jude. (thefixer) wrote in repose, @ 2016-08-26 19:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, daniel webster, jude coleman |
Daniel & Jude: tea
Who: Daniel and Jude
When: Recent
What: Surprise tea
Warnings: Nada
The music shop was dark, which was entirely in keeping with an evening late enough that the places open were the diner and the theater and people drifted in between on love’s young dream. It was not, Jude reasoned, entirely breaking in if one knew the person behind the door and every inclination they’d let you in if they were minded to tolerate company. This was of course, rumination not without purpose because he had a handful of worn silver implements looped together on a ring that opened all sorts of doors that ought to be closed. The dark was warm and vaguely sticky and the implements didn’t jangle because he was careful, please and thank you, it wasn’t his first break-in although his first with this degree of care.
He wore a coat counterweighted at the pockets which was light cotton but still entirely too warm, and a thin cotton tee-shirt worn through in places to transparency underneath. Jude liked the heat not over-much because he ran degrees warmer, metabolism ticking over like the low roar of an engine. Which, begging pardon, was not precisely the point, the point was what was in the pockets and he was particularly careful given delicacy of sundries within.
Ceil was no doubt sequestered somewhere within the building but nowhere within sight or sound and Jude contented himself with the fact that Daniel was practically standing invite, given the need to keep cat alive long enough to tease Daniel out of the depths of whatever mood he was drowning in. And it was drowning, or at least not angling to swim out from the depths and his people were nowhere in calling distance. Hello the door, and Jude crouched and worked the shining implements at the door until the lock clicked softly.
“This is,” he announced himself peremptorily, because he didn’t fancy being held up by his throat against a wall for creeping about without proper invite, “A home invasion, but with the best of intentions. Hello, beautiful,” this to the cat, “Aren’t you lovely? This is for you,” he dropped something soft and filled with what had to be catnip to the floor, which rolled, tinkling a bell.
The cat, at first, was the only one in evidence. She was growing bolder these days, hiding at the sound of the door and venturing forth whenever she managed to spy someone she recognized. She was young, but full-grown, with luxurious white fur and a flag of a tail. She was, in essence, a little princess, and wore a pink collar with a very small bell that tinkled in the otherwise ominous dark space. She trotted out from under the bed in the gloom to see what treats Jude had brought, the blue eyes sparks of glass as she watched the ball roll across the floor.
Daniel kept the shades down and the lamps low, so the shadows within the otherwise open space were very long. He had put together some of the unimpressive but serviceable wood shelves that could be ordered online, but there were still boxes of books, old and new, littered all over the floor.
It was not the darkness, but the silence that was most eerie on this particular day. (Daniel usually had music playing, the more melodic and the more absent the percussion, the better he liked it.) There was no coffee or tea bubbling, no pages turning, no footsteps and only, just barely, the hum of the constantly-working air conditioner rendering the air semi-frigid.
The tenant himself was just as silent. When he appeared, it was as if he had stepped from nowhere, because he made no noise. Daniel’s face made it clear that he had stopped caring about the outside world, and what they thought. Jude entering the den, he could expect the lion, and not what he had been pretending to be. Daniel was making no attempt to breathe, or hide his pallor, or blink more than the average lizard. His shadow interrupted a reading lamp near the window, the accompanying chair faced so that he could look out the curtains without being seen by those on the street. When he spoke, it was without the modern flavor of America he usually tried hard to adopt. “What have you brought?”
All signs pointed to something darkly wrong filtering through the air along with a chill that permeated his coat and prickled his skin. Mimi padded out from under cover of gloom and Jude bent because acolyte to high priestess demanded it be so, and ran a fingertip from the soft dome of her head to the tip of her back as she darted after the noisy ball. Noise that would have been lost, please and thank you, under cover of music had there been any playing. But hello, sadness because Jude felt nothing so much in Daniel’s space as that, thick as dust in roves.
He stepped over Mimi with ease and wandered close enough to the bookshelves to run finger over spines, “You’ve grown. Collection-wise that is, I imagine height’s pretty static by now. Hello, sunshine. I’ve a sense that you like me best for what I drag into your domain despite point of fact, my company’s glowing.” Jude had a ready line in warm and comforting patter because he’d come from the house in the woods where Oliver was sequestered and he brought with him the smell of open air, of singed wood and leaves and green, tangled into the scent of paint. He dug fingertips into pockets carefully and liberated new-found thing.
