such prigging tricks

In a public street, Goodsir gazes at another man with a less than scientific eye and gets more than he bargains for.

“Do you know the way to Surgeon’s Hall?”

The young man with red hair is shabbily-dressed but clean; Goodsir has been watching him long enough to note that his boots are polished like mirrors out here in the gray damp and that he carries himself very erect, not slumped to look smaller in his bottle-green coat. (Though it can only have been taken in quite a bit to fit him; it has the look of a secondhand garment.) Perhaps he’s an apprentice tailor by day, or a store clerk someplace; he wears his reddish whiskers trimmed in a scrubby approximation of a beard, but he can scarcely be out of his boyhood. That much by polite reckoning, anyway; the lower classes are pressed into service sooner than those with greater advantages. A lad of nineteen with roses in his cheeks might have a trade and a wife. The two of them have been watching one another while pretending to make their way. Goodsir can only wonder if the man likes what he sees in him.

There is mutual knowledge in the stares they exchange, a mutual comprehension that is difficult to mistake. This stranger has the smallest and loveliest feet he’s ever seen, so slender and well-shaped that you’d mistake them for a girl’s — Goodsir has to suppress a verbal remark, looking him over from head to toe and then returning again to that insolent young face. He’s good-looking enough, rosy lips parted to show crooked teeth, and he wears all the indelible signs of his class on him: his thin build, his dull complexion, even the middling color of his eyes. Queer hungry eyes — pity and intrigue, disgust and desire.

“Of course, it’s not far off. Will you walk with me?”

In the unbroken look that passes between them, Goodsir sees exactly what he will do — what they both will do. How many times has he walked past this fenced park, with all its ruins and mysteries, and never condescended to look its inmates in the face? Haunted men and painted women.

Harry leads him in the exact opposite direction from the Hall, from the street to the cobbled path to the fenced park — the man takes his hand, once they’ve crossed beyond the sight of any stranger in the road behind them, and leads him to a dark little corner designed for lovers’ meetings. The red-headed fellow will have to scrape the mud off his boots, later. Sheltered between tree trunks and hedges, they can conduct their business as men have likely transacted here since time immemorial. The natural historian in Goodsir wants to examine the mosses and fruiting bodies adhering to tree bark and moldering leaves; the natural man wants this experience to be over and done with as swiftly as the pair of them can manage.

The youth has to lift his chin to look Goodsir in the face, and here in the low light, he is openly considering him.

“So what do you want, then?”

“What’s your name?”

“Edward, sir.”

Goodsir tugs off his gloves — the other man finishes the task for him, drawing them off of his hands in a sweet sort of gesture. The tips of his fingers are hot and damp, and they graze Goodsir’s palm like brands.

“Do they call you Ned, or just Edward?”

“They call me what they like, sir.”

Goodsir tries to temper his skepticism at such an ambivalent answer, speaking in a low voice. “Where do you live, Edward?”

“Here and there. I go where the work is.”

From the sound of his voice, he’s a Yorkshireman. Not a tailor, then — perhaps a navvy, or a soldier caught out of uniform. A truant footman. How many wet afternoons has Harry lingered on a wet bench or a busy corner in some other place, privately wishing that some man would approach him first — some gallant trooper or coarse-handed bricklayer who might be persuaded to make an experimental study? All things in life must be paid for.

“Living rough?”

The man casts rueful eyes on him. “Is that any of your business, sir? Begging your pardon, of course.”

“I have money,” Goodsir says. This is too blunt. “I mean to say — you must be far from home.”

A man has more opportunities than a woman to make good for himself after a season or two spent in vice. How many dead men have crossed his dissecting table with their youthful indiscretions behind them now, forgotten forever? How many luckless boys, how many used-up women? Far from home and friendless, pitiable and canny. The red-haired man makes a face.

“You don’t really want to lie down in this weather, do you? You’d ruin your coat. I’ll see to you standing.”

