He knew he had been aroused by what they were doing together—he blushed as he remembered the hot, hard length of him pressed intimately inside him, remembered his low groan of pleasure as he had seized his buttocks and pulled him closer.
Surely it hadn’t all been a pretence? A confidence trick, designed to distract Albert from his true intentions, to gain his trust and his love and blind him to a wicked, unbearable truth?
But Henry had denied nothing. He had set about organising the men to set up firebreaks, digging trenches around the fire where it had not yet baked the red mud into an impenetrable clay and piling up stones where it was impossible to dig. He had set men to watch through the night to make sure that no sparks from the fire carried on its convection currents to set fire to the camp, his voice steady and sure, his movements decisive, never glancing back at Albert who had stood watching, miserable and bewildered, until the activity had begun to die down, then wandered back to his tent, heedless of the sharp stones cutting the naked soles of his feet.
Albert curled up into a ball on his side. He wanted to believe that Henry would not have done such a thing. He was finding himself a little more in love with him every day, but he did not know what else to think. The facts remained—Henry had published the paper that had ruined his father’s career. He had said that it was a last resort, but Albert only had his word for that, and the crux of the problem was that he did not know how far he could trust Henry’s word. So the man who had ruined his father’s career was now here, at the dig site, where the new hope for that career had been destroyed. Nobody else, as far as he could tell, had that kind of motive.
It seemed as though he had to accept that the man he loved had broken his father’s heart.
Tomorrow, he would speak to him, alone. He would ask him for the truth. And then he would try to put the pieces back together.
There was little for Albert to do by the time dawn broke. Henry and the hired hands had worked through the night to contain the fires, and were down at the dig site attempting to see what could be salvaged.
He found his father in his tent, looking small and sad, holding his cracked spectacles in his hand and trying in vain to clean them with the lap of his untucked shirt. He could barely see without them.
Albert sat beside him in silence for a while, until his father spoke. “I should go down to the dig site and see how bad the damage is.”
Albert shook his head. “At the moment, I think we would only be in the way. Better to wait until the men have come back to camp to rest.”
The old man sighed, and Albert took the broken spectacles gently out of his hand. “I’m sorry, Father. When you told me that Henry Elkington couldn’t be trusted, I—”
His father looked suddenly alarmed and Albert found himself more confused than ever.
“Oh, I don’t think we should jump to conclusions. I don’t think…” His voice wavered and he pressed his lips together, as though he was trying to keep his words inside. “What have I done?”
Albert folded the spectacles up and put them in his waistcoat pocket. “Don’t worry, Father. I won’t say anything. Not until I know whether or not your suspicions were…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Not until I know whether or not your suspicions were founded,” he finished miserably.
“What have I done?” the reverend said again, and he put his hand over his eyes.
After long minutes of silence, the misery in the tent so thick that Albert could feel it coating his throat and curdling in his lungs, he decided that action would be the best thing for both of them.
“Well, if we can’t help at the dig site—at the explosion site…” He cleared his throat. “If we can’t help there, at least we can go through some papers, do something useful with our time.”
“Oh! Er…no,” said his father hastily. He gestured at Albert’s waistcoat pocket. “My spectacles are broken. As you know, I can barely see anything without them. Even your face is just a round, pink blur.”
Albert
felt
blurry—adrift and unfocused. He smiled—even if his father couldn’t see it, perhaps he would hear it in his voice. “Then I’ll help you, just as I used to as a boy. My illustration skills might be a little rusty, but I still remember my shorthand. And in any case I think we have some organising to do first.” He gestured to the disorganised piles of papers spilling off his father’s orange-crate work table onto the dusty floor around it. “Did you just sweep all your relevant papers into a trunk, then upend it once you reached your tent?”
He had thought a little gentle levity might cheer his father up. But his face took on an indescribable expression and he snapped, “I can manage myself, thank you. I’m not completely incompetent, you know.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“An error… A mistake… I
am
an honest, thorough man of science. I
will
come back from this.”
