Serial. A gentleman carries on a secret engagement with his butler.
Part 2 of the Uncommon Partnership series, carrying on from the events of An Uncommon Betrothal. eBook is available to buy, or the serial is free to read online.
Alexos Fox, a disabled gentleman in the 1920s, has been carrying on a secret relationship with his new butler, Harry Sutton, for several months now. As their relationship develops and matures, the two of them are met with both new friends and new challenges – particularly as Alexos’ mother, Georgina, is soon to return from her travels abroad.
“Gosh,” Larry said, a croak in the word as his voice broke on the open syllable, and Alexos didn’t outright sigh, but did exhale subtly from his nostrils. “It’s very, erm… red inside, isn’t it?”
“Larry,” Alexos said in a warning tone, and not for the first time. Not raising his head, he did let his eyes flick up to take the other man in, and he could see that Larry had paled by several shades, his lips abruptly seeming more white than pink. He was well-lit for hovering in the doorway, and not only from behind.
Larry’s friend, Cricket, who was visiting this weekend, didn’t share any of their companion’s squeamishness. Where Alexos was sitting on a tall stool to let him work at the kitchen counter without standing, Cricket had scooted a spare up as close as he could to sit directly on the other side, and he was watching keenly as Alexos gripped the rabbit carcass in one hand and firmly pulled the skin up.
Cricket was holding one of its front paws between his narrow fingers, gently stroking the pad of his thumb over the fur and the tips of the rabbit’s claws.
It was not generally Alexos’ habit to shoot. He was comfortable handling a rifle, but had to shoot from a prone or seated position, which didn’t render his company particularly valuable in a party for shooting birds, but he still shot targets from time to time.
Today he, Cricket, and Larry had sat on a large stone overlooking a field until the rabbits had come out of their burrow – Larry had been plied with some dozen lemon sherbets to keep him from talking, and was now nursing a cut on his tongue – and Larry had had to turn his head away whilst Alexos had broken the shot rabbit’s neck, and nor could he stand to look at the drip as he’d drained its blood into a bucket outside.
“Larry, you read more gory crime novels in a week than I could stand to name,” he said dryly, pushing the skin across for Cricket to fascinatedly examine. Larry still stubbornly refused to sit, and was clinging to the doorjamb as though it was the only thing keeping it up. “Why does a rabbit so deter you?”
“Well, it’s not the same,” said Larry weakly. “This is… red. And so— Bright. Oh, God, Cricket, don’t do that!”
Cricket had delicately poked his fingers up underneath the fur where it was still attached to the rabbit’s head. He had traced the bones and tendons and manipulated the rabbit claws on the paws with great interest and engagement, and was now gently tracing the lines of the rabbit’s vertebrae.
“It’s really not so bloody now, Larry,” he said encouragingly. “And it’s even still a bit warm!”
Larry gulped in a sort of strangled way, mopping his sweating brow with a rumpled handkerchief. His walking cane, normally an ornamental thing, was clasped tightly in his hand, and was supporting him on the side he didn’t have leaned against the doorframe.
Taking back the corpse, Alexos made certain Cricket could see how he twisted the rabbit’s head off and removed it from the carcass, setting it aside. Cricket watched very keenly as he cut the shoulders away, though Larry didn’t – when Alexos spread the carcass’ legs and the broke the hip joints from their sockets, making the bones pop quietly on each side, Larry whimpered through gritted teeth.
“Larry,” Alexos said sharply, holding the knife above the carcass and not yet making a cut to remove its back passage and anal glands. In his periphery, he’d seen Larry sway, and now he saw the other man blinking rapidly. “Cricket—”
He didn’t even have time to get the whole order out, but it hardly mattered – the figure of Harry Sutton, Alexos’ butler and gentleman’s gentleman extraordinaire, broad and strong and powerful, appeared in the doorway and caught Larry underneath his elbows before he could crumple limply to the floor. So quick as his reflexes were, he even managed to catch Larry’s cane with an upward flick of his toe, and grasped it in his hand as he eased Larry onto the padded bench beside the door.
“Oh, dear,” said Cricket, blinking in an owlish manner from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles – he seemed not to have grasped until now that Larry was feeling faint. “Is he alright?”
