CHAPTER 19 - UNTO THE BREACH

Part 1

Bard

It was raining, of course it was raining, as Bard and Victory pulled up the street to Roger Fox’s house. Victory drove up to the house, but not into the driveway, and Bard looked through the rain at the faintly glowing window on the first floor. 

“Somebody’s home,” he said, feeling the dread build in his stomach. He knew he shouldn’t have been out yet. It had been just over a week since the concussion, but he had spent it in heady company—Kai, at his bedside every day, Kai in his bed, his warm body pressed against his. Bard’s head was beginning to throb already, and he had to wear sunglasses despite the rain.

“That was the plan, yeah?” Victory peered out the passenger side window with him.

“Yes, but it doesn’t make the prospect any more palatable.”

“Who fucking cares about ‘palatable.’ Go in there and get shite done.”

Bard sighed deeply. He traced a drop of rain sliding down the glass.

“I’d drop you off in the driveway, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to see my car.”

“No, I agree. Just give me a moment.”

“Pretend you’re just going in to get our jackets back.”

“What?”

“Kai and I left our jackets inside when we all had to run out. Cassandra’s too, and her satchel. Walk up there pretending that’s why you’re there. It’ll give you a clear objective and take the pressure off. Plus, it’ll throw them off, and you’ll have the advantage.”

“I’m beginning to think you missed your calling in MI5, Vic. Her Majesty’s Secret Service needs strategic minds like yours.”

“Oh, bollocks off, Bard,” Victory said, grinning. “Are you going to go in there or what?”

“All right, then,” Bard said, opening the door. “Unto the breach.”

He turned the collar of his overcoat up, took off his sunglasses, and then trotted up the driveway with his head ducked down. He hadn’t brought his umbrella, and the rain fell through his hair. He pictured the bedraggled mess that he’d be on his father’s doorstep.

Bard looked at the button for the doorbell once he was up to the door. He knew that if pressed, chimes would play the same melody as Big Ben striking the hour, just so utterly bourgeois that the thought of it sent a shudder across his skin.

So he knocked.

He expected the housekeeper, Parmila, to open the door, as she always did the few times Bard and Cassandra had been permitted to visit in the past. She would laugh when Bard called her “Mrs. Khan” and sneak ladoo wrapped in waxed paper into his jacket pockets that he’d find later as his father drove them back to the terrace house on Regent Street. But it was Edith who opened the door. Her face was grayish, resigned, and Bard thought of what Kai had said about her. She was being led through life; she felt nothing. Kai had said it with such pity, though not quite compassion.

Bard felt neither as he looked at her. He and Cassandra represented one of her failures, as far as their father was concerned—his only two heirs, his legacy, bastards born of an Irish secretary. Marrying Edith, having her bear his children, was supposed to have given Roger Fox entry into a world he had not been born into, as she had. He had bought his way there, new money for an impoverished aristocratic family. But Edith had proven faulty, and so Roger was forever standing outside that world. He had no son who went Eton, no daughter to be presented to the Queen.

“I expected you’d be here eventually,” Edith said. 

Her Received Pronunciation was native to her, languid in a way that it never could be from Roger. He fought to maintain discipline over the way his lips formed and his throat clipped each vowel, so he never seemed at ease. Not that ease was natural in a man like Roger Fox, either.

“I’ve come to retrieve Cassandra’s and my friends’ coats,” Bard said. “And Cassandra’s school satchel.”

Edith was too well-bred to outright show surprise, but Bard caught it in a quick quirk of her brow, the lines creasing it momentarily etched deeper. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

“May I come in?” Bard asked after a beat.

Wordlessly, Edith stepped aside and opened the door wider.

“Does Mrs. Khan have the day off?”

“You needn’t concern yourself with our domestic arrangements, Isambard,” Edith said brusquely. “I’ll go see to those coats.”

Bard nodded, his throat terribly dry. Now that he was inside, though, everything was easier than he thought it would be.

“My father is in his study, I assume?”

Before Edith could answer, Bard was walking across the foyer. She followed him, beginning to make an effort to stop him. “Now, Isambard, I’m sure you don’t want to burst in on him unaware; you know how he can be.”

Bard turned, hand resting on the doorknob to the library. Edith’s eyes were on the bruising that was still greenish-yellow on his temple and her hand was held out, slightly, as if she were debating touching him on the arm, trying to keep him from harm in a way that was almost maternal. But it wasn’t enough to soften him toward her.

“I don’t give a sodding fuck how he can be,” Bard hissed, opening the door.

Edith made a quiet, alarmed sound in her throat, but said nothing more.

Through the library—Bard glanced at the books on the shelves. He’d been impressed with them as a child, but he saw now that they’d never been moved from the places where they’d always been, their leather-bound spines uncreased. The rug that he was dripping on now was just as sumptuous as ever, the wood paneling just as dark and rich. Bard understood the rage, then, that must have coursed through Kai when he set fire to his school—that desire to destroy rather than run. Bard swallowed it down, keeping it in him, transforming it to resolve.

He’d ask Kai later, what it was like to feel that anger and act on it, to live life in that kind of unfiltered American way—every emotion at the surface. As much as they could be, anyway. Bard knew that Kai’s feelings ran deeper than he was able to express in words—and that was what he had heard in his voice that night when Kai had sung “Five Years.” That longing and sadness about the tragedy of being human and mortal.

Bard supposed it was lucky for both of them that Kai’s senses were so attuned his feelings, or else there would have never been any of these moments—his hand held in Kai’s in New World, the weeks of his own overwrought agony, the whispered confessions, the kisses, the warmth of somebody solid and present and beautiful. Bard would have gone on feeling and never speaking, wanting and never reaching out, never doing anything had Kai not drawn him forward. And it wasn’t like being compelled to act—it was more that Kai’s utter openness gave Bard permission to do what he wanted to do rather than shy from it.

And here he was, doing something he wanted to do. The realization made his stomach flip-flop, his head whirl, but just for a moment. He regained his bearings as he reached for the door knob of Roger’s study. His hand shook, but he could ignore that—he just needed to be on the other side.

Bard hadn’t planned what he was going to say. He had thought about it, agonized over it, but none of the words he put together had the gestalt he was looking for. He knew he would have to wait until the moment when he stood looking at his father.

And here he was. But he still didn’t bloody know what he wanted to say.

Bollocks.

Roger sat at a round table, his hand around a tumbler with an inch of amber-colored liquid in it. His posture was bowed, his shirt—unbuttoned at the cuffs and neck—rumpled. Bard had never seen him any way but puffed up and encased in suits—the distended emptiness of an iron maiden. Roger said nothing as he raised his eyes and met Bard’s. Roger’s were flat and dull with drinking and what wasn’t exactly resignation. More like the wet ashes of a doused fire. The power had gone out of him. Bard thought of Jude, the mischief behind the intensity of his dark eyes, the human warmth of his palm on Bard’s wounded leg. How different it must be for Kai, knowing that he could go home and find his uncle there to listen to him. Bard silently returned Roger’s gaze, thinking of all the ways his father had failed him, unable to summon any pity for the deflated man sitting at the table.