Page 114 of Pandora

He answers her knock at the door wearing a banyan of his own—this one distinctly more regal and modern—but it falls open at his chest. The skin is smooth, chiseled like a Grecian bust, and Dora blushes, fast averts her eyes.

“Do not concern yourself,” he says tiredly. “You know I won’t touch you. Come in,” he adds, heading back to his chair by the fire. “Shut it behind you, will you?”

She does as he asks, follows him into the room. He gestures at the partnering chair.

“Drink?”

He holds up a decanter. Its content is the color of amber. Whiskey or brandy, she thinks and Dora nods, wanting to feel numb. Mr. Ashmole pours her a generous helping, hands it to her over the tiger rug. She sits.

“You can’t sleep either?”

He rests his head on the chair back. “I can never sleep.”

Dora takes a sip from her glass. Grimaces.

“Rum,” Mr. Ashmole provides.

The fire pops. An ember falls onto the floor, glows for a split second before fading. Edward’s friend stares at her.

“I am sorry about your magpie.”

A beat.

Dora nods.

Mr. Ashmole turns his face, watches the flames dance in the grate. It seems at first he means for them to sit in silence but then he shifts in the chair, lets out a long breath that promises conversation.

“When I came home from the Grand Tour,” he says quietly, “and returned to Sandbourne, I wrote to Edward at the bindery. It belonged to a tradesman named Marcus Carrow back then, a monster of a man, though I wasn’t to discover that for some months.”

Dora cradles her glass.

“I wrote, every week. Never once did I receive a reply. It didn’t occur to me anything was wrong. I thought...” Mr. Ashmole rubs a hand over his eyes. “I thought he’d made new friends, had forgotten our childhood together in Staffordshire. And that made me angry. It hurt me. After all I’d done for him. I’d shared my books, my home. My life. And my father had given Edward the means to make a life for himself, a much better one, but what had Edward done? Taken what he wanted and never looked back.” A smile twists his mouth. He looks at Dora, away again. “You have to believe that’s what I thought. I’m sure it can come as no surprise that I struggled to make friends. I’ve been an arrogant arse all my life. I hated my time at Oxford. Resented being sent to Europe. Oh, I learned the ways of the world, it’s true. I gained a thorough education, moved in all the right circles and I commanded respect, too. I understood how to work the ranks. But I just wanted to be home. With him. And his rejection... it hurt like the Devil.”

Dora watches Mr. Ashmole study the glass in his lap.

“When did you realize you loved him?”

He chuckles low in his throat, but it holds no amusement. “When did you guess? The footman?”

“A little before that, actually.”

In response Mr. Ashmole shakes his head, raises the glass to his lips, and Dora can see by his inability to keep it straight that he has been drinking since long before she came downstairs. He takes a sip of rum, stretches his mouth at the burn, hisses through his teeth.

“I realized when I found him. After what must have been nine months, perhaps ten, I don’t remember now, I’d still had no reply to my letters and I couldn’t let the matter lie. It was stubborn pride that kept me away at first, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. If I’d gone after my first letter went unanswered...” He shakes his head again. “In the end I went to London, sought him out. But he wasn’t there. I couldn’t understand it. Had Edward left? No, sir, not that I recall. Where is he then? Oh, about. About? What does that even mean?” Mr. Ashmole takes another sip of rum. “Carrow was taunting me, didn’t much care that by his very vagueness he became an object for suspicion. But I saw I’d get no answer from him so I left. I rented a hovel of a room opposite the bindery and watched. I never saw Edward, but there was a man—Tobias Fingle as it transpired—who would leave the shop every morning for an hour. And I never saw him without a bruise. After a week, I caught up with him. Demanded he tell me what went on in there. It took three days to get him to speak. I remember how thin he was. It was food in the end that loosened his tongue.”

Mr. Ashmole takes a very long drink from the glass. When he lowers it again, there is only an inch of rum left in it.

“It turns out the bastard beat all the lads under his care—but Edward, him being so small, he got the brunt of it. Carrow worked all of them within an inch of their lives for no pay, and rarely let them sleep let alone eat. Three boys had already died that year, so Fingle told me. He’d had to dump the bodies in the river himself. As for Edward... How he survived all those years I’ll never know. Carrow kept him in a pitch-black wood store for days on end.”

Dora goes cold as she remembers the shadowed spot she saw that day in the bindery. She thinks of the candles in his office, Edward’s hesitance to go down into the basement that first night, his fear of the dark, and she looks at Mr. Ashmole in horror.

“What did you do?”

“Had the authorities come. They arrested Carrow—he swung from Tyburn the next year.”

“And Edward?”

Mr. Ashmole screws his eyes. “Got him out of the store myself. My God, you should have seen him. Emaciated, black and blue. I took him to my father’s town house to recover... You know the rest.”

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