“In the head, you mean?” sniped Alexos. Cricket blinked, uncomprehending, but Harry quietly laughed, easing Larry’s limp body back against the wall with more gentleness than he really deserved, his lanky legs extended out like those of a flattened spider. “Five times I told his silly arse to take a seat before he fainted dead away, Sutton. You ought have let him crack his head on the stone.”
“Brain damage rarely imparts the lessons we might hope it did, sir,” Harry demurred respectfully, checking Larry’s pulse whilst gently patting the side of his face. Blearily reviving, Larry looked even greener about the gills, but sat up and took the glass of water that Cricket brought over for him and drank greedily.
It occurred to Alexos that Larry would never have lasted if he’d been born even a year or two earlier and was called up to serve in the trenches, and he felt more sympathy than he was wholly comfortable with, watching him fold up ashamedly on the bench. Would he have fled, shot in the back whilst called a coward? No, Alexos didn’t think so – but he might have gone faint at the sight of a wounded comrade, and taken a shot to the face for his trouble.
“Perhaps a walk in the fresh air, sir,” Harry said gently, taking the water away from Larry before he could see the red smudges Cricket’s fingerprints had left on the glass and hiding it behind his back. “I’ll ring the bell for luncheon in half an hour.”
“Righto,” said Larry, needing no convincing at all and angling his head firmly away from Alexos and the island counter. “Erm, what are we having?”
Harry blinked. “I thought Mr Fox was going to braise the—”
“Perhaps just some sandwiches for Mr Kidd, Sutton,” Alexos interrupted even as Harry began to trail off, Larry’s eyes widening, his expression aghast.
After Larry stumbled out, Alexos showed Cricket how the rest of the rabbit was butchered, but he could see Cricket’s gaze was riveted to the remaining bones and skeleton of the carcass. He was far less interested in eating its fruits than he was in studying the specimen.
With a faint fondness – Alexos had met several of Lawrence Kidd’s friends in the past few months, and even having met him only twice before this weekend, Cricket was easily his personal favourite of them – he said, “You can just take it to examine out of doors, you know, Neil.”
“Oh, really? Don’t you need any help, erm, cooking, Alexos?”
Despite the question and his visible eagerness to please, Cricket was already rearing to his feet and reaching for the wet remainder of the carcass on its heavy wooden block but before his hands could close around the rabbit’s spine, Harry’s hand whipped out to block his grasp.
He had been putting Mrs Perry’s previously prepared dauphinoise in a dish to cook – Mrs Perry’s mother was ill, and while she had assented to go and care for her, she had anxiously prepared a veritable feast of dishes for them to cook in her absence. Alexos wished he could believe it was a silly anxiety of hers, but her fear wasn’t wholly unjustified – neither he nor his father would dismiss her, but if Alexos’ mother returned early, she would baulk at lacking a proper cook to attend the household.
Now, he was standing tall and looming over Cricket, casting the younger man into his shadow, and looked quite intimidating indeed. “On the understanding, of course, Mr Vauxhall,” he said, “that these remains will, post-examination, be given directly to myself or to Mr Lloyd. We might bleach the bones with lye for you, if you’d like to keep the skeleton.”
“Oh,” said Cricket, looking torn as he glanced down at the rabbit, worrying his bottom lip. He had a terrible habit of doing it – he wasn’t a bad-looking young man, but for being a little goofy and over-expressive, but his lower lip was scabbed and peeling in places, and the frequent indentations of his teeth had left prominent mark. “Well, I just, erm, you know—”
“Mr Vauxhall,” Harry intoned gravely, “in line with my previous ruling as to maggot-ridden corpses being left in-situ and not carried toward or into the house proper, I cannot permit you to post this corpse anywhere nearby for the purposes of attracting flies or other carnivorous insects.”
“Alright,” said Cricket dejectedly, withdrawing his hands. Alexos stifled his laughter at the astounding misery of his expression – Cricket was no schoolboy, but he might easily be mistaken in this moment for a child of eight instead of a man of eight-and-twenty. “But I may still have the bones, Sutton?”
“Of course, sir, I’ll attend them directly. Why not wash your hands and join Mr Kidd outside? I will assist Mr Fox in preparing luncheon and sound the gong when we’re ready for you.”
Some ten minutes later found Alexos sipping at a glass of white wine and waiting for Mrs Perry’s potato dauphinoise to heat in the oven as Harry washed his hands, having swilled the rabbit bones in their sizzling bucket outside.
