The entire property was entailed, so Martin hadn’t been able to sell it after his father’s death. He had, however, ordered the manor stripped down nearly to the beams and most of the furnishings sold off. That had kept the creditors at bay for a little while, but it had been a drop in the ocean. It wasn’t a large house, just a shooting box located halfway between London and Brighton. His father had used it to host house parties to which Martin had seldom been invited. At the time he thought it was because his father didn’t want the world to know that he had a sickly son. Now he suspected it was because his father didn’t want Martin to know what he got up to in his spare time.
“So you did bring me here,” Martin said, not bothering to make it a question.
Will sighed. Martin didn’t need to turn his head to know he looked guilty, and rightly so. “You needed country air. It was either here or Lindley Priory. Getting to Cumberland would have meant days in a carriage, and you weren’t in any state for that. Besides, you own this place, so, well, I could afford it.”
Martin let out a bitter laugh, but it turned into a cough. Walking so far had perhaps been unwise. Will looked at him with concern, and Martin waved his hand dismissively. “The people here, they don’t know who I am. Daisy calls me Mister.”
“I told Mrs. Tanner that you were a Mr. Smith.”
Martin refrained from rolling his eyes. “Let me guess. John Smith.”
“She didn’t ask for a first name,” Will said, a tiny smile playing at the edges of his mouth.
“Well. Friars’ Gate. You could have told me. I was hardly in any condition to get up and leave.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I figured we could fight about it when you were well enough to fight back. So, do you want to?”
“Do I want to do what?”
“Leave.”
Martin experienced the same ridiculous frisson of excitement that he did on each rare occasion that somebody gave him a choice. “No,” he said after some thought. He was annoyed that Will brought him here—or anywhere—without his permission, but he hadn’t been in any state to give permission, and he could grudgingly admit that Will had done what was necessary to save his life. “It was a good decision. I’m surprised you knew about the gamekeeper’s cottage, though.”
“I looked for you here,” Will said. “In the autumn, after you left your aunt’s house. That’s how I knew there was a cottage standing empty.”
“Thank you for not bringing me into the house itself,” Martin said, and meant it sincerely. He leaned back against the trunk of a tree and crossed his arms in front of him. Will came to stand nearby, and Martin wondered if he were even aware that he had positioned himself between Martin and the wind. Happily, Will seemed blissfully unaware of a good number of things, or surely he would have said something after what Martin thought of as the Shaving Incident. Two weeks had passed, and Will still treated him as a reasonable adult rather than a person who had nearly been reduced to tears by Will’s soft words and the feel of his own smooth jaw. Martin still couldn’t shave without a pang of guilt that didn’t even make sense to him, and he was ready to feel guilty at the drop of a hat.
“Since we’re unburdening our souls,” Martin said, trying to sound flippant and afraid he came off regrettably earnest, “I do suppose I owe you an apology for the unanswered letters.” He swallowed. “I read them—at least all those I received before leaving my aunt’s house—and I kept them.” He nearly admitted that he had kept all Will’s letters. For years, when Will was away at school and later at sea, they had written like paper was cheap and ink free and postage a trifling consideration; they had written pages upon pages, crossed and double crossed, and sometimes when Martin was feeling especially sorry for himself he’d read them all, right from the beginning.
“For a few months,” Will said, his gaze fixed over Martin’s shoulder, “I thought you must be dead, because surely if you were alive you would have written me back.”
Martin felt like he had been slapped. He stepped to the side, placing himself in Will’s line of sight. “You thought—it never once occurred to you that I didn’t want you to disrupt your whole life to come fix mine? Which, mind you, is exactly what happened, so I think that we can agree I was quite right not to answer your letters.”
“No we can’t. We will never agree about that.” Will scraped a hand across the stubble on his jaw, then let it rest beside Martin’s shoulder on the tree trunk. “I thought we were—” He shook his head, and Martin found himself holding his breath, wondering how Will planned to finish that sentence. “I thought we were—I thought we were important to one another. And then it turned out I was wrong.”
“You think you aren’t important to me,” Martin said, his voice an embarrassing whisper. “You lackwit. You spent your childhood watching your mother die and I didn’t want you to spend your adulthood watching me die. Idiot,” he said fondly. Too fondly for someone standing so near. At this distance Will could look at him and see everything. “You know, I’ve had time to think about this,” Martin went on. “I’ve never been well. The consumption is relatively new,” he said, glossing over the details of precisely how new it was, “but the rest isn’t. I’ve had a long time to think about how I don’t want to be a burden.”
Will, damn him, somehow stepped even closer. Martin could almost feel Will’s breath against his cheek. “You aren’t—”
“I see that now. But do you think that maybe, after twenty years of my father treating me as a burden and an embarrassment I might be justified in making assumptions?”
Will nodded. One strand of his hair tumbled across his forehead and Martin thought about how easy it would be to lift his hand and tuck that strand behind his ear. Instead he shoved his hands in his pockets. “That bastard,” Will said.
“You’ll get no argument from me. In any event, I promise I’ll always answer your letters. It is—” he swallowed “—intolerable to me that you thought I didn’t care.” He was saying too much, but if faced with a decision between Will knowing Martin cared too much and suspecting him of caring too little, Martin knew what choice he’d always make.
