Captured Shadows (6 page)

"I always thought I was the only one," Archie said desperately against my cheek, words coming out warm and wet on my skin as his hand flew back between us and started rubbing clumsily at my prick through the cotton frills. "I mean you hear stories but it ain't the same, I never seen pictures or known anyone who—" His words cut off, replaced by a quiet whining moan through his nose when I kissed him again, quiet and tender until he began to calm. His kisses became languid then, his breathing steadier, and he pressed forward with his hips until I took him in hand and began stroking. Archie was wet there against my palm, skin gliding gently over the head of him until my hand was slick with it and
he
was pressing whimpers into my shoulder, open-mouthed and trembling as he spent himself against my hip.

I wanted to tell him that he wasn't alone, that there were more of us, some such as Whitlock and Percival who knew what they were and some of us only just beginning to realise it, but whatever I wanted to say trembled and caught like coughs in my throat when Archie spat in his palm and closed his fingers around me again. His forehead rested against my cheekbone in the dark and he murmured feverishly into the silence left by my imprisoned words: "If I have to do them horrid photographs I don't care, I'll do them every day 'til I die if it means you let me kiss you."

"Damn the photographs," I swore, and I could feel the shape of Archie's mouth forming a smile against my cheek, the hot rush of shudders that ran through me as I spilled across his fingers and the cotton of his drawers.

I had spent the night in a strange reverie of hands and hair and kisses flavoured with cheap red wine, feeling flushed at the memories and downright feverish at the idea that there might be more to come, but the next afternoon Archie couldn't look at me beyond a first glance as we hurried late to the front door of the studio from opposite ends of the street. He lowered his eyes immediately, long lashes dark against his reddened cheeks, and held the door open for me. After that there was nothing, not a look or a word, and all of my own words crawled back down from my tongue where they had been waiting ready to be spoken.

In silence we began to work, Archie in the darkroom and me taking the coats of our next customers and leading them into the studio. As Mr Everett showed them where to stand, a bearded gentleman and his two young sons, the memories were so strong – Archie's bitten fingernails; the narrowness of his waist in the corset; that startled look of realisation in his green eyes – that I fumbled and almost dropped an entire packet of glass plates. As he passed by me to get behind the camera, Mr Everett quietly murmured, "Dear boy, do control yourself," and I felt a stab of shame that seemed to spread and encompass everything. My behaviour before and after the previous night, and indeed during, suddenly seemed repugnant to me; I felt
somehow that
I had taken advantage of a friend in despair, one who had said and done all those things in the privy after the photographs were taken not because he wanted to, but because he thought
I
wanted him to, or because he thought he owed me some sort of payment for my agreeing to help. I wasn't angry with Archie, only with myself; I had no sick sister of my own so I couldn't say whether I would do terrible things to help her or not, but I did have a conscience, black and shrivelled as it sometimes felt, and an understanding of how normal people behaved. In that
hasty moment of confusion and frightened doubt
I managed to convince myself that Archie was avoiding me so because I had enjoyed the depraved and desperate way he had been forced to behave in order to
try and
keep a child alive. I had, of course. It was impossible to deny, especially to myself after having spent the whole night delirious in dreams and remembrances of Archie's mouth on mine.
They were smiles he never felt
, a
cruel and
disgusted little voice inside me seemed to say,
and kisses he despised. You are despicable.

But after the customers left and Mr Everett returned to his office I found I could no longer avoid Archie, no matter how much I wanted to. I crept into the darkroom quietly, miserably, hating myself, and began to gather the things I needed to develop the negative. Behind me, I could hear Archie's breathing and the gentle splash and clink of chemicals in bottles as he worked at the other bench. Beating in my chest like a second heart was a desperate urge to apologise to him, but I found it impossible to form the words.

Then I heard footsteps, only three – the darkroom was small, and we had been almost close enough to touch already – and Archie's hand slipped into mine. I turned in surprise to look at him, his face made of strange glowing shapes and shadows in the ruby light from the lantern, and found desperation in his eyes, but not the sort for which I had been hating myself.

"I didn't know how to say thank you," he said in the quietest of whispers, as though afraid Mr Everett might be lurking outside listening. "James... I'm sorry I never spoke to you earlier, only I thought I might cry in the street. I've been praying you'd come in here so I can say it where nobody's listening."