“He is a bit of a menace,” Alexos said, “but he is polite.”
“The manners are what make him dangerous,” Harry said in a dry but long-suffering fashion.
In the past few months, these quiet conversations had become commonplace between the two of them – Alexos had always been accustomed to a certain surreptitiously pally relationship with some of the household staff, but the intimacies he shared with Henry Sutton far exceeded those he had ever shared with Harry’s predecessor in the role of butler, his own uncle. Reginald Sutton had, in many ways, been responsible for Alexos’ raising and rearing, and he and the old man exchanged friendly letters, but he didn’t know that the bounds of propriety would ever allow him to be quite so open as Harry was with Alexos now.
“So wide-eyed and unsuspecting as he is you forget to be suspicious of him, and before you know it the house is crawling with insects and arachnids, or hopping with frogs.” Harry clucked his tongue and shook his head disapprovingly, more obviously than he might have done in company – more like a man at liberty than a butler in a household’s employ, who was bound to keep his feelings closer to the chest than Harry did with Alexos.
Cricket – Neil Vauxhall, to his despairing parents and the costermongers he did business with clerking for a grocer’s market in London – was a close personal friend of Larry’s, whom he often stayed with in the city. He was a funny-looking man, average-sized but often seeming smaller and younger than he was because of his habit of wearing jackets too big for him, that he might huddle down in them and fill their pockets with miscellaneous tools and samples. His dark brown eyes were often wide behind his glasses, and this wide-eyed quality was more than physical – like Larry, he was energetic and distractable by his nature, his interest only ever single-minded when he had some sort of creepy-crawly to examine. His rooms, apparently, were dominated by hundreds of moths, butterflies, beetles, and spiders mounted with pins behind glass or preserved in jars, and he only recalled other people’s horror and disgust at such things at the moment of reminding, whereupon he forgot again completely.
“Oh, isn’t she such a dear little thing?” he had asked this morning, holding possibly the largest spider Alexos had ever seen outside of a horror illustration tenderly in his hands. The creature had neither seemed particularly little nor particularly dear to Alexos – it had been trembling in a manner he naturally perceived as threatening as Cricket cooed over it and gently stroked its back. “Scotophaeus blackwalli, don’t you know? She’s terribly soft of fur, Alexos, would you like to touch her?”
“I think not, Neil,” Alexos had said. He had been sleepless and suffering severely for lack of coffee, not prepared for a friend of Larry’s, who rose at noon only if someone insisted on his early rising, to be so bright-eyed and enthusiastic before seven o’clock. “I’ll stick to stroking the dog, if it’s all the same to you. Speaking of, you’d best escort the good lady elsewhere, or Aristaeus will gobble her up.”
He was fairly certain the aged basset hound was reasonably frightened of spiders – certainly, big ones like this one instead of the tiny dots with spindly legs – but Cricket had taken the warning at face-value and hurried off with the thing to release elsewhere.
For all Alexos didn’t much like to be greeted with one of Britain’s own tarantulas just after six on a Saturday morning, he found Cricket’s genuine and loving affection for such small and ugly beasts really quite endearing, and rather enjoyed his complete lack of self-consciousness in chattering about his passions for entomology and the natural world. Many of Larry’s friends were a bit more performative, it seemed to him, or just more calculated in their choices of conversation – most of Larry’s friends were both keener and more strategic than Larry was himself – and Alexos rather appreciated Cricket’s shameless lack of layers.
“Larry said your Valentine is trying to marry him off,” he said now, and Harry turned to look slyly over his shoulder at Alexos as he pushed the oven door shut. Brydon and Felix were out of the house today, part of the shooting party with Alexos’ father and uncle – Felix was learning to handle the guns and assist in the process – and there was a comfortable privacy like this.
Harry stepped closer, and then closer still, closer than a good butler ought, if he valued his position or his propriety – and worse still for the latter, when Alexos offered it to him, Harry took the glass of wine and sipped at it. They often drank out of the same glass, these days, in private.
Ulysses Valentine, who Alexos had yet to meet in person, was a long-time friend of Harry Sutton’s, and a devoted enemy of Neil Vauxhall’s. He was the man of Larry’s illustrator, who Alexos also had yet to meet, but had gathered was another of Larry’s orbit who tended more to conniving by nature more than conversing.
