False Colors Read Online Free PDF

looking down on Cavendish, which was also an amusing luxury. What a man! Nervy and sharp and on some deep emotional level just aware enough of what was going on to react against it with terror. A pox on it, but he’d set himself quite a task here! If he had any sense he should give up now. He really should.
    “Perhaps,” he said. “But then again man does not live by the word of God alone, but also by bread. She was very religious then, your mother?”
    “Still is, as far as I’m aware.” Now they were unable to touch one another, some of the tension in the room ebbed. John relaxed enough to lean back against the hull, and a softer side of him shone out as he looked up at Alfie with a wry smile.
    “I didn’t mean…I’m sorry,” Alfie said, unused to thinking of parents in the present tense.
“She is a member of the Society of Friends,” John admitted, unexpectedly, scratching his jaw. Taking off his wig, he looked with faint distaste at the state of it, winding the horse-hair around his finger before pushing it back into its curl “And believes in silence, sobriety, hard work and the scriptures.”
A Quaker? Alfie looked down at the bent head and rueful smile, the chocolate-dark hair modestly, severely cropped. Oh, but that made a lot of sense—restraint, restraint and restraint, all their passion channeled into one stream, making their piety roar like a mill race. “Yet you plainly admit you love music yourself,” he said. “Are you then terribly lapsed?”
The wig on his knee like a sleeping cat, John rested a hand on it. He scrunched his face together, pulling his generous mouth into a grimace that conveyed how difficult it was to explain. “My father,” all the lines hardened for a moment, implacable, “is Church of England, naturally. And so in theory am I. In truth, however, I am some mixture peculiar to myself. If one can lapse from the most permissive church in the world, my father managed it. It isn’t given to every son to be embarrassed by the ridiculous behavior of his parent.”
Alfie put down the music gently, no longer needing its shield. He recognized the look on Cavendish’s face—the steel and ice in those gray eyes. No pain in the world equaled that which your family could inflict. I should say something, but what? What could I say that would not be trite? ‘I understand’? But I don’t. He is at least still in possession of parents.
“Yet,” John interrupted his musing with a sudden smile, “when he brought his whores and actresses to the house, and I was still a child, I would creep from my bed, downstairs, to listen to the music through the closed doors of the ballroom. And if I would be switched soundly for it in the morning, all that achieved was to give it a certain illicit thrill. I could not be stopped.”
“I can picture it.” Alfie smiled, seeing in his mind’s eye the small form of a barefoot boy, draped in a white nightgown, like a stained glass saint, trapped between cheerless piety and cruel mirth. The thoughts conjured up as a result gave him a pang. “Should you like to sing?” he asked, feeling his way between the two extremes. “This is a cantata. I’m told it’s very suitable, sacred music. I can’t aver it positively, though—I don’t understand a word.”
John’s eyes widened. He drew himself together, very prim and contained, but Alfie didn’t miss the flickering glance at the stacked white pages on his cot. Picking up the top sheet, Alfie raised his head and sang the melody in his own inadequate bass, then held it out in offering. “It’s a hard piece—it’s not within anyone’s range of course, because….”
Standing up, solemn as a choirboy, John breathed in and sang, and Alfie’s apology stopped mid-sentence. For a moment he floated, born up like a petrel on a storm, for the captain’s voice—untrained, unsure—rang out in perfect counter-tenor, plumb square within the middle of the range for which the piece had been written. An