“I’m not delivery-boy today, I’m invited guest, even if I did the inviting.” The ring of the bell rolled around under the table, and Jude carved out of one deep pocket a very delicate bone-china pair of saucers, and from the other, two tissue-thin tea-cups. “Mostly because I’m inviting myself to tea. I’d offer you my book, but you’d only go away and read it and I want company so I came and found it captive. Besides,” Jude grinned bright sunshine in the face of austere bleakness, “You wouldn’t like it.”
It was plain as nobody’s business Daniel had given up pretense of bodily humanity in wholescale abandonment of the enterprise of existence. Jude abandoned any pretense he wasn’t cheerfully irritating presence and nudged up close enough he could peer out the window too. “Have you spotted the red hatted lady and her paramor yet? No? There’s a tale.”
Daniel felt the pull of courtesy and even recognition of affection, and he realized he should have smiled or done something welcoming. He did want Jude there, if only to relieve his own thoughts and the wash of sleep and memories that were easily mistaken for each other. “Hello.” Curious about the suggestion of the outside world Jude brought in with him, Daniel took a breath of woods and air. It was something outside himself he could think of, and he remembered something about Jude’s brother. He didn't know what. A house in the woods, it had been?
Daniel was slow in his thinking, and his dark eyes slid down to what Jude was bringing out without realizing he was doing it. The emotional recoil at the sight of the porcelain was clear, unusual in Daniel’s otherwise sober face. His mouth shook, and he turned his face away. “I do not think anyone is coming. But thank you. Just put it… over there somewhere.” He waved a hand in the middle space, where there was just dust and shadows.
Daniel turned away, toward the kitchen, the way he always did when people came to see him. For some reason, he expected them to be thirsty. “I prefer my own version until I see otherwise. It is more entertaining that way. What book?” As he walked he had to pause for the little belled ball to roll past him, and he nudged it with his foot for the white cat.
The thing of it was (the thing being Daniel and Jude’s long-standing attraction to people or situations who didn’t immediately embrace and welcome his own brand of peculiar, thank you) that Jude knew well enough how to get lost inside your own head. The mazes you put up and built for yourself to run through like a rat were harder to overcome unless something came and showed you the pathway. He watched Daniel flinch like sparks off struck flint, and Jude’s mouth sketched something like sympathy.
“This set’s mine, thank you. I brought it to take tea with you. I thought I could leave it behind if you were sincerely attached to it but I’ve picked out something pink and turquoise for you, to match my chair.” Jude’s own taste in china ran to the old himself because tea tasted all the better from slivers of porcelain but the tea-cups that sat on the table were precious and had traveled the distance from the far-flung city he’d come from to small town Repose. In actual fact, they belonged to all the various Judes that had occurred between there and here but that was beside the point.
“And I am an anyone,” he announced as he looked around for the stereo and clattered noisily on the way over. “I’m an anyone that objects to both darkness and silence. You might withstand it, I call it torture. Hello,” he ran fingers over Daniel’s collection and the tiptilted smile at the rattle of the bell was lost in the plethora of CDs. Jude saved some of his own sunshine for himself. “You’re in the right direction. Keep going until you hit water. I’m taking up space,” he held up a CD case.
“You’ve got three vetoes, and then I choose what we’re listening to. Mimi,” he instructed small, white and fluffy, “You’re on my team. So point of fact, she gets a veto that I will make for her. You’re missing out, sunshine. She’s a passionate sort, our red hat.” He declined to give away the title of the book, partly because it would madden his host if he didn’t.
Daniel sat down at his kitchen table. He spent a good amount of time here, it was clear, and he looked around and saw more of a mess of cups and soup bowls (gone over with a fine layer of gray mold) than had been there before Jude’s arrival. There were books, too, some of them used as placemats, open, closed, propped up and spine down. He made a soft noise of absent-minded discovery, and began to clear off the books. Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History, read one. Spirit possession and exorcism : history, psychology, and neurobiology was the title of another. Daniel packed all these into a careless pile and pushed them onto the counter.
He spread his fingers and ran his hands through his hair, shoving his palms over his ears on either side of his head and finishing with a slow collapse into a kitchen chair. It was perhaps the most human thing he had done so far in this visit, and he propped himself up with one elbow on the back of his chair, hanging from it as if the rest of him was all weight. He looked up at Jude expectantly.
