Captured Shadows (7 page)

Our new life began like a whirlwind and continued the same, sweeping us along with such savage speed that any attempt to catch our balance would have been pointless. We continued our usual work during the daytime – portraits, newlyweds, the occasional death, actors' playbill pictures – and for the next two Tuesday evenings we helped Mr Everett photograph Sally and the others as always, but the evenings around and in between which I might normally have spent reading or walking or drinking in the pub with the other bachelors from my boarding-house were spent with Archie, both in the studio and outside of it. I had not thought beyond Archie's plan of earning enough money to send Annie away for better air; now, Mr Everett said with that greedy gleam in his eye, there was a whole hidden London to exploit.

"I reckon we
are
part of that hidden London now," Archie whispered to me one night as he helped me carry a chaise in front of the backdrop. "Do you feel exploited?"

"I feel
something
," I muttered back, snatching his hand away from where it had begun to creep around the side of my hip, and he started laughing into his hand until Mr Everett cleared his throat and began to call directions from behind the camera.

He had a handwritten page of notes from Mr Whitlock, and, reclining there on the couch in stockings and corset with Archie above me, the oddness of one man telling me what to do to another in the words of a third began to feel less and less strange. It was harder to believe our new reality outside of the studio; inside it, things began to feel as though they had never been any different, as though we had sprung to life fully-formed for no reason except to be together. Even with the bursting flash powders and Mr Everett's instructions, it was barely possible to see anything except the smile on Archie's mouth and the rising heat in his cheeks, the heaving way his chest moved with his rapid breathing and the agonised, silent laughter in his eyes when Mr Everett commanded us to exchange places on the couch so I might take Archie's prick in my mouth without obstructing the camera's view of the deed.

"James," he said desperately when I touched my tongue to him for the first time. The camera flashed and Mr Everett made some kind of disapproving noise when Archie's hand slipped into my hair to hold me there.

"Whitlock's paying for your prick and his mouth, dear boy, do move your arm out of the way."

Archie flung it back above his head with a frustrated whine and his fingers tightened hard around the cushion there when I took him a fraction deeper into my mouth. I had never done this before but the act seemed as familiar as shaking hands after five years of photographing the girls. For a moment I tried to remember how they had done it, the exact movements that looked good when frozen in the photographs, but the brittle sound of Archie's caught breaths was like a spur in my side urging me on until Mr Everett's presence no longer seemed to matter and I barely even heard his words. I looked for Archie's eyes up the length of his body, across the rigid lines of his dark blue corset, and found them gazing back at me, half-lidded with pupils blown wide, thinking wildly that I might spend myself uselessly in my drawers just from that look and the new taste of him on my tongue; but it was Archie who finished then, arching his back and making sounds that were trying to be words, as Mr Everett shouted from behind the camera, "Don't waste it in your mouth, take it on your face!" The suddenness of it surprised me and I did as I was told clumsily, feeling the warmth of Archie's spendings splash across my lips and cheek and slip slowly down the side of my chin in a sticky trail as the flash burst for the final time.

Archie was still trembling, laughing and reaching for me until I moved up his body to lie above him, face to face; I was aching to kiss him, but not with Mr Everett in the room, and aching to be touched as well. Positioned like this I couldn't help but remember that first evening in my bed, the press of his bare body and the spit-slick slide of his prick against mine; I suppose Archie was thinking of it too, from the secret little nudge of his hips and the way his hand, the one closest to the back of the couch that was mostly hidden from Mr Everett's view by my body, pressed me down at the side of the waist to meet him.

"Looks like Mr Everett's whiskers," he murmured through a wide, exhausted grin, and Mr Everett said, "I heard that, Wilkes," and made him laugh again, shaky and content while I hovered above him, propped up by both hands, wondering how I could possibly want to laugh myself when this arrangement had felt so crushingly dreadful only days before.

* * *

It was the day after our fourth session of photographs when things changed in a strange run of luck and excited determination.

First Mr Everett overheard us talking about the cost of sending Annie and Mrs Wilkes to the seaside and offered to lend his house in Margate for free.