"You don't have to—"

"Yes I
do
," he insisted fiercely, his hands slipping up now to hold my face in front of his. "I'll have money after this, I can send Annie away to the seaside with my mother and see if she gets better, and if she don't then I'll k
TY
ow it's because horrible things happen sometimes even to the sweetest girls and that's the way it is, not because I never done all I could to stop it." His earnest eyes were glimmering wet again in the dim light; when I lifted my hand to dry below his lashes with my thumb he turned his face into my palm and kissed me there, and whatever doubts I had about the things he had said and done crumbled away like burning paper. I took him in my arms and he laughed, a breathless wet little sound pressed against my collar, and angled his face to kiss me.

"Don't do this to pay me back," I said, just to be certain, and into my mouth Archie said, "Just shut up, Sinnett, don't hurt my feelings when I'm trying to kiss you, you blundering idiot." His fingers were crumpling my hair and I could feel his smile, one of happiness and gratitude but not deference, not dishonesty. Even when he stopped kissing me we stayed there where we were for a minute or two, his arms draped around my neck and mine around his waist, just breathing, just taking a moment for ourselves in the dim red silence.

Then Archie cleared his throat and stepped away, looking instead at the workbench where I had been setting out my things before. "Are they the ones from yesterday?"

"No. Mr Everett's already set those to develop upstairs."

"Oh." He lingered beside me, watching me work for a while, but his curiosity and impatience made the air almost palpable until eventually he said, "Don't you want to see them?"

"Absolutely not."

"Ain't you even a bit curious? You did look awfully fetching in them stockings, you know."

It wasn't enough that the
red
lantern
disguised
the colour in my cheeks; I covered them with my hands as well, willing my blush away even as I laughed. "You're the pretty one," I said, entirely sincere but still awkward and stumbling over this newfound permission to say such things to him. Plenty of portraits of me existed already, as tests for Mr Everett's new cameras or new backdrops or new brands of plates, and none of them were at all remarkable, I thought, certainly not in comparison to the picture I had taken of Archie the week before. My own hair and eyes were dull brown and unchanging in shade like the flat stain of spilled paint; but Archie shimmered and glinted like something fey, as changeable and golden as a spirit Andersen dreamed up and fed with ink until it came alive. I recalled my first thoughts of him, as though something had stepped down from the walls of the Royal Academy, and in that moment in the darkroom, exhilarated and half-crazed with love, I felt arrogantly superior to the pitiful painters who could only capture oil impressions, never a picture as true as a reflection or a scene taken in through the eyes. "I assure you nobody will be looking at
my
half of the photographs."

"Perhaps I'll make copies," he said, leaning there against the bench and hindering my work with a hand that kept trying to close around my own. "Cut your face out and paste it over mine. Then
both
halves'll be you and I won't ever look at nothing again for my whole life."

"You belong in an asylum."

"Ain't you a charmer?" Archie murmured with his lips suddenly just above my collar. I shivered at his touch and turned in his arms, opening my mouth against his and tasting the sweetness of his breath, those ever-present barley sugars, as he kissed me.

When we emerged from the darkroom, blinking in the sunlight that flooded through the glass walls and ceiling of the upstairs studio, Mr Everett was sitting in the chair we sometimes used for portraits and shuffling through a stack of photographs as though they were a deck of cards, murmuring to himself like a madman. He looked excited, bright red spots blooming on his cheeks above his whiskers, and when he saw us across the room his sudden beaming smile was almost dazzling.

"Splendid," he kept saying. "Splendid! You marvellous boys."

I heard Archie stifle a noise behind me, a sort of embarrassed laugh surrounded by a cough, and I wanted to make a show of bravery and go to look at the photographs but I was rooted to the floorboards in terror. It seemed inexplicable and ridiculous, given all that Mr Everett had seen in the flesh the night before and all that had just been said and done in the darkroom, and I suppose Archie thought so as well because he pushed past me, then, suddenly brash with bravado when before he had been nothing but impeccably polite and formal towards our employer.

"May I see?"

"Wonderful!" Mr Everett all but bellowed at him, handing over the photographs and strutting out of the room like a chortling peacock, I assumed to shut himself in his office and wallow in the imagined success of his new enterprise.

Still too apprehensive to join Archie, I stayed where I was and watched him look at the first picture; watched his mouth fall open slightly and then close, teeth pinching his lower lip; watched the sudden strange gentleness of his hands on the paper, and the faint flush of blood rising in his cheeks.

