by Emily Larkin
“No. Oh— The port wine on the mantelpiece!”
“Best Portuguese.”
“I wondered where it had come from. No, sir, he didn’t mention your visit.”
“He was rather castaway.”
Smollet grimaced fleetingly.
Tom looked at the man—stocky and blunt-faced, in his early forties. He’d been with Lucas since Lucas had left the nursery. “May I have a word with you?”
“With me?” Smollet’s eyebrows lifted fractionally. “Of course, sir. Come in.”
Tom stepped inside. He removed his hat and gloves, gave Smollet his greatcoat, and walked through into the sitting room. Candles glowed in the sconces and a fire burned briskly in the grate.
He glanced at the bedroom door. It was closed.
Tom sat in the armchair Lucas had slouched in last night. A book sat on the table alongside, a ribbon neatly marking Lucas’s place.
Smollet came to stand before him. “Sir?”
Tom nodded at the second armchair. “Have a seat, man.”
Smollet obeyed. “Sir?” he asked again.
“Tell me how Lucas is.”
“He’s very well, sir.”
“No.” Tom waved this answer aside. “How is he? Truthfully.”
Smollet hesitated, and then said, “Better than he was.”
Tom eyed the man. Smollet was the perfect gentleman’s gentleman. Efficient, discreet, sober—and loyal. That was the rub: Smollet’s loyalty. He wouldn’t gossip about the man he’d dressed since childhood. “Lucas was so drunk last night he couldn’t stand up.” He wrestled with his own loyalty, and then said, “He’d been crying.”
Smollet gave another fleeting grimace, and looked away.
“For God’s sake, man. This isn’t tattlemongering! I need to know how he is so I can help him.”
Smollet glanced back at him.
“You said he’s better now than he was, so tell me: how was he?”
Smollet pressed his lips together, as if holding words back, and then sighed. “He’s been pretty bad, Master Tom.”
“How bad?”
Smollet looked down at his hands. He smoothed one cuff, then the other. “He’s never been a gabster. Not like Miss Julia.”
Tom waited.
Smollet sighed again and looked up, meeting his eyes. “He stopped talking after she died. He’d answer if you spoke to him, but otherwise . . . He’d go days without saying a word.”
“I saw him in June,” Tom said, disturbed. A few hours only, snatched before embarking for Portugal. “He was talking then.”
“In public, yes,” Smollet said, and lapsed into silence again. But it wasn’t the silence of a man who’d said all he wanted to say. The manservant’s lips were compressed, his brow faintly knotted, his hands gripped together in his lap.
Wrestling with his loyalty, Tom diagnosed. “Lucas stopped talking,” he prompted. “What else?”
Smollet’s lips pressed more tightly together, and then he said, “Laudanum.”
“Laudanum?”
“We was down in Cornwall—that estate he inherited last year . . .”
Tom nodded encouragingly. “I know of it. Pendarve.”
“He wasn’t sleeping more’n an hour or two a night, and he was getting worn to the bone, and he started taking laudanum and I thought it was a good thing—because at least it helped him sleep!—but then he started taking more, and he got so he was like a sleepwalker and . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
Tom listened with alarm. “Is he taking that much laudanum now?” Had Lucas’s confusion last night been due to more than just cognac?
“No, sir.” Smollet hesitated, and then said, “I threw it all out.”
Tom lifted his eyebrows. “Threw it out?”
Smollet nodded. “Master Lucas was . . . not pleased.”
Tom sat back in the armchair and eyed Smollet with respect. “I imagine he wasn’t.”
“He turned me off.”
Tom blinked. Lucas was as devoted to Smollet as Smollet was to him. “He what?”
“I told him as how Miss Julia didn’t hold with laudanum, and how she’d be regular worried if she were alive and could see what he was at, and he threw a boot at me and damned me to perdition and turned me off. But an hour later he begged my pardon, and told me I had the right of it, and that he’d be obliged if I would stay after all. You know how he is, Master Tom. He don’t stay angry for long, and he always begs one’s pardon.”
Tom did know. “When was this?”
“Last winter.”
“And there’s been no more laudanum since then?”
