Poetic Justice, a Traditional Regency Romance (Regency Escapades)

by Alicia Rasley

  So Dennis could hardly be blamed for resenting his elder brother, and for chafing at the necessity to ask a favor, even so minor a one as a loan guarantee. John understood this, and regretted it, knowing that he'd always been too preoccupied playing the prodigal son to be much of a brother. As he scanned the clauses of the agreement, he said, "I'd've lent you the funds myself. I have no doubt that you will make it pay. You've done wonders already in the time you've had the shop."

  Dennis nodded grudgingly as John signed his name. It was true; once his father's shade had departed, Dennis had started the modernization the old man had resisted for so long. He'd added a window to let in a bit of light, and installed a Bodley range in the back room for cooking up his potions, and now he meant to add a new room. "Well, business is up, that's clear. I might even have to hire a shop assistant so I can supervise the work on the new room. Sophie won't work for me, you know. Says I order her about enough as it is."

  "A domestic tyrant. Just like Father."

  Dennis's hands played restlessly over the plans for the new salesroom, and his gaze slid away from his brother towards the counter where their father used to stand. "Not yet. I haven't had enough experience at it. And Sophie'd never put up with it. Do you know," he added suddenly, "I imagine I'll be struck down by a thunderbolt for this, but lately I've realized that Father wasn't a very able businessman, for all he boasted of his acumen."

  John was a bit taken aback, for he had always believed he'd inherited Tom Manning's self-professed flair for business. Perhaps he'd gotten it somewhere else after all. "No?"

  "No. He never did a real inventory, that I can see, and he left the books all ahoo. And of course, half the village owed him for years worth of medicating, and here he forgave all debts in his will, so they came back to me demanding further credit, saying they'd as good as paid their bills off." He shook his head and folded away the agreement John handed him. "And he always, always preached thrift, and neither borrower nor lender be. Well, he never borrowed, but he'd've been able to retire to Brighton had he collected what was owed. He hadn't the least notion of balancing the books, not if it meant dunning his neighbors. No, not any sort of businessman, not the modern sort, anyway."

  John smiled wryly as he considered Tom Manning's other boasts. "I expect someday we'll discover he couldn't have thrashed us within an inch of our lives either, as he always threatened."

  Indeed, their father never laid an angry hand on either son, no matter how one of them provoked him to it. John was reminded again of his comment that his father was something of a saint, if a particularly irritating and critical sort of saint.

  He rose from the table and went to the door. The shop had always felt like a prison, but today, with his father's shade dimming the light from the window, it felt like a dungeon too. "He was a good man," John said. "Look, I've got to check with my first mate to see how the re-coppering took. I'll be back at dinnertime."

  Dennis called after him, "Don't forget, Jack, you're in the country now. We dine at six, not midnight as you do in Town."

  ***

  Dinner went well enough, though in this most familiar of dining rooms John kept expecting his brother to kick him under the table the way he used to, or slip salt into his pudding—Dennis had been a poisonous little brat at times. But he'd come into his own as paterfamilias, sitting at the head of the table, carving the roast like a surgeon, pouring out wine with a hand far more generous than their father's.

  And Sophie was far more socially adept than their mother. A schoolmaster's daughter, she had been brought up in the upper reaches of the middle class. Dennis had been lucky indeed to win her, for she could keep his books and scribe his correspondence and converse easily with all his customers from the princess on down. And she was a dazzling cook besides. The ripening of berries all along the coast had impelled her to dizzying heights tonight, and she blushed when John pronounced her Bakewell tart worthy of Carême.

  Tommy and Lilly got to stay up a bit late to try out his gifts, little wind-up goblins from Germany, ghoulish enough in their lurching to delight any child. But as Dennis and Sophie took them off to bed, John felt the walls of the little parlor converge towards him. He called up the stairs that he was going for a ride, though he knew Dennis would probably take offense, presuming he was going to the Oak and Crown for a respite from family life.

  Instead, by long habit John rode along the coastal road out of the village, watching the wind ripple across the bay. Though it was still light, all the fishing boats were docked, their sails furled and their masts standing lonely and brave above the harbor.

