Bone Idol (2 page)

Their tools—rock hammer, boar bristle brush, trowel—lay forgotten on the beach, scattered around the scene of their recent labours. Henry found a battered old leather bag, left open to the elements. He tipped out three inches of rainwater and packed the tools carefully inside, only now noticing the wet sand caking his jacket cuffs. With a sigh, he threw his greatcoat—quite ruined—over his arm and trailed the party up the beach, weary again with the task done and bewildered by the way he had reacted to Albert.

He had soon caught up with one of the older locals, a huge man with hands like shovels who was lagging some little way behind and keeping an eye on the younger lads. He introduced himself as John Baines. Henry fell into step with him, somehow easy in his company after their shared exertions on the beach, despite the obvious differences in their class and social station. Henry might come from new money, but in society’s eyes he was still a far step above men like Baines, who scratched a living from the beaches, emptying lobster pots and selling souvenirs to tourists, much as Mary Anning had done all those years ago—

ammonites, the curled black shell shapes that the villagers called snake stones, or the pale ovals known as devils’ toenails. They were ancient sea creatures, more common by far than the monster they had dug from the rock, but just as precious and mysterious in their own small way.

“Albert seems an…unconventional young man,” Henry ventured, not wishing to cause offence, but intrigued by his new young acquaintance. Although the reverend had mentioned in his correspondence that Albert was his only child and the darling of his autumn years, Henry had got no sense of the young man’s unusual energy from those passing mentions.

The big man smiled, the lines of his weathered face crinkling deeply around his eyes.

“Unconventional, aye. He and his father both. But well liked in these parts.” Baines nodded towards Albert and continued. “Lad has been scrambling around on these beaches after fossils since he was nowt but a scrap of a thing.” He looked assessingly at Henry. “You’re a friend of the reverend’s? A bone man yourself?”

“I’ve corresponded with a number of prominent palaeontologists, both here and in the Americas,” said Henry stiffly. He suddenly felt as though he was intruding on this strange, enclosed little world, and regretted his impulsive decision to come chasing down here after the news of discovery the reverend’s telegram had brought him. “But really I’m in railways.”

He wondered if this was true. The time he had spent on the beach tonight, battling against the tide and the elements, had seemed far realer to him than fusty boardrooms filled with cigar smoke and endless talk of gauges and loads and new types of piston-head. Railways were his father’s passion, not his.

His companion’s gaze was disconcertingly penetrating. “Aye,” he said. “And the reverend’s really a clergyman. But these days he gives his sermon on a Sunday and leaves the rest to his curate. It seems to me that when the passion for bones takes hold of a man, it’s like a fever. Railways or no railways, you have the look to me of a man who has that fever.

Just as the reverend has. And just as our Albert has himself.”

Albert and his father had reached the rectory now, along with their little band of helpers. Henry and his friend had fallen behind a way as they talked. They lengthened their strides to catch up, and reached the little house as the precious block of stone was being manoeuvred through the door.

Henry was reluctant to step inside as he was so wet but, noticing the puddle that Albert and his father stood in and the filth on the boots of the men assisting them, he got over his qualms. They seemed unconcerned as they engaged in animated conversation, and so he removed his hat and stepped inside. He caught Albert’s eye and handed him the damp bag full of tools that he had rescued from the beach.

The warmth inside the rectory was a happy relief, and Henry tried to chafe some feeling back into his cold hands. But what really warmed him through, starting a fierce glow in his belly and bringing the hot blood flooding to his cheeks, was the radiant smile of thanks that Albert gave him.

Why, when he should be absorbed in mulling over the ancient remains, could he think about nothing but Albert? Albert’s slender, clever hands. Albert’s lips, his ready smile.
Albert.