“Oh,” Will said, and it was little more than a puff of air. Martin didn’t dare meet his eyes.
“Regarding the letters. In my defense, I was not in the most reliable frame of mind last year.”
Will let out a laugh and finally straightened up, putting some distance between them. “Christ, neither was I, for that matter. I don’t think either of us have had two consecutive days of sound thought between us since 1814.”
Martin snorted. It shouldn’t be funny. There was nothing funny about what happened to Will, and only in his darker moods did Martin find much humor in his own predicament. But still he was laughing, and when he looked over, saw that Will was smiling, one hand over his mouth. It felt like—he couldn’t think of anything less theatrical than miracle—that they were standing here, alive, relatively well in mind and body, and laughing about everything that had happened. Maybe that same thought struck Will, because for a moment it looked like he was going to embrace Martin. But then he stepped away awkwardly.
Feeling that far too much had been said and done between them for one afternoon, Martin turned and made his way back to the cottage, Will falling into step beside him.
“I saw your young gentleman up and about,” Mrs. Tanner said when she shouldered her way into the cottage, Daisy trailing sullenly behind her. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Will said, putting down his pen and sanding the topmost sheet of paper. “He’s recovered about as well as could be expected.” Since that first walk they had taken a few days earlier, Martin had made a habit of exploring the grounds every morning. Will didn’t quite like it—it was cold, and Martin wasn’t strong yet. But he also knew that arguing about it would only make Martin do something even more reckless, so he let it go, and tried not to look too anxious when Martin returned to the cottage, flushed and short of breath.
&nb
sp; “Poor lad.” The older woman hung a pot from the hook near the fire, and Will caught the scent of herbs and meat. “Now. Be gone with you. There’s a jug of ale and some bread for your breakfast,” she said, pressing both items into his hands. “Take them and go. The cottage hasn’t been aired since old Jackson lived here and it could do with a thorough turning out. Daisy and I will do the wash and hang it to dry.”
“Thank you.”
“No need to thank me. Fair’s fair.”
In the past few months, Will had whitewashed the Tanners’ cottage, inside and out; he had mended bucket handles and windowsills and everything that could be fixed; he had rounded up sundry geese and ducks and coaxed the milk goat down from the top of the chicken coop. More than once it had occurred to him that Mrs. Tanner had been getting by for quite a while without anyone’s help but Daisy’s, and he wondered why she hadn’t years earlier come to an arrangement such as that she had with Will. But he remembered the way neighbors had steered clear of his mother—sickly, French, and openly living with a married man—and reckoned that there was no shortage of reasons a woman might find herself shunned by her neighbors.
Will put the ale and bread into his satchel and took his coat off the peg. They had arrived at the cottage in January with little more than the clothes on their backs. In the loft, Will had found a couple of shirts and a coat that was only slightly moth-eaten, and Hartley brought even more. By Will’s standards, they were pretty well set up, but whenever he saw Martin shrug into that tatty old coat he felt a pang of remorse that he couldn’t have done better by the man.
It was cold, but not windy, so not a terrible day for a walk, Will supposed. The skies were a shade of grayish blue that made Will think of the ocean. He shoved that thought aside and wrapped the coat more tightly around himself. He was fairly certain that Martin typically walked to the top of the nearest hill and then returned to the cottage, so that was the direction he headed. Sure enough, he found Martin sitting against a fence post.
“Checking up on me?” Martin asked, but not impatiently so much as almost indulgently. Sometimes he looked at Will with naked fondness, as if the usual prickliness had slid off his face and he forgot to put it back on. Will was so used to seeing the fondness through the mask of surliness, that seeing it plain and unadorned on Martin’s face took his breath away.
Will sat beside Martin on the cold, hard ground. “Got chucked out of the house by Mrs. Tanner and Daisy. Here.” He took the bread and ale out of his bag.
Martin tore off a chunk of the bread and ate it in a few quick bites. “I passed Mrs. Tanner on her way to the cottage and I think she recognized me. Or, rather, I think she noted the resemblance to my father.”
“You take after your mother,” Will said. It was a poor lie, and the incredulous look Martin cast him told him so. There was certainly a superficial resemblance between father and son, but Will could never see much of the florid, ill-tempered old man in Martin. Well, apart from the ill temper, he supposed. Will had only ever seen a portrait of Martin’s mother, but in that painting she had an expression he often saw on Martin’s face—a wry twist of the mouth, a knowing glint in the eyes.
Will turned his head and regarded Martin. The sight of him was so familiar that sometimes he forgot its component parts. His hair, which had been wheat blond during childhood, was now the dark ash blond of driftwood, and his eyes were the dangerous gray of the North Sea but sometimes, rarely, flecked with the shifting blues of sea glass. It seemed so strange that Will had only learned these things after traveling thousands of miles away from Martin, but now he couldn’t look at his friend without thinking of the ocean. It was as if his mind had taken the source of all his nightmares and mapped it onto the face of the person he loved best, as if to remind him that maybe the sea wasn’t all bad.