Then, after Archie had run out of ways to express his stunned gratitude, we tore up our page of figures and started over without taking the rent into account.

"You know," he said after a while, watching over my shoulder as I wrote, "if we've got lodgings for free then it wouldn't cost very much more to send everyone, not only my mother and Annie." His tone was carefully casual, as though he thought I might find him ridiculous; in fact, I liked the idea enormously. I remembered all the times I had visited the Wilkes house with Archie, how kind and friendly his parents were and how much I enjoyed listening to the little ones chattering and playing, and the thought of sending Annie away to the seaside without her brothers and sisters when we had the means to save enough for everybody was suddenly rather appalling.

I put down my pen and turned in my chair, listening hard for a moment to make sure Mr Everett was still out and then reaching for Archie's hand, tugging him to sit on my lap. Immediately his arms went around my neck and he kissed me on the nose until I took his face in both hands and made him kiss me properly.

Breathless and pink in the cheeks when I finally let him move away, Archie kept one arm draped around my shoulders and began playing his fingertips at the tip of my collar, continuing the conversation as though the interruption had never happened. "It'd mean more work, of course. But..."

"...I don't mind if you don't," I finished, and Archie smiled faintly and reached to hold my hand. It had become something of a motto between us, a careful reestablishment of consent every time Mr Everett asked us to be in another set of pictures, but I realised this was the first time I truly meant it. I truly didn't mind. It was a complacency I could never have believed of myself back during that first terrible night in front of Mr Everett and a room full of prostitutes, but taking my clothes off and performing before the camera had come to feel so normal to me, or at least no less strange than standing behind the camera and photographing others. The anonymity of Mr Everett's collectors almost made it feel as though they didn't exist at all; I had been helping take the photographs for years but I had no part in distributing them, so our strange new employment as photographic models felt as though it ended when we turned off the studio lamps and went home in the middle of the night. No part of it crossed over with the work we did in the daytime, except for the detail of being around Archie every moment we were at the studio and for as many as I could manage outside of it. Mr Everett treated us the same in either situation, the girls had always teased so a bit added made no significant difference, and we could almost fool ourselves that our involvement in the whole sordid affair went no further than taking the negatives.

When Mr Everett returned to the studio an hour later we were emptying the frames of developed photographs on the roof. He stepped out onto the platform, squinting in the sunlight and mopping his red face with his handkerchief, complaining strenuously about the climb as always until Archie ran inside to fetch him a chair.

"Someone wants to meet you pair," he said when Archie returned, in the tone of a man imparting a great secret or offering a tremendous treat.

I wondered stupidly whether I might have cursed us by thinking earlier how anonymity made this strange new task so easy.

"Who?" I asked, although I had already guessed.

"Whitlock, of course. And that dreadful little lapdog Percival. I'm to take you over this evening when I deliver the latest batch of photographs. He wants to see whether your hair," Here he nodded at Archie with a grimace of distaste twisting his mouth, "is really as golden as he imagines."

Archie laughed sharply at that, leaning back against the wall with his arms folded in a display of nonchalance that I knew was fake; I could tell he was as uneasy with the idea as I was. "Is his as grey and wispy as
I
imagine?"

"Greyer," Mr Everett said grimly, "but do remember he's richer than Croesus and willing to spend a sizeable portion of his fortune on the depraved behaviour you and Jim would otherwise be doing for free anyway."

"Sir!" I protested, which only made him boom with laughter and pat me condescendingly on the shoulder as he passed me to go back inside. Archie stole his seat as soon as he was gone, and to wipe the matching grin off his face I went over to sit on him as he had sat on me earlier, doing it with rather more force than was necessary so he pulled a face and thumped me several times on the shoulder.

"You're bigger than me. Get off."

"Stop laughing, then."

"Why?"

"Because I asked you to."

The smile faded slightly, but it still glinted in his eyes as he slipped his arms around my waist to hold me in place and dropped his head to rest on the spot he had just been hitting. "Cheer up, Sinnett. You look like you're going to your execution. Let's just charm the old bugger 'til he don't know what's hit him. Might be able to put our prices up, hey?"