"Good Lord," he muttered eventually, and stared at me as though I had slapped him; then, perhaps realising I wouldn't go to him of my own accord, he came forward and thrust the pile of pictures into my hand before taking a step back, holding his arms clutched around his middle as though he had a pain. He didn't speak, he simply let me look in silence; I placed the photographs one by one on the table until there were a dozen or more, then he stood close by me and we both leaned in to inspect them again.

"Good Lord," I echoed. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Our discomfort and fear were so evident in the earlier pictures, twisted unhappy expressions and eyes lowered in shame or gazing off into the distance beneath frowning brows, but I remembered so clearly that lightning moment when our eyes met and found that photograph amongst the others, lifting it to my face to peer more closely at it.

"Stop looking at my prick," Archie said, sounding as though he meant it as a brash salacious sort of joke when in fact he only seemed small and scared.

"I'm not," I told him, holding out the photograph for him to take. "I'm looking at your eyes."

Now I could see why Mr Everett had told us not to look away; there was something urgent in the picture, a sort of unaffected yearning although from the necks down we still looked clumsy and awkward. Archie in the photograph was smiling very slightly, just enough of a hint to be obvious. I merely looked stunned, as though the moment of realising something enormous had been captured by Mr Everett's flash powders and
chemistry
, which I suppose was true.

"What do you think of them?" I asked Archie, dry in the mouth and stumbling over my words, and he dropped the two he was holding back onto the table and kissed me where we were, drenched in sunlight and high above London as though nobody else in the city existed.

Something had changed so completely between us that when it was time to close the studio we lingered at the door after Mr Everett's carriage had driven away, neither of us wanting to say goodbye. The sudden lack of awkwardness we felt in each other's company seemed as new and strange as an unknown place, as though we were explorers in a distant land; but this was London, smoky and crowded and as familiar to me as my own face in the looking-glass, so I began to walk in the direction of home and glanced back over my shoulder so that Archie knew to follow me.

"Come for supper," I said casually when he caught up with me. "Will your mother miss you?"

"She knows I work funny hours sometimes, she won't worry unless I don't come home at all. Does your landlady cook for you?"

"Cottage pie on Wednesdays. Or we could make toast in my room."

"Toast," Archie said decisively, then leaned in closer as we walked and lowered his voice to a murmur that only reached my ear. "I don't want to share you with anybody."

I couldn't think of a reply to that, at least not one that I felt I could say out loud in the busy street, so we walked in companionable silence all the way to my boarding-house in Bloomsbury, and Archie followed me up the stairs to my rooms, three flights carpeted in a threadbare greenish strip down the middle so that a foot of pitted oak floorboards showed at each side. I was embarrassed when Mr Everett first saw where I lived after I saved a bit of money and moved out of his guest wing, as though he might think me as unrefined and shabby as my new home; but with Archie things were different, and even on that short journey from the front door to my rooms I sensed that he was at ease here for the same reason I had been at ease in his crowded little house down in Lambeth. There was a sort of comfort in the shabbiness; not in a conventional way, perhaps, as the paper on the walls was faded with age and the pile of the ill-fitting carpet was thin and rough, but the fresh flowers on every landing table gave the house a motherly sort of scent, like attar of roses, and the softly glowing lamps made the hallways warm and inviting. There were photographs hung on the walls, some gifts from me to Mrs Bamber and some that had been there for so long that were you to remove them from the walls the patches of paper behind would be as bright as on the day it was pasted up.

My rooms were chilly and I took care of the fire while Archie stood beside me, holding his hat and looking about the place but not taking a seat as though we were still at the point in our friendship where manners mattered. It seemed funny to me that he would wait to be invited to sit when he had kissed me so ferociously when we were alone together in the darkroom, when he had placed his hands upon parts of me that Mr Everett hadn't yet instructed when we were in front of his camera, and I tried to hide my amusement but couldn't. I'm afraid I looked rather foolish, smiling like an imbecile trying to get the paper to catch, but then Archie's fingertips were entangled in my hair and I felt the smile fade at once as my throat seemed to close up and I swallowed with difficulty, feeling the click in the back of my mouth and hearing the sound it made inside my head.

"Will you sit down?"

"Will you?" he said softly, as he stroked the hair behind my ear and made me shiver.

There was only one armchair placed to the side of the fireplace, an ugly old wingback thing in muddy brown velvet, shiny in the seat and on the back from decades of perpetual use, and an old brocade ottoman, rectangular in shape with the piping frayed at the corners. This I took for myself, perching on the narrow end and gesturing Archie towards the chair; but before he sat he pulled the chair closer to where I was, so that my knees were trapped between his own, and then it seemed rather silly not to be kissing so I leaned in to him, the scent and warmth of his skin, and captured his mouth with my own. He made a startled little sound through his nose – he did that often, I realised, as though every kiss were unexpected, even the ones he initiated – and I felt his arms slip around me, the shuffling movement of his body and mine as we hovered there, each on the very edge of his seat, balanced together like pieces of a playing card castle.