“He heard tell of an acquaintance’s second cousin whose family despairs of her,” Harry said, his lips twitching. “Any moment she gets, her skirts are hiked up so she can go about ankle-deep in pondwater, scooping out spawn and frogs and even fish with her bare hands. Ulysses think they’d be a good match.”
“He thinks a wife might stop Cricket visiting so often, you mean.”
“Mr Fox,” said Harry mildly, “you’re terribly shrewd.”
“Shrewd indeed, and judgemental too,” Alexos murmured, and laughed when Harry kissed him – he tasted the sweetness of the wine on Harry’s lips, a pleasantly tart flavour that Larry had wrinkled his nose at upon tasting it yesterday night, which was why Alexos and Harry were finishing the bottle now. “Is she employed, this girl?”
“Comes from a decent family,” Harry said. “The father is a dentist, I believe, and the other daughter helps out in the surgery. She’s as likely to bring in a tray of tadpoles or newts as she is dental instruments, so she’s as of now banned from his surgery.”
“Isn’t he worried that marrying these two off together will just create a pair of menaces? A pair of menaces, at that, who might breed together and produce even more menaces between them?”
“They aren’t likely to breed in Mr Samuels’ house. So long as they’re elsewhere, I don’t know that Ulysses minds what they get up to or into, whether it’s collecting animal spawn or creating their own.”
Offering Alexos the support of one of his rather warm and deliciously solid arms, Harry carried the stool in his other hand, and Alexos eased himself into the seat again, turning the heat up on the pan.
“I had no idea Larry was a fainter,” he muttered, checking the heat of the pan with the back of his hand before he began to pick up each of the pieces of rabbit in tongs, listening to the satisfying sizzle as he gently laid each of them against the fire-hot cast-iron. “Hasn’t he gone into butcher’s and abattoirs and that sort of place, researching his books?”
“He’s gone into a butcher’s shop, certainly, though I think much the same thing happened there as happened today,” said Harry, pushing a plate of crushed garlic cloves over to him – Alexos hated peeling the fucking things – and then commencing to rummage through the pantry for some cold cuts and cheese to assemble into a sandwich for Larry. “Can’t stand needles either, and faints much quicker at the sight of his own blood.”
“Ridiculous,” Alexos said. “If you looked at Neil and Larry side-by-side in the street, I don’t know that you’d pick Larry for the fainter between them.”
“Appearances are never as they seem. Speaking of…”
“Speaking of?”
“Your mother.”
“I’m acquainted.”
“She’s written with her dates of return.”
“Her dates of engagement, more like. You’d best be ready to go again to war, Harry.”
“This is why I bring up the subject,” Harry said, seeming more concerned than Alexos had expected. As he cut slices of cheese from the block, his strong brow was furrowed in consternation, and Alexos could see that his eyes, which were a handsome forest green colour, looked darker for his narrowing of them, his plump lips similarly thinned. “It’s one thing to speak admiringly or even cautiously of a woman who is, we might say, something of a battle-axe. That isn’t how you speak of your mother.”
“No,” Alexos admitted, feeling himself tense a little in his seat, his bad leg giving a twinge as he shifted in his position, and absently, he stroked his palm over the weak muscle.
It had been the beginning of May when Harry had arrived at the Fox household and taken over his uncle’s mantle, and they were now swiftly approaching the end of October. That made six months since Harry had come to join the household; around three, since they had fully embarked on the more intimate aspects of their relationship.
They had talked of a great many things in their private moments together – about sex and desire, about Alexos’ craft and his interests in the Greeks and Romans and Etruscans and Minoans and all the rest; about tattoos and piercings; about Harry’s long-time affection for and interest in (his descriptor) silly adventure novels; about plays and theatre; about books; about Oscar Wilde; about men; about the war; about machinery; about guns.
(The week before last, Alexos has examined Harry’s service revolver, a Webley Mark IV, and Harry had been rather surprised at Alexos’ comfort and ease in handling it. “My father has one of these, Harry,” he’d said. “This is the Boer War model, after all – I suppose you weren’t lucky enough to get a Mark V. Did many medics have these?”
“It was issued to me for trench raiding – I was a big man, strong, but quiet enough on my feet to work stealthily.”
“Did you kill many men with this gun, Harry?”
“A good few, yes.”
Harry’s tone had been solemn and serious, looking ready for a fight, but Alexos hadn’t been looking for one. He’d just placed the Webley back in its case and passed it back.)
