The carriage left him at the foot of the drive, because the ruts past the gate would have finished what the Amphitrite’s splinters had started, and Gideon Trevelyan — seven-and-twenty, three weeks off a frigate’s orlop deck, still faintly the colour of tallow — walked the last quarter-mile to Nansallow House on his own two feet, out of pure stubbornness, his left arm strapped tight beneath his coat and his sea-chest following behind him at a mule’s pace.
His mother wept over him in the hall for exactly as long as propriety required and not one minute longer, which was among the things he loved best about her. His sister Charlotte told him he looked like something dragged backward through a hedge and then put back out to sea. And Mrs. Pascoe, who had run the house since before he could properly remember, informed him that the surgeon would call at eleven the following morning to look at the arm, and that he was not, on any account, to send the man away out of naval pride.
“I don’t recall asking for a surgeon,” Gideon said.
“No,” his mother agreed placidly. “I asked for one. Old Dr. Pascoe is three years in his grave, so you’ll have young Rundle instead — he trained in Edinburgh and came home to take the practice when his father died. You won’t remember him. He was small when you went to sea.”
Gideon did remember him, in fact, in the vague and unimportant way one remembers a neighbour’s child: a quiet, watchful boy who used to sit on the harbour wall with a book while the other boys fought over who would crew the gigs. Gideon had left for the Navy at eighteen, and the boy had been some years behind him, always a little apart from the pack. He had not thought of him again in nine years at sea. There had not been room to.
The boy who arrived at eleven the next morning was not a boy at all.
He came into the small parlour Mrs. Pascoe had made over into a sickroom with a leather case under one arm and an unhurried economy of movement that Gideon associated with men twice his age — men who had learned, the hard way, that panic never made a wound close faster. Samuel Rundle was five-and-twenty, broad through the shoulder in a way that argued against the popular idea of physicians as indoor creatures, his dark hair cropped shorter than fashion currently required, as though fashion had never once entered into his calculations. He set the case down without ceremony and looked at Gideon the way a man looks at a locked door he has been given no key to and intends to open regardless.
“Lieutenant Trevelyan.” Not a question. “Samuel Rundle. I don’t expect you remember me.”
“You set my sister’s wrist. The orchard fence.”
“You remember that.”
“She still complains of the weather in it. I remember being told a boy half my size had done a better job of it than the surgeon we sent for after.” Gideon meant it as an easy thing, a way of putting them both on familiar footing before the unpleasant business began. Rundle’s mouth moved, not quite a smile, there and gone. “You’ve the advantage of me, Mr. Rundle. I don’t recall you being” — he gestured, vaguely, at the whole considerable fact of the man — “quite so large.”
“Nine years will do that.” Rundle was already unwinding the strapping, fingers that did not hesitate over the work, brisk and impersonal, and Gideon understood within the first thirty seconds that whatever this man had been as a boy on a harbour wall, he was, now, entirely serious about the only thing in the room that mattered. “Hold still. This will hurt, and there is no version of it that doesn’t, so I won’t insult you by promising otherwise.”
It hurt. Gideon had been handled by three different surgeons since the splinter took him off his feet on the Amphitrite’s gundeck — the first aboard ship, half-drunk on rum and speed, the second at Haslar, the third at a coaching inn in Bristol who’d wanted paying twice — and he had braced himself, from long practice, for the particular violence of being touched by a stranger. What he had not braced for was the quality of attention underneath the pain: Rundle’s fingers moving over the puckered line of the wound with a focus so complete it verged on tenderness, reading the muscle beneath the scar the way another man might read a chart, murmuring findings to himself — here, and here, that’s the muscle knotting, not the bone, that’s something — as though Gideon’s body were a text he intended to get right rather than a job to be finished.
“Well?” Gideon said, when he trusted his voice.
“The bone knit clean. Whoever cut the splinter out at Haslar knew his business, at least.” Rundle sat back on his heels, studying the arm rather than Gideon’s face, which Gideon found he preferred; it let him breathe. “But the muscle’s shortened round the scar, and the shoulder’s been strapped still for two months, which is two months too long. Left as it is, you’ll keep the arm and lose the use of it — it’ll seize like an unoiled hinge and stay that way. I can prevent that. It will require me to come often, and it will require you to let me hurt you on purpose, which is a different thing from letting a wound hurt you by accident. Men mislike it more, in my experience.”
“How often is often?”
“Daily, for a fortnight. Less, after, if it answers.” He was already reaching for a jar of something from the leather case, unhurried. “You may tell your mother I said so, if you find you need the excuse.”
“I don’t generally require an excuse to see a man in my own house, Mr. Rundle.”
