15
"I deserve a hail of fire." Jack begs.
Ianto extricates himself from his embrace. "I'm tired and sick. I need some water."
Jack perceives Ianto's inanition. He carries him down The gallery. Ianto clings on to his bag of belongings. He has nothing else left.
Jack has laid Ianto in front of the fire in the library. He forces himself to eat. Jack gives him wine. He sips.
"How are you now?" Jack asks softly.
"Much better, sir." Ianto whispers "I shall be well again soon."
Jack paces away to the fire. He comes back. Stoops his head down to Ianto to kiss him. he turns his head away. Jack pauses then says sadly "I know you. You are thinking. Talking is no use; you are thinking how to act."
"All is changed, sir. I must change too." Ianto agrees.
"Yes. There is no doubt that we both must change. I was wrong ever to keep you here; this narrow stone vault with its one real fiend. I'll shut it up. I'll pay Mrs Poole two hundred a year to care for its inmate and then no one will be harmed when she is prompted to burn people, to stab them, to bite the flesh from their bones …" Jack waxes on.
"Sir - you speak of her with hate - it is cruel. She cannot help being mad."
"It's not because she's mad that I hate her. If you were mad do you think that I'd hate you?" Jack asks.
"I do."
"Then you know nothing about me," Jack reels back "nothing about the way I love. Your mind is my treasure - and if it were broken it would be my treasure still. You are my sympathy, my better self, my angel. I will wrap my whole existence round you. Let us leave here tomorrow. Come with me - as my mate."
"No."
"I'll pledge you my fidelity" Jack pleads now.
"You can't." Ianto sighs. It's all too clear.
"You'll live a happy, most innocent life"
"I must leave you, sir." Ianto decides. He knows he is right, even if it means leaving his heart and soul in the dark shadows of this tomb.
Jack cannot take this in. "Don't you love me?"
"I do love you - But I mustn't show it or speak it ever again." Ianto is still emotionless and this is unnerving as Jack finally releases Ianto's' hands "I must begin a new existence - strange scenes among strange faces. I must part from you."
Jack shakes his head "Must be a part of me; that's what you mean. You are my mate, Ianto. In truth …"
"You have a wife already."
"I was tricked, duped into wedlock with that demon-hate, that harlot, that succubus upstairs. My father wanted her money and so I was sent to Spanish Town and the match was made. I hardly spoke with her. I was dazzled, ignorant, raw. My senses were besotted and I married her - gross, grovelling mole-eyed blockhead that I was." Jack sits, staring at the fire. "I lived with her for four years. She dragged me through all the degrading agonies which attend those bound to the intemperate and unchaste. Her excesses developed germs of madness and the doctors shut her up. One night, unable to bear her screaming hate and knowing I could never be rid of her, I put a gun to my head to kill myself."
Ianto is both appalled and moved.
"I would have pulled the trigger, died in that tropical place but for a breeze which blew in from the sea and smelt of home. With it, I came to my senses. Bertha Antoinetta Hart had abused my long suffering, sullied my name, outraged my honour and blighted my youth. It was enough. At that moment, as I decided to live, she ceased to be my wife. Only my father and brother knew of the marriage and by then they were both dead. I let my connection with her be buried in oblivion and I brought her here. I have seen that she's cared for as her condition demands and that is all that God and humanity asks."
"I earnestly pity you, sir."
He sees that Ianto is silently crying. "Ianto, it's not pity that I see in your face. It's not pity …"
"Do not say it …"
"It is love."
"STOP"
They are holding each other.
Jack whispers sadly "I was wrong to deceive you. It was cowardly. I should have appealed to your spirit - as I do now – should have opened my life, described my hunger for a better existence - shown you my chains. I give you my life. I give you my pledge. Please, be my mate."
"I cannot."
"You would be my equal"
"How?" Ianto tries to pull away but Jack holds him tightly.
"I would make it so."
"You once told me that hiring a Handler is the next worse thing to buying a slave." Ianto reminds him.
Not my Handler…"
"I would not degrade you by having you live with a slave." Ianto is haughty now.
"I said mate, my mate …" Jack blusters.
Ianto tries to rise. Jack keeps hold of his hand. He gently pulls him down again. Comforts him. "Do you really mean to leave me?"
"I do."
"Ianto..." He kisses Ianto gently, lovingly. "Do you mean it now?"
"I do."
He runs his hands over Ianto, with great tenderness. Ianto offers no resistance. "And now?"
Ianto nods.
"Oh Ianto..." Jack lays him down. "What friends would you offend by living with me? Who would be injured? Who would care?"
Ianto is almost lost. He speaks in a small voice. "I would."
"Ianto, it would not be wicked to love me..."
"It would be to obey you. I care for myself." Ianto cuts him off. Ianto's resolve grows. He resists. "The more alone, the more friendless, un-sustained I am, the more I must respect myself"
Will you listen to me?"
