“I know you don’t like it,” she said when they were back in the carriage. “But it’s both your name and your greatest asset. No, don’t look at me like that, I’m not in the mood for the universal rights of man and I never will be. Practically speaking, your title is your greatest asset, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Be that as it may, it’s still worth precisely nothing. It hasn’t done me any good at all, as you well know.” He was being peevish and difficult and he couldn’t bring himself to stop.
“I shouldn’t think it would, not when you’re holed up in a hut in West Sussex. You’re hardly likely to find an heiress at a pig farm. But your timing couldn’t be better. It’s the very beginning of the season so we have three full months to get things settled.”
“I already feel sorry for the girl.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a proper marriage,” his aunt said, without missing a beat, as if she had already given the matter some consideration. “There are plenty of young ladies who wouldn’t expect you to have anything to do with them. You wouldn’t need to share a house, let alone a bed. You confer a title on them, they confer some money on you, everybody lives happily ever after.”
He narrowed his eyes and turned sideways on the seat to face his aunt. “You seem to be making a number of assumptions.”
She sighed. “Darling, I’m making exactly one assumption, and it’s that you don’t want to go to bed with women, and frankly I don’t care. Why are you looking at me like that? I found you keeping house with a young man, both of you in a frightful state of dishabille and covered in various bite marks and so forth. You ought to be grateful I got you out of there before you got yourselves arrested. Love in a cottage is all very romantic, and I’m certain I’ve read many tiresome poems on the topic, but a little bit of discretion would not go amiss in the future, nephew.”
Martin tamped down a swell of horror that she had seen all that. “And yet you still want me to marry some poor unsuspecting woman.”
“Oh, be quiet. Not every woman wants a man in her bed. You could come to a very peaceable arrangement.”
For one horrifying moment Martin thought he might cry. It had been a long day. His aunt’s hand covered his own. “New clothes do go a long way toward mending a broken heart, I always find,” she went on, and he didn’t have it in him to protest that she had the wrong end of the stick. He was almost grateful that she seemed to understand.
“No clothing is that good,” he sniffled.
“We’ll visit the bootmaker tomorrow, then,” she mused.
When the carriage stopped in front of Bermondsey House, Martin excused himself from dinner and followed a maid to the bedroom that was to be his. Peeling off his new clothes, he tried not to remember where he had been not twelve hours earlier. When he glanced in the looking glass, he tried not to take stock of the faded bite and bruises on his neck. If he thought of those things, he’d miss Will too much.
As that thought settled over his heart like a lead weight, he felt more than a mere thirty miles from the cottage. Maybe this distance would give him the strength to move past these months with Will. After all, Will had been able to part from Martin without any sign of distress. Martin had always suspected that his own feelings ran deeper than Will’s and now he had evidence. It was just as well that they ended this before Will’s feelings became more entrenched, because Martin felt truly miserable, and the only bright spot was that at least by parting now he had spared Will from that pain.
Will leaned against the closed door, his eyes squeezed shut, his heart pounding against his ribs, until he could no longer convince himself that he still heard the sound of hoofbeats and carriage wheels retreating down the lane. He could hardly stand to look around the cottage, knowing Martin wasn’t there.
It was better this way, better to end their—his mind stumbled over the word affair—at the beginning. Their hearts would mend easier that way. Martin had been right. Besides, this separation was only temporary. In a few days—tomorrow night, even, if Will hurried—they’d both be in London. And, no, it wouldn’t be the same, but they could be together. As friends, which had been enough for most of their lives, and which would still be enough tomorrow. If something angry and demanding lurked in the pit of his belly, he could just ignore it.
Will wrenched open his eyes and took in the unmade bed, the book Martin had been reading still facedown on the table, the cup of flowers. He wanted to shut his eyes again. Instead he threw on his coat, grabbed his coin purse, and left the cottage. He found Mrs. Tanner plucking a goose while Daisy collected the feathers.
“Didn’t expect to see you today,” Daisy said.
“I have a favor to ask. I’m going to London tomorrow, rather than next week, and I’m hoping you can look after the cottage and feed the pigs for the extra time that I’ll be away. I’ll pay you, of course.” He took the coin purse out of his coat pocket. “If I’m not back in two weeks, the pigs are yours.” He tried not to dwell on that if, because then he’d have to admit that he wasn’t coming back—he couldn’t, not without Martin.
“What about your young man?” Mrs. Tanner asked.
“He already left.”
“He can’t have,” Daisy said, her brows furrowed. “He asked me to show him how to do the wash one day next week.”
“The wash?” Mrs. Tanner squawked, regarding her daughter with wide, scandalized eyes. “The laundry? A gentleman? I’ve never.”
“That’s what I said,” Daisy agreed. “I’ve never seen a man do the wash in my entire life. But he insisted.”
“I’d like to know how you suppose laundry gets done aboard ship if not by men,” Will said absently, distracted by the idea of Martin setting out to learn how to perform such a humble task.
“Probably very badly,” Mrs. Tanner said. “Probably not particularly often either. And I’d bet no gentlemen do laundry on any ship.”
Will had to concede that she was correct on all points.