“You would gift me with such a thing, because I would need to keep it. I have had several such gifts. They’re a nightmare, I never know what to do with them. Gaudy things.” He was not chatting; he was speaking his mind, a continual flow of neutral words that meant nothing and were therefore honest.
Resentfully, he added, “If you did not like the dark, or the quiet, then you should have not come here.” His dark eyes gave a faint, ferocious glitter, but it was all gone in the drop of a lash. At least the stack only contained music Daniel owned, and nothing with pounding or electronic screeching. “No voices,” he requested, and looked away toward his books. He resisted asking about the woman in the red hat in a mulish whim.
The kitchen was a state, sorry to say but not impossible to rectify. The house in the woods looked ramshackle on the outside but was neat as ships on the in, saving of course the inevitability of Oliver. Jude had learned long enough of how to take care of house before he had anything like enough years of other people taking care of him but the mold-riddled cups were a soapy-warm sink-soak and all to rights. Which was not, please and thank you, same for the host. Daniel slid like he’d lost all his bones at once into a chair and Jude took opportunity to study fore and aft.
He looked like somebody who’d had strings cut out above. Had he not known the ins and outs of Daniel prior, today would not have been a good day for secret-keeping because Daniel wasn’t trying to keep them tucked inside, which begging pardon, Jude supposed was the point. This was inhumanity sprawled out defiantly for all to see, damning the consequences.
“You love them, on account of who gave them to you, and you take them out each time Aunt Mildred comes to visit to prove you still own them and they’re usable.” No voices, he could work well enough within the bounds set and Jude dug out choice at random and held up the CD case in the direction of the cat.
“Does Madam approve? She approves,” he tossed in Daniel’s direction a sparse second later, “Don’t you, my lovely?” The CD was fitted without difficulty into the sound-system and the room filled very quietly with sound that trickled in at the edges and took care of all that dead air that left the place feeling so desolate.
That took care of the noise. Jude slid toward the doorframe and leaned into the wood with a long, slow smile aimed directly into Daniel’s face. “You mean I can’t bring it with me? You’ll break my heart if I have to sit on my hands and not say a word. I’m incapable, it’d be undue cruelty. Besides, sunshine. You’re not all darkness and gloom.” But he was shut in, and when Jude unpeeled himself from the wood to collect up the dirty tea-cups, he came close enough to look at Daniel further. No expertise in field required of course, but he asked nonetheless. Same voice, same manner of speech, in fact.
“Do you need anything that isn’t tea just at present? Given current sit-in-the-dark circumstances, a man wouldn’t be faulted for wondering whether bodily needs are presently cared for. And you haven’t asked me about the red hat escapades.” He’d gathered cups into his free hand, stacked them like a waiter at an expensive restaurant.
Daniel lived in thoughtless luxury; he had little value for most of his possessions, and it was obvious he had no emotional attachment to the grassy cups or the new books, which had been published only in the last fifty years and bore a certain thin fragility to the paper of which he did not approve. There was already something inhuman about him as he sat there in the abandoned kitchen, and it was not the lack of solid food or the dimness of the lights. It was something else, something a human recognized from back in the woods, where predators came in the night and crept silently forward. That Daniel was neither baring fangs nor creeping suggested he wasn’t exactly on the hunt, but not troubling himself to move, speak or breathe like a human certainly put the hairs on end when the living were around.
He did not comment on the choice, which he found was popular in this century in a way that none of them would have expected of romantic pieces at the time. At least it was quiet, and not overly cheerful, because Daniel was not in the mood for cheerful. He stared at Jude without blinking for about five seconds, looking into his face and wondering if the boy knew what he was offering. “I don’t need anything.” He left it at that, still refusing to parlay about red hats, or be cheered out of his prodigious sulk.
Daniel waved a hand behind him toward the kettle. “You can put on the tea.” Then, after another short pause, he seemed not to be able to resist the argument and said, “It’s not a good idea to overly value gifts. They become burdensome when they can’t be thrown away due to misplaced sentiment.” Daniel turned his chin to look down the room, in the direction of the crates he’d shipped in from Rome before arriving. He hadn’t bothered to open them.
