May 1914

It was late in the evening when Mathias arrived at the house, the light thickening as the sun began to set and the shadows lying dark along the pathway and clustered among the trees. There was something oddly abandoned about the place. The fountains flanking the driveway spurted up in irregular jets, firing off to an unsettled rhythm like a pair of damaged hearts, and the topiary hedges were untended, overgrowing their patterns and blurring out their own shapes. He paused to light a cigarette and looked around the gardens with disapproval. He had heard of houses like this before – old, decaying houses, dying with their last owners. He had seen things in newspapers, advertisements selling off their contents piece by piece. This was a place where everything was running out – time, money and heirs. And yet here he was, with the letter offering him a job there scrunched up deep in his pocket, hoping to be taken on as an odd-job boy.

Mathias took an irritated sip of smoke and walked on. Such a position was beneath him, that much was certain. A few weeks short of eighteen, he had already spent four years in service at Asterley Hall, a vulgar faux-gothic mansion that gave off an overwhelming impression of rapidly-gained wealth and the status anxiety of the nouveau riche. He had been happy there, second footman and with the prospect of rising further in the servants' hierarchy in the future. Well. So much for all that. An ill-advised entanglement with a one of the gardeners had put a stop to his plans. Caught at it by the butler, his choice had been a rather stark one: leave without a reference, or leave with the police. Hence why he was here, rather lower down the ladder than he had begun, and with nothing to prove his four years of hard work. And all for a few stolen strawberries bruised and warm from being hidden inside his lover's shirt, and for a few kisses soft with juice and pungent with tobacco… He sighed, tossed his finished cigarette into a bush and straightened his tie. It was time to go back into service.

Mathias knocked on the back door and waited for a response, nervously tightening his grip on the handles of his suitcase and looking up at the shrouded windows. So this was Lille Skarstind, or 'the mountain house' as the locals in the village down the hill called it. He pictured the interior of the house as empty, dust thick on every surface and pale dowagers drifting from room to room. His knock echoed deeply through the corridors and then vanished into silence, a few moments passing until he heard sharp, precise footsteps approaching. Swallowing slightly, he smoothed his unruly hair and stood up a little straighter. The door swung open.

"Hello? Ah, you must be the new manservant." The speaker was a handsome man in his thirties, a little shorter than Mathias, with ash-blond hair and a rather severe set to his eyebrows.

Mathias nodded and mumbled, "Yes, sir."

The man gave a restrained smile. "Good, good – you seem to know the drill already," He shook his head. "You wouldn't believe how many servants go round to the front door on their first day," He looked Mathias up and down, as though he could sense that the truth was being kept from him. "You've not been in service before, have you? You didn't mention it in your letter."

"My aunt was a housemaid," Mathias lied. He lied easily and out of necessity. After all, he thought with a hint of bitterness, it wasn't as though he could disclose the circumstances of his dismissal. "But I used to be a labourer myself."

"Very well," the man replied. "I'm Arthur Kirkland – Mr Kirkland to you. I'm the butler here." He extended a hand and Mathias shook it.

"Mathias Køhler." he said, a little surprised. From the style of the letter, he'd expected Arthur to be older, a loyal servant clinging to the remnants of the family that had first employed him.

Arthur led him inside, giving him a cursory tour of the maze of kitchens downstairs. They were far too empty, the distant chattering of two or three female voices the only evidence of other servants. Most of the rooms were unused, the last ashes long ago scraped out of the grates, and half-open doors revealed dark, empty larders.

"Interesting surname you've got there, Køhler." Arthur commented after a while.

Mathias nodded absently, preoccupied by the state of the house. "My father was Danish." he explained.

"You'll be in good company, then," Arthur replied. "The Bondeviks here can trace their family back to Norway. They came over in the 1680s, I believe, in the court of Prince George of Denmark." Arthur's voice had taken on a rather bored tone, like that of a teacher teaching the same curriculum year on year. So they were one of those noble families, Mathias realised – one of those families who, in the absence of a future, glorified their past.

