A Wager of Love: M/M Historical Romance (2 page)

“Anything that is real can be proven. You might prove the emotions and concepts of fear and hate—if a man fears or hates a certain stimulus, he shall always react with fear or hatred toward the introduction of that stimulus. But anything that a man
loves
is quite variable. What one passionately loves one day may be the object of loathing and derision upon the next. Alcohol, as an example.”

“You may not use
alcohol
as an example on the topic of love,” Laurie objected.

“When a man is drunk,” Gilbert continued unabashed, “he may passionately declare that he loves wine, women, and all the world, but sunrise finds him in sickened loathing of all those things. If love exists at all, then it exists only as the dew: wrought by moonlight and vanished by noon in the sensible light of day.”

“You are wrong.”

“I may indeed be wrong,” Gilbert conceded, “but I will not accept so until you have furnished some proof.”

“And so I shall,” Laurie said, setting down his glass and sitting forward with determination. “Love exists, and I shall find a way to prove it.”

“Shall we make a pact?” Gilbert asked. His dark eyes glittered impishly.

Surprised, Laurie’s determination cooled and he tilted his head in consideration. He’d vowed to his sister that he would not fall to the vice of gambling while in London, not after he was still in disgrace for having wagered the family’s good carriage and lost.

“We shall take turns,” Gilbert said, “in the provision of evidence as to whether true, lasting love exists in the world, until one of us has won his case.”

“And what are the stakes of our bet?” Laurie asked, irresistibly tempted by the challenge.

“A forfeit,” Gilbert said. “Since we do not know each other well enough yet to wager anything specific. The winner shall ask a forfeit of his choosing from the loser.”

“Done,” Laurie said. If there was no money or property at stake, he would not risk his promise, and he was determined that he could and would win the debate. A forfeit between gentleman friends was sure to be something amusing and harmless, no more than a favour or a dare. “Although I do warn you that I don’t take losing lightly. Who shall provide the first example?”

“By all means,” Gilbert said, gesturing generously to his new friend. “As love’s champion, you must make the first assay.”

“I will,” Laurie said. “I shall send to you once I’ve decided on my first example. Where are your lodgings?”

“I’ve a house in Mayfair,” Gilbert said, providing an address which was quite a bit more impressive than Laurie’s lodgings for the season.

“I’m in Steven’s Hotel on Bond Street,” Laurie replied, taking down Gilbert’s address and agreeing to the terms that he would have no more than a week to provide his first exhibit.

“
H
ow might
one go about proving love?” Laurie asked his sister over tea. She seemed like the best source for information, being happily married, within easy visiting distance in London, and inclined to indulge her brother’s whims.

Mrs. Elizabeth Brook, Laurie’s tall, blonde, and elegant elder sister, set down the watercress sandwich she had just picked up. “Laurie!” she exclaimed. “Why, who in the world is the lady in question?”

Laurie blushed to the tips of his ears. “No, forgive me, there is no lady. The question was theoretical. I’m afraid I have entered into a philosophical ... wager regarding the existence of love, which now seems rather a poor decision on my part given that I have never been in love and therefore have very little experience by which to prove the existence of the sentiment.”

Elizabeth sighed. “A wager! Oh, Laurie. Only you could find yourself in such a conundrum. What are the stakes of this wager?”

“Merely a small forfeit to be asked,” Laurie said, blushing with embarrassment over the incident with gambling away the family carriage, even though it had been years ago and he had been most strictly well-behaved about gambling since then. “Nothing of value, I assure you. I’ve made the wager with Mr. Gilbert Heckwith of Mayfair, a very merry young gentleman whose acquaintance I made at Agatha Barrow’s party on Tuesday. I am resolved not to lose.”

“And yet you have no idea how to begin,” Elizabeth said. “You ought to present him with a happily married couple: our parents, for example.”

Grimacing, Laurie added a second sugar cube to his tea. “They are in the country, and besides I had hoped to reserve such proofs for once the game had escalated. I thought to start with something smaller.”

“Love poetry?”

Laurie sipped at his tea and discovered that had not been his second sugar cube, but his third. He coughed. “I would prefer not to find myself reciting love poetry to a gentleman I have only just met.”

Laughing, Elizabeth picked up another sandwich. “Then I have just the thing. Take him to a play.”

“A play?”

“William and I have just been to see a play called
The Triumph of Love
. It is French, and very charming.”

The Triumph of Love
. The title certainly sounded right.

Laurie arranged for tickets, sent word to Gilbert, and they met beforehand for dinner.

“That is a very confident choice of title,” Gilbert said, as they entered the restaurant, which was lively and crowded. It was elegantly furnished in the French style, with exceedingly crisp white linens on the tables off-set by stark black napkins and flawlessly polished silver. “What if it turns out to be a tragedy?”

“I have it on my sister’s authority that, as advertised, love triumphs.”

