Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(24)

“I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.”

“I shouldn’t worry, dear chap, I am notoriously unsympathetic. But I do strive to be fair. I say again, if you’re worried, come to me.” Glyde drained his glass. “Or, indeed, if you need a listening ear. I don’t claim to be good at that, but I’m probably better than nothing.”

“Why would you?” Saul demanded.

“The War took too many decent people. I find myself disinclined to let it take any more.”

The visiting card gave suddenly in Saul’s hand, folding almost in half. It was thick stock, expensive. He realised he must have been crushing it even as he noticed the sharp line of pain along his finger ends.

Glyde’s eyebrow twitched. “Tut. Allow me.”

He extracted another card and held it out. Saul dropped his in the ashtray and reached for the new, unspoiled one. He took hold of it just as Glyde moved it forward, so the ends of his finger and thumb bumped into Glyde’s. Saul held on; Glyde didn’t let go.

They stared at each other over the card. The touch of skin to skin was so tiny, so trivial, and it tingled through Saul’s hand like a caress.

Glyde’s hazel-dappled eyes were intent, but the only compulsion going on was the one in Saul’s blood, throbbing through fingers and heart and groin. He licked his lips, and saw Glyde’s gaze track the movement, still didn’t dare speak.

“Yes,” Glyde said at last. “Do call on me, should you wish to. I must go. I’d say goodbye but it feels almost inevitable that it will be au revoir. One way or another.”

He picked up hat and coat on that shot and departed, leaving Saul to stare after his lean form. He finished his pint slowly, not really paying attention, and set off home.

That was the strangest conversation he’d had since—well, since any of the other conversations with Glyde. It was the longest he’d had in years with anyone who wasn’t Major Peabody, and those barely counted since they were punctuated monologues. It was also the most painful since his father had informed him he was no longer considered a son.

Glyde had offered help, and even perhaps friendship, and Saul knew that could be a trick or a trap. He’d been caught by his longings before; wanting made you vulnerable, and he was afraid to be vulnerable again. And God knew what the man was playing at with his cloak-and-dagger business. It was eccentricity, or a game—or it was meaningful, which made it doubly dangerous. Saul had been unwillingly caught up in the secret side of the War; he had no desire to find himself dragged back into anything. All he wanted—

All I want is to be left alone. That was what he’d have said yesterday, and meant it. To do no more harm, to risk no more hurt.

But in that conversation he’d wanted something else. He’d wanted—well, he’d wanted Glyde, without question; he’d have come to heel like a dog if Glyde had suggested a back alley, but there was more. He wanted the touch of fingers, and a sympathetic voice, and someone with whom to laugh, or talk, or be silent. He wanted to know that someone thought well of him again; to feel for someone in return. And for the first time in years, he found himself believing that one day he might.

It didn’t make him happy. It hurt like hell, like the agony of blood returning to a long-numbed limb, but, Saul realised, the painful prospect of hoping again was better than the dull knowledge he never would.

They said time healed all wounds. Maybe by the time his handkerchief had rotted away on the cloutie tree, his own gaping wound would have scarred over.

*

Over the next few days Saul took a closer look than he’d have liked to admit at his employer and his work. He couldn’t, when thinking clearly, imagine Major Peabody being of any use to foreign governments. The man was a fool and a fanatic, but surely nothing worse, and he clearly didn’t know anything of value. Nevertheless, Saul looked, so that he could not in future rebuke himself for failing to do so, and perhaps a little because if he had found anything, he could have taken it to Glyde.

He was not going to indulge those thoughts. It was, he’d discovered, very easy to imagine walking into a palatial flat, taking hold of Glyde’s face, kissing him fiercely and wordlessly, sliding to his knees. He could picture any number of acts of pleasure and need carried out in panting, hungry silence, and he did imagine them on his own in his bare room. What he couldn’t imagine was an actual conversation that would lead them there.

The fact was, Saul had lost his nerve. He didn’t trust himself or his judgement, and Glyde had left the pub first. If Saul had imagined the attraction between them—or, because he wasn’t a fool, if Glyde had felt it but chosen not to act—Saul didn’t want to take the risk of being refused. It didn’t matter anyway. If his imagination and his heart were coming back to life, he’d be grateful, and not ask for more. He told himself that very firmly, several times.

Today he was compiling the dossier Major Peabody had requested, into which he defied anyone to read sinister meaning. It was a summary of the various accounts of Geoffrey de Mandeville’s twelfth-century death and burial, on which no two chroniclers seemed able to agree. His corpse had been gibbetted in Temple Church orchard, or he’d hidden in a tree that had broken and dropped him into a sacred well, or he’d simply been killed in battle up near Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. The litany of possible dooms ran through Saul’s head, adapting itself to the tune of ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor’. Hanging off a tree in a leaden coffin; drowned in a well with a tree grown over it; arrow to the eye and lost in fenland; ear-lie in the morning. He didn’t realise he was whistling until Major Peabody walked in.