Jude had healthy fear in all places present and correct, thank you. He lived in scrape-grace fashion but looked behind him in the dark and whichways before crossing roads and Daniel’s stillness was unearthly. Far from the man in the bookshop who’d sent peremptory shiver down the length of Jude’s spine (which had at least as much to do with perfectly human characteristics as prehistoric hind-brain quaking on his behalf) this version of Daniel ran Jude’s senses aware in a way that was uncomfortably close to - well, uncomfortable. But given Daniel could rouse himself to imitated humanity, this too was irritation or sadness or some toxic blend of the two that sat in the air darkly worse than mold crawling up the side of teacups.
Which were perfectly serviceable, thank you, subject to soap and water and a steady stomach. Jude had the latter and could apply the former but he looked blithely back at Daniel as if trust were an easy commodity, much flung around like paint. Jude’s taste in books trended to ‘old’ and the Gothic and the romantic slunk in by the backdoor. He’d a crumpled paper-back or two that suggested perhaps more fear, less trust but Jude didn’t move a whisker even if he held out an offer like it was written on rice-paper in the wet.
“Excellent. Given I’m not errand-boy tonight but uninvited company.” Daniel’s kitchen was like most other kitchens if a little more shadowy, and Jude saw no problem in skidding about it as if he owned it; it wasn’t like Daniel was doing anything particularly territorial just at present. The kettle placed precisely on the stove, he looked in the direction Daniel had indicated with intent, given first obvious sign of acknowledged company.
“Sentiment’s rarely misplaced, sunshine. It gets a bad rep, but it’s worth it occasionally now and again. I don’t see why we’re all so scared of feeling things,” he shoved his hands in his pockets and made the stroll over to the boxes, nudging the bell-in-a-ball to rattle to one side as the cat patted after it. “After all, we’re made that way. May I?”
Irritation or sadness seemed not enough to cover it. Daniel was in a state of frozen inhumanity, with still lungs and slow lizard’s blinks. Whenever Jude moved he tracked the movement, almost snakelike, and in the drape of his body over the chair he seemed incapable of effort. But he was still talking, and there were no… extra teeth. In his containment, he had decided to let time pass outside, where it belonged. In here he would stay the same, and he would not care what people thought of it.
Daniel watched Jude move around the kitchen with the efficiency of a maid, and he made no move to get up and help. He was not raised to do that kind of a thing for himself, and it frankly didn’t occur to him unless it was absolutely necessary - which is to say, when he ran out of clean cups. There was another light in the kitchen too, an overhead with a fan, because the apartment had previous, much happier tenants once. There was a switch somewhere behind one of the oversize shelves.
A watched pot never boils, so Daniel turned away to follow Jude’s gaze with more listless blinking. It occurred to him that Jude would never be easy unless he had some puzzle to solve, and it occurred to him that he wanted Jude to stay. He alleviated the quiet, the maze of his mind. Abruptly, Daniel stood up, not graceful but fast, rapid with decision. The cat was playing with her toy, and she bounded out of the way and in pursuit of the bell ball as Daniel crossed the room, passing Jude on his way to the boxes.
“I will show you something you’ll like.” He put four fingers into one of the wooden crates, wrenching under the lid, and pulling upward against the nails. It came free, revealing musty-smelling dry moss and packing from an age gone. Daniel looked at the lid and the black ink label of numbers, and then down into the crate. Handing the lid to Jude, Daniel dug into the box and took out yet another box, plain wood, this one much smaller, polished and big enough for a loaf of bread. He put it under his arm. “Over tea.”
He’d harum-scarum notion that Daniel would sit until the music and the company seeped into his spine and drew him out of the dead man’s sprawl in the chair. Music dug under the skin all the better because it didn’t (begging pardon, so long as your music wasn’t sugar-gum bubble and snap) require engagement in this specific moment out of time. It reeled off years after composition as effortlessly as cotton spooled. The passage of time all the same was how humanity notched off its existence. Jude had no intention of leaving him be, a Miss Havisham with disappointment in people drawn a wider net than lost love.
He didn’t bother with the light just then in the recesses of the kitchen. Light just then would sting his eyes sun-blind and he wanted to keep weather-eye on Daniel for any signifier he was moving. But when Daniel moved with expediency toward the box? Oh, hello hope, nice to see you once again. Jude snaked out a hand to the nearest lamp and the light burst into substance, a soft yellow glow in the pitch of the evening.
