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“Stop, are you kidding me?” Alex says. “Prince Consort Road?Oh my God, take a picture of me with the sign.”
“Not there yet!” Henry says over his shoulder. He gives Alex’s arm another pull to keep him running. “Keep moving, you wastrel.”
They cross to another street and duck into an alcove between two pillars while Henry fishes a keyring with dozens of keys out of his hoodie. “Funny thing about being a prince—people will give you keys to just about anything if you ask nicely.”
Alex gawks, watching Henry feel around the edge of a seemingly plain wall. “All this time, I thoughtIwas the Ferris Bueller of this relationship.”
“What, did you think I was Sloane?” Henry says, pushing the panel open a crack and yanking Alex into a wide, dark plaza.
The grounds are sloping, white tiles carrying the sounds of their feet as they run. Sturdy Victorian bricks tower into the night, framing the courtyard, and Alex thinks,Oh. The Victoria and Albert Museum. Henry has a key to the V&A.
There’s a stout old security guard waiting at the doors.
“Can’t thank you enough, Gavin,” Henry says, and Alex notices the thick wad of cash Henry slips into their handshake.
“Renaissance City tonight, yeah?” Gavin says.
“If you would be so kind,” Henry tells him.
And they’re off again, hustling through rooms of Chinese art and French sculptures. Henry moves fluidly from room to room, past a black stone sculpture of a seated Buddha and John the Baptist nude and in bronze, without a single false step.
“You do this a lot?”
Henry laughs. “It’s, ah, sort of my little secret. When I was young, my mum and dad would take us early in the morning, before opening. They wanted us to have a sense of the arts, I suppose, but mostly history.” He slows and points to a massive piece, a wooden tiger mauling a man dressed as a European soldier, the sign declaring:TIPU’S TIGER.“Mum would take us to look at this one and whisper to me, ‘See how the tiger is eating him up? That’s because my great-great-great-great grandadstolethis from India. I think we should give it back, but your gran says no.’”
Alex watches Henry’s face in quarter profile, the slight pain that moves under his skin, but he shakes it off quickly and takes Alex’s hand back up. They’re running again.
“Now, I like to come at night,” he says. “A few of thehigher-up security guards know me. Sometimes I think I keep coming because, no matter how many places I’ve been or people I’ve met or books I read, this place is proof I’ll never learn it all. It’s like Westminster: You can look at every individual carving or pane of stained glass and know there’s this wealth of stories there, that everything was put in a specific place for a reason. Everything has a meaning, an intention. There are pieces in here—The Great Bed of Ware,it’s mentioned inTwelfth Night, Epicoene, Don Juan,and it’s here. Everything is a story, never finished. Isn’t it incredible? And the archives, God, I could spend hours in the archives, they—mmph.”
He’s cut off mid-sentence because Alex has stopped in the middle of the corridor and yanked him backward into a kiss.
“Hello,” Henry says when they break apart. “What was that for?”
“I just, like.” Alex shrugs. “Really love you.”
The corridor dumps them out into a cavernous atrium, rooms sprawling out in each direction. Only some of the overhead lighting has been left on, and Alex can see an enormous chandelier looming high in the rotunda, tendrils and bubbles of glass in blues and greens and yellows. Behind it, there’s an elaborate iron choir screen standing broad and gorgeous on the landing above.
“This is it,” Henry says, pulling Alex by the hand to the left, where light spills out of an immense archway. “I called ahead to Gavin to make sure they left a light on. It’s my favorite room.”
Alex has personally helped with exhibitions at the Smithsonian and sleeps in a room once occupied by Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law, but he still loses his breath when Henry pulls him through the marble pillars.
In the half light, the room is alive. The vaulted roof seemsto stretch up forever into the inky London sky, and beneath it the room is arranged like a city square somewhere in Florence, climbing columns and towering altars and archways. Deep basins of fountains are planted in the floor between statues on heavy pedestals, and effigies lie behind black doorways with the Resurrection carved into their slate. Dominating the entire back wall is a colossal, Gothic choir screen carved from marble and adorned with ornate statues of saints, black and gold and imposing, holy.
When Henry speaks again, it’s soft, as if he’s trying not to break the spell.
“In here, at night, it’s almost like walking through a real piazza,” Henry says. “But there’s nobody else around to touch you or gawk at you or try to steal a photo of you. You can justbe.”
Alex looks over to find Henry’s expression careful, waiting, and he realizes this is the same as when Alex took Henry to the lake house—the most sacred place he has.
He squeezes Henry’s hand and says, “Tell me everything.”
Henry does, leading him around to each piece in turn. There’s a life-size sculpture of Zephyr, the Greek god of the west wind brought to life by Francavilla, a crown on his head and one foot on a cloud. Narcissus on his knees, mesmerized by his own reflection in the pool, once thought to be Michelangelo’s lost Cupid but actually carved by Cioli—“Do you see here, where they had to repair his knuckles with stucco?”—Pluto stealing Proserpina away to the underworld, and Jason with his golden fleece.
They wind up back at the first statue,Samson Slaying a Philistine, the one that knocked the wind out of Alex when they walked in. He’s never seen anything like it—the smoothmuscles, the indentations of flesh, the breathing, bleeding life of it, all carved by Giambologna out of marble. If he could touch it, he swears the skin would be warm.
“It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much shelovedthose sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually… you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?”
“The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?”