“Of course—”
“Through hard work. Through genuine talent. Not by trickery.”
“Father, I only meant…” Albert trailed off as his father turned his face away from him, petulant and dismissive. He laid a hand on his shoulder and felt the tension there. “I think perhaps I should leave you for a while,” he said. “Try to get some rest. Things will look better afterwards.”
He glanced back as he left the tent. His father was sitting with his head sunk into his hands, taking deep, shuddering breaths as if to calm himself. Or perhaps he was weeping.
Albert understood his father’s distress. They had all been shocked by the blast, and his father was the one whose career had been invested in the specimen that was now so much rubble and soot. But something puzzled him, a single word that kept reverberating in his mind, making no sense in the context of the facts as he knew them.
What had his father meant by ‘trickery’?
* * * *
When he saw his father leave the tent as the blistering sun climbed into the achingly hot sky and the day wore on towards noon, Albert slipped back inside.
He felt like a cad, going behind his father’s back like this, but there was something he wasn’t being told—something that was distressing his father beyond the paper on
Streptosaurus boundrii
, even beyond the explosion that had rocked the camp last night and still sent wisps of sooty black smoke into the burning blue sky as the last of the smouldering fires, now contained, died down.
He glanced around the tent, then placed his father’s cracked spectacles gently on the folded-down blankets of his cot. Then he moved over to the makeshift work desk, piled haphazardly with papers. He picked up a handful from the top of the pile and leafed through them, sighing as he saw page after page of his father’s tiny, copperplate handwriting. This could take some time.
It was a good two hours later when he sat back and rubbed his eyes, then stretched his arms up and over his head to relieve the cricks in his neck and back.
Three papers lay in front of him, neatly squared on top of the underlying chaos of the work desk. Albert looked grimly at what he had found. He would have to be stupid—or blindly trusting—not to be able to see the pattern that had emerged.
An account of the Calaveras Skull, a relic discovered in California in 1866, believed to be the oldest known record of human existence in North America. And the newspaper report from only three years later that suggested the whole thing had been got up as a joke on Professor Whitney, the unfortunate gentleman who had publicised the discovery. Still controversial, but widely discredited. A practical joke; a hoax.
A battered and brightly-coloured flier from 1842 advertising the showman P. T.
Barnum’s Feejee mermaid, a curiosity he claimed was a real-life siren but was actually the head and torso of a baby monkey sewn to the tail of a fish and covered in shellac or papier mâché. Grotesque and at least superficially convincing. But a fake; a fraud.
And the third paper. The one that made Albert’s stomach turn over, made him swallow hard. The creature depicted there was the specimen his father had brought them there to extract and take home to England in triumph. Curious, almost complete; something new to the science of palaeontology. And, as Albert flicked through the bundle of papers, a pelvis that matched that of the specimen. A partial skull, from another site entirely, its lines and curves so familiar in his father’s sketch that he might have traced them directly from his www.total-e-bound.com
sketch of this earlier find. Tarsals and metatarsals that, Albert could see now, did not belong with the other bones. All at once the specimen seemed an amalgamation; a chimera.
But that could not be…
* * * *
It was nearing dusk when Henry strode into Albert’s tent. He was filthy, his skin smeared with smuts and red dust, washed clean only where trickles of sweat had run down his temples. He was in his shirtsleeves, his shirt rumpled and sweat-stained, and his fingers were black with soot. Albert had never seen his dapper, fastidious lover looking so dishevelled, and his heart turned over.
Henry seemed seized with a potent vitality, and he strode over to Albert and took him in his arms, crushing him to his chest and pressing his mouth hard against Albert’s. He smelt of smoke and sweat, and excitement fizzed low in Albert’s belly, his cock hardening at once as Henry moved his hands down to clutch at his arse and thrust against his hips, all raw, masterful longing and command.
Albert could not help giving a little groan of pleasure and yearning, but he pushed at Henry’s warm chest, trying to wriggle free.
He managed to draw back only a few inches before Henry took him by the lapels and hauled him closer again. He pushed his tongue forcefully into Albert’s mouth, greedily swallowing his whimpers of protest.