  He reined in when he got to Traders' Point, scanning the horizon for a sail. There were none to be seen, but he knew better than to think that once he left the business, all the other Dorset free-traders had followed suit. Smuggling was too lucrative, and too seductive, to give up without a struggle. He'd had to be blackmailed into quitting himself, and still he missed it whenever the night was especially dark. Even now, he need only close his eyes to relive all those long lazy summer evenings spent out there halfway across the Channel, sitting crosslegged on the deck, tossing dice, drinking brandy out of the bottle, and keeping one eye out for the blockade ships and the excise boats. Waiting for dark.

  John shaded his eyes and looked west across the bay. The sun was still glancing off the promontory of Portland Bill. The free-traders would be in hiding for another hour and forty minutes, by his estimate, too long to sit here, reminiscing about his misspent youth.

  Around the bend from the point was the long avenue that led to Devlyn Keep, and without much volition he took it. The Keep was a precise brick Palladian house, an anomaly for more than a century here, where Portland stone was the usual material for manors. But an earlier viscount, besotted with his wife who was besotted with the architect Palladio, had torn down the stern old Keep and erected an Italian villa in its place.

  There was some courage, he thought again, gazing up at the rotunda from the drive, in surviving despite such utter unsuitability. And there was beauty in it too. Books and sailing ships aside, all beauty needn't be functional.

  But that reminded him of Wiley, and his useless, destructive obsession. There might be art in that, too, at least in the utter defiance of sense and tradition and evidence. No one else, not in two centuries, had conceived that Shakespeare might not be Shakespeare. No one else had ever dared.

  He was still brooding on this when he located Devlyn on the south lawn, tape in hand, measuring out a cricket pitch in the fading light. John took out of his pocket the doll he had brought from London, and received the reassuring report that Anastasia had not perished for lack of it.

  "She's just taken to crawling into our bed whenever she misses the doll." Devlyn held the doll out as if charging it with dereliction of duty. "This has been, you might imagine, rather a trying time on the marital front."

  "Oh, I've something for young Jack too."

  Devlyn wasn't so happy to see the cricket-ball-sized head, with its wizened face and sparse wiry hair. "For his collection of oddities, I take it?"

  "It's not a real shrunken head. It's made of a coconut."

  "Jack will be disappointed. Not to mention Tatiana."

  "Well, I'll keep the truth to myself, if you will." John tossed it up and caught it again. "It is rather like, you know. I had a shipmate who had one of each sex."

  Devlyn sent a gardener off towards the house bearing the gifts, the head held gingerly in two begrimed fingers. "We're in something of a building frenzy this summer. Come down and see the pier I had constructed on the beach."

  The new pier was a fine one, extending out fifty feet from the beach, with a sturdy iron rail and davits for several boats. John gave this new addition the attention it deserved, leaning over the rail to estimate the depth of the water. "I'd be able to bring the Coronale up here, if you'd cut a channel, you know."

  "And what is it you plan to unload, if I cut a channel through?"

  "Nothing too object
ionable. Nothing to compare with what I used to haul up on the beach there, back in the olden days."

  Devlyn was stomping a protruding nail in the boardwalk, but stopped to regard him suspiciously. "Did you really unload contraband on my beach?"

  John only shrugged. He hadn't the heart to tell the truth, that while Devlyn had been off at war, this beach had been a major rendezvous for free-traders from two counties. Instead he leaned back against the rail and watched the sun get darker as it slid slowly towards the water. "Another sun gone forever."

  Devlyn had found a hammer in a discarded toolbelt and was busy correcting all the carpenter's other mistakes. He paused in his pounding long enough to glance quizzically at John. "There'll be another tomorrow, you know." With the hammer, he gestured back in the other direction. "It'll appear on that horizon, oh, in nine hours or so. Haven't you ever noticed?"

  "I've noticed that sarcasm doesn't become you. And it won't even be eight hours till sun-up. Someone who owns such a fine pier ought to keep better account of the sun times. And the tides too. And for God's sake, could you belay that infernal hammering?"