“Why did your Mr. Smith go to London without you?” Daisy asked. “He hardly even goes as far as the village by himself.”
“His aunt arrived unexpectedly and he returned to town with her,” Will said.
Mrs. Tanner and Daisy exchanged a glance Will could not interpret. “Was that the carriage we saw turn up the lane a few hours ago? Shiny, green, and with a picture of a lion on the door?”
“Yes,” Will said.
“That’s your friend’s aunt?” Daisy’s eyes were wide. “In a carriage like that?” Mother and daughter exchanged another impenetrable glance. “No wonder he went with her rather than learn to do the wash.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Will said. “I think he’d rather have stayed to do the wash.” The truth of his words sunk in as he spoke them. Martin would have stayed if he could have; in a world where they had their druthers, they both would have stayed. That something so humble as a one-room cottage and a couple of pigs was to be denied them seemed wretchedly unfair. Will dragged his mind away from that line of thought—if he started dwelling on things that were unfair, he might never stop.
He spent the rest of the day settling his bills at the village shops. In the morning he made sure the cottage was as safe and secure as he could make it: no imminent leaks, no bits of food left out for mice to get at, the pig pen as sturdy as it could be. He double-checked that the windows were shut tight and the teapot properly rinsed. He knew they weren’t returning but the idea of the cottage becoming damp or infested with mice made him want to cry.
Only when he was finished did he begin to pack. He had arrived with little more than the shirt on his back, but since then the cottage had filled with books and jars of ink and all the detritus of life, all the little things that made a home, and far more than he could fit in his satchel.
On the shelf he had built with his own hands was the final manuscript of the play. He picked it up, considering making room in his satchel for it, as if Hartley didn’t have half a dozen bound copies of the printed copy. B
ut as he looked at the manuscript, he saw that in between each of the lines of dialogue were words written in a different handwriting. He stepped into the light to get a better look.
It took him a minute to understand what he was seeing, because while the handwriting was unmistakably Martin’s—he’d recognize it even in the dark, he thought—the language was not English. He sounded out the words, and after stumbling over a few lines he realized he was reading French.
He didn’t know when Martin had done this, although it must have been during the time Will spent helping Mrs. Tanner. Will could speak French—his mother had been a native—but he could read it only haltingly and couldn’t write it at all. He recalled what Martin had told him, and imagined an eight-year-old Martin, alone in his sickroom, insisting on learning French because he missed his friend. Martin had called it jealousy, but maybe that was because he had the idea that wanting things—specifically closeness and affection—was wrong. To Will, it seemed only natural that a lonely child would do what he could to feel close to what few friends he had.
He read the first few pages aloud, remembering his mother’s lessons on how to pronounce the language. A few pages later, he felt almost confident in his reading, and could hear the words as if it were his mother speaking them. It was an odd sensation—his words, Martin’s pen, his mother’s language—and even odder to know that Martin had sat at this table and translated his play. It was a good translation, too, preserving both the sense and the humor of the original. He took a few books out of his satchel to make room for the manuscript.
Before closing the flap on his satchel, he took the primroses from the cup and carefully pressed them between the pages of the book he was reading, then slid the book into his bag.
Chapter Fifteen
Martin stood in the doorway of the elegantly appointed bedchamber that his aunt had kept clean and ready for him. In one corner sat a trunk that contained everything he had brought from Lindley Priory the previous year. Almost afraid to peer inside, he tried to remember what he had thrown into his trunk in that hurried flight to town: a few changes of clothes, a shaving kit, a miniature portrait of his mother, Will’s letters.
When he opened the lid, the first thing he took out was the clothing. It all looked enormous compared to the clothes he currently wore. But it was good quality, and he could sell it. He refolded the garments and stacked them on the dressing table. Then he looked at his mother’s portrait. She had died before he was old enough to remember her, and when he thought of her it was mainly as the idea of someone who might have loved him, who might have prevented things from going the way they did with his father. But that was a heavy burden to put on a person he didn’t know, a person who, at the time this portrait was painted, had been some years younger than himself. He really looked nothing like her, despite what Will might say, but he could see his aunt in the wry turn of his mother’s mouth and the sharpness of her gaze.
He reached into the depths of the trunk for Will’s letters, which was what he had come for in the first place, but was distracted by a gleam of gold. He bent and picked it up without thinking. He knew, even before his fingers closed around the cold metal, that it was his father’s signet ring. Martin had worn it every day between his father’s death and the day, a year later, when he finally left Lindley Priory, and not once since then had he thought about it. He didn’t even remember tossing it into the trunk. Absently, he slid it onto his third finger, but it was precariously loose. On his middle finger it was a better fit but still wobbly. The band, made of intricate swirls of gold, was in need of polishing. In the center was the Easterbrook coat of arms, which was supposed to be a dragon and a unicorn holding up a shield, but those creatures looked so belligerent that Martin always thought they appeared to be quarreling over it.
He remembered the ring forever glinting from his father’s finger, glinting when Martin was ordered back to his room for another bloodletting, glinting when his father hared off to London for a round of debauchery. But the ring was tarnished now, a vaguely embarrassing reminder of faded glory, a sad relic of misused power. Put it next to his mother’s portrait and you got a pretty little picture of landed aristocracy—old power, a compliant bride, a tale that spun itself out again and again.
