A Seditious Affair

by K. J. Charles

  “Be damned to you.”

  “We both know what you want of me. Here to fuck you when you want it and be got out of the country when it’s convenient for the gentry.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Shut your mouth,” Silas snarled. “I’m talking. And I asked you a question, Mr. Frey, standing here in this fucking molly house with me. If I told you—”

  “Stop it!” Dominic wanted to hit him or to block his own ears against this hellish distortion. Or perhaps what they’d had had been the distortion, and this was the truth after all. “Stop,” he repeated, and felt the word’s awful familiarity in this room. A humiliation without anything good in it at all.

  Silas laughed without amusement. “Stop,” he mimicked cruelly. “There’s my answer. Well, then.” One deep breath. “Lucky for you I don’t want it.”

  “What?”

  “Just fuck off.” Silas spat the words. “Fuck off back to the Home Office and do your job. Gaol the reformers and anyone who speaks against your mad king and your fat, greedy slug of a Regent. Protect your friends. Dance at balls. What do I know what gentlemen do? But I’m not your lackey; I’m not your whore. I won’t take your charity, and I won’t vanish for your convenience. I got my own life, just like you got yours, and mine’s no less to me than yours to you, so piss off and leave me alone.”

  Chapter 5

  The banging on the shop door came at an unseasonable hour of Saturday morning.

  Silas rolled out of bed, snarling. He was dizzy to the point of nausea from nights of sleepless fury, and days of exhausting himself physically in the hope of better nights. The constant, angry, miserable roil in mind and heart.

  The knocking suggested urgency rather than soldiery. He blinked his crusted eyes clear and hurried downstairs.

  When he unbolted the door, it was to see George Charkin’s mother, Martha, with nine-year-old Amy by her side. Amy looked white, her eyes huge. Martha’s face was crumpled and streaked with tears.

  “Mr. Mason,” she said, voice shaking. “Oh, Mr. Mason. It’s George.”

  They brought his body to the bookshop. Martha Charkin, a seamstress who worked every waking hour until her eyes failed and fingers bled, lived with her children in a single room. She had no space to lay out her dead son.

  The corpse was a pallid, bloody sight. It was stiff with rigor, sodden with rain, icy with the night’s exposure. Someone had shut his eyes, at least.

  George’s raggedy shirt was stained with blood, and so was the gentleman’s coat he wore, which was a shade of horribly familiar pink. Except that Harry had called it puce.

  “That coat,” Martha Charkin whispered. “Where’d it come from? My George was no thief!”

  “No one says he was.”

  “They will. That coat! Where’d he get it? He wouldn’t rob a gentleman, not for a coat. He would not.”

  Only a mother could believe that George had turned apache, idle layabout that he had been. “He didn’t rob anyone. Don’t you worry, he came by it fair. I know who gave him the coat.”

  “But—” Her eyes darted around the empty room, and when she next spoke, it was barely audible. “He had a purse too.”

  George, to Silas’s certain knowledge, had not had a shilling to his name. What little Silas could pay him went straight to his mother, or to the Spotted Cat inn and his vain hopes of the barmaid. “What purse?”

  Martha pulled out a pouch from under her shawl. It was heavy, not too far off half a pound, and it clinked, and when Silas opened the drawstring, he saw the glint of gold.

  “What the—”

  Harry Vane, of course. It had to be. Harry had given George his coat, that ugly pink thing; if George also held a purse of more money than he’d ever have seen in his life, that must have been Harry too. With Skelton’s threats hanging over him, the accusation that he’d had radicals kill his own kin, he’d handed George a fortune.

  The bloody fool.

  “What am I going to do?” Martha demanded. “Twenty guineas! If the Runners come after us…” The grief in her face was mixed with fear. Silas couldn’t blame her. For a woman in her position, simply holding that much money would feel like guilt.

  “Who found him?” he asked.

  It was watchmen, it seemed. They had stumbled across the body in the dark ways of Leicester Square. George’s father had been watch, before the drink carried him off. The men had known George, and that recognition had meant they’d showed him a little respect, or at least that they’d refrained from stripping the corpse of valuables.

  Thank God. A stabbed youth, a radical, far too much money on him, wearing Harry Vane’s coat. If that man Skelton heard about this, what conclusions might he draw?

  Silas had to warn Harry. Before Skelton or any other law found out about this, before the noose tightened around the lad’s neck.

  It wouldn’t be hard to find Lord Richard Vane’s direction. But Silas couldn’t go to find Harry there, even assuming the staff would permit a gutter-blood like himself to commune with a gentleman. That would just make everything worse. Harry had to be kept away from the bookshop, away from radical politics, away from the snares that would entrap Silas and George—

  Not George. George was dead. Silas stared down at the scrawny, underfed body and felt his chest constrict.

