FOXES by M A Bennett

Author:M A Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471408601
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
Published: 2020-05-20T13:04:00.447000+00:00

25

Once I’d locked the bedroom door I texted Ty straight away.

Are you ok? PLEASE txt me

I kept checking, but there was no reply. I was pretty tired, as it had been such a long day, but I still sat down with Volpone. Remember, Remember. There must have been some reason why Professor Nashe had been so keen for me to read it.

It was quite different to The Isle of Dogs – for a start, all the action took place in one day. For another, it was set in Venice, a place I didn’t know at all. It was quite a cool story, about a nobleman obsessed with money and status, who was amused by his three so-called friends squabbling over who would become his heir. I couldn’t particularly see how it could be interpreted as an attack on Robert Cecil though. To be honest, I couldn’t see past what I’d mentally called the De Warlencourt Gambit: Volpone faking his own death just so he could screw with everybody, and the squabbling of his heirs over his fortune, and his eventual heir, Mosca, refusing to give up his inheritance. After all, if you’d convinced everyone you were dead, and all your friends and family were mourning you, it would be pretty hard to come out and say, Only kidding!

Wouldn’t it?

I don’t know how long I slept, but I do know that I was wakened, in the dead of night, by a weight on the end of the bed. The mattress sagged, as if someone was sitting on it.

And someone was.

Shafeen, I thought. I’d half expected him. That kiss had been an invitation, as surely as a card pushed beneath a door. Even Henry couldn’t keep us apart for long.

But then I saw the bone-white curve of a naked back, and the blond hair like silver in the moonlight. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘It’s my room.’ There it was, that cut-glass upper-class English voice. ‘Can I get in? It’s jolly cold.’

‘I guess if it’s your room, it’s your bed. Just … just keep your distance.’

He got under the covers and we faced each other, my head on one pillow, his head on the other.

I looked at him, he looked at me. Here was Greer MacDonald, there was Henry de Warlencourt. We didn’t touch. We didn’t do anything, we just looked, each drinking the other in. In the near dark this Henry didn’t look like himself – the gold hair silver, the blue eyes black. This was the Henry from the other side of the Looking Glass, the Henry from the ether. Did everyone look like this in the Valley of the Shadow of Death?

He took my hand. He was warm for a ghost. Then he did something odd. He raised it to his face, found my branded thumb and kissed it. Then it came to me.

I’d done this to him.

I’d let him fall Through the Looking Glass.

I was a Manslayer.

I looked at our hands together, clasped tightly. I remembered then the top of the waterfall – his fingertips grazing mine as he fell back into space.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.