The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(5)

He opened the door and cast a mournful gaze around the room. It was a tiny space, scarcely more sophisticated than a barn, with flaking walls and a few sticks of battered furniture including a dilapidated bed, a grimy mirror, a crumbling fireplace, and a couple of chairs which looked as if they might fall apart if a fly landed on them. He felt a renewed sense of amazement that life could actually take place in somewhere like this. And yet, had he not known more happiness in that room than in the luxurious setting of the Harrington mansion? If, as he had read somewhere, every man’s paradise was in a different place, his was undoubtedly here, a place he had reached guided by a map not charting rivers or valleys but kisses and caresses.

And it was precisely a caress, this time an icy one on the nape of his neck, which drew his attention to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to fix the broken window to the left of the door.

What was the point? McCarthy seemed to belong to that class of people whose motto was to work as little as possible, and had Andrew reproached him for not replacing the pane of glass, he could always have argued that since he had requested everything be kept just as it was he had assumed this included the windowpane. Andrew sighed. He could see nothing with which to plug the hole, and so decided to kill himself in his hat and coat. He sat down on one of the rickety chairs, reached into his pocket for the gun, and carefully unfolded the cloth, as if he were performing a liturgy. The Colt gleamed in the moonlight filtering weakly through the small, grimy window.

He stroked the weapon as though it were a cat curled up in his lap and let Marie’s smile wash over him once more. Andrew was always surprised that his memories retained the vibrancy, like fresh roses, of those first days. He remembered everything so incredibly vividly, as though no eight-year gap stretched between them, and at times these memories seemed even more beautiful than the real events. What mysterious alchemy could make these imitations appear more vivid than the real thing? The answer was obvious: the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole.





2


The first time their eyes met, she was not even there. Andrew had fallen in love with Marie without needing to have her in front of him, and to him this felt as romantic as it did paradoxical. The event had occurred at his uncle’s mansion in Queen’s Gate, opposite the Natural History Museum, a place Andrew had always thought of as his second home. He and his cousin were the same age and had almost grown up together; to the point where the servants sometimes forgot which of them was their employer’s son. And, as is easily imaginable, their affluent social position had spared them any hardship and misfortune, exposing them only to the pleasant side of life, which they immediately mistook for one long party where everything was apparently permissible. They moved on from sharing toys to sharing teenage conquests, and from there, curious to see how far they could stretch the seeming impunity they enjoyed, to devising different ways of testing the limits of what was acceptable. Their elaborate indiscretions and more or less immoral behavior were so perfectly coordinated that for years it had been difficult not to see them as one person. This was partly down to their sharing the complicity of twins, but also to their arrogant approach to life and even to their physical similarity. Both boys were lean and sinewy, and possessed the sort of angelic good looks that made it almost impossible to refuse them anything. This was especially true of women, as was amply demonstrated during their time in Cambridge, where they established a record number of conquests unmatched to this day. Their habit of visiting the same tailors and hat makers added the finishing touch to that unnerving resemblance, a likeness it seemed would go on forever, until one day, without any warning, as though God had resolved to compensate for his lack of creativity, that wild, two-headed, creature they formed suddenly split into two distinct halves. Andrew turned into a pensive, taciturn young man, while Charles went on perfecting the frivolous behavior of his adolescence. This change did not however alter their friendship rooted in kinship.

Far from driving them apart, this unexpected divergence in their characters made them complement one another. Charles’s devil-may-care attitude found its counterpart in the refined melancholy of his cousin, for whom such a whimsical approach to life was no longer satisfying. Charles observed with a wry smile Andrew’s attempts to give his life some meaning, wandering around secretly disillusioned, waiting for a sudden flash of inspiration that never came. Andrew, in turn, looked on amused at his cousin’s insistence on behaving like a brash, shallow youth, even though some of his gestures and opinions betrayed a mind as disappointed as his own, despite his seeming unwillingness to give up enjoying what he had. Charles lived intensely, as though he could not get enough of life’s pleasures, whereas Andrew could sit in a corner for hours, watching a rose wilt in his hands.

The month of August when it all happened, they had both just turned eighteen, and although neither showed any signs of settling down, they both sensed this life of leisure could not go on much longer, that sooner or later their parents would lose patience with this unproductive indolence and find them positions for them in one of the family firms. Though in the meantime they were enjoying seeing how much longer they could get away with it. Charles was already going to the office occasionally in the mornings to attend to minor business, but Andrew preferred to wait until his boredom became so unbearable that taking care of family business would seem like a relief rather than a prison sentence. After all, his older brother Anthony already fulfilled their father’s expectations sufficiently enough to allow the illustrious William Harrington to consent to his second son pursuing his career of black sheep for a couple more years, provided he did not stray from his sight. But Andrew had strayed. He had strayed a long way. And now he intended to stray even further, until he disappeared completely, beyond all redemption.