The smell of him so close to my face was wonderful and I turned my head, seeking some part of his warm skin against my own, until he took advantage of my movement and pressed a quick little kiss to my jawbone that made me smile despite all my misgivings. "When did you get so mercenary?"

"When I realised we could make money off the depraved behaviour we'd otherwise be doing for free anyway," Archie said, in an impression of Mr Everett that was no better than mine – and I thought, not for the first time, how there was nothing in the world I could bring myself to deny him, no matter how much I wished I could.

The Mr Whitlock I had met in the studio and the Mr Whitlock we went to visit that night seemed like two entirely different men. I remembered him as haughty and rude from the two times I had photographed him and his so-called nephew; yet upon reaching his home in Chester Square, it was Whitlock himself who met us at the door, shook our hands warmly as though we were old friends, and led us to a luxurious drawing-room, hung all about with tapestries and vibrant curtains of silk and velvet.

In front of the fireplace, which was lit and burning fiercely despite the day's warmth, was an enormous orange tiger-skin, and upon the skin John Percival lounged against a heap of cushions like a porcelain Alma-Tadema girl, watching Archie and me from beneath his long eyelashes. Of course we were used to seeing people in varying states of dishabille, but the sight of Percival in nothing but an extremely old-fashioned shirt, open halfway down his chest, and royal blue knee breeches with white stockings, was so extraordinarily incongruous with the opulence of the room that I dared not look at Archie for fear we might both start laughing.

"How do you do?" I said to him instead, grateful for the steadiness of my voice. Percival didn't stand to greet us, he only stretched like a cat and watched us like a bird.

"I presume you're Uncle Basil's new playthings?" he said in a lazy drawl, and beside me Archie made a startled, slightly indignant noise before Mr Everett cleared his throat in a gentle warning and he relented just enough to force a smile onto his face.

"My name's Archie Wilkes," he said, in a voice that I hoped only I could tell was saturated with scorn. "I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr Percival."

"Good God, did he find you in a Whitechapel gutter? You're barely speaking English."

"I shan't ask where he found
you
," Archie retorted. The look he gave me reminded me so strongly of that first day we met, when he begged me with his eyes to intervene and save him from Mr Everett's overpowering charity; I glanced at Mr Everett then, and found him talking with Mr Whitlock and presenting him with a package of photographs at the other end of the room, too far away and too involved to pay attention to what we were saying now, which I supposed we ought to have been thankful for after his severe instructions in the carriage not to make an enemy of Percival for fear of losing Mr Whitlock's patronage.

In these peculiar circumstances I didn't think showing affection to Archie in the company of others would be frowned upon, so I took his hand and tried to remind him with a look that this awful man in his absurd costume was at least in part to thank for our sudden turn of fortune and ought not to be provoked. Archie's jaw was set hard, a stubbornness I had seldom encountered in him before, but he did let me lead him to a couch and he sat silently beside me while Percival ran his eyes over both of us and I tried to think of inoffensive things to say.

"Have you lived here long?" was all my brain would provide for me, and I almost winced at giving such a weak conversation starter, but Percival seemed satisfied enough with an excuse to talk about himself and began to drone on in his conceited, affected voice for so long that eventually it reached that strange stage of becoming almost soothing and hypnotic, like the sound of rain on the windows at night or the distant hum of drunkards singing outside the pub on my street, and combined with the heat from the fire and the lateness of the hour it began to lull me almost into a stupor.

It was Archie's hand that jolted me back to my senses, a gentle pinch on the back of my wrist, and I realised Mr Everett and Mr Whitlock were taking their leave of us to go into another room and talk about business. The thought of having to listen to Percival rattle on for even longer about his marvellous cosseted life made me wish I had never come; but as soon as they were gone his voice trailed off to nothing and he blew his breath out in a great sigh, rolling onto his stomach and staring morosely into the firelight with his arms clasped around the tiger's head and his chin resting upon it. Behind him, his white-stockinged feet swung lazily up in the air, smudged a dingy grey at the toes and heels from wear.