“Then it must be a comedy,” Gilbert said, and chose them a table. “Love always triumphs in a comedy, unless it is Russian.”

“Do you see many Russian comedies?”

“Not in London, though I enjoy reading them. Russian comedy is an acquired taste.”

Laurie sat across from him, drawn to the irresistible way Gilbert grinned, as though he constantly had a joke ready on his lips. “An acquired taste?”

“Yes. You could put a Russian comedy on a London stage, call it a tragedy, and the entire audience would leave depressed.”

Befuddled, Laurie blinked at him. “Then how is it a comedy?”

Gilbert shrugged. “Russian humour. I think it is the nature of the Russian spirit to laugh at misery, and that intrigues me. It’s rather noble, don’t you think? The English strive to endure and rise above misery, but the Russians simply laugh, shrug their shoulders, and accept life as it is. We Brits are far more inclined to deceive ourselves.”

“With deceptions such as love?”

Eyes lighting with surprise and delight with how Laurie turned the conversation, Gilbert nodded. “Precisely so.”

“Do the Russians have no love stories?”

“They do--although I must beg that I am no expert on Russian literature, and it occupies only a small, albeit fond, corner of my library. The romances of Russian literature that I have read are more fatalistic, I suppose. In English romance, love is a thing which is forged or discovered, and then remains pure and untarnished. The book ends with a wedding and everything is happy. In the Russian stories that I’ve read, love may be unrequited or bitter. It may sour or age. A man may fall in love with the idea of a beautiful girl, and the idea of love is more important to him than the girl who is the mere vehicle of that idea.”

“I think I’d rather have the wedding and the happy ending,” Laurie said. “For with that we may aspire to a better form of love and a more virtuous self, rather than merely accepting that we are flawed and selfish creatures. I wish to believe that we can be more, if we try.”

Gilbert’s expression flickered with surprise and longing. “Then may I, too, be so English. I like your theory, although I do not believe it.”

T
he play
in question was about a Princess Regent who prevented a civil war by romancing the rival heir to the throne, and convincing a set of anti-love philosophers that love did indeed conquer all, which Laurie enjoyed thoroughly.

“But the question is,” said Gilbert as they entered a carriage and he gave his own address to the driver, “did their newly formed romance last? And, indeed, on what basis was their romance built? The Princess first sees him bathing and falls promptly in love, or so it is called, but I would name that lust.”

“She feels physical attraction, yes,” Laurie agreed, “but she was there watching him bathing for noble reasons, on account of seeking an amiable solution to her political problems. Once they speak with each other, their romance is built first on friendship, then on attraction, and finally deepens into love.”

“So is that love, then, as you wish to present it?”

Laurie thought about it. “Yes.” Gilbert sat close beside him in the carriage, his shoulder warm where it pressed against Laurie’s. “It is a lasting sentiment based on friendship, attraction, and, I think, honesty and trust.”

“Very well,” Gilbert said. “But the love that we’ve seen presented tonight was only a representation of love, performed by actors who likely felt no love between them, and may never themselves have experienced love. So, too, we know nothing of the playwright’s knowledge or experience of love. They may all be performing to an ideal, a commonly recognised concept of love which is known to them merely by the ubiquitous nature of its presentation in plays, books, and songs.”

“But how,” said Laurie, “can there be such consensus on the nature of love that it can be so universally recognised, if there is no true concept on which to base these performances?”

They emerged from the cab in front of a very handsome townhouse of white stone and mounted up the steps. Gilbert held the door for him. “Are you familiar with Plato’s theory of forms?”

“I think I once heard it mentioned,” Laurie said, removing his hat. Within, the house was even more handsome, decorated generously with golden marble.

There was a grand statue in the front foyer, a classical marble of a nude young man holding up a bunch of grapes. Laurie laughed in surprise. “Dionysus. You know you look like him, don’t you?”

“Me, like a god?” Gilbert teased, dropping his own hat over Laurie’s head instead of hanging it respectably on a hook. “I drink like him, is more like.”

“And that.” Laughing, Laurie hung both hats and followed Gilbert into the parlour.

“Plato’s theory of forms,” Gilbert said, resuming his philosophy, “supposes that all our representations of a concept, such as love or beauty, are poor shadow versions of true Love or Beauty, the divine forms of which are perfect and immortal,” Gilbert explained, pouring them each a drink and coming over to sit next to Laurie on the couch. He sat sideways, slipping off his boots and stretching out his legs over Laurie’s lap with his usual shameless disregard for social decorum. “But no one has ever seen these divine forms.”

“No one alive, no,” Laurie agreed, trying to figure out where he was supposed to put his arms if Gilbert’s legs were in his lap. He settled upon resting one arm along the back of the couch and clasping his drink with the other as he settled into debating theory and theology. “If we, as mortals, are imperfect, then we can only experience the true forms of such ideals in heaven, with our immortal souls.”