They’d discussed Reginald Sutton at length. He had, after all, been the butler of Alexos’ household for most of his life, and had doted on him, nursed him, taught him, laughed with him – it was Reginald who had been most supportive of Alexos’ studying Classics rather than more modern aspects of English literature, as his mother had hoped for; it was he who had quietly made recommendations of certain underground places, once or twice, albeit places Alexos had always been too fearful to go to; it was he who was the most aware and most supportive of his disability, why there were various aids about the place, like rests for his cane in his various tables and desks, or folding tables, or stools like the one he was seated on now.
As for Harry, Reginald had always been his favourite of his uncles, and not only because they were of a similar lilt toward men, or because of their passing physical resemblance – Reginald had always bought him his favourite books for birthdays or Christmasses, had taught him the use of an invisible ink he used to write secret letters to him even now, mentored him in the importance of secrecy and subtlety, not only as a man in service, but as the sort of man he was.
As for the rest of their respective relations, well. What was there to say about Alexos’ family?
He loved his father, and knew himself to be similar to the man: Patrick Fox was intelligent but scatter-brained, often more interested in his current subject of study than any social engagement, could be insular, but not for lack of confidence. He was also endlessly patient, saw the best in everybody, was warm of nature and liked to soothe any conflict he saw, if he could – Alexos didn’t particularly share those traits.
In those aspects, he was more like his mother: cutting, judgemental, cruel, even, and with a temper to match.
“What’s your mother like?” Alexos asked, perhaps to delay the inevitable.
“Tired is the word that usually comes to mind,” Harry said. “You know there are a great many Suttons about the place – my mother has borne nine of us. I have two older sisters, and one younger; the rest are brothers, one older, four younger.”
“Good God,” said Alexos, not actually meaning to, and Harry laughed as he sliced through Larry’s sandwiches.
“Yes,” he murmured. “It was a busy household.”
“Did any of your brothers and sisters enter service?”
“My sister, Arabella, she’s a lady’s maid in Suffolk for an elderly widow, and my elder brother, Paul, he valets for an Englishman but is generally abroad – the gentleman is some sort of businessman who trades in motors and engines – and I think they’re currently in America. Mostly, though, no – three of my brothers are clerks of one description or other, and the vast majority of my cousins have different skilled trades, are carpenters or farriers or stonemasons, things of that nature. John Edmund, the blacksmith who made various of the devices about the place Uncle Reg commissioned, he’s my brother.”
“And your mother’s tired, you say, from rearing all of these people to their taxing and complex vocations?” Alexos asked wryly, sloshing wine over the rabbit as it sizzled in the pan. “No wonder, Harry.”
“It’s no wonder at all she’s tired, no, we were menaces,” Harry said. “She’s a good woman, I think – church-going, and perhaps a little too biblical at times for my liking, I’ve never been one for scripture – but not unloving, by any means.”
A leading statement if ever there was one. Harry was rather good at those, and was looking at Alexos now as he arranged Larry’s sandwiches on a plate for him.
“It isn’t that my mother is unloving, per se,” Alexos said quietly. “She’s very affectionate with my father – she loves the man to bits, though perhaps not as much as he loves her. I think, as some mothers do, she loves the idea of me more than she does the execution, that’s all. One of her books, if it doesn’t come out quite right the first time, she can edit it or put it aside for a while and come back to it, chop it and change it, make it into something more to her liking. The fact that she could never do that with me has never sat well with her.”
Harry was quiet as he took this in, slowly moving closer and taking up the empty plates the garlic cloves and diced onions had been on, bringing them over to the sink to wash.
“Are you frightened of her?” he asked after an uncomfortably long silence.
Alexos felt the question hit him rather hard, almost serving to knock him out of the chair, and his head whipped about to get a look at Harry’s face, but he couldn’t see it – Harry’s back was to him as he washed up the plates.
“Frightened of her?” Alexos repeated. “No, not at all. She isn’t cruel, or at least, not intentionally – she’s always fiercely protected me from anything she thinks could hurt me. Only— Well. To be quite frank, Harry, she has no idea who or what I am. Any detail she learns about me, she quickly and promptly forgets: in her absence, she replaces any real details with ones she likes better, and is frustrated indeed to find I haven’t worked to match her expectations by the time she comes home again.”