“No more laudanum, but . . . he started dipping pretty heavily.”
Tom remembered Lucas last night: too drunk to stand, let alone walk.
“It came about over several weeks. I wasn’t worried at first, but then it grew so much that I was worried, but there weren’t a thing I could say to stop him. Miss Julia didn’t have nothing against a drop of wine.”
“His family—”
“We was at Pendarve, sir. Weren’t no one to notice if he got castaway every night—and no one but me to care about it.”
“Every night?” Tom said, perturbed. Lucas had never been a heavy drinker.
“Used to be. But I packed him into a post-chaise one night when he were too drunk to notice, and took him back to Whiteoaks.”
Tom was surprised into a crack of laughter. “How did he take that?”
Smollet smiled ruefully. “I think he would have turned me off again if he hadn’t been feeling so poorly.”
Tom shook his head, chuckling, and then sobered. “Did it work? Going home?”
“Yes, sir. We stayed for all of April and May, and he didn’t get castaway once, and he hasn’t since . . . excepting last night, which isn’t to be wondered at, seeing as how it were their birthday.”
“No,” Tom said. “Not to be wondered at.”
They were both silent. Tom wondered if Smollet was thinking of Julia, too, thinking of how close she and Lucas had been.
A coal shifted in the grate. Tom gave himself a mental shake. “So that’s how he’s been . . . how is he now?”
Smollet frowned, and pursed his lips, as if deliberating what to say.
“Don’t dress it up in clean linen.”
Smollet met his eyes and said bluntly, “He put off his blacks and he started talking more, and he looks like he’s over it, but you know him as well as I do, Master Tom, and you’ll see for yourself pretty quick that it’s all a sham.”
“How much of a sham?”
“He still has days where he don’t speak at all. And days where he don’t want to leave his bedchamber.”
Tom’s throat tightened. He looked away, at the fire.
“Miss Julia’s been dead more’n a year, but I think he still misses her every minute of every day, and even if he don’t take the laudanum anymore or drink himself under the table every night, I think he wants to.”
Tom glanced back at the manservant.
“But he won’t talk about it, so I’m only guessing.” Smollet gave a helpless shrug.
Smollet was no fool; his guess would be a good one.
Tom blew out a breath. “I didn’t realize it was so bad.”
Smollet didn’t respond to this statement of the obvious; instead he said, “How long are you here for?”
“I don’t know. No one knows when the inquiry will start, let alone how long it’ll go on for.” Tom scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’ll see if I can get some leave.”
He saw relief on Smollet’s face. “That would be good, Master Tom. If you could. He misses you, though he’d never say it.”
He did say it yesterday. Tom remembered Lucas sagging against him in the bedroom doorway, a warm, heavy weight. He remembered Lucas’s huff of laughter, his sigh, his words: I’ve missed you.
And he remembered Lucas naked and aroused on the bed.
Tom cleared his throat. “He didn’t mention my visit l
ast night?”
“No, sir. I doubt he remembers. He had a devil of a head this morning.”
Was it a good thing Lucas didn’t remember what had happened? Or not?
Chapter Four
Tom found Lucas at Ned Howick’s lodgings in Duke Street, with two other friends from their schooldays. The men sat around a table, with a punch bowl and a pack of cards, but when Ned’s manservant ushered Tom into the room there was a scraping of chair legs as everyone stood hastily.
“Tom!”
“Matlock, old chap!”
He was clapped on the back, his hand wrung heartily, a chair drawn up to the table for him, a glass of punch poured, the cards shoved aside. Questions were pelted at him about the recent skirmishes in Portugal, the French defeat—and unavoidably, the Convention of Cintra.
“It’s a disgrace!” Rupert Banning said indignantly. “Those damned generals should be discharged from the army!”
“Burrard and Dalrymple certainly, but not Wellesley,” Tom sipped the punch. It was warm and spicy, potent with arrack. “Wellesley wanted to fight. He was as mad as anything to go after the French.”
Talk turned to the approaching hunting season. Tom drank a second glass of punch, refused a third, and kept an eye on Lucas. He looked to be in good spirits, leaning back in his chair, glass in hand.
