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One evening in the late summer of 1897, Raffles and I returned from one of our nocturnal escapades, the like of which I have described elsewhere. I shan’t bore you by describing what was a fairly unremarkable exploit; all had proceeded exactly as Raffles had anticipated, naturally, with the exception of a quarter hour which I was forced to spend hiding in a closet, until the owner of the house had taken himself and his pistol back to bed. I had found myself in tighter corners since I’d taken up with Raffles, but I must admit that I still felt somewhat shaken when we returned to the flat in Earl’s Court.
“A fine night all around, Bunny,” Raffles pronounced, admiring our prizes in the sitting room: a fine pearl necklace, and a gold brooch artfully crafted in the shape of a honeyflower blossom. Altogether, a smaller prize than we had once been used to; but then, we lived within much smaller means than we had then.
I agreed with him absently as I poured myself a whiskey and soda. It had been a struggle against Dr. Theobald to be allowed to have spirits in the apartment at all. He was suspicious that our Mr. Maturin was the unseen hand on the neck of the bottle. If the good doctor hadn’t relented, I’d have been obliged to go through the production of hiding it from him, because I had lately found myself unable to fall asleep without a stiff nightcap to sooth my nerves. That argument would probably have been enough to more easily secure the doctor’s permission, but I hadn’t told him.
“No lasting damage from that posturing ass, I hope?” His keen eye had not, of course, missed the slight trembling of my hands when he and I had met again in said ass’s garden, which I was managing to suppress in the safety of our apartment. He eyed me as I finished my drink and set the glass down on an end table to wash in the morning.
“No harm at all,” I assured him with a light laugh. “I suppose I’m simply out of practice. I was jumping at shadows all the way through.” I stretched, and made a show of yawning. “Tomorrow night to the broker’s, eh? Well, I’m off to bed. Goodnight, Raffles!”
“Sleep well, Bunny,” he called after me. I felt his gaze on my back as I shut my bedroom door behind me.
In the dark of my room, I allowed the mask to fall. A shuddering sigh escaped my lips. We didn’t have electric lights at Earl’s Court, and I couldn’t force myself to cross the room to light the lamp beside my bed. I stood just inside the room, my hands clenched into fists in an effort to stop them from shaking. I squeezed my eyes shut. In spite of the size of the room, for an agonizing moment I was fully convinced that the walls were too close for me to move, and that they were moving still closer. I was going to be crushed, suffocated, and no one would hear me if I yelled for help.
After several deep breaths, the fit passed, and I stumbled to the table beside my bed. I’m afraid I was misleading earlier, in my mention of the scotch which Dr. Theobald had begrudgingly sanctioned. The decanter in the sitting room was shared between me and Raffles, when he had a mind, and even the doctor himself once or twice. Neither Raffles nor the doctor was informed of the bottle which I kept in my nightstand. It was much cheaper stuff, but stronger, and I only pulled it out on nights like this, when a nightcap with Raffles would be insufficient to allow me to sleep. I remained moderate when I could be, and hid my weakness when I could not. I couldn’t bear the thought of Raffles thinking of me as a weak-willed drunkard. As low as I’d fallen in the eyes of the world, I needed to believe that he, at least, held me in the same esteem as he always had.
I drank two more glasses of the whiskey before my breathing became less shallow, and I felt that sleep might stand a chance against my nerves. As I changed out of my clothes and got into bed, I noted that the light from the sitting room still crept beneath the door. Fancifully, as I closed my eyes, I imagined that Raffles stayed awake as a guardian, watching over me and keeping shadows at bay. It was nonsense, of course, but that thought was perhaps as useful as the whiskey was in allowing me to slip mercifully into slumber.
* * *
I didn’t dream the same dreams every night, or even dream at all. Most of my dreams, however, followed a similar theme, which became no less harrowing for its familiarity. Almost always, I dreamed of prison.