Jude’s smile was same echo of sunshine, warm approval in stretch of mouth and steady eyes. Oh, small step. Infinitesimal if you really wanted to be stingy about it but more than he’d adjusted ever-present hopeful expectation to accommodate. “You’re going to indulge my curiosity, excellent, most happy of days.” He accepted the lid, and watched Daniel dig with the fug of old must and dead air coming from the box. “Over tea. Mind telling me why you’re inquiring into possession?” Idly, as he wound his way back toward the hissing kettle; he’d looked of course, at the spines piled up in haphazard fashion. “Or is that a secret?”
This particular music wasn’t doing any digging with Daniel. His eyes were still glassy and distant, but missing any of the euphoria that most addicts wore when they sported a similar expression. He was distracted and slow to comprehend Jude’s words, even if he was listening to him talk, clear in the parade of shadows that moved over his face. Lacking energy but not listless, Daniel took his box from the box with him to the table, and he straightened the chair as he sat down again to the soft tinkle of notes that did not match his mood. Havisham had schemes and sought to freeze herself like amber in sordid vengeance against half of humanity, but Daniel lacked her stamina. He sat down and waited for the sound of the kettle with his hand over the past.
Daniel didn’t turn toward the light. A few hundred years ago he might have, something that happens when you’re flammable and all the light comes from fire, so modernity had that going for it, at least.
Daniel’s dark eyes squinted up at Jude, who was beaming like a skinny Santa Claus. He didn’t much care for that, because he wasn’t playing for a crowd and disliked the idea that Jude might imagine he had some power over him to do what he, Daniel, didn’t want to do. His mouth moved in distaste. “It’s none of your business. Don’t doctor my tea.” In case Jude had any ideas of sweetening the situation.
Jude had no happenstance notion of Daniel mellowed to sweetness, sour discord was however a step or two higher on the scale of humanity from lizard stillness (all things being considered, which Jude did, thank you). Music was not notional marionette strings to draw Daniel into generosity of mood but rather reminder that here we are human, thank you even if meaning of humanity is overly-broad. And Jude’s own mood floated on sea of twinkle-star notes, fortitude found in trappings of brief buoyancy for boy’s own disposition. Jude wasn’t overly abundant with good feeling his own self these days, but never noticeable in present circumstances. Sound and sight and tea, and Jude’s mouth quirked in recognition of well-trodden ground. Displeasure was traction, if only response to irritation.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said promptly. Jude preferred tannin and the delicacy of tea itself rather than stirred in sweetness meant to bury the flavor. “Given you’re host this evening, sunshine, by rights if anyone’s doing any doctoring, it’s you. I like mine black, thanks.” The kettle shrieked from behind Jude’s back and he twisted into the sound with biddable predictability. Jude’s voice floated over steam: “Fair enough.” Peaceable enough on the notion of business and whose it was: Jude didn’t believe Daniel considered himself possessed which meant third party and preservation of secrets was stock in trade.
Thus Jude dropped it, much the way he had the bell in the ball. “You still haven’t asked about the red hat. I don’t think you could invent nearly so good a story as the one conducted under your window. Here,” he re-entered the room with unruffled good humor and a tray full of tea-cups and the smell of fragrant steam, “Tea.”
If there was such a mechanism that led savage beasts to humanity, it was almost certainly music. Daniel might not be an exception in this case, as he was easily charmed by music and musical skill, but many a time the application of novelty was also necessary, and if there was anything difficult to find, it was novelty in the face of hundreds of years of experience. Besides, the man had to be in the mood to be enticed. It was enough that he was tolerating tea.
Again in the chair, Daniel left the box at his elbow and took a cup-on-saucer with easy practice. Years ago he had taken milk, but not now. Now, the darker the better, the hotter the more easy to taste. He eyed Jude over the length of his arm, which he positioned for filling. Rather rudely. “I am not hosting. Hosts send invitations.”
Good Lord, let’s not think about Daniel being possessed. They were all having enough of a time with the puppeteering going on in the antique shop. Anything with the ability to control such a creature as the grumpy thing sitting across the table waiting for his teacup would be terrifying indeed. “I don’t care about anyone in a garish hat,” he added, sneering slightly for added effect. “You need more to occupy your thoughts, Jude.”
He did, did he? Jude contemplated shades and shadows that skipped through thoughts as preoccupied and tangled as cat with ball of twine and laughed, low and private even as he offered smile over teacups. Not me, y’honor, not guilty, although begging pardon but guilt was daily preoccupation. But he’d presumed upon Daniel’s (bad, it had to be said) graces because guilt was left on the doorstep to be collected tidily once done with present company.
