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John had made it only as far as the corner of Ormond Yard and the Duke of York Street before Raoul caught up with him.
“You are acting like a child, John.” Raoul grabbed John’s sleeve. “Please, wait, and let us discuss this.”
“I can’t do it, Raoul. It’s as simple as that. You are asking me to walk naked and exposed into the lion’s den, to be gored to pieces by his deadly jaws and claws.”
“Don’t you see, this is the only way we can be together,” Raoul said, hurrying to keep up with John, who would not stop. “To remove the threat against your father.”
“How does my exposing myself to him help me?”
“We can figure something out.”
“I won’t do it. If the word is already on the street about his affair, then he will come a cropper himself. Surely that benefits me more, if he is reduced and forced to return to Shorecliff House in ignominy.”
“I don’t see it that way. If this becomes public, and Morvan goes down, he is likely to drag me down with him. I will be exiled back to France, either to a low-level role in Paris or one of the provinces, or lose my career entirely.”
John stopped and confronted him. “So it is up to my sacrifice or yours?”
“John, please. I don’t see it that way.”
“Well, I do. I thought I was making a new life for myself, with my writing and my circle of friends, and you. Now I see it was all a house of cards, ready to tumble at the slightest disruption.”
A world of emotions passed over Raoul’s face. But where in the past he would have reached for Raoul, to make things better with words and gestures, he could not find the courage to do so once more.
“It destroys my heart to say this, but I must distance myself from you. I may already have to suffer slings and arrows because of my father, and I cannot bear to have our relationship, which has been so precious to me, consumed in the oncoming flames.”
He realized that his hands were freezing, and pulled his gloves from his topcoat pocket. Sliding them on, he said, “Let me go, and face this disaster. Should we both emerge in the future, I shall be willing to consider resuming with you. But for now you must consider our affair over.”
With that, John turned once again and continued to walk forward. At least Raoul had stopped following him, and he strode down Piccadilly until he reached Leicester Square. There he paused for a memory of visiting Wyld’s Great Globe as a child, on one of his few trips to the city with his parents before heading to Eton.
He remembered marveling at the hollow globe in the center of the hall, which contained a staircase and elevated platforms. He had only the dimmest grasp of geography then, thinking England, and Cornwall in particular, at the center of the world, and the globe had been a revelation, showing him the surface of the earth and a display of maps, globes, and surveying equipment.
It was now part of a squalid, poverty-stricken area, and John hurried forward, his head down, rejecting the importuning of beggars and prostitutes. How naïve he had been then, he thought. Thinking that the world revolved around him and his family. Now he knew they were all pawns in a larger struggle, one that threatened to destroy him.
And Raoul. He, too, was bound to be brought down by this debacle. Though John could not think about him anymore. He had to focus on how he could keep his own head above water.
Could he retreat to Shorecliff House until whatever fuss was generated over the revelation about his father had died down? No, because his father was sure to go to ground in Cornwall if London became too hot for him to bear. He could not imagine being stuck in the same remote house, however large, with his father, baited like a bear in a trap.
He had some money in his accounts. He could give up the rooms in Russell Square and take to the continent. He had a few contacts in Paris and Nice, and perhaps he could hide with one of them for a while. But where would that lead? Would he be doomed to wander the earth on some perilous odyssey in search of home?