"I must listen to myself"
"Will you hear reason?" Jack seizes his shoulders like he is going to shake him, his heart bleeding everywhere.
"Let me go"
"Because if you won't I'll try violence." Ianto instantly stops resisting. He looks at him with utter shock. He is above him. "I could bend you with my finger and thumb; a mere Reid you feel in my hands."
Ianto neither moves nor speaks.
"But your eye; resolute, free. Whatever I do with this cage I cannot get at you. And it is you, soul, that I want. Why don't you come of your own free will here, to my heart? Oh come, Ianto, come …"
"God help me!" Ianto sobs.
All the life seems to go out of Jack. He lets Ianto go. Ianto pulls himself away from him. Ianto stands. He remains, his face buried.
Ianto goes to the door. Jack turns his eyes to him.
Ianto turns away.
,
,
,
,
First light. Ianto is running; flushed, breathless, his pants soaked with dew. he has his bag of belongings over his shoulder. He trips; falls to his knees.
He looks back. For a moment he seems paralysed. He returns his gaze to the route ahead. His need to escape is so great that he crawls forwards until he is able to raise himself to his feet.
He reaches the stile; lifts himself on to it; puts his arms around the post. He holds it, as if it were beloved. His eyes close. We hear the sound of a winter blizzard.
.
.
.
.
IANTO'S COTTAGE.
Ianto opens his eyes. He is sitting at his fireside. Outside, a snowstorm howls. On his knee is a sketchbook. He looks down at it.
Jack's dark eye is beginning to appear on his paper. He puts a line through it; scribbles it out, blinding him.
He stands up, trying to escape his thoughts. he whispers: "Jack"
There is a loud knock on the door. Ianto starts.
Ianto is opening the door. Jack is there, standing in the frozen hurricane and howling darkness.
"Ianto."
Ianto pulls him inside. he falls into his arms. They embrace passionately. Ianto is actively pulling him towards him, delirious with love and longing.
BANG BANG BANG
Ianto wakes with a start then rouses, opening the door. Stan-Lee is waiting on the doorstop "Mr Stan-Lee - What on earth brings you away from your hearth on a night like this? Has anything happened? There's no bad news I hope?"
"How easily alarmed you are." He takes off his cloak; stamps the snow off his boots. "The snow was up to my waist at one point."
"You are recklessly rash about your own health." Ianot scolds as he banks up the fire.
"Nonsense." Stan-Lee's eyes alight on Ianto's charcoal drawing. Ianto snatches it away too late. There is a moment of silence.
"Why are you come?"
"An inhospitable question."
"I mean on a night like this …" Ianto sighs with an apologetic smile.
"I got tired of my mute books and empty rooms. Besides I've been told half a story and I'm most impatient to find out the end." He replies.
"Please..." Ianto motions to Stan-Lee to sit. He doesn't. Ianto becomes increasingly uneasy as he speaks.
"Twenty years ago, a poor curate fell in love with a rich man's daughter and married her. She was disowned by her family and two years later the rash pair were both dead. They left a son which charity received into her lap – as cold as that snow drift I almost stuck fast in. Charity carried the friendless thing to the house of its rich maternal relations. It was reared by an aunt-in-law; I come to names now - Mrs Reid of Gateshead."
Ianto starts. He is on his feet. The man continues to speak
"Mrs Reid kept the orphan ten years and at the end of that time he was sent to Torchwood One school. It seems his career there was very honourable. He became a teacher like yourself, and left it, like yourself, to be a Handler. He undertook the education of the ward of a certain Mr Jack …"-
"Mr Rivers!"
"I can guess your feelings but hear me to the end. Of Mr Jack's character I know nothing but he professed to offer honourable marriage to this young boy and at the very altar he discovered that he had a wife yet alive. His subsequent conduct is a matter of pure conjecture but when the Handler was enquired after it was discovered that he had fled Torchwood Hall and no trace of him has since been found. Now isn't that an odd tale?"
Ianto sinks to a chair "Since you know so much, perhaps you can tell me how he is."
"Who?"
"Mr Jack; how is he?"
"I'm ignorant of all concerning him." Stan-Lee opens his pocket book and removes a piece of paper. "Well, since you won't ask the Handler's name, I must tell you. I have it written down here in black and white."
He hands Ianto the paper. On it are doodled the heads of some of his pupils. He has absently written Ianto Jones in the margin several times "A solicitor named Briggs wrote to me of a Ianto Jones. I knew a Ianto Elliott. This paper resolved suspicion into certainty."
"The solicitor - Mr Briggs – does he have any news of Mr Jack?"
"Are you not going to enquire why he has gone to such lengths to find you?"
"What does he want with me?" Ianto says without much care really.
"Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr John Jones of Madeira, is dead; that he has left you all his property and that you are now rich."
"What?" Ianto is aghast.