Eventually, they emerged from the kitchens into a narrow hallway which had a door at one end and a bare wooden staircase at the other.

"I'll leave you to get yourself settled in then," Arthur said, looking at his pocket watch with a slight frown. Quarter to eight, Mathias thought – high time the butler went to oversee the serving of dinner. He pointed upstairs. "Straight up to the attic and your room's the third on the right."

"Thank you." Mathias replied, turning to go.

Arthur called him back. "Just a little advice, lad," he said. "Make sure you're well rested tonight. You're replacing quite a few people, so you'll be working hard in the morning, and more so when the boys come back from school next month. Supper at half past nine."

With that, he disappeared through the door that separated the servants from their masters, and Mathias slowly began his ascent.

…

June 1914

The bedroom felt as if someone had died in it. There were clouds of cobwebs strung across the corners, the bed was stripped to its cold sheet and a weak sun gleamed through the window as sullenly as a scolded schoolchild. Mathias stood in the doorway for a moment, unwilling to cross the threshold. The air in the room seemed to have a different quality – thicker, perhaps, or heavier than the air outside, stale and unbreathed. The room was undisturbed, mirror-lake untouched, and it felt strange for Mathias to be stepping in and shattering the emptiness, sending ripples all through it. But step in he must, and did. It was necessary because life was finally returning to the house. After a month of creeping around the dust-filled corridors and trying to force open locked doors that were warped and swollen with water and heat, a month as lad-of-all-work and only once catching sight of the widowed Mrs Bondevik through a window as he pulled weeds in the garden, her sons were returning from boarding school.

Mathias reached up with a duster and pulled down the webs, the great mass of them like fishing nets or a bridal train. They clung to his fingers with their faint stickiness and he prised them off with a grimace. He undid the catch on the window to let a breeze into the stuffy room and his hands came away streaked with rust. He looked down at them with distaste. Within a week of his arrival, Mathias had had his initial suspicions confirmed – the Bondeviks were poor. This was not true poverty. It was not hunger or disease or going barefoot. It was poverty strictly in the relative sense – genteel poverty, but poverty nonetheless. It was the cracks in the best china, the walls denuded of their pictures, the paint on the window frames that flaked off at the slightest touch. It had crept in over the years like damp, and like all things that could not be repaired, it had been concealed. There was a sadness to Lille Skarstind, as though the house was aware of its own decline.

Nonetheless, Mathias felt a faint pricking of excitement in his stomach as he went about making the bed. He was looking forward to seeing the sons of the family, even though he knew his interactions with them would be minimal. Arthur was a stickler for that sort of propriety, even with the way things were, and he was far too proud a man to ever let on that they were all living in somewhat reduced circumstances. He would enforce the myriad rules of society until the house collapsed around them, Mathias knew that.

Having made the bed, Mathias turned his attention to the bookshelves, running his duster along the spines with a playful motion. He scanned the titles for something he recognised, something that would give away something of the young man who owned these books. His eyes flicked along shelves of algebra and geometry, a Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer, all twelve books of the Aeneid in the original Latin and a few things written in a strange script that Mathias half-recognised as Greek. A scholar, then, he thought. Studious, this boy, whoever he was. On the bottom shelf, the schoolbooks gave way to a few more personal things. There were a couple of Dickens novels, Tennyson's Poetical Works, Paradise Lost, a well-loved copy of Our Island Story and, tucked into the corner as though an embarrassing concession to sentiment, A Child's Garden of Verses. Attracted by the thought of a childhood that had never quite belonged to him, it was this book that Mathias plucked from the shelf. He felt its comfortable weight in his hands, opening it up to the first page and reading the inscription there, done in the immaculate copperplate of a society lady:

To Lukas, on his birthday,

I can hardly believe that my little grandson is already five years old! Now that you are such a big, clever boy, I hope that you will enjoy reading this book and sharing it with your lillebror!