“I know that she disapproves of your mechanical aptitude, and your interest in repairing or taking apart devices; your father has remarked a few times that she’ll be pleased to find you’re making friends, being more social.”
“Yes, well, that might change,” Alexos said softly. “Larry she knows, but she’s never introduced us before, nor even invited him here to a party. She might dislike the idea of us as friends, for whatever reason. None of my social connections are to embarrass her, you see, and being as I am a cripple, a drunk, a dull bastard, and such things as these, embarrassment is easy to come by.”
He watched the line of Harry’s back stiffen under his suit jacket, but he voiced nothing.
“Does she know of your inclinations?” he asked.
“That I prefer to bat than bowl, you mean?”
“Alexos.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. It was uncomfortable to think about, and he gritted his teeth together, because he didn’t think he’d ever actually voiced this out loud before, even to Reginald. Drumming his fingers against the countertop as he began to lift the pieces of rabbit out of the pan and onto some cloth to absorb the grease, he said – quietly enough that he almost couldn’t be heard over the sizzle of the meat – “I know some mothers have suspicions as to their sons being of inclinations like ours, but… Well. The moment the doctor said “polio” to her, I rather think she ceased to think of me as having any potential sexual or romantic prospects at all, man or woman. The idea disgusts her to her very core, or is somehow unthinkable, a cripple going to bed with anybody. She’s always become quite green at the idea, even if it’s joked about at a party, me getting affianced to some girl.”
Harry had turned to look at him now, and his expression was so openly and obviously horrified, his eyes widened, that Alexos felt humiliated, wanted to crawl into the pantry and hide there in the dark, wanted the ground to swallow him up, wanted—
“I’m very sorry,” he said in his rich, grave voice. “You never deserved that.”
Alexos regretted saying anything, and had rather lost his appetite.
“I’ll head upstairs,” he said, “if you want to sound the gong for dinner.”
“Alexos,” Harry said, approaching, but Alexos stiffened, and Harry stopped a foot away from him, his hands up in some gesture of peace, as his palms up, as though to impress upon Alexos that he was unarmed.
“She’ll be here from the third of December,” he said. “And she has rather a few dinners and parties planned.”
“I expect she does, yes,” Alexos said. “She always does.”
“Alexos,” Harry said again, “what can I—”
“Just leave it. Give me— Give me a few hours, and we can come back to it, Harry, but I need to sit for a while first.”
As he stood to his feet, Harry came forward and very gently cupped Alexos’ cheek in one big, broad palm, his thumb stroking tenderly over the flesh. The kiss he delivered didn’t land on Alexos’ cheek or on his mouth, but tenderly landed in the centre of his forehead.
He wanted to shove the other man in the big, broad chest, even knowing that of the two of them, he’d be more likely to the topple to the floor. His hands twitched – he wanted to punch Harry in the lip, in the jaw, wanted to make a black eye blossom darkly on one side of his face, or leave enough blood dripping from his nose or his split lip that Larry would faint again at the sight of him.
The anger burning in him was followed swiftly by a heavy cloud of disgust and utter self-loathing, and when he looked up at Harry’s face, each emotion only multiplied – the impotent fury and the self-disgust each – at seeing how carefully Harry was studying him, his eyes moving back and forth over Alexos’ feature as though to read his mind, his thoughts etched on the surface of his skin.
“What?” Alexos asked, and the word came out like a curse even though he wasn’t swearing.
“I’ll sound the gong in a few minutes – I’ll have Riggs serve you at luncheon, and I’ll go out to assist the hunting party.”
Alexos crumpled inwardly, and his hand went to rest on Harry’s chest. The other man took it very gently, stroking his thumb over the inside of Alexos’ palm.
“I am prepared for your mother, Alexos,” he said. “I was warned in advance, remember.”
“You’ve been warned,” Alexos muttered, feeling too stupid with pointless anger to make his case one way or another, feeling utterly overwhelmed with emotions going too far in each direction, and he drew his hand back even though it made him feel cold and quite alone. “You aren’t prepared, I can promise you that.”
Limping upstairs, he whistled for the dog to follow him into the dining room, and Aristaeus came bumbling in from where he’d been melted before the fire in the sitting room, resting his heavy, drooping muzzle on Alexos’ knees and blissfully accepting the attention Alexos gave to his ears.
Outside, it was starting to rain.
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