“No,” Rundle agreed, and this time the almost-smile stayed a fraction longer before he bent back to the work. “I don’t suppose you do.”
The daily fortnight became three weeks, and then, by unspoken agreement neither of them examined too closely, simply continued.
Gideon learned the shape of Samuel Rundle’s hands before he learned much else about him — learned that they were exact rather than gentle, which he came to prefer; that when they were working they forgot to be careful of anything but the work, so that Rundle would brace a knee against the daybed and lean his whole weight into stretching the shoulder joint without once seeming to notice he had put himself a handsbreadth from Gideon’s face to do it. He learned that Rundle asked questions the way he set bones — directly, expecting the truth, unimpressed by evasion. Where does it catch. Not where I’m pressing — where does it catch when you’re not thinking about it. He learned that the man had trained four years in Edinburgh on money his father hadn’t had to spare, come home to a practice worth a third of what he could have earned in a city, and would not, when asked why, give an answer that satisfied either of them.
“Someone has to set Penmorrow’s bones,” was all he said, working his thumb along the line of Gideon’s collarbone in a way that made the question, and every question after it, considerably harder to keep hold of.
Gideon, for his part, offered up the easy currency of a man laid up with nothing to do — the American war, the smell of the orlop deck in a running fight, Charlotte’s campaign to see him married off to whichever neighbour’s daughter was currently at home, his mother’s conviction that no man could properly recover from a wound without also being fed into insensibility. He did not offer up the thing he was increasingly aware of: that he had begun, somewhere in the second week, to count the hours until eleven o’clock, and to feel their loss keenly on the one day Rundle sent word he was detained at a difficult lying-in on the far side of the parish.
The nightmare came in the fourth week, later than he’d expected and no less ugly for the delay. He surfaced from it the way he always did — already moving, already reaching for a blade that was not there, his own shout still hanging in the dark before he understood it had been his — and it was Mrs. Pascoe, white-faced in her nightcap, who sent the stable boy running for Rundle at the surgeon’s cottage a half-mile off, because no one else in the house could get near him without being struck.
Rundle came in his shirtsleeves, hair uncombed, and did not touch him at all at first. He simply sat, at a careful distance, in the chair by the window, and said his own name, and Gideon’s, low and unhurried, the way he might have named the parts of an injury, until the room stopped being the gundeck and became, again, a bedroom in Cornwall with rain against the glass.
“There,” Rundle said, when Gideon’s breathing had gone ragged in the ordinary way instead of the other. “You’re home. It doesn’t always feel true. It is true.”
“You didn’t flinch.” Gideon’s voice came out unfamiliar to him, stripped of its easy currency. “Half the house is convinced I’ve come home mad.”
“I’ve sat with worse.” Rundle’s eyes, in the low candlelight, were steady on him in a way that had nothing professional left in it, and both of them seemed to notice this at the same moment. “I don’t frighten as easily as your mother would like to believe.” A pause, weighed carefully. “And I didn’t want to be anywhere else tonight. If that’s a confession, you may make of it what you like. It’s late, and I find I haven’t the strength left to dress it up as anything else.”
Gideon looked at him for a long moment — the borrowed candlelight, the shirt open at the throat, the steadiness that had not once, in four weeks, wavered in front of him until just now — and understood that whatever this was, it had stopped being containable inside the shape of doctor and patient some time ago, and neither of them had said so aloud because saying so aloud would make it a thing that had to be managed rather than simply endured.
He did not say so aloud now, either. But he reached across the space between the bed and the chair with his good hand, and Rundle let himself be caught by the wrist, and for a while that was the whole of it — two men in a candlelit room, holding on, saying nothing that could not be unsaid by morning.
By the sixth week the shoulder had loosened enough that Rundle could raise the arm above the horizontal without Gideon swearing, and by every reasonable medical account, the daily visits should have ended.
They did not end. Neither man remarked on this.
It was Charlotte, in the end, who forced the reckoning, arriving at breakfast with the particular brightness of a sister who has decided to be helpful. “Mama says the Pentreaths have asked us to dine Thursday, and that you’re to be presentable, and that Louisa Pentreath has grown very accomplished at the pianoforte since you went away, which I am given to understand is meant to be significant.” She buttered her toast with great attention. “You could do worse, Gideon. She’s pretty, and her father’s land runs along ours the whole west boundary.”
“I’ve been home six weeks.”
“You’re seven-and-twenty and unmarried and just back from nearly dying twice, once by grapeshot and once by the surgeon at Bristol,” Charlotte said, not unkindly. “Mama isn’t going to wait for a better argument than that.”