It was a kiss like none we had shared yet, as though the realisation that we were truly alone together behind a locked door for the first time had exploded with enough force to break that final barrier, the last lingering little thoughts of
is this right
and
does he want what I want
. The touches in front of the camera
had been
more posed than true, angled to be flattering. Those in the darkroom had been quick and almost fearful, and the night in the privy behind the studio had been frantic and desperate, clumsy with unfamiliarity. Now, seated precariously in front of the fire, his hands were curled around my shoulders and my forearms rested upon his thighs, my fingertips pressed to his waist, and I kissed him with a raw feeling I thought might choke me. His tongue was warm on mine – and this was new too, this careful pressure of tongues, the exploration of the planes of his teeth and the curious way he sucked for a moment upon my lower lip. His eyes were open, a blur of white and green, and his lashes fluttered against my cheek when he relinquished my mouth and began instead to kiss a meandering path across my face and down my jaw. I was laughing again entirely without meaning to; there was nothing funny, but the exhilaration needed to escape me somehow and it chose my mouth, already cooling and hungry for more touch. I sought his lips again with my own and he submitted with a sigh; then I saw his eyes slide closed, felt the tug of his fingers in the back of my hair, and were it not for the heat of the fire to the left of me I think I would have stayed there forever and died where I was, breathing him and tangled up in him until the flames beside me flickered too far and turned us both to ash.

"You're feverish," Archie murmured against my mouth, the back of his fingers touching my roasted cheek.

"The fire's burning me," I said stupidly, and he laughed at me, bright and sharp in the hot silence of the room.

"That's charming, that is. If you were a proper gent you would've said something nice about me then."

"If you were a proper gent you wouldn't ask for compliments."

"Who ever said I was a gent?" I found myself in his arms suddenly, hauled to my feet and so close to him that our noses touched and I couldn't make out his features, only his scent and warmth and this thrumming promise between us, pushed from his body to mine and back again with the thud of our beating hearts. "Say something nice about me."

I wished I were a poet. Words had never come easily to me, especially not now; my lungs were burning, my mouth was dry, my mind was blank of everything but him, the memory of images, the scandalous daydreams of more. In a strained sort of mumble, quick and quiet, I managed to say his name and then fell silent, simply breathing out when he inhaled, breathing in when he let it out. The tremble of his hands at my waist betrayed him and I knew suddenly that his manner was mere bluster; he was as nervous as I, and it gave me the courage to try again.

"I try to think of things to say to you sometimes when I wake up in the night. Even if I didn't dream of you. I lie there in my bed in the dark and I wonder how can I make Archie Wilkes believe I'm clever and interesting and worth knowing? Then I see you and words don't seem to make sense any more, because all my mouth wants to do is kiss you. But now, even now I'm
allowed
to kiss you, when I do then all over again I try to think of things to say to you after. I go around myself in circles like a damn dog chasing his own tail and I suppose the conclusion is something about wanting you, or loving you if you prefer, and telling myself what an idiot I am at the same time as congratulating myself on my good fortune." Then Archie put his hand over my mouth and leaned back to look at me, a perplexed expression crumpling his brows.

"You are an idiot. You talk too much
,
too. You could've just said the loving part instead of spoiling it by insulting yourself."

"Is it spoiled?" I said when he removed his hand. "I'm sorry–" But the word was swallowed in another rush of kisses and I found myself propelled towards the door in the corner of my living-room, onto the creaking feather bed, out of my clothes. Archie's hand around me was warm and sure, newly practised now in how to touch me as I knew with barely a coherent thought how to do the same for him, but the difference between the privacy of my rooms and the cool, crowded studio was incredible in its scale; there was nobody else to impress or excite here, no need for instruction or haste or inconvenient pauses to change the plates – there was only Archie, his skin golden in the late afternoon sunlight and his breath shaping my name against my neck, and the languid, unhurried rhythm we eventually found between us, slick with spit as I thrust against him and he rose his hips to meet me until at the crest of our pleasure he bit the side of my hand to muffle his cry and left a circle of neat red teeth marks in the flesh there so that I dreaded taking my gloves off the next day for fear of questions.