"Are you alright, Mr Percival?" Archie asked, sounding as though he were too perturbed by Percival's change in mood to remember how much he disliked him, and I saw the side of Percival's lips lift up in a faintly sardonic smile.

"I don't remember the last time someone called me Mr Percival. It's always John, or Johnny. Or Little Johnny, depending on how much brandy he's had."

Archie's distaste twisted his mouth into an ugly grimace; I wondered whether mine looked the same. "Tell him to stop if you don't like it."

"I don't mind it," he said carelessly, although we all knew that was a lie. "He's very kind to me."

At what cost?
I wondered, staring again at his strange clothes and boyish mannerisms, and the sudden change his demeanour had taken as soon as Mr Whitlock had left the room, as though Percival's portrayal of a whining, spoiled, petulant child had been for his benefit somehow. Percival was, I estimated, somewhere between Archie's age and mine, while Mr Whitlock was older than Mr Everett, and leant on a cane when he walked. I tried to imagine the two of them as lovers and felt a shudder of revulsion at the thought, made worse by the idea that Mr Whitlock had taken a fancy to me and Archie as well, or at least to Archie. I couldn't imagine how terrible my life would have to be before I ever entertained the notion of giving up my freedom to take on the role of a rich old man's plaything; but as the days and weeks passed and we began to spend more time at the house on Chester Square, sometimes even delivering our photographs alone without Mr Everett if he had business elsewhere, Archie's opinion of Percival changed from that instant loathing to an odd, volatile sort of friendship. Much of the time they fought like cats, but their quarrels tended to be hot and quick, over mere moments after they had begun; they argued about each other's clothes, opinions, choice of lover, even things as innocuous as the weather or the misheard lyrics to a bawdy music-hall song, and between their spats all they ever seemed to do was laugh: at me, at each other, at nothing at all. Everything amused them, while I hovered around the edges of their peculiar new friendship feeling suddenly as much a stranger to Archie as I was to Percival. I found myself spending more and more time with Mr Whitlock instead when we visited his house, sometimes with Mr Everett there and sometimes just the two of us, which always made me uncomfortable. Mr Whitlock was perfectly polite to me, and very generous, offering all manner of gifts from a new suit fitted to me by his personal tailor to a silver tobacco tin with my initials engraved upon it; somehow I managed to refuse all of them tactfully and respectfully, until he learned of my all-consuming love for Verne and Shelley, whereupon he took me by the hand like a child and led me to his library, the biggest room I had ever seen in my life and every wall lined in books, and told me to take as many as I wished. Upon inspection most of them turned out to be the dull, worthy books one might expect to see in a rich old man's library; but I found a high shelf containing nothing but the most lewd and shocking stories I had ever read, some of them hand-written and some of them illustrated with such unimaginable drawings and photographs that I blushed to describe them even to Archie, and I spent one incredulous evening listening to Mr Whitlock's recollections of Mary Shelley herself, who
had
lived on the adjacent side of the square before her death.

Amongst all of this, the photographs continued. Mr Whitlock was never present during the taking of the pictures, but he might as well have been; his commands remained more or less the same, despite my fear that he might try to mould us into whatever he had created from John Percival, but they were always there. He was as much a part of the photographs as Mr Everett and Archie and I were, yet I found myself uncomfortable and anxious around him in a way I never felt about the others once I had become accustomed to my new job. Despite his kindness toward me I remained repulsed and somewhat frightened by him in a way I could never explain satisfactorily to Archie; and Archie, of course, only laughed when I tried to explain myself, in that high, affected way he had acquired from proximity to Percival.

"You're keeping him sweet," he always said. "Squeeze more money out the old duffer, hey?"