Jude preferred the kind of music he played, kinetic rather than a restful occupation but the Debussy was close enough kin to his own flavor of music spread haphazard across the keys at home that he found it suitable background noise. He watched Daniel pour his own tea, black as pitch and squared the teapot once Daniel was ensconced grumpily with teacup in hand.
“True. Except hosts forget occasionally, and have to be reminded by company. It’s all right, sunshine. I don’t mind a lack of invitation, I come anyway.” Jude blew on his tea, and grinned as he sipped. But the sneer was excellent, worthy of admiration and preserving for posterity, Jude gave it rapt attention if only with the smile tucked into the corner of his mouth. “You don’t care about her because you’ve never paid attention. You were going to show me something.”
Certainly, Daniel did not imagine Jude to be guilty about anything. He seemed inquisitive and carefree, like a damned rabbit frolicing through the woods, and it had surprised Daniel to learn that Jude had occupation or life that was not fetching for people, handyman type things that allowed him to peer through other people’s windows and meddle with them over tea. It seemed a distinctly British thing to do, the meddling and the tea, and Daniel gave Jude another suspicious look. His lack of motivation always disconcerted Daniel.
Daniel had his moods, even if the spectrum favored the darker, self-pitying end. Today was not a Chopin mood. The troubling thing was that there was no other music, an absence of mood.
“I noticed that,” he said, dryly, of Jude’s assumption of his welcome. And, as if in counter to this comment, he pushed the box at Jude. “Carefully,” he said, lifting his tea again.
Inside, cushioned in padding of crushed velvet, there was an ovular confection of gold and diamonds, pale ivory upward from a band of bright color around its widest point. The false ribbon was a colour of vibrant mauve--that in-between royal purple and blood pink--brought about by polished enamel, which in turn was supporting a crown of ivory painted with soft watercolor flowers. Standing out against its bed of velvet in a wrapping of inauspicious wood, the egg glimmered with the sheer number of perfectly matched white diamonds, rose-cut and inlaid in curling patterns from its central hinge, almost hidden in the jeweled foliage. It was large enough that Jude would need to cup it in both palms, with green enamel forming spring-like leaf patterns about blood-red enameled strawberries. Tiny seed pearls patterned the strawberry’s seed, and it would take some investigating to open the thing.
Daniel looked at it from under hooded eyes, obscured by the steam from his cup.
Carefree was not epithet attached at the end of Jude’s name, though long did he lavish time and attention on its cultivation, please. Justly proud of earning estimation, Jude’s long fingers set down tea-cup with a quick grin sparked up from the edge of table, gleeful acknowledgment of his own bad manners and the dust-dry intonation of Daniel’s delivery. Smile earned, it bloomed and Daniel pushed box over table as if this was gift enough to make up for creeping gloom and silence and stillness ahead of action.
The tea was forgotten entirely. (Tea an affectation learned from a man who drank it often, which would otherwise loom large in peripheral vision, sense-memory steeped in bad feeling. Jude drank it often enough that no associations unwanted please and thank you, and meddling was honest interest with a side-helping of long-standing knack and line of business).
Jude had art-dealer’s hands for beauty, and boy of woods and ramshackle house was practically not present as he stroked open the box with reverence for contents that glowed with old wealth. He barely breathed, scout’s honor, because what lay in front of him was king’s ransom and beauty fit for old empires long since lost. “Faberge?” a question directed at the confection itself as he swiped hands along the thighs of his pants to remove what oils he could before curling fingers to pluck it from the box.
No prying here, careful for embedded jewels and Jude’s fingers were butterfly-careful, gentle over surface studded. When his fingernail scraped hidden hinge, he exhaled brief grin of triumph and coaxed the creation to open.
“How on earth d’you have something like this locked up in here? This is museum-worthy. Is it on record?”
Daniel nodded his agreement, working the teacup against his palm with evident enjoyment of the heat. Since death, Daniel liked heat, attracted to it in a way he had not been before. It was a suicidal affection, because, after all--he was flammable. “Fabergé,” he agreed, but in a different accent. “An Imperial.” Daniel looked across the table at the glittering confection. It was a piece of molded spring and its bright colors and sparkle were almost obscene in the poor light of Daniel’s grim kitchen.
The egg was empty, the interior clearly sculpted to hold something with two indentations on either side, which had since been separated from its shell. There was a tiny clock, long since still and silent, worked into the lid, visible if the egg was propped open as if for display. It was without peer, a jeweled marvel.