He tried to engage in conversation with the Reverend Arthur Boundry, but time and time again he found his attention drifting to the other side of the room, where Albert gestured animatedly and bestowed his easy smile on the workmen from the beach. Henry was astonished to feel a twinge of jealousy. Why was his body responding like this? He’d always been ruled by the pursuit of knowledge, not by his passions—by his mind, not his body. So why was it that now he couldn’t get his mind off Albert?
Albert
…

He was still thinking about him as, in the spare room of the rectory, he blew out his candle and lay down on the narrow bed, fully dressed as he had forgotten to bring a nightshirt with him. It seemed utterly silent outside his darkened window, in the wake of the dying storm. In London he was used to the sound of carriages at all hours, voices, even singing. Here, not a sound disturbed the stillness of the early hours. If he strained his senses to the utmost, he fancied he could just hear the lashing of the waves at the nearby shore, but it might have been his imagination.

He was still thinking about Albert as his hand strayed downwards, gently stroking the front of his trousers where his cock strained against the fabric, plump with arousal.

He tried half-heartedly to recall what his schoolmasters had told him. Did it stunt your growth or make you go blind? Certainly to do it while thinking of a man was…well, unnatural. But the memory of Albert kneeling on the beach, filthy with sand, his trousers clinging to his thighs, made almost indecent by being soaked through… It made him long to www.total-e-bound.com

see the other man on his knees in front of him, had him lingering on thoughts of that smiling mouth.

He rolled onto his front, pushing his hips against the mattress, trying to ease the ache but succeeding only in arousing himself further.

With a stifled groan he rolled onto his back again, his erection jutting in his trousers. He undid the buttons of his fly to ease his discomfort.

Albert, Albert.

He thought about his unrestrained glee, and wondered what sort of glee and lack of inhibition he might bring to lovemaking—to fucking.

He wrapped his fingers around himself, squeezing, closing his eyes at the slow stab of pleasure. He was so hard it hurt, his balls drawn up tight and throbbing close to his body, a milky drop of semen glistening on the silky tip of his cock. He caressed himself slowly, drawing his palm from root to tip, and an electrifying sensation shuddered through him as he imagined Albert’s slender fingers doing the same thing—caressing him, touching him.

He groaned low in his throat and moved his hand faster, his breath coming in pants and gasps as he worked towards climax, oblivious now to everything but the sensation in his loins and the thought of Albert, of holding his slender, supple body in his arms, clutching at his arse, burying his face in his neck, biting his collarbone, pushing his hips against him again and again. His breath became laboured, almost frantic, and he thrust his hips up from the mattress. He bit back a low, desperate groan, eyes closed tight and free hand twisted hard in the sheets as he spilled himself. Warm liquid coated his palm and wrist in an upwelling of physical pleasure that left him trembling and exhausted.

Physically sated, he gradually became aware of a sense of shame; of disgust at himself and his lack of self-control—that having such filthy thoughts about a respectable young man had driven him to self-abuse.

Henry drew a handkerchief from his pocket to mop at the sticky mess on his hand and wrist. His spend lay in slick, sticky strands on his belly and thighs. He cleaned himself up and buttoned his fly, then stood, on legs still a little weak, and went to the window. He looked out at the cliff edge and the black, thrashing waves beyond.

Opening the window and leaning out slightly, Henry opened his hand and let the wind take the soiled handkerchief, watching the pale shape as it danced away over the dark waves until it was out of sight.

The Reverend Arthur Boundry was kneeling in the parlour, shabby-genteel in his faded black. The knees of his trousers were covered in a fine, grey dust. Part of the floor was taken up by the huge slab of rock that had been recovered from the beach the night before.

Albert’s father was a gentle eccentric with a passion for curios—stuffed dormice, grisly, mummified remains from Egypt and South America and, most particularly, the bones of fossilised animals long dead, the dinosaurs or ‘terrible lizards’ that had so caught the modern imagination.

Now he blew at the rock dust he had painstakingly scraped away from around the petrified bones and sneezed. Albert looked on him with an indulgent eye, fished in a pocket and handed him a crumpled but more or less clean handkerchief.

“Here,” he said. “Have a good blow.” He was aware that he sometimes spoke to his father as though he were a child, but he was also all too aware that, brilliant as he undoubtedly was, humdrum, workaday concerns like handkerchiefs and firmly tied bootlaces often escaped the old man. “How goes the work?”

