Page 51 of By Any Means

The only thing Chary had known of his older brother at first was that at one point he’d had one—someone had let it slip that he wasn’t an only child, that he was the miracle replacement—and then after, only as an angelic face in one attic-bound portrait.

His brother. He’d had a brother. Chary had replaced him. Replaced him to his mother, to his father, even to Wright Glass. Chary knew how to blow glass by then, though his father had discouraged it. After all, he was the heir. The most the heir was responsible for were the proprietary recipes, and those he’d memorized practically alongside his own full name.

His own full name that wasn’t truly his, because it’d been his brother’s first.

Three years ago, after coming of age and receiving his inheritance in full, Chary had taken pains to find his older brother. He hadn’t found a thing. Not a scrap. Not Paris or London or New York. Not until, like a nauseating miracle, Chary had stumbled upon him, feral and slurring and broken off Broadway, selling his body outside a brothel. Chary had thanked God for the intervention anyway and taken August in to live with him at the Fifth Avenue townhouse. They had lived together ever since—at least up until eight months ago, when August had spectacularly died.

“Lau—Mr. Tulley thinks I’m the one who was disinherited by Father. Naturally.”

“Aha,” August singsonged. “So, he found his sob-story angle. The flaw in the diamond.” He let his th’s buzz, briefly, like a Frenchman.

“Yes. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have given me the time of day, I think.”

“An interesting facet, to be thrown out to the streets. Character growth. Pfff.” August stomped the cigarette, the last hiss coming out derisive beneath his heel.

Charles Edward claimed the first time he had been identified as August had been unintentional. A printing error. And maybe it had been. Attractiveness was youth, after all, and they already shared most of a name. Their parents were long dead and Chary, too busy at the glasshouse for socializing, hadn’t been out in society more than a couple of times. Not enough for people to know him on sight, for really anybody to know that he, Chary, the baby, the younger, the replacement, was an ugly duckling, the farthest thing from a playboy.

So, Charles Edward had simply… become August. August, the infamous red-blooded Lothario, beloved from his first wild, gilded appearance.

Chary had let it happen. Had welcomed it. Certainly hadn’t stopped it. Why would he have? He didn’t want any of it, anyway; he knew he was the usurper changeling, who by being born had taken everything from his brother. Charles Edward was the elder and the stronger and the more beautiful, a victim of circumstance; he should have inherited.

August had deserved a chance to live as the man he was born to be. Normal, if he wanted. And Chary had thrilled when his brother begun calling him Chary—it was clever, it wasn’t like it wasn’t also his name, and he’d never liked August as a name anyway, not for himself—and taken his place.

It’d felt like righting a wrong.

“If you’re not more careful,” Chary said, “he’ll really find it out, August. The truth about you, the switch, the inheritance, all of it. You must stay hidden.”

“If I am not careful?” August taunted. “You are sleeping with a communist reporter in my house.”

“I’m not, and I didn’t invite him, for God’s sake. He broke in. I warned you to stay away, not to show up at Mass. And—and—you haven’t been careful, and not just here. You’ve been to the city recently; don’t say you haven’t.”

August jerked his head to look at him. “Gotham?” He huffed. “How do you know that?”

“Mr. Tulley accused me of union-busting. I should say he is continuously accusing me of union-busting. Or, rather, accusing a blond, bearded man whom he believes was me, who has been attending flint glassworkers’ meetings. Ostensibly to spy on them and prevent Wright Glass unionizing.” He paused. “Hm. Perhaps he does theorize some conspiracies.”

August put his forehead on marble shroud and blasphemed softly. “I do not suppose you could’ve fucked an incompetent communist.”

“Or does he theorize?” Chary demanded. “Is he correct? August, what are you doing, going to Local meetings?”

“Not union-busting, Jesus.”

“What, then? Why Brooklyn Glass? Do you wish to draw Raberding’s attention back upon us? Upon you? After everything we’ve done?”

“No,” August said wearily. “I don’t. But you did all that, Chary.”

He had. Chary had done all of it. He’d paid off police, the coroner, the witnesses, even brought the ice that’d chilled August’s limbs, brought the stain to make his lips blue. Had physically carried, with Brasher’s help, a dangerously unconscious August out of the Algonquin hotel room.

He’d have moved heaven and earth to get August away from Tjofabier Raberding and his fist-wrapped declarations of “love” and his hostile-takeover sweet nothings; if he had to, he’d do it again.

“Do you try to ruin him somehow? I cannot blame you. But it looks as though you would ruin both of us instead. And if Laurie had seen you firsthand in his surveillance—if he does see you⁠—”

“I am not scared of a rag-man reporter.” August sneered.

“If anyone saw you. All it would take is one word in any paper, and you know it.”

“All right,” August said. “I’m thirty-seven and the syphilis hasn’t yet reached my brain. I don’t need a lecture. I feel bad enough about your face already.”

“You don’t have syphilis, do you?”