I was lucky, upon my return to England in that summer of 1895, because I didn’t stay at Newgate for long before being moved to Reading. I might even have skipped it altogether, had I the cash to post bail, but of course my assets had run dry before Raffles had invited me to join him on his Mediterranean cruise. Still, I was only obliged to enjoy Newgate’s hospitality for a fortnight before my trial, and many are not fortunate enough to leave it so quickly.
I couldn’t afford the sour ale which sustained so many unfortunates through their sentences, but perhaps that was for the best. Some such wretches appeared in the dark corridors of my dreams, sick and bloated and occupying a drunken daze that seemed to be only a different cage. One particular such man had died in front of me three days into my stay, clutching his stomach and cursing me, God, and the wardens who looked on. His jaundiced, accusing eyes returned to my mind frequently.
Newgate is closed now, of course. Seven years since my release, I stood across the street to watch the demolition of its cursed dungeons. The pious voices of charity workers and reformers brought the darkest sins to light, and to the newspapers. My own voice could add little to what has been printed about the horrors of the place: the beatings, the guards, the disease, the palpable stench of death and the agonized voices of the living damned. Only let me say that I cannot imagine a Tartarus more wicked than that prison. Within the streets of our Empire’s greatest metropolis was a veritable hell on Earth, which haunts me still. That any who serve whole sentences there emerge at all is a miracle by the grace of God.
It’s said that the spirits of those who died in the gaol stalk its halls as a great black hound from hell. It hides in the shadows of the prisoners, especially those condemned to death. Men have died of terror before they were brought to the noose, the Dog seizing them in their sleep. In one of the commonest of my dreams, the Black Dog hunts me through the filthy passages of Newgate. The stones beneath my feet are slick with blood, and the air reeks of decaying bodies. There is no sound except my own ragged breath. The Dog never tires, but I cannot keep running. I wake up as its claws meet my back, as its fangs meet my throat.
In another dream, I am in the prison chapel, where the condemned make their final pleas to God. Atop a table before the pulpit, they display an empty coffin as a reminder of the impending. When I dream, I am lying in the coffin. The lid is missing, at first, but I still cannot sit up. A chaplain’s voice booms all around me: "All you that in the condemned hold do lie, prepare you, for tomorrow you shall die,” and though my mouth opens, I cannot scream. Impassive wardens watch my face as they drag the coffin lid over me. I cannot move. “Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near that you before the Almighty must appear.” The coffin nails are hammered into place. I cannot see. I can feel the coffin being lowered, as if into a grave, but it never hits the bottom, just keeps lowering. I cannot breathe. “Examine well yourselves, in time repent, that you may not to eternal flames be sent.” I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. “And when St. Sepulchre's bell tomorrow tolls, The Lord above have mercy on your souls.” I cannot—
“Bunny! Bunny!”
My eyes snapped open, a sob caught in my throat alongside my heart. Raffles was mere inches from my face. His hands gripped my arms tightly. His expression was as fearful as I’d ever seen him look.
“It was just a dream, my dear rabbit, it’s quite all right.”
I shook in his grasp, feeling an iron band wrapped around my ribs, keeping me from taking an adequate breath. Sweat ran down my face and my skin beneath my pajamas, and my cheeks were wet with tears. Later I would be mortified at the state I was in, but at that moment, it was all I could do to clench my teeth against a scream that struggled to escape me.
Raffles was at a loss about how to proceed. He was still dressed from our earlier caper, and was kneeling on the bed, straddling my legs. He had heard me cry out in my sleep, perhaps, and had rushed in to pull me out from the throes of a nightmare. This he had accomplished, but now that I was awake he was visibly unsure of what to do. Seeing him so uncertain was such a rare occurrence that it seemed a shame that I was in no frame of mind to study his expression for later reflection.
Rather hesitantly, he asked, “Are you quite all right, Bunny?”