His father snuffled into the handkerchief and smiled at him. His round, owlish spectacles winked in the light, and his fine hair formed a halo around his head, like white dandelion fluff.

“Wonderfully, wonderfully,” he replied. “By Christmas I will have this beautiful beast out of the stone and ready to mount. Can you see what is special about it?”

Albert peered with interest at the fossil remains in the rock. He had thought he was familiar enough with them from his labours the night before, but he wasn’t sure exactly what his father meant. Perhaps he’d missed something. “It looks like a very fine example of a plesiosaurus,” he said. “But…”

It was a wonderful find, beautifully preserved and close to complete. But his father was looking at him with barely contained excitement, a sort of banked glee that he found perplexing. “Is there something extraordinary about it?”

His father chuckled. He rubbed his hands together with satisfaction and beamed short-sightedly at him. “Let us see if your Mr Elkington spots it when he returns from his constitutional.”

“He’s not
my
Mr Elkington,” protested Albert. “You were the one who invited him.”

“Ah, but he took a shine to you,” his father insisted. “I could tell. Not like him. An up-and-coming man, I think. Brilliant, quite brilliant, but a bit of a cold fish. We have corresponded for some months, and yet he has a certain…reserve I cannot seem to persuade him to shake off. Still, I’m sure he will enjoy the walk. It is a beautiful morning.”

It was, too, thought Albert. Cold and golden and crisp, with a light frost still clinging to the fallen leaves that littered the paths. It was a marked contrast to the dramatic, lightning-filled storm of the night before, but the Boundrys were used to the temperamental and changeable weather of the Dorset coast. Thinking about the storm took Albert back to the wet, dirty work he and Mr Elkington had engaged in together in the early hours of the morning.

At the sound of a footstep behind him, he turned, sure he must be blushing.

Mumbling a greeting, he looked around himself, wondering what their visitor must think of their home. Their parlour was a cabinet of curiosities. Every surface was covered in piles of papers and in strangely shaped pieces of rock—ammonites curled like snail shells, three-quarters of a lower jawbone from something his father had told him was much like a rat but had lived many thousands of years ago. The carpet was coated in grey dust from his father’s work and, to be truthful, because it was not cleaned as often as it might be.

The maid had been strictly forbidden to clean in the parlour since the time she had gone into hysterics after coming unexpectedly upon a stuffed weasel with glassy eyes and a frozen snarl, then spent forty-five minutes sobbing in Albert’s arms. Since then, Albert had taken responsibility for keeping some sort of order in that room—but it did not come naturally to him. He was too prone to being distracted by some new fancy or passion. Like father, like son.

His father greeted their guest with evident pleasure. “Sit down, Elkington, sit down.

We have so much to discuss. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.”

Ordinarily passionate about palaeontology, Albert found it strangely difficult to concentrate with Henry in the room. He took a graceless, casual seat in an overstuffed armchair.

He heard murmured phrases—“marine creature…dorsal vertebrae…preserved by the geological pressures…” But his thoughts were on Henry—the quiet intensity of his impossibly blue gaze as he had helped to free the creature from the rock, his upright posture, his slight air of tension—and he did not understand why.

“Never seen before…I intend to call it
Streptosaurus boundrii
, Boundry’s reversed lizard…”

Albert looked up, suddenly alert.

“Are you saying it’s something new?” he asked eagerly. “A saurian that has never been seen before?” His father was well respected in scientific circles, but this would make him one of the elite, would make his name known worldwide!

“Precisely!” The reverend ran his fingers lovingly over the bones set into the rock, his hands trembling so slightly that only someone who knew him as well as Albert did might have noticed. “Its structure is quite the reverse of other marine saurians we have seen.

Observe the foreshortened vertebrae in the neck, and by contrast the elongated tail. It’s not a plesiosaur at all—it’s quite the other way around! This could give a fascinating insight into the locomotion of aquatic saurians, introduce an entirely new branch on the cladogram…”

Albert saw Henry shift uneasily. Despite his rising excitement, Albert could not help but notice the shadow in his eyes, his expression of concern.

“Do you disagree, Henry?” he asked impulsively.