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

the Royal Geographic Society, where he had been an active member, or to the British Museum collection. However, for some reason I never really had gotten around to it, and as a result, the house at Holland Park Avenue was full of all kinds of things, some which I suppose were rather valuable, especially for a petty thief.
    Because that was what they were, my uninvited guests downstairs: thieves. As I sneaked down the stairs, I hesitated half way down the staircase by a wall decoration from Kenya, which consisted of several crude but sharp spears , and a shield made of animal skins in brown and white, with peculiar red hand markings on it . I carefully pulled one of the spears free from underneath the shield. I felt a little bit ridiculous arming myself with a primitive Maasai spear; however , one can never take too many precautions if one has to engage with criminals, I reasoned as I peeked into the drawing room.
    The drawing room was a rather large, rectangular room with the uncommon combination of acting as a drawing room, an unplanned library, and a study. I do not hold dinner parties or similar social gathering s , so I have never had a reason to change it from the way my uncle left it. The result was a room with several mismatched bookshelves filled with different anthropological tomes, scientific reference literature, and my uncle’s travelling journals. In addition , the room held several glass cabinets with exotic objects, a wall - mounted zebra head, and a large teak desk , which I had adopted as my own. The desk was completely empty, but everything else in the room was rather cluttered, as it had been during my uncle’s time. Carl had once, after many discreet rephrased attempts, tried to insinuate that the maids had a faint complain t about the dusting possibility in the room; however , we never really got any further than that.
    The two thieves were standing in front of a glass cabinet , which I knew contained several South American items, some of which I believed to be of Mayan origin, if I remembered correctly. However , I doubted that the thieves had been attracted to the objects’ historical value; more likely it was the unmistakably golden shine of the various necklaces and bracelets that had caught their greedy attention , drawing them in like flies to a sugar lump .
    The cabinet ’s doors were locked , and one of the thieves was kneeling in front of them, trying to open the lock with a thin, unfamiliar device, while the other thief was waiting nervously. The key to the cabinet had been lost for years, and I never had opened the cabinet myself. I decided without feeling guilty to eavesdrop on their conversation before I confronted them. I could not see them properly in the dark room; however , they had some kind of hooded lantern , which spread the light in only one single direction. One of the thieves, the nervous one, focused the light from the lantern on the cabinet’s lock , and I managed to get a quick look of the man kneeling in front of the glass doors and struggling with the lock. I only saw his silhouette, but I noticed that he was young, perhaps in his early twenties, and had uncut , straw-blond hair in a ponytail. He was dressed in the universal tatty clothes of the less fortunate inhabitants of London : c rude brown trousers, a wrinkled linen shirt, and worn leather boots. However, he was also wearing a strangely nice blue dress coat , which he, for all t hat I knew, probably had stolen from some other unlucky gentleman. The thieves were talking together quietly in one of the broadest and most vulgar Cockney accents I had ever heard, and I had a hard time understanding them.
    “Are you sure there is no one else here, Simon? I thought I heard something … ”
    “Just be quiet and shine the damned light on the lock,” said the young man , who apparently was called Simon.
    “I am. Do you need help with that?”
    “Of course not, moron! And there is no one here, all right ? I have had the bloody house under observation for days. The coxcomb who lives here is on some sort of holiday , according to one of the maids. He is not coming back for days,” Simon said in an irritated voice.
    “I still do not like it. This place gives me the creeps. Did you see those small, weird heads over there?” t he other thief said and waved the lantern towards the shelves with my uncle’s collection of small tribal heads. “Do you think they are real human heads?”
    “Of course they are not !