  Devlyn frowned at this uncordial observation, as well he might, considering the fine Chambolles-Musigny he had brought along to christen the pier. But at least he replaced the hammer in the toolbelt and uncorked the wine. "What's ailing you?"

  John took the glass and tasted the wine, and decided to forgive his friend for having no nautical training. "I am facing something of a moral dilemma."

  "You are?"

  Devlyn's all-too-evident surprise annoyed him and cut short John's impulse to confide. "I have them occasionally, you know. They come up every now and again, when I'm between throat slittings and embezzlings. Not that you're likely to recognize a dilemma, as you have gone through life unerringly doing only the right thing."

  This got Devlyn's back up again, though he was too good a host to toss his guest over the railing into the surf. They stood there in silence while the clouds turned pink and orange. Devlyn was even better at withdrawing than John was, and stubborner besides, and would likely stand out here till sunup, too polite to go up to bed and too angry to say good night. John saw him looking purposefully at the hammer, and gave up. "I am about to ruin a man, and I don't know if I should warn him."

  Devlyn picked up the wine bottle and refreshed both their glasses. It was as close to a signal of accord as he would give. "I'd say the moral dilemma would be, should you ruin him?"

  "Ah," John said, "but I have no choice. He is doing great wrong."

  He supposed he couldn't blame Devlyn for looking skeptical; Sir Galahad was not John's customary role. "Incalcuable wrong," he added.

  After another sip or so, Devlyn accepted this. "Why do you want to warn him?"

  "So that he can stop doing what he's doing."

  "Is that what will happen if you warn him?"

  It was this sort of interrogation he valued most from Devlyn—rational and analytical. "I'm not sure. I doubt it will stop him. He's obsessed with this."

  "Then will warning him put you in danger?"

  John envisioned Wiley, his sharp face and dim eyes, and shook his head. "I don't think so. He's not the violent sort, from what I can see. Just another dotty scholar."

  "Right. Like that other—what's his name?—was just another devout priest."

  "Alavieri. Oh, but he's different. He cut his eyeteeth on the Machiavelli journals. Hemlock is his favorite drink." John set his glass down on the rail and turned back to the sunset. The dying rays splashed red on the bluest part of the sea, then faded to pink. Fine day tomorrow, he thought. "This one—well, Wiley has hired a thug or two, though where he found them I can't think. Not the worldly sort, you know. And they haven't made any move towards me. He's more likely to confine his viciousness to pen and paper."

  "So what damage can he do with pen and paper?"

  Slowly John replied, "He might try to get me cashiered from the Royal Society. In fact, I don't doubt he's already started that."

  "Will he succeed?"

  He shrugged. "I've been of more use than he to the Society, I know that much. He writes an occasional monograph about Bacon, but I'm the link to the Regent."

  "Is he likely to damage your relationship with the Regent?"

  "I can't see how. Wellesley and Castlereagh did their damnedest to discredit me when I worked for them, and they're both at Alavieri's level when it comes to poisoning. The Regent thought it was amusing, defying his foreign secretaries like that. And Wiley hasn't any credit with the prince."

  "What's the worst that can happen, then?"

  John thought of the vault, securely locked up, the guards he'd stationed to watch the library, Jessica's eagle eye. "He might try to steal a document. I don't know if he'd be able to get to it. But he might do it anyway, eventually, no matter what I tell him. It's not beyond belief that he would destroy it, did he get his hands on it."

  Devlyn probably didn't follow this tangle of possibilities. But he had been a colonel under Wellington, and knew how to summarize options. "So if you tell him what you intend, he likely won't stop what he's doing. Moreover, he might well try to damage your reputation, and it is not inconceivable that he might do injury to you or this document you value. And, of course, you will have lost whatever element of surprise you have right now. So your choice is clear: Do not warn him."

  John was taken aback by this curt recommendation. "But you are giving me the pragmatical choice, not the moral one."

  "The only moral dilemma is that first one, whether you are right to ruin him. The rest is mere pragmatics, what is the most efficient way to accomplish that. And the safest."