I badly wanted to say that I was. As the terror of my dream faded, dreadful embarrassment took its place. To think that Raffles had felt he’d needed to save me from my own imagination! I could only manage to nod, however, not speak, and it clearly did little to convince him of my wellness. His hands slid down my arms to hold my wrists, no down allowing him to feel my rapid, erratic pulse.
“I was reading in the other room when I heard you shout,” he explained. His eyes were on mine, but they missed the certainty that usually held me spellbound. He looked almost lost. “At first I thought perhaps our friend from this evening had entered through a window to demand the return of his brooch.”
Such a weak joke ought to have simply gone unremarked in the dark. Instead, I was suddenly, vividly reminded of those terrible minutes trapped in that closet, suffocating, too afraid to breathe. To my profound shame, I sobbed loudly, and began to weep.
If Raffles was nonplussed by my trembling, my tears had him entirely thunderstruck. He released my wrists at once, as though it was his touch which had upset me, and stared in astonishment. I raised my free hands to my face and wept into them, half-hoping I could prevent Raffles from seeing me that way. I was astonished in turn when Raffles reached for me, and pulled me against his chest with his arms around my back, in the way one holds a crying child. My sobs were muffled in his silly striped jumper, and his cheek pressed softly against my sleep-mussed hair.
“Oh, my dear,” he murmured, “if I only knew how to help you.”
For several minutes more, the dual spectres of the prison and the man with the gun continued to haunt me, choking me with a dread I knew was beyond reason but couldn’t banish. Through this, Raffles held me, stroking a hand over my shaking shoulders and whispering soft shushing sounds into my ear. Eventually, my distress abated, leaving me exhausted. I regained the presence of mind to lean away from him. I expected that Raffles—a man who had never leant himself to undue emotion, or empathized with it in others—would politely rise and leave, and that in the morning it would be as if nothing had occurred. Instead, he reached past me to light the lamp beside my bed, and shifted his position so that he was seated on the edge of the bed beside my hip.
“Well now, Bunny,” he said, as I shamefully pulled myself up to lean against the headboard, and wiped the tear tracks from my flushed cheeks. “Will you tell me what this is about?”
That Raffles should see me like this was humiliating; that I’d cried on him, unbearable. Even worse, I saw him look towards the half-empty bottle of whiskey beside the lamp, and knew that that weakness of mine was understood as well. And yet, when he met my gaze again, his eyes held only intent interest. As had always been among Raffles’s finest qualities, there was no pity in the look he gave me. I was in a pitiful state, but Raffles would never be the chap to indulge in the emotion, or to allow me to do so.
If he had pitied me, I might have refused to answer, out of pride. As it was—as it so frequently was, between Raffles and me—I couldn’t deny him. Still, I’d already shown a fearful intimacy that night and attempted to keep my answer brief.
“Only a bad dream, as you said,” I told him, with a self-deprecating laugh that sounded utterly hollow in my ears. “Brought on by our friend with his peashooter. It, well, reminded me of my time in the brig.” Raffles’s brow furrowed, as it did when a lock proved more difficult to crack than he’d anticipated. I tried, again, to laugh off the whole affair. “Goes to show me, I suppose; drinking before bed, and after a fright. Sorry to disturb you, old chap, and just for a bit of nonsense.”
My guileless face, which Raffles so relied upon for our adventures, betrayed me to him as it nearly always did. (The one area where it so far had not persisted since we were schoolboys together, to my continued surprise. I’m sure I wore my adoration as plain as the nose on my face, every time I looked at him.) He touched his fingertips to his chin, his habit when he didn’t have a cigarette in hand, and asked, “Many bad dreams of the kind?”
I’d have lied, if I thought I’d get away with it. “A few,” I allowed, avoiding his steely gaze.
“Hm.” He drummed his fingers on the bedspread directly over my knee; the placement of his hand seemed accidental, until his fingers stilled and squeezed my knee comfortingly. I was rather surprised by this gesture. Since his resurrection, the easy affection and familiarity with which Raffles had once conducted himself had waned considerably. I had missed it, but I remained so grateful that he lived at all, that I accepted every piece of his character as it was, without questioning or effort to change it. His hand upon my knee now felt like an incredible kindness.