“It’s on record, but I am not. Lost, I think they say.” Daniel smiled faintly, a superior smile. It was grand to have small secrets the billionaires of the world desired so savagely. “These things are bought and sold and left to children, and become ‘lost,’ as they say. We only had paper to keep track of such things then.” He shrugged one shoulder and brought his tea to his lips once more.
Jude took speculative look back toward the box with reluctance to leave go the prize in his hands, but hello treasure-trove, excellent to meet you, long may you stroll through dreams at night. Daniel lived like a criminal with it all boxed into oblivion and Jude liked nice things beyond avarice, he mourned their absence from eyesight.
He caught a hint of somewhere in Europe on Daniel’s palate, a twist of French. The French sold and bought and connived over enough art that Jude had a smattering, thank you, care-of the man who had kept art like this shut within walls for boys to dream over, but grew impatient enough with their qualities that he sold them on in fitful moods. Jude watched what little light there was dance over the table-edge in refractions and breathed as little as he could.
Oh, for the heart of the thing, Jude’s little finger stroked carefully over the depression where no doubt the beauty had nestled. “Why is it incomplete?” He looked at Daniel now, briefly, face very full of the egg in his hands and no charm duly wasted on its owner. “How’d you manage it? Stolen, or family heirloom with known heir sliding off the map? This is millions, sunshine. Millions upon millions, you could buy and sell the whole town over. Why’d you hide it? It’s practically a capital offense.”
“I’m told the seller wanted to keep the portrait. A heart that opened into a clover as well. It fit in there in the middle.” Daniel used the flat of his hand to indicate the depression, where one could imagine something growing out. “More diamonds.” He observed it, head tilted, obviously thinking of where it had been and not showing the respect for its age that Jude did as he held it. To Daniel it was a thing bought-and-sold, as he was far older than it, or its maker.
Daniel looked at Jude’s face and was pleased to see less of what Jude wanted him to see, and more of Jude himself. Daniel liked peeling away the layers of other people, and it improved his mood. “My kind tend to be collectors. You can say I inherited it.” Daniel showed his teeth. Not his real ones, the flat ones, and the effect was not quite a grin, because it wasn’t nice enough.
“I think I read the last one sold for a million and a half,” Daniel agreed. He sniffed. “Inflation.” He gave Jude a sidelong look. “What would I do with a town?” It was the most ridiculous notion he could think of. Likewise the idea he was hiding it. “I’m not hiding it. I am just not advertising it.”
Jude had no magpie’s love of sparkle and shine, his heart rang only for the gems of art, please and thank you. He’d no mind for diamonds, but heart-sore after the portrait he wouldn’t see, the incomplete nature of the thing. To Jude it was pressed-nose against glass, the covetousness of belly-empty hunger. They’d been here weeks and months and art for art’s sake was something locked up in the Capital and Jude without inclination to go solo.
He had layers upon layers like onion-skin and he didn’t mind stripping down a few for the object in hands. Daniel had his own hand of cards exposed and Jude cared not one whit for nakedness in face of beauty. He’d strip further for less, and he set the egg back in its box with a forlorn look of the love-struck. “You mean you killed for it?” That grin said nothing sweetly pleasant about familial memories, “Or d’you mean whoever made you donated to a good cause?” Neither mattered, precisely and Jude’s question was not entirely caring. He’d been given obscene present in handling the treasure of the art-world.
“You’re not putting it on display. You buried it in a box!” Abject dismay with the notion of locking up further artworks, Jude believed art breathed as much as anyone else. “That’s practically criminal.”
Daniel clearly did not understand this love of an item newly introduced, a sugar-like confection of gems and gold, a cherished piece of history for which all who loved it were now dead. He stared into Jude’s face and his own betrayed a stirring of life, of faint curiosity, under the layer of stale mist. “I didn’t say either of those things,” he replied, not elaborating.
“It is not on display,” he agreed. “And it will not be put on display. It is not injured. It’s safe, safe enough, and as much mine as anyone else’s.” He paused for thought. “Even the Russian Empire is no more, and its descendents do not deserve it. It was sold, and sold again, until it was owned by a dead man, and then another dead man.” He shrugged. “It should be displayed because it is beautiful? Why? Waterfalls are beautiful, and the more so if they are hidden.”