Albert moved his hands to Henry’s shoulders and pushed him, hard.
Henry stumbled backwards, almost tripping over his own feet. “What the devil…?”
Obviously bewildered, Henry searched Albert’s eyes, his brows drawn together. Then his expression changed. His eyes opened wider and his lips parted. His expression of shock lasted for only a moment before it was replaced with one of absolute misery. “No…” he said.
“Albert, no…”
For Albert the accusation, the sense of betrayal, was a real, sharp, physical sensation in his chest. Tears pricked behind his eyes, and he blinked rapidly, holding his breath for a moment as he tried to calm his thumping, uneven heartbeat.
“Is it true…?” he began, feeling rather than hearing the quaver in his voice.
He hated the note of pleading in his own words. Because he didn’t want to believe that his father—the man he had loved and looked up to all his life—had perpetrated the most extraordinary hoax.
And he didn’t want to believe that Henry—upright, clear-eyed Henry—had fallen for it, had believed the dig site held an extraordinary discovery, and had been ambitious enough, wicked enough, to destroy it.
Henry stalked over to him, his eyes never leaving Albert’s, the tension palpable in his straight spine and the set of his shoulders. Then he yanked Albert’s head towards him, taking his mouth in a crushing, brutal kiss. Still holding him in place with a fierce hand in his curls, Henry moved his other hand to take Albert’s upper arm in a bruising grip, pulling him forward so hard that Albert had no choice but to fall against him. When Albert refused to open his mouth, Henry bit him sharply enough to taste blood, pushing his tongue inside when Albert’s lips parted in a little cry of pain and surprise.
Then, with an abruptness that left Albert shocked, shaken and, strangely, bereft, he stepped back, setting Albert away from him, standing with his head lowered, breathing hard.
When he spoke, his voice was so low that Albert had to strain to hear it. “How could you?” He raised his head, his dark blue eyes full of pain. “How could you believe it?”
Albert touched his hand to his lip, and stared at his fingers for a long moment when they came away stained with blood. “I didn’t know what else to believe,” he mumbled, shame-faced. He felt an urgent upwelling of love and relief that threatened to choke him.
“He said he saw you last night…”
Henry stared at him. “You little fool,” he said, not altogether unkindly. “I was coming to your tent. I was coming to you.”
“So you didn’t…?”
“Of course I didn’t!”
Albert had never heard Henry raise his voice before. Not when he had argued with his father. Not when Albert had accused him of deliberate cruelty. Not when he had woken, all innocence, to find himself in the centre of a maelstrom of fire and accusations. But he was shouting now, his usually placid and controlled features lined with anguish.
“Why didn’t you defend yourself?” Albert wanted to weep.
“How could I? Should I have told them that I was on my way to make love to you?
Dawlish knew what he was doing when he made that accusation.” His face twisted into an www.total-e-bound.com
expression of bitter grief. “And it seems he knew his man when he thought that you would believe him, would believe the worst of me.”
Albert’s relief was swallowed up by guilt and regret, and he moved towards Henry, wanting to touch him, to comfort him. But Henry stepped back, moving away from him as though he was caustic, or poisonous.
“How could you accuse me after all we have been to one another? After all we have done?”
Albert felt thick blood rush to his face. “I didn’t mean to accuse,” he faltered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Henry, what else was I supposed to believe?”
Henry’s face had resumed its accustomed stillness, but that quietness, that impeccable, implacable control, was almost worse than his anger. “Anything else,” he said, in a voice that was perfectly steady and perfectly calm. “You were supposed to believe
anything
else. You were supposed to suspect anybody else. Not me.”
“Suspect whom?” Albert began to feel exasperated. He was tired and confused. He had swung from despair to powerful, confusing, reluctant arousal, to relief, to guilt, and he wanted to cry.
He wanted to go to Henry, to lay his head against his chest while he stroked his hair, to tell him how sorry he was and be told in return that it was all right, that he was forgiven.