  "But, as I told you, Wiley isn't much of a threat. He's rather stupid, in that peculiarly scholarly way. Blinkered. He's caught in the grip of this obsession and thinks nothing of the consequences. He's already revealed all his secrets to me, without even noticing he was doing so."

  "Then if he is stupid for making these revelations, what does that make you, if you warn him of your plans?"

  John drew himself up straight. "I told you. I thought it made me moral."

  Devlyn grinned and held out the wine bottle. "I can tell you haven't much practice at it. Morality doesn't mean martyrdom." He poured the rest of the wine into John's glass—he'd always been the generous sort, Devlyn had. "Take my advice. Do what you have to do, but do it quietly."

  "It sounds rather easier than I imagined," John said doubtfully. "I'd always presumed this would be painful, doing the right thing."

  Devlyn laughed shortly and held the bottle upside down over the pier. Only a few drops fell to spot the planks, but that was christening enough. "It's not the deciding that's painful, but the imposition of the decision. I take it you won't be staying long, if you have such urgent business awaiting you in London."

  John thought of Wiley, of his promise to Jessica, of the scene with Parham that awaited him. "I shan't be staying long, no. Just the night."

  "Here, I hope."

  "No," John answered absently, his mind on London. "I'm staying with my brother."

  The silence was iron-hard, eloquent. John closed his eyes, but the setting sun blazed red under his eyelids. "Don't start, Devlyn. I am too weary for this."

  But Devlyn ignored him. Staring off into the horizon, he said, "Do you know, my solicitor had a new will drawn up for me, since Anastasia's birth. It was the naming of a guardian for the children that stopped me. Naturally, I thought of you. But I didn't know if you would accept the commission."

  John set his glass down on the top of the rail and rubbed his forehead with his fist. "You know I would be honored."

  "Well, I didn't mean it to be an honor, for you to stand guardian to my children. A duty, more."

  "Fine. A duty. We have been friends all our lives. That makes it duty enough, I suppose."

  "No. I have other friends, you know, ones whose lives are more adaptable to childrearing than yours. But I wouldn't want them reared by a friend, when their uncl
e is available."

  "Why are we having this conversation?" John said with exasperation. "We both know how it will end. I told you. Name me as guardian. If the worst happens, and I must, I will take good care of your children. Now have done, will you?"

  "No, I won't have done. I thought we had done with this years ago, before Tatiana and I married."

  John straightened and walked back towards the beach. When he felt the sand under his boots he stopped, but Devlyn remained a dozen feet back on the pier, leaning against the rail. The wind had lightened and the waves were only a whisper, so Devlyn's low voice cut across the distance. "But you couldn't acknowledge it. Couldn't live with it."

  "Is that so hard for you to understand? I will not attach scandal to my mother's name. And I will not deny my father."

  "For God's sake, John, they're long dead. And besides, you are denying your father."

  With triumph as well as anger, John seized on this. "That's it, isn't it, for you? This father of yours—why do you think I would want to claim him?"

  "You did once. When we were boys. You were the one who brought all this up."

  The guilt stirred in him, even after so long. He had been a wild boy, and his father—his real father, the only one he had—was coming the tyrant, as might be expected. And, as might be expected, John had considered alternatives. "That was only because I didn't want the father I had. And there was some glamour in it, some notion of nobility." Sardonically, he added, "I learned better as I grew older, what real nobility is. And it has nothing to do with the sort of father you had."

  "Our father's been dead these twenty years."

  "Not our father. You see, you insist on that tie. And I won't ever accept that. God! Have you forgotten? How can you forgive him? He left you destitute and alone like a stray dog. I remember stealing food for you, because I knew you'd never do it yourself, till my father found out and took to giving me shillings for you. Poor little Lord Michael, he used to say. Doesn't have a father."

  It was brutal, John realized when Devlyn sucked in his breath and stepped back, pressing against the rail. To remind the man of the boy he had been, an object of pity for his social inferiors. It wasn't fair, and yet it was true.