When Mr Whitlock eventually decided that he wanted Archie to be in photographs with Percival sometimes instead of always with me, I barely felt surprised. I had expected that some strange turn of events was on its way, and all I felt was a resigned sort of sinking in my stomach. We were at the dinner table when Mr Whitlock made his proposal and I dared not look at Archie opposite me, fearing his reaction, until the silence because too long and painful to bear and I rose my eyes to his, only for him to drop his gaze immediately and begin tapping nervously at the base of his wine glass with his fingernails. I wondered then whether the matter had already been discussed between him and Percival, and the idea made me want to flee the house in shame as though the thing I had thought was love was in fact just a way of passing the time and I was the only person who hadn't known it. Of course I told myself sternly how stupid I was being, although Archie continued to avoid my eyes; even without looking at our photographs I could remember every moment together with such vivid clarity it was as though I lived multiple lives at the same time, layered upon each other in endless strata of kisses and gentle words and careful new discoveries. He had said all those things with such verve and sincerity it was impossible not to believe him – but then I remembered his agitated confession that night in the privy after our first photographs, his desperate feeling of relief that he was no longer alone in his yearning for another man, and Percival's smirking face only seemed to confirm it:
you were there to fill the space while he waited for something better
.

"I'd rather be behind the camera than in front of it anyway," I said carelessly, and Mr Everett sitting to my left laughed as though I had told a tremendous joke and nudged me hard with his elbow.

"And leave all our other buyers bereft of your charms? I think not."

It was only later, when Archie crammed himself into the carriage seat next to Mr Everett instead of beside me as usual and sat there scowling out of the window with his arms folded, that I realised he and I were the only ones who had never uttered another word throughout the rest of dinner.

* * *

The argument, when it happened, was the maddening sort that wants to be loud but is forced to spitting ferociousness by the need for quiet. It took place while we were parcelling photographs in the little office behind the front room of the studio, and it began with Archie banging his chair too loudly as he sat down, as if to show me without words how cross he was. I glanced at him irritably and saw the desire for a fight as clear on his face as though it had been written there in ink. It took no more than that for me to turn on him.

"You're actually enjoying this, aren't you? You
want
that repulsive old man and that sideshow exhibit to turn you into one of them."

"One of
what
? You're just jealous it ain't you."

"You're absurd. Don’t you realise how stupid you sound?"

"Well, I'm sorry I ain't some bleeding intellectual like you."

"Again, stupid."

By this point we were standing, both trembling with the urge to shout but forced to speak in hissing whispers so as not to disturb Mr Everett next door or cause a scene loud enough not to hear the bell above the door if any customers came in. Archie pushed me hard in the chest and said, "
Don't
call me stupid!" and I took hold of his hand and flung it back at him.

"Give me one other suitable word for a person who enjoys John Percival's company."

"James, what's wrong with you? It's for the money, remember?"

"We
have
money, we already have even more than we need. Do you really mean to make this your career?"

He hesitated at that, swallowing back whatever words were on his tongue and turning his back on me to pace in silence, as though trying to calm down; but when he finally stopped to look at me again, his eyes were still alight with a sneering anger I had never seen in him before, although I had encountered it plenty of times in Percival.

"You don't know what it's like being poor. What you understand about me wouldn't fill a postage stamp. I don't care what your reasons were, I'm doing these photographs so I can save money and get away from this lousy city and everyone in it."

His words stung me like a slap, so much that I almost stepped back from him. It had only been a week since the last time we had found time to be alone together, an entire evening locked in my rooms; we had talked and talked and he had fallen asleep in my arms without us even getting as far as removing our clothes, and later he awoke slowly and stared at me with unfocused, sleepy eyes as though he couldn't remember where he was.
I wish I never had to go home
, he said then, sounding scratchy from sleep but smiling through the sound until I forgot all about the numbness in my arm where it lay beneath the press of his body and rolled him closer to me, burying my nose in the warm scents of his neck and hair while he whispered
I love you more than anything
against the curve of my ear in a breath so quiet that it could have been my own thoughts. I wondered what it was that had changed so entirely; there was the hasty, falsely-casual approval I had given to Mr Whitlock's new plan, of course, and yet even before that the connection between me and Archie had started to fray like a rotten rope.