Page 42 of By Any Means

Brasher smiled, a rare thing. He was fortyish, intimidating-looking, with pasty-white skin lumpen from scarring; a nose that’d been broken several times; dark-brown eyes and a black mustache that drooped to his jawbone. August hadn’t cared if he put off his callers, so Brasher didn’t care. Chary didn’t care either. He had no callers, anyway.

“You said… you did receive the telegram?”

Brasher did blink then—not without sympathy. “Yes.”

“Oh. Good.” Fatigue came down upon Chary like a ratty burgundy curtain. He only wanted his bed and to forget for a little while what it was to exist.

Offering no dismissal to Brasher—which the man wouldn’t expect anyway—he walked away down the hall and up the stair.

Chary’s room was technically one of the guest rooms, the west-facer with the balcony that overlooked the hothouse nave. Sometimes, he had lunch there, in the westerly breeze, but he almost never slept there. He peered in: the staff had kept its double bed pillows fluffed and its rugs beaten. Everything was as it should be.

The turret library stood guard on the southeast corner, overlooking the willow slope, the curve of the stream, the bucolic trail of stacked-stone fencing that carved out the meadows beyond. He unlocked the door and went in. Too dark tonight to see through the windows, and the brass electric sconces glowed too bright, anyway, pulsing with stuttering current. They were on the same front circuit as the front hall; Brasher had probably turned off the nightstand lamp or turned off the one for the guest bathroom.

Proof of company. Strangely reassuring.

Chary locked the door.

He stripped to his threadbare union suit and climbed the sliding ladder to the third-floor landing. There were only windows, an elm walkway, a round iron balcony railing, and curved, floor-to-ceiling shelves upon shelves upon shelves. Chary, when he couldn’t sleep, sometimes lay on the floor and watched the morning sun crawl its way down from the top of the stacks. Books were piled at the base of the shelves, sporadically, decorative stalagmites. He picked his way over these to the southernmost-facing window. Beneath it were a stuff mattress, too many velveteen pillows, an enormous patchwork quilt left crumpled in the precise, slightly dusty crescent he’d left it in a week before.

Nobody touched the turret library. Brasher had a key and peeked his head in occasionally while Chary was absent to make sure vermin hadn’t invaded, or possibly to make sure Chary hadn’t invited them with filth and disorder.

He flumped down onto the mattress with a little groan and rolled over.

No lights up there. Only windows, the shallow charcoal grey of night and the electric glow that was beneath him but whose glare couldn’t reach him. He stared up at the wood-panel ceiling that came to a point.

He hadn’t meant to sleep there full-time. It’d happened gradually, as an evening reading turned into a cramped night on an armchair, then two, and his limbs made it clear they were too long to accommodate the practice. He wasn’t in Berryfield more than two nights the week, anyway.

Chary fell asleep in the grasp of a specific, sunless nightmare: he was dead, and he should’ve spent more time with his brother while he’d had the chance.

Chary woke too early, a little past dawn, his body confused and betrayed by the shift in schedule. He was at least rewarded for waking: when he pushed himself up to sit upon the window box, he found a low orange sun lighting a shimmering fog across the property. The fog came down from the distant evergreens, the purple-green barrens, the silvery birch copse, and faded, of course, upon the willow stream.

He scurried past the northwest balcony room—its door was still firmly closed—to the bathroom, where he had a hot bath. He waited for the water to turn pink-tinged with blood like yesterday; it didn’t. He shaved: wincingly but without interruption.

If August had been there, he would’ve already been pestering him to come down. Very rarely in three years of living together had Chary been able to sneak awake and steal back the Sunday quiet. His brother had had some internal ticking watchdog that sensed his waking, and wouldn’t let him alone. Irritating at first; he missed it now.

Every solitary Sunday morning of the past eight months had turned bittersweet. The first, unprecedented time that August had failed to pester Chary had been the very same day that everything had come apart at the seams. August’s mere absence had been a sign of the apocalypse, the rumbling of hooves before chaos. Before blue-stained lips and pale slapped cheeks.

Chary tied his dressing gown and went down the front stair, into the foyer, and there went right to unlock the door to the greenhouse nave. This, a custom sort of long hall of an addendum made of glass walls, was stuffed with shelving and stacked tropical plants, mosses and ivies and hanging ferns, and stood adjacent to the northwest-facing kitchens and the breakfast room. All the arching, yellow-stain leadlighting, he had done himself. Merely standing in the greenhouse raised Chary’s mood significantly, which was why as a habit, he went there first thing on waking.

But today, as he passed the breakfast room, keys in hand, he paused.

The breakfast room door had been left slightly ajar. Besides that, it was a Saturday—he was usually only home on the Sabbath—it was early for him to be awake, and not a one of the household staff would’ve anticipated his taking breakfast at this hour. Not a one should even be there.

With a twisting stomach and a pounding, hopeful heart, he pushed open the door. The breakfast room was lit up softly by the new electric sconces and smelled of fresh coffee and pastries, and lemony, cut-grass, provoking scent⁠—

“What on earth!”

Laurie Tulley was seated at the end of the breakfast table. He gleamed at Chary from his casual, hands-behind-his-head recline, as relaxed as you please. “Hiya, Chary.”

“What are you— This is my house,” Chary hissed. “Are you also a housebreaker? What are you doing here? Who let you in?”

“Your broadsheet outlaw of a butler. Who else?”

Broadsheet outlaw—? But this was a lie. Brasher, even if he had been there this early, would’ve never. He was too protective. “You can’t be here.”

“But I am.”

Unlike him, Laurie was dressed and had been for a while: he was jacketless, with his shirt rolled up to elbows, and his slim-cut trousers damp and clinging enough to form to the shape of his considerable thighs. His oxfords were shiny with settled fog.