And here he stood, in his soft wool coat and his newly cut hair, getting ready to play his part in the latest telling of the tale. Except now the Easterbrook baronetcy wouldn’t be purchasing compliance, but solvency. He, Martin realized with a shudder, would be the compliant one. He’d be forever beholden to his new wife and her family. The first time he got sick they’d realize how bad a bargain they had struck. Christ, they might realize it before then, if he couldn’t manage to get his wife with child. And while he didn’t think his wife’s family would be able to lock him away, he also knew he’d be too guilty to protest if they insisted on putting him in a seaside asylum for invalids with weak lungs—for his own good, of course.
It would likely be fine, he told himself. People entered into these sorts of marriages every day, if his aunt were to be believed. He slid the ring over his finger and it gleamed back up at him like a warning.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go like that,” Hartley said, looking about as formidable as a man could with a drooling baby on his hip. “It’s eight o’clock in the morning, which I assure you is a thoroughly bizarre time for social calls, but more importantly you haven’t eaten since you got here last night. I need hardly mention that you look like you were dragged behind the stagecoach all the way from Sussex. You simply cannot saunter up to Bermondsey House looking like that and expect to be let in.”
“But—”
“He’ll still be there later, Will,” Hartley said severely. “Now sit down.” Will sat in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs in the Fox’s still empty taproom. “I saw that you arrived with a satchel. Dare I hope it contains presentable clothing or will you be borrowing something of mine?”
“Er. Probably the latter,” said Will.
“Let the man eat his food,” Sam said, approaching the table with a plate, and then leaving with the baby. Will dutifully ate his breakfast as Hartley stared balefully at him from across the table.
“I knew it was a bad idea,” Hartley said. “The two of you in one another’s pockets for so many months.”
“You’re an oracle, Hart. Who knew?”
Hartley ignored this. “And now, because you’re you, you’ll assume that whatever happened is actually a grand passion that requires you to make an enormous mess of your life rather than two people doing exactly what people do when they’re cooped up together.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Will grumbled.
“Dare I hope it’s only physical?”
“Hartley!” Will knew he was blushing.
“How bad is it? Does he feel the same way?”
Will thought of the flowers pressed between the pages of his book and mumbled something that might be interpreted as assent. “In any event, it’s over,” he said, pushing food around on his plate.
Hartley sighed, whether with relief or sympathy Will could not tell. “You did the right thing by handing him over to his aunt. Well done. Heroic self-sacrifice, accomplished.”
“It was his idea,” Will said.
“Never thought sacrifice was much in Martin’s line,” Hartley mused. “But I suppose he yearned for the comforts of civilization—”
“It wasn’t like that,” Will protested, but even as he spoke he realized that Martin probably was very much enjoying having three hot meals a day and servants to draw his baths. And Will wanted Martin to have those things. He tried to remind himself that Martin was where he belonged.
“Regardless, now what you ought to do is give him some time to learn how to be Sir Martin again. You’ll call on him later, but first please finish your breakfast, shave as if you care about the results, and make some kind of effort with your hair. I’ll put some clothes that might fit you on your bed.”
When Will went upstairs, he half expected to find one of Hartley’s elaborate waistcoats and gold-buttoned coats sitting out for him. But instead there was a suit of clothes in brown wool, perfectly ordinary, and showing signs of wear. In fact, the last several times he had seen his brother, Hartley had been wearing unremarkable clothing—the sort of clothes one might expect to find on a man who lived above a pub, the sort of man you wouldn’t look at twice. With something of a start, he realized Hartley had done this to protect Sam, to keep anyone from reading anything specific into the nature of their friendship.
“You gave up your waistcoats,” Will said, pointing an accusing finger at Hartley when he walked into the room with a ewer of hot water. “And you dare accuse me of grand passions.”
“Fashions change, darling,” Hartley said. And then, busying himself in laying out a razor and a comb, “I’d go about in sackcloth for him if he required it, as much as it pains me to admit it.” He looked up sharply. “Don’t you dare throw it in my face.”
“I didn’t mean to!” Will held up his hands in surrender. “I think it’s . . . nice, that’s all.”
“You would,” Hartley sniffed.
An hour later Will was deemed sufficiently presentable to visit Bermondsey House. He knew where it was, because he had spent countless futile hours lurking around the place when he was looking for Martin the previous autumn. He lifted the brass knocker and let it fall. “I’m here to call on Sir Martin Easterbrook,” he told the servant who answered the door.
Will’s borrowed clothing felt scratchy and too tight as he waited for the footman to return, but eventually the man did, and led him up a flight of stairs. Will found himself in an empty sitting room filled with furniture that he felt certain he shouldn’t be allowed to sit on. Everything was dainty, edged with gilt, and likely worth more than Will could ever hope to earn. He’d count himself lucky if he got out with nothing crashing in pieces to the polished parquet floor. On the chimneypiece stood a clock that seemed to be made of solid gold and comprised of intertwined cherubs who were up to no good. He stepped closer and squinted.
Two Rogues Make a Right Page 15