“What?” Martin asked, turning to face him fully, one eyebrow hitched in question. He had a crumb at the corner of his mouth, which rather undercut the archness of his expression.
“Just looking at you,” Will said, and when Martin flushed, he knew he had overstepped. He cleared his throat and looked away.
“In any event, I suppose I’m hardly the only person in this part of Sussex who bears a resemblance to my father,” Martin said grimly.
“What? Oh, right. I suppose not.” God only knew how many children Sir Humphrey had fathered over the years. He uncorked the jug of ale and took a long sip, then passed it to Martin. “Is it going to be a problem, do you think?”
“It’s a problem every time I look in the mirror,” Martin said. “Although I suppose I could do with the reminder that I have his blood in my veins.”
“You’re not him.”
“Aren’t I? You’re unconscionably biased where I’m concerned.”
Will stared. “You’re nothing like him. He went to bed with—” He stopped, not liking the euphemism. “He took advantage of people who were too young and too poor to say no.” That was what had happened to Hartley, and it stood to reason that Sir Humphrey hadn’t stopped there. “You would never.”
Martin drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, looking terribly small. “I took advantage of my tenants,” he said. “Not in the way you mean. But I did it anyway.”
“Your father ran his estate into the ground, leaving you with nothing but debts.”
“And I handled that beautifully, did I not,” Martin said, his lip curled in a sneer.
Martin spent a year raising rents, enclosing property, and in general trying to drain as much as he could from his Cumberland tenants to make the estate solvent. “No, you handled it like a horse’s arse, but you were one and twenty. And, I might add, you made things right in the end. Furthermore, your father hadn’t taught you how to manage an estate. He hadn’t taught you a damned thing.”
Martin bristled. “I’m not entirely ignorant.”
“That’s despite your father’s efforts, you know.” Martin spent his childhood with his nose in a book and learned as much as he could teach himself. But some things, like how to run a large and failing estate, couldn’t be learned within the pages of a book.
“Hmph.”
Will didn’t know why Martin refused to listen to reason when it came to his father. It was almost as if he wanted to blame himself entirely for his own predicament. Will had no trouble acknowledging the role both their fathers played in their sons’ present circumstances: poor, ill-equipped for any profession, and emotionally raw. He went to put his arm around Martin, then remembered that Martin didn’t want to be touched, and pulled his hand back.
“I read that manuscript you left on the table,” Martin said.
“You what?” Will sputtered.
“Was I not meant to? It was sitting right in the open. I wouldn’t have read it if I thought it was a secret. It was very good.”
“It wasn’t a secret.” Will’s cheeks were burning hot. “The good lines are all Hartley’s.”
“And the parts where I actually—” he gestured to the vicinity of his chest “—felt things, that was you, damn you.”
“Probably,” Will said, grinning despite himself.
“What do you plan to do with it?”
“We offered it to a theater manager who is a friend of a friend. I suppose we’ll hear back any day now.”
Martin made an appreciative noise. “Perhaps I’ll be well enough to return to London in time to see it staged.”
“Are you eager to get back?” Will asked cautiously.
“Eager,” Martin repeated. “William, you know better. I haven’t been eager for anything in ages,” he said, dry as dust. “I suppose I’m grimly resigned to returning to my aunt’s house at some point. I can’t very well stay here, living off your charity, can I?” Martin went on.
He sounded acutely miserable, and Will badly wanted to promise that Martin would never have to return to his aunt. But that was a promise Will couldn’t make. “I’m literally living in your house for free, so that’s a funny definition of
charity,” he said instead.
“What about you?” Martin asked. “Are you eager to get back to town?”
The truth was that he wasn’t. He wanted to plant a few rows of carrots and be around when they were ready to harvest. He wanted to chop more firewood and know that he’d be the one to put it in the hearth next winter. He wanted—he wanted a lot of things, he was beginning to realize, and he wasn’t going to have any of them. “I miss my friends,” he said, because it was the truth, of a kind. “I’d say I miss Hartley but he hasn’t given me a chance to miss him.” For a moment he thought about telling Martin what he had already told Hartley, that being in the country made it easier to avoid temptation. After all, Martin already knew the worst. During those first months after Will had returned to England, Martin had been the one to drag Will out of opium dens and hells of every variety. But Martin looked fragile and young, and he was looking at Will with something like faith, and Will didn’t want to shatter it, however misguided.
“It’ll be grand when we go back to London,” Will said brightly. “You’ll see.”
Chapter Six
A few times since they had been living in the gamekeeper’s cottage, Will had what Martin privately thought of as a Gloomy Day. This was probably making light of a serious matter, but Day of Remembering Being Tortured by a Madman on a Boat seemed a trifle grim, however accurate, so Gloomy Day would have to do. On those days, Will would sleep even heavier and later than usual, then spend the rest of the day with a teacup clutched in his hands, his gaze apparently fixed on something like a whorl in the plaster or a crack in the windowpane. Sometimes he seemed not to hear when Martin spoke to him. Martin, for the most part, left him alone; he found that if he refilled Will’s teacup or put a sandwich within arm’s reach, Will would absently drink or eat. If Martin dropped a blanket over Will’s shoulders, it would remain there hours later.
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