to him if a mother was left childless? That was a problem for the powers, for whoever issued pensions. It could he God’s problem, for all he knew, if God still lived. It did not matter at all as long as some of them survived, themselves rewarded as he thought he would be; as long as England was triumphant and there were spoils to be divided.

He did not survive the year. His feats are unrecorded (did he do anything at all?); his body, cremated in a small French village that, if one were to believe the maps, does not exist.

His widow got the letter not a week before Christmas.