“If there are divine forms of any of these ideals at all,” Gilbert argued, gesturing elegantly with his glass. “What if Plato had things the wrong way around?”

“Which way around?”

“His idea that there exist true forms which dictate their lesser mimicries, rather than that the lesser mimicries themselves create the idea of a form which can never truly exist.”

Laurie furrowed his brow, then shook his head. “I don’t follow.”

“Take the form of Beauty, shall we? Let us say that we gathered a group of Englishmen to agree upon a unified concept of beauty. There would be some variation for taste, but let us say that our group of Englishmen comes to the consensus that the elements which form a beautiful man...” Gilbert hesitated, gesturing vaguely, and his eyes lingered for a moment on Laurie’s face before he resumed the train of his thought. “... Include a sharp jaw, a straight nose, and fair skin. That seems reasonable, don’t you think?”

This was certainly going somewhere, but Laurie couldn’t yet make sense of it, and he blushed at the implication that he might be used as the English standard of male beauty. “Certainly,” he agreed.

“But if we were to gather a similar group of Ethiops, they might conclude that the elements of a beautiful man were a broad mouth and ebon skin.”

“Ah,” Laurie said, beginning to catch up with him.

“And a council of Chinamen would say that the truest form of beauty must belong to a man with slanted eyes and yellow skin. So how can there indeed be an ideal divine form of beauty, or love, or anything else, when such things are each different for different audiences?”

“But, to be sure, could not you or I appreciate the beauty of a man of China or Ethiopia, and recognise beauty in him even if it were different from an Englishman? So is there not, then, a similar aesthetic appeal to beauty no matter its adherence to cultural standards?”

“Yes and no.” Gilbert said. He smiled recklessly, and Laurie’s found himself distracted briefly by the redness of the lips and the way they curved. It seemed to him that if either of them were a candidate for being a beauty standard, it must be Gilbert’s classical appeal and not his own sharp-edged elfin beauty.

“And then if that is the case,” Gilbert was saying, “then who gets to judge whose standard of beauty is the true divine form?”

Laurie cleared his throat to hide his distraction, blushing as he attempted to catch up. “Surely there could be a broad universal consensus towards beauty.”

“But can the majority be trusted to choose truly?” Gilbert asked. “Plato has an argument for that as well—if you are sick, will you have your illness and treatment voted upon by the people, or would you rather go to a trained physician?”

“I’m beginning to feel like I’d rather not have my standard of beauty established by either the majority or a trained aesthetician,” Laurie grumbled, tilting his head back and sighing deeply. “But what has this to do with the form of Love, Gilbert?”

“It has to do,” Gilbert explained, “with the theory that there is no true divine form of Love, but rather that our concept of love is a conceit invented by poets and playwrights, a falsehood which appeals to our universal loneliness as humans and our desire for approval and companionship. The concept of a divine form is indeed created by the popular, repeated consensus of a form such as Love or Justice, though it never existed at all.”

Laurie grimaced. “That’s depressingly nihilistic.”

“Which is why you have generously taken upon yourself to prove that I am mistaken,” Gilbert reminded him. His own glass was empty, so he stole the rest of Laurie’s.

“Hey!” Laurie complained, then laughed and wrinkled his nose. “I can see the proof may be difficult.”

“Perhaps impossible,” Gilbert said. The playful, challenging glint in his eye made his skepticism charming. “And yet you have valiantly taken up the challenge.”

“Why do you have such doubt of love?” Laurie asked. He was growing more comfortable with lounging about with Gilbert, and rested his arms upon his friend’s well-formed legs. “You must tell me. Who was it broke your heart?”

“Truly,” Gilbert assured him, “no one at all has broken my heart, not ever. I have never felt my cold stone of a heart—”

Laurie snorted.

“—warmed by any such wayward sentiment as love.”

“Not even toward your family?” Laurie prompted.

“I have some fondness toward my aunt Agatha and my cousin Ralph, but the emotion is formed more out of necessary proximity and gratitude rather than any affectionate outpouring of love.”

“That is an incredibly depressing state of affairs,” Laurie said. “So you do not believe in love because you have never felt it.”

“Correct.”

“Hm.” Laurie thought for a moment, allowing his fingertips to drift idly over the curve of Gilbert’s knee.

“That tickles.”

Laurie continued it regardless. “If,” he supposed, “love as presented in tonight’s play were indeed a true state of being which exists in our world, would you wish to feel it?”

“Of course,” Gilbert said, sitting forward. “According to the poets, love is misery and bliss. It is the purpose of our existence, such as gives life meaning.
Love is not love,
” he said, holding Laurie’s gaze as he began to recite. “
Which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.
”

His voice was elegant and smooth, reciting the poem with a sort of longing, suppressed passion that made Laurie sit up and consider Gilbert anew.

“O no!
” Gilbert said, voice hitching softly as he paused.
“It is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
”