Contemporary Gay Romances (18 page)

“Then, my young starveling, for if you do not soon avail yourself, there will be none left and starveling surely you must become today, you must do
nothing
. And by all means follow the path your irksome conscience describes for you. This dish now is called a Korma. Experience, my love, to what a culinary pinnacle a mere kitchen garden marrow may aspire!”

Landsdowne did at last sample the feastling set before the two, and if he never quite rose to the occasion as did his editor, at least he contrived to taste sufficient of each platter before them to summarize for himself the varied buccal sensations that had been conjured. DeHaven was undoubtedly a boon friend and his advice worth heeding. Even so, he observed himself still unserene by luncheon’s conclusion, and he stalked off to his labors with still-crimped brow and apprehensive mien.

Only to be greeted not a half hour after he’d settled into the long-honored chair and desk by a new series of horrors which, if by no means as equal in number or manner to the great man’s, were all the more intolerable for detailing as they so unswervingly did detail from the husband’s perspective, the utter disregard of marital vows of the wife! The passages Van Pryor had penned in natural response partook of equal portions of jaded amusement and connubial irritation. His single remaining desire in the face of it all was merely that she and her unnamed companion become never quite so fatuous as to entitle the hoi polloi to deduce their clandestine alliance. In that at least, Landsdowne had to admit, they’d all succeeded very well, as he’d never heard the breath of a whisper against the woman.

Landsdowne’s own stupefaction was quietly accompanied by a correspondent reanimation of the presence he’d so recently sensed, upon this occasion renewed by the long familiar hair riffling but newly accompanied by a soft respiration into the cup of his hearing organ, so subtle that at first he couldn’t be utterly certain, until it was repeated, until the surety was undeniable. If earlier he’d been blessed, now surely he was doubly so.

Quitting the establishment somewhat earlier that night than others to attend upon DeHaven at the opera, he stumbled upon his hostess herself, in the house’s foyer, preparing for the outdoors. He begged her pardon, asservating that he’d come upon yet more information of a particularly uncivil nature, and wondered did her command still stand, no matter the party involved in the potential damage? Or would perhaps she wish to know its details?

She was about to herself step out, apparently a second time for the night in company, all aflutter in jet and feathers, gemstones and furs, and at first she barely registered his presence, then did evince it with a graciousness he could only admire: “Every bountiful phrase,” she reiterated. Then as she swept out to an awaiting carriage, she adumbrated: “His demanding readers must have it
all
.”

“But… No matter the cost to him…or to yourself?”

“What is mere cost to such as he…or to I?” she in turn asked. And was gone.

6.

“Discretion means all in Service,” a maternal-line relation had once intoned to him, then a barely comprehending child, “and discretion in Service is nothing more or less than a finely discriminating blindness in the matter of one’s betters.” The ancient and now munificently endowed old thing had unquestionably managed the artful practice of discretion, if one were to conclude only by external compensations. Her pension was unstinting, the very cottage in which she’d resided since the passing of her longtime mistress was charmingly situated; remarkably capacious; it even harbored its own service in the form of a slavy from the “big house,” no longer required there, if gratifyingly essential to his aged relation’s newly won gentility. Fresher generations of the great house unfailingly called upon the older person whenever they happened anywhere near the neighborhood, behaving when they did so with the openhanded, openhearted unconstraint, not of mere former employer’s offspring, but indeed almost as though they themselves were but honored, respectful, younger relations.

As he advanced onward in his labors, Landsdowne couldn’t help but recollect all that and himself attempt to apply some of these well-experienced lessons to his own more particularized circumstances. Nor had it escaped his apprehension that in the last few months of his nocturnal efforts among the Van Pryor papers, his own poor little pittance of repute had all unawares by himself become considerably elevated beyond what his slim volume of
contes
could genuinely warrant; among his own poor and scattered set of artists-in-training as would have been understandable; but also, dare one say it, among others less
en famille
, not excluding certain bellwethers gathered at the more established Athenaeums of erudition.

