A Gentleman's Secret ~ The third novelette from "Different Desire", a Gay Victorian Romance and Erotic novelette collection Read Free Page B

settle and find myself a real buyer. The right collector without a conscience would easily pay ten times more than the blood leeches at the pawnshop on the corner. Of course , I never told Brian of the bracel et; he was not going to share the bounty, since he had scurried off like a flea on a washing day.
    I sometimes looked at the bracelet late at night when I was alone in the kitchen. It was solid gold, remarkably heavy , and it felt almost warm in my hands. It was not really elaborately decorated , but had a set of strange and unfamiliar markings, like small characters with a little imagination, around it. I even tried it on, and it fitted quite nicely around my wrist.
    I could not afford to rent a room, but I rented the kitchen from an Irish family. They had two other lodgers and a horde of ginger-haired children. The father was a tanner and a drunk, but he was never brutal or loud when he came home late at night. Som etimes he would sit down on the wooden kitchen sofa together with me and share the last of his bottle of cheap gin.
    “This was not what I had expected, you know?” he used to mumble in his heavy Irish accent and sigh deeply. He never said anything more than that.
    Well, I can honestly say that I agreed whole-hearted ly . This was not the life I had expected or hoped for either, which made it rather atypical that I did not pawn or sell the golden bracelet at the first opportunity.
    But then things got a little bit stranger.
    First, the little boy, who used to sell newspapers along Holland Park Avenue and who had told me that the house in Kensington had been empty, disappeared. That was regrettably not extremely unusual. And every time a street urchin disappeared, t he rumour was always the same: s omeone swore they had seen a fancy carriage suddenly stop and a beautiful lady step out, crying, “Charles, my dear boy, I have found you at last!” and they would leave together in the carriage. Sometimes the missing street children would show up again, sometimes they would not, and sometimes they would end up at the workhouse for loitering. The fact that they were actually selling newspapers was often plainly ignored. Too many street urchin s in a posh area had to be culled on a regular basis, just like rats, someone had once explained to me. One or two you could tolerate , and then they were even kind of cute. But bring a throng of them , and you had a pest.
    After that, the maid, from whom I had gotten the information about how long the house was going to be empty, suddenly died in a raging fever.
    Then, two days ago, Little Brian got killed when the horses pulling an omnibus down on Oxford Street had suddenly panicked and the driver lost control of the carriage.
    I am not superstitious; however , I will follow my gut feeling, which has saved me more times than I could count. Therefore , I decided to return the stolen bracelet. It might be worth a small fortune; however, all the bad luck associated with the theft was just too compelling. Besides , I wanted to get my dress coat back. I had won it playing cards with a young dandy, and I missed it. I t was almost like a part of me a nd a kind of statement that separated me from the rest of the sorry lot of lower London. I had once broken another fellow’s nose in a spray of blood after he had said an ill-chosen remark about my dress coat, a nd after that, no one around Fleet Street had dared to comment on it again. Also, the weather was miserably cold, and I felt shabby and ordinary without it.
    I must admit I did look forward to g oing back to the white , terraced house in Kensington. I did not know why, really. It certainly did not have anything to do with that handsome but rather pesky gentleman, whom I was unable to get out of my head. Absolutely nothing at all.
     
    *
     
    Carl and the rest of the staff invaded the house a couple of days later. When Carl politely enquired about the broken cabinet and the marks on the carpet, I told him that I had dropped