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It was thus, without a word of goodbye, that their partnership met its end.
The London rain was pelting against the panes of his attic room. Benjamin lifted his head from his knuckles, feeling the imprint of them on his face. He had been staring out of the blasted porthole window for what must have been hours, hoping foolishly that the rain might provide some solace. Some answer.
So many weeks had he spent dedicated to this new life as Huxley. He hadn’t considered what he might feel when the time came to shed his poet’s mask and pick up where he had left off as Benjamin Fletcher. He barely knew who that man was. If not for the noise from down the stairs, the wagering, the drinking, and the smell of smoke on the air, he would have been fleeting from this world, existing only for the falling of the rain.
It had not been a lie when he had told Charlotte of his plans to leave London, but the details of that plan were yet undecided. He had known only two homes, the first of which he still occupied; the second, a string of ships, camps, and battles. To build another seemed too demanding a task. Where even would one start? What would it mean for the men who depended on him?
He would look out for himself. He could go to Italy, retrace his mother’s footsteps, and settle in the small village at the base of the Alps she had called home. He might find family there; he mightevenfind purpose… but to do what? All he had known was crime.
It was a crime to have left Charlotte as he had.
Reaching up, he pressed his fingers to his mouth, hoping he might catch the taste of her there. Nothing, not even the ghost of her lingered still. He smelled his undershirt, hoping to find her there instead. No—the only parts of him that played host to her memory were out of reach.Almost.
Benjamin lay back on his cot and reached a hand down to his breeches. He ached for her still. He had not enjoyed a woman since their meeting, had not wanted to. The world of greedy, hollow pleasure had lost its appeal. He held only Charlotte in his desire. If he listened, he could hear her sighs in his mind in haunting memory. He couldseeher face twisting in release, her cheeks dappled pink, and her eyes clouded over with lust. He could feel her against his fingers, and he could imagine what she might feel like wrapped around his cock.
He gave himself a squeeze over the fabric of his trousers, and it was painful.
There would be no release from her, not while he was indebted to her as he was with guilt and longing. He could escape to Italy; he could escape to the ends of the earth, and still, he would never be free.
“Charlotte,” he whispered to no avail.
The name moved him to action.
He sprang from the bed and rushed over to his desk. With a great sweep of his arms, he pushed aside all that lay atop it. His effects scattered, crashing against the creaking, waxy floor. He thrust his fist against the tabletop with a cry, hoping,praying, that such bodily anger might free him from her snare, that he might move the world to mercy.
“Did you hear?Mercy!” he cried out and hurried over to his wardrobe.
Out came the suits Pollock had helped commission. Out came the cravats, the gloves, the vests that had been stained with her.
Her.
He plucked a portrait from the wall of that little Italian village, so old was it that it had all but greyed over, and that too found its way to the floor, splintering in half.
Benjamin could not stop, would not stop, not until everything that had ever been and everwouldbe of him disappeared.
He picked up the letter opener with which she had threatened him. For a second, he considered plunging it into his heart if only to feel her there, where he needed her most. Instead, he brandished it at the walls, slicing what little remained of the wallpaper away. He pulled at the scraps of tapestry until the wooden planks showed bare before him until he could feel the faintest breeze from outside on his skin.
So sweet was it that it stunned him and he fell into the chair behind his desk in a crumple. Only then did he notice the line of blood across his palm from where he had cut himself on the blade.
With a crippling sigh, he reached into the top drawer of his desk and retrieved a long, cotton kerchief. He wrapped it around his injury, flexing his hand to savor the feeling for a moment more.
“The least I deserve,” he muttered against that dark, disgraced room. A moment passed, and then one more, as he eased himself back into peaceful misery.
Absently, he moved to close the drawer, only for his eye to settle on the papers that had been homed there: the letters he had found in his old bedchamber on the day he had met her at Piccadilly.
Meaning only to cast them off too, he pried them from their cubby, and he was most surprised to find that the envelopes had no address nor name. With his clumsier hand, he wrestled a two-page letter from the first and read, “My darling Milena...”
He pushed the letter away.
Milena.
His mother’s name. She had been someone’s darling.
He could not move until the rain subsided. His mother had been here, waiting for him, his entire life, hidden in a drawer in his nursery. Had they been penned by his family…or by a lover? Could that lover have been his father?
Carefully, as though the letter might fall to pieces in his hands, he flattened it out against his desk and read.
My darling Milena,