His late master’s star continued its irrepressible ascent, undeterred by the vulgar fact of mortality, and as its rays more widely glimmered, casting further light over the house, the
oeuvre
, the uncollected papers, invariably the widow herself began to assume the unequivocal status of a personage among certain districts of society. It became at first intimated, then generally accepted, that perhaps one had been unjust toward the poor woman in the past, if only in one’s conscious efforts to so set her husband so apart from the common run. Thankfully, reparation could only be more valuable in how utterly it must now be performed. These later months it was wholly in vain that our youth awaited her tentative footfalls upon the uncarpeted risers outside the chamber lintel. It seemed she now luncheoned, dined, even breakfasted abroad quite so systematically that were it not for themselves and his own meager little repasts, the kitchen staff would have found itself delightfully superfluous.

Even DeHaven’s publishing establishment, by now so inextricably coupled with the great author’s name, continued to batten and gorge upon the generalized radiance, as did DeHaven himself, spoken of as a noted “Clever Young Turk of the Arts.” And, as did our simple scribe himself, granted the growing sincerity of regard evidently provoked, he was certain, at least partially by the aura of mystery that naturally surrounded his endeavors. One would have to be sightless, heedless, deaf, indiscreet, as well as indiscriminate in varied senses of those terms to not truly apprehend how very universal a sunset glow had come to suffuse all that lay within the ill-defined, ever-amplifying, Van Pryor penumbra.

In such a benevolently crepuscular ambiance, an accommodation with the less palatable specifics of his superiors did arrive, quite slowly at first given the galaxy of compunctions it must overcome—or illuminate—only to at long last fully scatter all contentions asunder, resulting one afternoon in our young man’s completely uncharacteristic species of Gallically shoulder-shrugging insouciance.

Thus ensued the penultimate phase of Landsdowne’s mission: the most recent year’s journals, slipshod as they were, along with the accompanying, heretofore barely glanced at, aggregate of letters, notes, relevant and irrelevant paper effluvia. It went without needed having to be said that the previously eerie and by now more or less customary caresses from an unnamed source that had at first so alarmed our young savant whenever he sat in the master’s chair at his labors were now redoubled in some hitherto unaccustomed manner, causing equal amounts of pleasure and consternation, and yet still he plunged onward.

The newest disclosure when ultimately it reached its destination—an undulating course dictated by unfolded note by scribbled note, twice-left visiting cards, multiple hansom cab receipts, not fully distinct journal entries, even once an invoice from a shared chamber at a less-than-estimable seaside resort—would sensibly enough be less effectively thunder-striking than had it come earlier and sans antecedent heralds, despite what its even more sensational content otherwise indicated.

Evidently, our collator was coerced to conclude that his very own editorial champion had felt the need only a few short months previously to ensure fertilization of the ground of his new ascension into the paternal position, by initiating what he, in a strikingly precipitate
billet-doux
, reminded the Master was a long-desired, long spoken of, and long postponed, joint intimacy. That it had been as corporeal as preceding amours concerning members of the house was wholly inevitable, Landsdowne supposed in retrospect, and thus equally unremarkable. After all, those above, as these three Demigods apparently so considered themselves, bestrode the world as Olympians; hence equally Olympian would be their inclinations and as well their transgressions. At times our poor scribe even pondered whether in the very heated moment of conception of the project, his
soi-disant
friend, the perversely public DeHaven, hadn’t even fallen upon, nay relied upon, this very
denouement
being arrived at. He could today without a jot of difficulty envision the young publisher carefully deciding to do so, and simultaneously deciding exactly what tack to veer onto, once it were all broadcast. Indubitably only once he comprehended the prevailing westerlies of opinion, only then would DeHaven opt to deride it all as a simple, if all-too-graciously flattering, phantasy of his elder; or conversely to entertain it further, explaining it away as a conclusive, Hellenically developmental, stage in the life and art of a great author.