He thought of this, unhelpfully, all through that morning’s visit — thought of it while Rundle’s hands moved over the last stubborn knot of muscle at the top of his shoulder, competent and unhurried and entirely too familiar now for Gideon to pretend, even to himself, that this was still about the arm. He thought of Louisa Pentreath’s pianoforte, and his mother’s patient, relentless hope, and the particular narrowness of the life expected of him now the sea had spat him back out: land, a wife, an heir, the slow unremarkable business of becoming his father. He thought, too, of the word for what he wanted instead, which the law had a great deal to say about, none of it merciful, and which would end Samuel Rundle’s practice and his standing and very possibly his liberty a great deal faster than it would ever touch a lieutenant’s family.
“You’ve gone somewhere else,” Rundle said, without looking up. It was, Gideon realised, exactly the question he asked of the arm — where does it catch — turned now on the whole of him.
“My sister thinks I should marry Louisa Pentreath.”
Rundle’s hands went still on his shoulder for one unguarded second before they resumed, careful and even. “A sensible thought, on her part. Good land, I’m told.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It isn’t my place to answer it.” But he had not moved his hand, and his voice, when it came again, had dropped the professional flatness entirely. “I know exactly what I am risking every week I walk up this drive, Lieutenant. I’ve known it since the second week, when I started finding reasons the fortnight needed extending. I am not a fool, whatever else I am, and I’d ask you not to make me one by pretending you haven’t noticed the same thing.”
“I’ve noticed.” It came out rawer than he intended. “I’ve noticed for a month. I didn’t know what there was to be done about it that didn’t ruin one or both of us.”
“There may be nothing to be done about it.” Rundle finally met his eyes, and the steadiness Gideon had come to rely on had a crack running clean through the centre of it. “I have spent my whole life in this parish being careful, Lieutenant Trevelyan. I know precisely what carefulness costs, and I have paid it gladly, because the alternative costs more. I won’t pretend to you that this is a small risk dressed up as a large one. It is a large one.” He stopped himself, and began again, quieter. “I would only say that I have not, in four weeks, once regretted the risk of coming here. Whatever you decide to do with that, I’d rather know I’d said it than not.”
Gideon did not sleep that night, which by now was nothing new, except that this time it was not the gundeck keeping him awake.
He lay in the dark turning over what carefulness had cost a man like Samuel Rundle — a whole life of it, by his own account, paid gladly because the alternative cost more — and what it would cost him to go on being careful now, in the specific way of saying nothing and doing nothing and watching Louisa Pentreath’s pianoforte fill up the space where an honest thing might have gone instead. Somewhere past midnight he understood that he had already made the choice, some weeks ago, without troubling to tell himself; the only thing left undecided was whether he had the courage to act on it before morning made it easy to lose again.
He found Rundle still at the house, in the small parlour, writing up the day’s case notes by a single candle because Mrs. Pascoe had, with what Gideon strongly suspected was deliberate tact, given him leave to finish before the ride home in the wet. He looked up when the door opened, and whatever he saw in Gideon’s face made him set down the pen very carefully, the way a man sets down anything he does not want to knock over by moving too fast.
“You should be asleep,” Rundle said.
“I’ve been asleep for a month. I want to be awake for this part.” Gideon crossed the room — his choice, his legs carrying him there before the sensible half of him could object — and stopped close enough to see the pulse going hard at the base of Rundle’s throat, close enough that Rundle had to tip his face up to hold his eyes. “You said you hadn’t regretted the risk. I find I haven’t the patience left to be careful about the rest of it. Tell me if I’m wrong to be standing this close to you, and I’ll go back upstairs, and we need never speak of it again.”
“You’re not wrong.” Rundle’s voice had roughened out of all its professional evenness. “God help us both, you are not wrong.”
Gideon kissed him, then — his doing, his hand coming up to the line of Rundle’s jaw before he had finished deciding to do it, because some decisions, once made honestly, do not require a second asking. Rundle made a low sound against his mouth and answered him without an instant’s hesitation, one hand fisting careful and immediate in the front of Gideon’s shirt as if to prove to himself the thing was actually happening. He kissed the way he worked: entirely present, missing nothing, giving the whole of his attention to the one task in front of him. When he finally drew back it was only far enough to speak.
“Your shoulder—”
“Is the least interesting thing about tonight.” But Gideon caught the hand that came up automatically to check it and pressed it flat instead over his own racing heart, where Rundle could feel exactly what four weeks of careful hands had done to him. “Touch me like a man who isn’t being paid to, Samuel. I’ve been waiting a month to hear my given name in your mouth, and I find I’m no longer willing to wait for anything else either.”