After a thoughtful pause, in which Raffles eyed me and I eyed his hand, Raffles spoke again: “One hears dreadful tales about the goings-on in our England’s jails. The Puritans seem to be onto something, in their attempts to shut them down. I doubt that any man has ever emerged from Reading unscathed, old fellow; there’s no shame in it. I dare say I’d have fared worse than you. The strength of your character has always bested mine.” He pressed my knee again, and smiled at me when I raised my eyes. “For all the romantic heroism you try to paint me with, you have always been the better and the brighter of us. I’d have been lost without your resilience more times than I could count.”
“My resilience?” I jerked up my knees to escape his touch; as much as I’d craved it, in the moment I could not stand it. Simply wanting it only emphasized how damnably weak I was. “For eighteen months, Raffles, I cried myself to sleep most nights, and now I cannot sleep without drinking. As you’ve seen yourself, I suffer nightmares like a child. I’m frightened by shadows.” My laughter was piercingly bitter. “I’m as resilient as glass.”
His brow furrowed again—he hated to be contradicted. I pressed on, staring at the bedspread covering my legs. My arms were crossed over my chest, my hands tucked into my armpits to hide how they shook. “There was no speaking between prisoners, you know, in Reading. The guards would beat us if we tried. They didn’t speak unless it was to give orders, and then they only called us by the number of our cells. We were prisoners, not humans. Some days I forgot I had another name than ‘C.3.2.’ I’d sit up repeating, ‘Harry Manders’ to myself until the sun rose, because I was so frightened I’d lose it if I didn’t remind myself,” I whispered. My vision blurred with tears again, but I couldn’t blink to clear them away. If I looked away from my quilt, would it disappear? Would the whole room vanish, leaving me back in my impossibly narrow cell? Would Raffles be gone again? “My name was all I had left to lose.”
Raffles was silent for a time, while I strove to collect myself again. At last, he said, in an uncharacteristically charitable tone, “It sounds as if it’s a wonder anyone comes out at the end at all, Bunny, to say nothing of leaving unscathed.” He repeated, with a cool certainty, “There’s no shame to be had in it.”
“I nearly didn’t.”
“What’s that?”
“Come out of it.” In surprise, it seemed, Raffles’s hand came to my knee again. I could not raise my eyes to look at him. “They made it difficult. I could hardly expect to find a gun in my cell, after all. But I thought of starving myself, which wouldn’t have been much effort on my part. But I couldn’t stand how long it would have taken.
“When I was released, of course, a gun would have been easy enough to come by, or a noose. I very nearly…”
His grip upon my knee tightened, and his voice became strained. “What kept you from it?”
At last, I looked up at him. He looked fairly stricken, and seeing him in pain compelled me to place my hand over his; to remind him, perhaps, of my continued vitality. “You did, naturally.”
“Me?”
“When I came near to it, my finger on the trigger, if you will, I remembered that night, all those years ago. I remembered the way you looked at me. There was no sympathy, or horror. Had there been, I’d have done it, I think, but you have never allowed me to wallow in self-pity. I could almost hear your voice in my ear, reprimanding me. ‘Bunny, you ass!’”
It was a poor joke—the only kind I seemed capable of making, in those days—and only served to cause Raffles to blanch further. Guilt seized me, even as Raffles freed his hand from beneath mine and gripped my shoulders.
“No horror, Bunny? Do you think I wouldn’t have cared, if you’d gone through with it? Do you think it wouldn’t have mattered to me?”
“You were dead!”
That stung him, I saw. I realized I’d wanted it to.