A sham, Smollet had said. But it didn’t look like a sham; it looked real. It looked as if last night—the cognac, the tears in the dark—hadn’t happened.
Lucas caught his glance and smiled cheerfully.
He doesn’t remember that I found him crying, Tom thought. He doesn’t remember that I put him to bed.
He dug in his pocket and pulled out his latest sketchbook and a stub of a pencil.
“You still doing that?” Ned asked, as Tom flicked through to the next blank page.
“Whenever I can. Don’t mind me. Keep talking.”
The four men, inured by long experience to his sketchbook and pencil, did just that. Tom drew them quickly, two-minute portraits, each on a page two and a half inches by four. Rupert Banning, with his collar-points as high as a dandy. John Ludlow, halfway to being drunk. Ned Howick, round-faced and jolly. And Lucas, lounging in his chair.
Tom’s pencil slowed. Lucas was nowhere near as relaxed as he appeared. His smile didn’t reach his eyes. He looked like a man enjoying a convivial evening with friends, but he wasn’t. Smollet was correct: it’s a sham.
Tom soberly sketched in the folds of Lucas’s neckcloth, closed the little book, and tucked the pencil back into his pocket.
“Let’s see,” Rupert said, with a snap of his fingers.
The sketchbook was passed around the table, and inevitably the pages were turned back to the beginning and the drawings of the past two weeks examined—the journey from Plymouth, the transport from Lisbon. “This Portugal?” Ned asked, peering at a street scene.
“Lisbon.”
“You got any more sketchbooks of Portugal?”
“A couple.” He glanced at Lucas. “I brought them to show Lu.”
“What? You’ve got them here?” Ned said. “Show us!”
Tom pushed to his feet and went out into the entrance hall and fished in the pockets of his greatcoat. One, two, three little sketchbooks. He hesitated a moment, and then drew out the fourth, uncertain whether he wanted to show it to anyone.
He brought the books back to the table, laid three of them out, and tucked the fourth one in his pocket, still undecided. “Not much in one of ’em. Spilled tea over it.”
Lucas refilled everyone’s glasses but his own and the sketchbooks were passed around. The inevitable questions followed: questions about soldiering, about what it was like to be one of General Wellesley’s aides-de-camp.
“Where’s this?” Ned wanted to know, and “What the devil’s this?” John asked, and Tom leaned over the table to explain.
“Who’s this?” Lucas asked.
“Let me see.” Tom reached across for the sketchbook. “That’s Houghton. Damned good sergeant. Lost an arm at Vimeiro, poor sod.” He handed the book back. His fingers brushed Lucas’s briefly.
Tom reached for his glass and sipped, and watched Lucas study the sketch of Sergeant Houghton.
Lucas was very carefully not looking at him, all his attention on the sketchbook, but Tom wasn’t fooled. The angle of Lucas’s head, the set of his shoulders . . . it looked like casual nonchalance, but it wasn’t. Tom’s fingers burned where they’d touched Lucas’s, and he knew—knew—that Lucas’s fingers were burning, too.
Lucas turned three more pages, his gaze fixed on the little book, and Tom made a discovery: Lucas was blushing ever so faintly, the merest hint of color along his cheekbones, almost invisible in the lamplight.
Tom swallowed another mouthful of punch. He’s as aware of me as I am of him. And on the heels of that thought, came a jump of intuition: Lucas did remember what had happened in his bedchamber last night.
He watched Lucas flip through the pages, and told himself that intuition wasn’t infallible, that maybe he was seeing what he wanted to see, that the blush was because the room was overly warm, that in all likelihood Lucas didn’t remember last night.
“No battle sketches?” Rupert said, flicking through a sketchbook, his tone disappointed.
“There’s no time to draw during battle. And if I tried to, the general would have my head on a platter—and rightly so!”
“You’d be a target, standing still,” John put in.
“You’re a target whether you’re standing still or not,” Tom said, and he brought out the fourth sketchbook and tossed it down on the table.
“Jesus Christ!” Ned said, reaching for it.