With much love,

Grandma

Mathias blinked, shocked by the Norwegian word. Two hundred years the Bondevik family had been here. Two hundred years and as English as they came, yet they still hung on to the language, the odd scattered words like relics. Lillebror. Lille Skarstind. The name of a mighty mountain to grace the gentle slope of an English hill. He closed his eyes. It all reminded him unbearably of his father – his father, the Danish fisherman, raising his motherless son in a rough port of shipyards and shouting sailors and smoke and melting iron. He remembered his father's hands – a working man's hands, never soft but always gentle – and how they had guided him carefully down the narrow harbour steps to the boat. He remembered the fish glittering in the net and the scales that remained in the bottom of the boat, gleaming like silver sixpences, even long after the catch had been cleared out. His father had spoken Danish to him, a language so like the Norwegian that had so pierced him, but it was all lost to him now. It was the language of the place his father had left, the language of his nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and yet he could not summon a word of it.

His father was dead, carried off by some illness or another that had come over him the winter Mathias was five years old. He remembered the charity people who had come to take him to his new home, and he remembered himself, the distraught little boy, screaming at them in a confused mixture of English and Danish. Once he'd got to the orphanage, the other children had laughed at him, laughed at the thick, dark sounds and up-and-down rhythms of his language, and so he had let it shrivel away inside him. It wasn't as though he'd ever need it.

There was a knock at the open door and he turned sharply towards the sound, hastily shoving the book back onto the shelf. It was one of the maids, and Mathias quickly stood up, hoping that his distress didn't show on his face.

"Mr Kirkland says he wants you out front," she said breathlessly, cheeks pink from her rush to deliver the message. "The boys have just come."

"Suppose I'd best be off then," Mathias replied. He felt a spike of apprehensiveness shooting through him, and, with a last look back at the now-presentable room, went out to meet his employers.

…

Mathias knew, as it is sometimes possible to know, that he would remember this moment forever. He would remember those awful arrhythmic fountains and the weeds springing up through the gravel of the driveway. He would remember the lukewarm sun and the heavy humidity that was the price of warmth in England. And above all, he would remember the people he saw – Arthur, but he was familiar, and the strangers he was talking to. Two boys, two pale, beautiful boys. He knew that they were brothers, the Bondevik brothers – the heir and the spare, as such pairings were termed – but even if he had not known, he would have guessed. There was a vague resemblance between them, like each was a badly-altered painting of the other, and the older one – Lukas, he must be Lukas – had his hand on his brother's shoulder. They were dressed in school uniform – old enough now for long trousers, having outgrown the shorts and socks Mathias had worn until he left school at twelve – navy blazers and straw boaters with a black band around them.

Arthur saw him approach and called out to him.

"Køhler! You're to help bring the bags up," he informed him. He inclined his head to the two boys. "Mr Lukas, Køhler here will take yours. Master Emil, I shall take yours." Arthur bent and picked up Emil's bulging suitcase as though it weighed nothing, then stood waiting for Emil to follow him. The brothers looked at each other for a brief moment, then Lukas released his shoulder and let him follow Arthur inside.

Mathias looked up at Lukas and felt anything he might have wanted to say die in his throat. Lukas was perfect. His eyes were dark blue with a peculiar dullness to them; they were the colour of a starless night. His hair glimmered with the palest shade of gold, an achingly delicate colour. He was full-lipped, with cheekbones like buttresses, and in him Mathias saw a saint, an angel, a statue – a thing painted and gilded and made to be worshipped. He took a deep breath and was suddenly desperate for a cigarette – anything to calm him and make the warmth drain from his cheeks. Fixing his eyes on a distant point, he decided to take refuge in pleasantries.

"I trust you had a comfortable journey, sir." he said, picking up the suitcase. It was smart and shining, with Lukas Bondevik, Lord Rochester's School for Boys embossed on the lid.

Lukas nodded. "I did, thank you." he replied, in a quiet, deep voice.

Mathias took a step back, a gesture of submission. "And now, if you'll just lead the way, sir." he said, gesturing towards the front door.