Something in Rundle’s face came loose at that, the last of the caution he’d worn like a coat all these weeks. He got a hand into Gideon’s hair and kissed him again, harder, walking him back until the wall met his spine, and Gideon went willingly, hungrily, working the buttons of Rundle’s waistcoat with his one good hand while Rundle huffed something that might have been a laugh against his jaw and finished the work himself. Shirts came half open rather than off, layers pushed aside rather than shed — the arm Gideon still couldn’t fully trust made anything more a practical impossibility for the moment — and Rundle, even now, even with his mouth gone hot and open against the side of Gideon’s throat, kept one careful hand braced behind the healing shoulder the whole time, protecting it without being asked, as though tenderness were simply the only register he owned.
“Tell me what you want,” Rundle murmured against his ear, an echo — deliberate, Gideon thought, and was undone a little further by the deliberateness of it — of every question he’d asked over that shoulder for a month. “I find I’d rather hear it than guess. I’ve guessed enough already, lying awake over it.”
“Your hands,” Gideon said, low, and put his good hand over Rundle’s where it rested at his waist to show him exactly where. “Everywhere they’ve already been these four weeks. Lower. Without a professional reason in sight.”
Rundle laughed, breathless and real, and gave him precisely that. He worked Gideon’s falls open with the same unhurried exactness he brought to everything, watching his face the whole time for what worked and what didn’t, adjusting without being told twice — and when his hand finally closed around him, bare and sure, Gideon’s head fell back against the wall and a sound came out of him he did not try to muffle, because there was no one left in the house he cared to hide it from. Rundle watched him with an open, hungry attention that had nothing clinical left in it at all, learning him the way he’d learned the shoulder — what made him gasp, what made his hips stutter forward for more, the exact place his breath caught hardest — and returned to what worked without drift, murmuring low, rough approval against his throat, until Gideon gripped his shoulder hard enough to bruise and came undone in his hand, shaking, his forehead dropped against Rundle’s own.
For a moment neither of them moved. Rain went on against the window. Then Gideon got his breath back enough to reach for the fall of Rundle’s own trousers, clumsy and one-handed and entirely undeterred, and found him already achingly hard, already rocking forward into the first touch as if he’d been holding himself in check by main force for the better part of an hour. “Let me,” Gideon said, and it was not a question either, and Rundle’s answer was to bury his face against Gideon’s neck and give himself over to it, hips working into Gideon’s fist with none of his usual careful economy left, undone in a way Gideon suspected very few people had ever been permitted to see. He came with Gideon’s name broken in half against his skin, and Gideon held him through it exactly the way he’d once been held through a bad night: steady, unflinching, not going anywhere.
Morning came grey and ordinary, the way mornings had an unhelpful habit of doing after a night that had rearranged everything. Gideon woke to find Rundle had not, in fact, ridden home in the wet at all, but sat asleep and upright in the chair by the window with his coat over them both, as if he’d meant to leave and simply hadn’t been able to make his body agree to it.
“Mrs. Pascoe will have opinions,” Gideon said, when Rundle’s eyes opened.
“Mrs. Pascoe has had opinions about me since I was nine years old and put a frog in the church font. I don’t imagine this will be the one that finally undoes me.” But he sobered, sitting up, the caution creeping visibly back into his shoulders like a coat he knew he still had to wear outside this room. “I meant what I said. About the risk. It hasn’t gotten smaller between last night and this morning, whatever else has changed.”
“No.” Gideon caught his hand before he could withdraw it, laced their fingers together plainly, in daylight, which felt like the larger admission of the two. “But I find I’ve spent nine years being careful in exactly the way the Navy required of me, and I begin to think I’ve had enough of that particular economy. I’m not proposing we announce it at the Pentreaths’ dinner Thursday. I am proposing that you keep coming up this drive, on whatever excuse you like or none at all, and that we find out together how much carefulness a thing like this actually needs, rather than assuming the worst of it in advance.”
“That’s not nothing,” Rundle said, low.
“It’s not everything, either. I know that.” Gideon brought their joined hands up and pressed his mouth to Rundle’s knuckles, deliberate, unhurried — the same unhurried exactness Rundle had spent a month teaching him. “But I no longer want the version of my life that doesn’t have you walking up this drive most mornings. Whatever we have to call it, to whoever asks. We’ll manage the rest as it comes.”
Outside, the rain had finally stopped. Rundle turned Gideon’s hand over in his, tracing the calluses the sea had left there the way he might once have read an injury, and said, at last, that he thought he could manage that. Then he kissed him again, slow and certain, in the plain grey light of a morning neither of them had to pretend about.