The man thrusts a knobbly hand into his flies, cupping at him where he stiffens. Goodsir gasps, and he presses his whiskery mouth to Goodsir’s throat, working a hot bruise with his teeth and tongue. Goodsir cleaves to him, he kisses and caresses with a guilty hand — the burr of cloth under his palm sends an electric push through his entire body, the knocking of a sharp knee against the inside of his own leg. He is stirring, as suddenly and readily as the shift in the stranger’s disposition had happened — as naturally as the turning of the tide, all the blood in his own body has turned. His flesh runs hot with baffled passions.

The fellow Edward’s tongue presses wantonly into Harry’s mouth, sporting against his own, and it’s as if the youth means to scale him like a mountain — one of his feet hooks around the back of Harry’s leg in a forcible tangle and he clings to Harry’s neck with the arm that isn’t busied tugging at his yard. Goodsir’s back is pressed flush against a trunk that’s likely stood here for a hundred years — the friction against his prick is delicious, and for a moment he can almost forget himself.

The crook of the man’s hand brutalizes him with short sharp strokes. There is remarkable strength in such a slender body, an animal mechanical strength.

“You like this,” he says against Harry’s mouth — not asking, but telling. “I can feel the blood in your prick.”

The sound of that hoarse low voice makes Goodsir’s balls hitch tight. He is close already, terribly close. “Please—”

“I’d like to have you on your knees, or are you too good for that? I’d have it in your mouth.”

His crisis comes pouring out heavy and keenly-felt — afterward, he’s left bloodless and hollowed-out, aghast with himself.

“I’ll have my shilling now,” the youth says, smoothing out his rumpled coat. “You’re a good and generous man. Faith, hope, and charity, they say, but the greatest of these is charity. Will I see you again, sir? I hope so, the nights are getting colder, and I’ve got to look out for myself somehow.”

That’s laying it on a little thick, but Harry can forgive it; Goodsir passes the fellow a few shillings and rummages in his pockets for a handkerchief. What’s the going rate for this sort of thing? For a man’s effort and dignity? Surely no one stands out in the dark and wet for love alone. The man will catch cold out in this weather, sleeping on bridges or on park-benches or in doorways. He must have left his handkerchief in some other pocket — his hands are sticky with spendings, which is a shockingly disagreeable experience, and all this rustling and jingling is setting his nerves on edge.

Goodsir looks up at the sound of a polite cough.

“And the rest of it?”

The youth stands straight now, but with a saucy cant to his hip, boots crossed at the ankles for optimal display. There is a knife in his hand, a folding knife with a blade no longer than a man’s finger. By the look of it, it is very sharp.

Goodsir says, “Oh.”

It registers on him only dully that this is a robbery. The pleasure of his expenditure fades from him only slowly, like the memory of a good cup of tea.

This isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a man alone — next to a beating or a discovery, it’s nothing. He isn’t in the habit of carrying much on his person at the best of time — his pockets are stuffed with papers and books, pencil-stubs and torn tickets. No more than a few shillings at any given time. Nothing such an assailant might want.

“And your watch,” the man says. “There’s a policeman walks these streets, not far from here, and he’d be interested to know what you were doing in the Gardens after dark.”

Such a wiry young fellow must be confident in his prowess to mount such a maneuver against a man larger than himself; he waves the blade around like a pipe-stem, with no especial sense of urgency as if the very fact of it will get him what he wants. It’s more of a gesture than anything else, and Goodsir must comply.

“You don’t know where to put that thing, do you?”

“I could say the same for yourself, old cove.” The man clinches him close, drawing in the knife — something snags on the fabric of his waistcoat. Goodsir stiffens, ready to wrench back this stranger’s arm and assess the damage, but before he can blink the man has only slit the lining of his pocket, and shaken out the coins into his hand.

Mechanically, Goodsir unhooks his watch as he is bidden and hands it over — Edward, if Edward is his name, dutifully secures it in his own pocket and folds the knife away.

“Keep out of the wet, then.” The man grins at him, absurdly pleased with himself for the trick he’s played. Goodsir’s cheeks burn like a schoolboy’s.