Rupert beat him to it, picking up the book, giving a low whistle. “Musket ball?”
“At Roliça.”
“Where were you carrying it?” Rupert asked, turning the sketchbook over in his hand, fingering the lump of lead embedded in it.
“Breast pocket.” Tom tapped above his heart. “Knocked me off my horse. I thought I was dead for a few seconds.”
John took the sketchbook and examined it. “Lord,” he said, awe in his voice. “That’s something, that is!”
Tom shrugged, and glanced at Lucas.
Lucas’s smile had congealed. If Tom didn’t know Lucas had been nursing the same glass of punch for the last hour, he’d think him drunk and ready to cast up his accounts.
* * *
Tom stayed another half hour, and Lucas didn’t say a single word, not even when Ned asked him if he’d like more punch. He simply shook his head. Ned and Rupert and John, well on the way to being bosky, didn’t notice his silence, but Tom did.
Soberly, he stacked the sketchbooks in a little pile, the one with the musket ball at the bottom. I shouldn’t have let Lucas see it.
At eleven, Tom pushed to his feet. “I must be off.”
“Me, too,” John said, yawning and lurching to his feet. “Promised to drop in on Frasier. Coming, Rupert? Lucas?”
Rupert declined.
Lucas stood. “I think I’ll head home.” He thanked Ned for his hospitality, and donned his coat and gloves. A smile sat on his face, but his eyes gave him away, blue and somber.
Tom silently pulled on his own greatcoat, and wished he’d kept the fourth sketchbook in his pocket.
Outside, thick clouds still covered the moon. John walked as far as Oxford Street with them, then took his leave with a cheerful good-bye, lounging off into the dark. Tom matched his step to Lucas’s. “You all right?” he asked quietly.
“Me? Of course.”
Bollocks. “Lu . . .” He caught Lucas’s arm, halting him. “We need to talk.”
Lucas tried to tug free.
Tom tightened his grip. “We need to talk.”
“Tom, I’m tired. I’m drunk. I just want to go to bed.”
“You’re not drunk.” You’re upset. He paused, and then said, “Last night you were drunk.”
Lucas wrenched his arm
free. He began striding towards Grosvenor Square.
Tom stretched his legs to catch up. “Last night—”
“I don’t remember last night!” Lucas said fiercely.
The devil you don’t.
They walked to Grosvenor Square in silence, their boots slapping briskly on the pavement. Tom didn’t notice the great townhouses towering against the black sky. He was remembering what it had been like to hold Lucas’s cock in his mouth.
Intuition told him that Lucas was remembering it, too. Tension built between them as they walked, a taut, prickling awareness of each other. They turned into Brook Street. Lucas lengthened his stride, walking even faster. Trying to outrun the memory of last night? Trying to outrun the silent, sexual frisson between them?
Or is it only me who feels it?
Tom didn’t think so. Something—instinct, hunch, gut feeling—call it whatever one wanted—something told him that the attraction wasn’t one-sided. That it had never been one-sided.
But if Lucas felt the frisson, he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to pretend it didn’t exist, to pretend that last night hadn’t happened.
I should let this go. It could ruin our friendship.
And then Tom thought of the musket ball, and how close he’d come to death, and thought Fuck it, I’m not letting this go.
Lucas swung right and cut down Avery Row, striding fast.
“Lucas—”
“Not now.”
“Yes, now.” Another five minutes and they’d be at the Albany, where Smollet was waiting and where any chance of private conversation would be lost.
“I told you: I don’t—”
The Brook Street Mews loomed to one side, a black cave in the darkness. Tom caught Lucas’s arm and pulled him into the mews.
Lucas tried to jerk his arm free. “Look, I don’t want to talk. I’m tired—”
“Tough,” Tom said, propelling Lucas backwards until his back thudded up against a wall. “Because I do want to talk.”
“Damn it, Tom—”
Tom leaned in and kissed him. He couldn’t see Lucas in the darkness of the mews; the kiss fell off-center, catching the very corner of Lucas’s mouth.
Lucas stiffened, and jerked his head back. Tom heard their breaths—short, sharp—and then he kissed Lucas again.