As for himself, Landsdowne recognized fully now that he was but an underling, instrument of them all, including, indeed especially, he who Landsdowne had for so long a duration and so intently admired from a distance, Van Pryor himself, and of late, from within his own private demesne, and who, it appeared, now so supernaturally reciprocated that admiration, so that all that could possibly matter given the extremity of the circumstances was to perform as capacious and discriminate a service as was humanly conceivable. Opportunity did not waver, so long as DeHaven existed in any proximity to his orbit, and soon enough one such sterling exemplar presented itself to our scholar with untypically equal portions of celerity and the possibility of expansiveness.

It appeared that a celebrated quarterly of more than ordinarily literate pretensions had perforce recently swept clear the accumulated cellars of elder statesmen of their more ephemeral scribblings and now sought, well, sought anything it might deem justifiably publishable. Insofar as Landsdowne was concerned, it sought his own slender pluckings among the incunabula of his more distinguished ally; if, that is, one might be assured of utter exclusivity. A distaff version of his handsome young publishing friend efficiently uncovered our young savant’s comings and goings, and she daily waylaid him with unceasing application and absolute fortitude, virtually commanding his participation. The placement and position offered by her were to say in the least admirable, in fact they would be unquestionably conspicuous; the remuneration, although fiduciarily modest, would be of a binary nature: including not only whatever he might volunteer from the worktable where he had labored nightly—with its careful annotations naturally for comprehension—but also, it was desired, some piece not inconsiderably from his own poor personal stock of scribbling. Our scrivener’s sole condition in turn, waved into reality the instant it was proposed, was that what would be delivered to her offices must become the final, the reading draft. The masculine young periodical she-wolf pondered and then pounced. Agreement was sealed with an athletic shake of her hands and a virile back clasp, and within a fortnight she had as good as her word already typeset and had printed up the material.

To describe the consequences of this publication as electrifying would be as much as ignoring it almost entirely. Landsdowne only began to understand the range of its fullest implications during the afternoon of the quarterly’s debut issuance, when, during his diurnal labors, and from his semi-opaque view across a large chamber filled with clerks of equal or greater denomination than himself, he was able to briefly ascertain his immediate superior along with his own superior, communicating with a certain intensity and every once in a while, unable to keep themselves from turning to gaze in his, Landsdowne’s, general direction; upon which perceiving themselves perceived, they rapidly gazed away again. When, upon exiting for the evening, our hero passed the administrative area, he was able to substantiate the presence of the latest number of the very periodical, partially hidden by overlying actuarial tables, yet indubitably already much thumbed through.

Upon arriving at his own chambers he found a quick note from some secretarial individual associated with DeHaven House, advising of the sudden cancellation of a previous engagement with her young employer; without in addition, he couldn’t have failed but note, apology nor offer to reconstitute the appointment. He dined then alone in a neighboring tea-shop, upon bread soup and trifle, not unaware of the suddenly frequent, usually whispered stares of not familiar, oft-noted personages he had tended to think of as possessing some literary inclination, whenever he occasioned to look up from his evening paper or diminutive collation. His gaze was alas never in any danger of being in turn caught nor returned by any of them nor his physiology of being for a second glancingly skirted even within the most restricted of situations.

Nor was our savant, an hour afterward, in any way astonished to find the door to his nightly labors of recent and months-long duration adamantly shut against his ringing or knocking, while his erstwhile confederate from within the Van Pryor pantry appeared to shoot furious or alarmed glimpses at him from behind the poorly furled camouflage of an arras across an upper window.

He’d beforehand removed handmade copies of what he’d specifically required from the workroom, after all, and so he turned away in tranquil resignation from the house suddenly prohibited to him, its mistress doubtless in the most implacable dudgeon, as no doubt his earlier friend and benefactor was also now utterly enmitous. Landsdowne allowed himself the tiniest glimmer of a smile, before he revolved for a final moment within the once so beloved little court and then for the ultimate time bid farewell to its alabaster excrescences.