“You were at the bottom of the Mediterranean, Raffles, and I was at the mercy of the Crown for the crimes we’d done. You’d thought little enough of me then, why should I have given a thought to you? Why should I have given a damn what you’d thought?” I repeated the question not for emphasis, but almost as a plea, though I couldn’t be sure whether that plea was made to Raffles, to myself, or to God. It was a question I’d begged an answer to before; why must I continue to help him, to devote my very body and soul to him, when it was abundantly clear that his loyalty to me only went as far as it suited him? Why must my every word and action be to his benefit, as best as I was able, when he thought so little of benefitting me?
Why, in short, must I love him, when he had never loved me in return?
I was utterly wearied by then, by my dreams and my tears. I ran a tired hand over my face and sighed. “Leave me to sleep, Raffles. There’ll be no more tears tonight to disturb you.”
He withdrew his hands from my person, but made no motion to stand. He sat at the edge of tmy bed, staring rather blankly down at his feet. I considered pouring myself another whiskey. He knew about that now, after all, and I was in a mood to ignore him if he should say anything about it, or even to drink more to spite him.
Instead, I simply continued to watch him. His white hair still caused a pang of loss, but it didn’t detract from the handsomeness of his face, which had changed so little. He still possessed the same sharp cheekbones, the same unscrupulous mouth, and above all the same arresting eyes which I had always loved so dearly. He was not the same man to whom I pledged myself on that fateful March night, but nor had he been so terribly altered. Despite my frustrations and hurt, my heart was still his, as I expected it would always be.
“You’re in the right, Bunny,” he said in a low voice, after several minutes of mutual silence. The words were themselves a surprise, coming from him, but not as much as the wholly vulnerable expression upon those features which I had been admiring. “I have been abominably selfish. I thought so little of what would happen to you, in that mess with the pearl; all I’d bothered to think was of myself, my own escape. I was so vainly determined not to pollute my legacy with prison that I didn’t think of what it would mean to you, getting caught. And then, once I’d arrived in Naples, I gave the whole thing up for loss—Queen, country, and cricket—and told myself it’d be no good to think of any of it anymore. I never gave a thought to what you might be sentenced to, and all for trouble I’d brought on you in the first place.”
I’d no idea what to say to him. I could count on one hand the number of apologies I’d heard Raffles make, and this one felt weighted as few had. There was no trace of either a smile nor a scowl upon his face, only a breathtaking sincerity. He took my hand and pressed it with an intensity matched by his tone when he said, “I’m so terribly sorry, Bunny.”
There was his dear old hand holding mine, an intimacy I’d ached for in these months since May. I couldn’t help but to squeeze his hand in return, and coughed to clear my throat of the sentimental words that sought to break free. “It’s no matter, now you’re back. Only don’t—don’t do it again, Raffles, if you would.”
He chuckled at that, though his expression still held little humor. “I’ve no plans to attempt such a swim again, Bunny, you have my word. Now—” At last, he made to rise and leave. “—let us both go to bed, or when Theobald visits in the afternoon he’ll drug me to the gills when he sees I haven’t slept.”
As he stood, however, I found I could not let go of his hand. My fingers wrapped around his wrist; beneath my fingertips, I could feel his pulse. His heart beat steadily, but I had a frightening, foolish notion that if I were to relinquish my old on him, it would cease completely.
Raffles looked down at me curiously, not trying to shake my hand loose. “Bunny?”
I pressed my fingertips more firmly against that place on his wrist that assured me he was still alive, still with me. “Promise me, Raffles,” I blurted out, surprising myself with my fervor. “Please, promise me you won’t die again. I couldn’t bear it a second time. I couldn’t bear it the first.”
(I didn’t notice, at the time, that he didn’t make any promise. I don’t know if he avoided it on purpose. He can’t have known, then, what the future held. But years later, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the future might have been different, if he had had that promise to bind him.)
I was staring so intently at my hand on his wrist that I didn’t notice him raising his other hand until it was pressed against my cheek. His thumb traced over my cheekbone—sharper than it had once been, as Reading had managed to sculpt away the cherubic fullness of my cheeks that I’d never outgrown—and my eyes fluttered closed. It was entirely too telling a reaction, I knew, but I’d already bared my nightmares to Raffles. I would allow myself to indulge in my better dreams, however fleetingly. I didn’t have the strength to resist. With my eyes so closed, I didn’t see his next action, either, and so I was shocked by the touch of his lips on mine.
