Chapter Text
In four years’ time, as a young man stands before a hushed salon proclaiming, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Benedict’s breath will hitch. Awestruck once again, his knuckles will brush his wife’s hand. Her gaze will follow his touch down to the glass in his hand as he swirls it, and together their eyes will sink into the pull of the amber spiral, dropping down the whirlpool of memory to the depths of the day they met.
{The Artist Adrift}
Waves close over him in this dimly lit room: crests of music, pools of satin, and the gentle, foaming hiss of opium smoke. Benedict is at sea, is swimming in beauty, is drowning in truth. The Demimonde, once exotic and almost painfully thrilling, is now a warm bath of familiar sensation, of sweet wine and scented flesh.
He is here only for a moment, a passing sip of sweet release before the icy submersion into society. At the first invitation, he shrugs himself into a kiss, glad beyond measure to give in to the desire of a moment, heady with brevity. Gladder still when the moment stretches, languorous, Louis’ piercing eyes pinning him to the silken chaise lounge, precisely dissecting, as always, his desire to be anywhere but home. He leaves smelling of spirits and something else, richer and earthier. But society does not recognize the scent of one man on another, does not indulge in the eroticism of brandy-soaked cigar divans, or acknowledge the other lusts that so often arise following the bloodlust of the hunt.
So when he arrives at his mother’s party, she accuses him only of drunkenness, the most mandatory of sins for a bachelor and second son of Mayfair society in 1815. He lets his smile swim dreamily in to reassure her, just a nip of gin, Mother, a twist of tobacco. Nothing to see here of the imp of desire, of the grasping rasp of pleasure, the gulped rush of a lover’s lips in the dark corner of an unoccupied room. His smile slides sideways, souring with the knowledge that, once again, he has disappointed her just enough to go on another day.
But alas, he has not failed well enough and she points him toward the debutantes. He drifts like an arrow flung lazily from a poorly strung bow. His consonants slush with gin, his vowels wobble through laudanum. He aims low, strives to fall short of the target. But the line of ladies gasps as if struck before burbling to life at his platitudes, their bright greetings and tinned compliments not quite drowning out the hasty inquiries and confirmations of his name, his rank, his brother’s title.
Anthony’s earliest advice sloshes softly in his skull, treading water on the intoxicant sea that softens the space between his thoughts and his action. “When you look at them, when you meet them, always think of mother.”
Benedict had choked on horror as much as the measure of brandy. His expression shuddered into a question mark.
“Not like that, you unlicked cub.” Anthony had swatted him then on the back of the head, explaining, “Mother will be watching so be mindful of what she sees. Make your address warm but non-specific. Compliment all of their taste, all of their gowns. Meet each one’s eyes long enough to be polite but not so long as to give anyone false hope. Especially mother. She will see through you no doubt. Give her nothing to see.”
He follows Anthony's advice with none of Anthony’s charm. His eyes are too restless. His grin feels savage and syrupy. His own name follows him, foaming from the mouths of the crowd and he is up to his neck again in a sea of beauty, glittering waves spinning him this way and that, dragging him out to the depths.
And then, a breath.
A woman alone in that crowded room, gazing upon a chandelier in wonder. For a moment, there is silence.