Daniel put his hand out and closed the box, the lid snapping down into security, and the glimmer of enamel, diamonds, emeralds and ivory dimming from the silent room.
Jude grieved its loss with the spread of palms, the tidy upturn of fingers before he curled them neatly back into line. Daniel, he was becoming to understand, was dragon with treasure-trove, and he held himself back from looking speculatively at the other boxes upon boxes of possessions buried like the houses under the ashes of Pompeii. “It was made to be seen,” he suggested, tipping his chin into the cup of his palm and observing Daniel from this new-found comfort.
Jude loved pretty things for the magpie rationale of boy who had grown up accustomed to seeking out the pretty in order for the petting and the praise, glitter was excellent guide for small boy without artistic sense of what was decorative and what was expensive and what was both, but he loved with the wistfulness of the soon-parted. He noticed, thank you, the faint traceries of human interest trying to resurrect itself from the stern planes of Daniel’s face, but he said not a word in kind.
“If you’ve some rare Master in there,” he informed Daniel with lazy outrage, “I shall be forced to commandeer it to the next gallery. Did you collect it?” The egg, again. “I’ve a wonder at why people acquired them in the first place. D’you think all those dead men bought it for themselves, or somebody else?” He sipped his tea, idled to lukewarm.
Daniel put down his cooled tea with an air of finality, settling back into his chair and hunching his shoulders to ponder the middle space between them. “It was not made to be seen. It was made for one very wealthy person, and did them little when the world fell apart. Beautiful art is like that.” He shrugged again, the latest in a series, and then blinked across the table at Jude. He was interested to see what this particular carrot might do, and wondered if he saw any light of greed in the young man’s eyes. It can be said that it was something of a test, a prod into character, because the lure of wealth could do strange things to a man. Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov.
Daniel’s eyebrows arched up and down in rapid succession at the vague threat, considering how closely it lined up to his previous thoughts. He didn’t meet it with any threat of his own. “I don’t collect it because it is art, no. If I have it through chance, then I have it, that is all. I don’t pursue ownership, or understand it very much.” He dismissed this analysis of other men with a wave of his hand, flat disinterested fingers.
No speculative and preemptory claim, please and thank you. Jude admired art the way he admired pretty men and women, notional pleasure in their existence and in spending time in respective company. He’d had his fingers smacked sharply when he had been young enough to reach for what was just beyond fingertips, whether it gleamed with easy-discerned wealth or when he’d grown a little to recognize his Boticelli from his Cezane, when it distinguished itself in patina of age. But Daniel looked a little more alive in the dim light (alive being substitution for truth of the fact, obviously) even as he dismissed the whims of men as though they were dust on the flat of his fingernails.
“So it’s not wealth or art or riches that keeps you put,” Jude observed candidly, over tea, “There has to be something you like more than anything else, something you’d go after if it was just beyond your nose. Isn’t there?” He supposed with age came exhaustion with the accumulation of things. “Apart from books.” This now, covetous look under long lashes. “If you’re ever suited to sitting about in the dark in silence, on my honor I won’t disturb you as long as you give me books. Books and sheet music, two things this town runs out of quickly enough to merit runs to the Capital.” He looked content now, with the box put aside and the tea in his hands. The woodsmoke smell lingered as did the vague scent of turpentine, but Jude had lost something of the outdoors air inside the crypt dedicated to dust and shrouds.
And if he were asking with half a mind to find pretty trinkets to seduce Daniel out into the outside world, who was there to know? Jude smiled blithe sunshine.
Daniel’s eyes gleamed a little as he raised them to the ceiling in speculation. “No, there is nothing like that. And it is safer so. To lust for something we can’t have makes us do stupid things, and in my case, such things can end very, very badly.” It was one of the reasons why he was so careful to avoid contact with Temperance, though it obviously hurt her feelings and she thought of the reaction more as fear than caution. Daniel didn’t want to forget himself. That way was oblivion, and madness, and blood.
It was obvious that Daniel had never really encountered a physical thing that he could not reach for and obtain, and so want was something he equated with hunger for people and sustenance. It was a strange juxtaposition that only came to light when he was presented with such obvious wealth. He nudged the box with its golden secret off the table and into his hands.
“I will lend you books. But stop coming uninvited. One day you may take me by surprise.” It was not a good thing, the way he said it, grim and heavy as he pushed out his chair and stood. “Time for you to go. Tea is over.”