He was gentler, first, than I supposed him capable of. The first soft brush of his mouth caused me to stiffen in surprise, and my eyes to fly open, but he simply brushed another kiss against my slack lips. At a third, I closed my eyes again, and kissed him back.
Gradually, his kisses became firmer, deeper. His hand on my cheek tangled itself in my hair, as I brought my left hand to the back of his neck to pull him close. I grazed my teeth over his full lower lip, and followed with a gentler touch of my tongue. Our other hands remained as they were between us, and I was gratified to feel the acceleration his heartbeat as I poured into each kiss the passion I’d so long forbidden myself to reveal.
Raffles broke away, breathing hard, but didn’t retreat far. His dark, lustful gaze from only a few inches away was an overwhelmingly heady rush. He murmured my name, and I could stand to wait no longer. Hastily, I threw back the bedclothes and rose to my feet, pulling him against me with my arms around his waist and his shoulders. One of his hands fell to my hip, and the other moved restlessly over my face and hair as we continued to kiss until we both were left gasping for breath and flushed with desire.
“Bunny,” he panted against my lips again. He toyed with the top button of my pajama shirt, the movement curiously tentative. His eyes were on his hand resting against on my chest, rather than meeting my gaze.
In that moment of silence, I had the time to wonder. “Raffles,” I asked, “have you never…?”
He raised his face, a slight smirk upon his lips that belied the nervous fidgeting of his fingers. “Not in a very long time,” he confessed. “Not with another man, at any rate. I rather thought I’d got all that out of my system in my school days, when you were my faithful sentinel.” There was the answer to the mystery of his false beard, after all these years, but I didn’t spare a thought at the time to appreciate receiving it. “Since then, I’ve only encountered one man whom I found to be sufficiently…interesting.”
Surer now, Raffles began laying kisses upon my neck and along the line of my jaw. I suppressed a moan as I tipped my head back to allow him more room to do so. Simply to hear him say it, because events as they were unravelling were beyond what I had ever dreamed possible, I asked, “Who?”
Raffles rewarded me with a nip to the hinge of my jaw, and a husky whisper at my ear, “You, you ass.”
I laughed at that, as it felt I hadn’t been able to laugh in years, and, taking hold of his striped jumper, dragged him with me onto the bed.
* * *
Sometime rather later, we lay together in silence, watching the sky outside turning gradually greyer. Raffles was leaning against the pillows, smoking, while I was curled up beside him, my head on his chest and his arm around my shoulders. At one point he hummed a few bars under his breath; some music hall tune I’d forgotten the name of, but which I recognized from a show we’d seen together, years ago. I smiled to myself, and wrapped an arm more tightly around his waist.
Raffles looked down at me with a soft smile on his own lips. “Still awake, Bunny? I’m a scant sleeper by habit, but I’d have expected you to be out like a light.”
I tried not to tense as the thought of sleeping brought on a wave of dread. What if I woke up, to find that this had been a dream? It would be a kinder sort of nightmare than what usually plagued me, but a nightmare nonetheless. I’d dreamt similar dreams in Reading, and they’d done as much to break my spirit as the wardens. Or I might go to sleep, and in my dreams see Raffles reaching for me, too far away, as he sank beneath the waves again. I’d had that dream before, too, too many times to count.
Raffles was watching my face, acute as ever. He stretched over the stub out his cigarette in the empty glass on the table, and shifted around to lie flat with my head now resting on his shoulder. Gentle fingers combed through my hair, and gentle lips pressed a kiss to my forehead.
“Sleep, my dear Bunny,” he whispered, so wonderfully near. “I’m right here.”
I lay my head on his chest, just over his heart, and slept.