"Of course." Lukas replied, and together they entered the cool of the house.

Once they reached the bedroom, Mathias was momentarily wrong-footed. Unpacking luggage was a job for maids, and he was unsure what Lukas was expecting him to do. He brought the suitcase into room, and then paused uncertainly.

"Would you like me to unpack this now, sir?" he asked Lukas, who had already pulled off his hat and blazer and thrown them onto his chair.

"Yes, if you would." he replied.

Mathias nodded and undid the clasps. He worked in silence, hanging the clothes back in the wardrobe. It felt strangely intimate to be touching them. He had never had dealings with clothing in his old job, but now he received a small, secret thrill from holding these things that had touched Lukas, though they were all washed and held no trace of him. He shook his head. The last thing he needed was to fall in love again.

The silence grew and he felt like he was intruding. Lukas seemed like a private person, and he sat on his bed as though there under sufferance, waiting with ill-disguised impatience for Mathias to leave. Folded inside the suitcase was a second school blazer, and as Mathias pulled it out, Lukas spoke to him.

"You can bring that to Emil when you've finished here," he said. "That and all my uniform."

"Have you finished school then?" Mathias asked. He was eager to continue the conversation, but the servant in him was horrified. Hand-me-downs? They really were poor, then, these Bondeviks.

Lukas nodded. "I shall be going up to Cambridge at the beginning of October."

"What will you be studying?" Mathias asked from the depths of the suitcase.

"Classics." Lukas replied shortly, as if it was a stupid question. And perhaps it was, Mathias thought. What else was there for a young man who never expected to work? What reason did he have to study anything else?

Mathias lifted the last things out of the suitcase – a pile of books – and stood up to leave. He would have loved to stay and talk for a while, but his work was done and there was no reason for him to stay any longer.

"Would you like the case put under the bed, sir?" he asked, slipping back into his customary role.

"If you would." Lukas replied absently, already reaching for one of the books. He had turned away from him, and he and Mathias were lost in their separate worlds once more.

…

"You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…"

Mathias silently spoke the familiar words as he read the passage once again, letting the writing fill him with its dull heat, a sort of abstracted desire for no one in particular. His bedside candle flamed up suddenly, then settled again, its thrusting shadow clear against the white wall of his room. The Picture of Dorian Gray was his favourite book, the only one he owned, bought on one of his Sunday afternoons off back when he was sixteen. He had been wondering about himself then, and about the way he was, and had come to hear of Oscar Wilde's novel about a beautiful young man, statuesque yet a moral wreck, and of the forbidden desire that supposedly permeated every page. He remembered the lengthy train journey all the way to the next town – he dared not go to the local shops for fear one of the maids might catch him there – and the frantic search through the shelves of the bookshop to find it. Most of all, he remembered the ride back to Asterley Hall through the darkening countryside, the book wrapped in brown paper and hidden inside his jacket, its sharp corners pressing into the flesh just below his ribcage and the delicious feeling of having taken his first step on the road to utter, glorious ruin.

From the back page, he removed one of his treasured postcards. You could buy them if you asked nicely, paid well and knew where to look, and Mathias had amassed a collection of six or so. This one showed a young man of about twenty leaning against a wall, bare-chested and smoking a cigarette. Mathias liked this one, and as he looked at it, he felt the familiar stirring heat of arousal rising in him, soothing in its strange way. He was frustrated, that was his problem. Always so frustrated, always so angry at something or other in the way that only young men can be. Rose-red youth, he thought, rose-white boyhood. He thought of a rose, the fleshy eroticism of its not-quite-open centre, and when he fell asleep his dreams were deep red, and hot, and when he woke, he was drenched in sweat and his own shame and thinking, desperately, of Lukas.

…

Author's Note: Hey guys! Missed me? I've certainly missed writing, but many extrememly stressful months and 26 exams later, I'm back in the fanfiction game. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter and that it wasn't too terrible – I certainly hope I haven't lost my touch!