  Nothing to be done for the lad now except make sure his mother didn’t suffer. No accusations staining her dead son, no suspicions of theft falling on her. He had to keep Martha clear and Harry too.

  He needed help and reluctantly, inevitably, he knew where it had to come from.

  “Watch him,” he told Martha. “Don’t open the door. Get the coat off him if you can, when the stiffness goes. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  —

  He had no idea where Dominic Frey lived, but he knew who might, and in little more than an hour, huddled against the spattering, cold autumn rain, he was knocking at the door of some very neat lodgings on Gerrard Street.

  He didn’t expect much of a welcome. The men he’d come to visit would have been up until four, no doubt, and it was not yet nine. But he banged at the door anyway until it opened, to reveal a bleary-eyed Jonathan Shakespeare, who greeted him with, “Mason? You slab-sided lump.”

  “Let me in, Jon. There’s trouble.”

  Jon’s skin was dark enough that it didn’t show circles under his eyes, which was more than Silas could boast. Jon looked exhausted, but he admitted Silas, muttering under his breath. “Well, what’s the matter?”

  “I need to know where Dominic Frey lives.”

  “Be fucked. You’ve got me out of bed for your fancy man?” Jon’s voice rose with incredulous anger. “You think you haven’t given us enough trouble yet? Hell’s teeth!”

  Silas growled. “Listen, will you? It’s not—”

  “You listen,” Jon snapped. “I had Foxy David on my back yesterday, wanting to know why his lordship’s bosom friend is sporting a black eye off a man I introduced him to. You want to explain yourself to Foxy for me?”

  That was Lord Richard Vane’s flashman, Silas knew, the servant who acted as his procurer, carried out his will in the running of Quex’s, and otherwise handled matters below a gentleman’s dignity. Silas didn’t give a damn for his opinion. “Bugger your Foxy. I need to talk to Frey, urgent, and it ain’t about private matters. It’s my lad Harry in trouble.”

  “Yes, well, bugger Harry Vane, come to that,” Jon said. “I had to throw him out a few weeks back. Squabbling like a fishwife with his doxy-boy—”

  “Jon!” Silas barked. “There’s trouble brewing, bad trouble. My lad George, my assistant, was murdered last night.”

  “What? Christ.”

  “And—don’t ask why, for God’s sake—I need to talk to Frey,” Silas went on. “I need his direction. Just do it, eh?”

  There were light footsteps in the passage, and Will Quex pushed open the door, looking every bit as wretched as Silas felt. Like Jon, Will wore a dressing gown, loosel
y tied, and he hadn’t bound his breasts yet, so there was a slight, unnerving shadow of cleavage. Silas had known Will as a man for so long, he was startled on the rare occasions he recalled the fellow had been born Susannah.

  “As I live and breathe, it’s Gentleman Jackson,” Will observed in a rasp. “Silas Mason, pet of the fancy. If you had to punch one of the nobs, did it have to be Frey? Because, one, I could name a few others who’d benefit more from having their daylights darkened, and, two, he’s the apple of Lord Richard’s eye, you stupid sod!”

  “Silas’s assistant’s got himself killed,” Jon said.

  “Oh yes?” Will flopped down in a seat. “Why are you shouting about that?”

  “He wants Frey’s address.”

  “Really. Fighting or fucking?”

  “Neither,” Silas growled. “And while we’re at it, why did neither of you tell me who the bastard was?”

  “You didn’t know?” Unholy glee dawned on Jon’s features. “You didn’t know—Mr. Radical—you didn’t know you were fucking Dominic Frey?”

  “Course I didn’t know. You think he gave me his card?”

  “Oh, dear me.” Will was making a very poor fist of concealing his amusement. “All that time, and you didn’t know you were birching a high Tory. Oh, that’s glorious.”

  “Ah, Silas,” said Jon. “Just think how much harder you could have hit him.”

  Will cackled. “Talk about a missed opportunity. For Frey, I mean—”

  “Shut your mouths!” It came out as a shout, unintentionally, but Silas glowered at the pair of them as though he’d meant to bellow. He’d laughed along enough times with their mockery of the pampered peacocks they served, he could take ribbing himself, but he couldn’t laugh at this. His fists were clenched.

  They were both giving him sideways looks. “Touchy, Silas?” Will asked.

  “Just give me his direction,” Silas said. “Or I promise you, there’ll be trouble coming to Lord Richard’s door, and your Foxy David will have something to say then.”

  All the amusement dropped from Will’s face. Their club was a fashionable resort, a gambling hell, and a place of safety for Lord Richard’s set of men who preferred men. It was also, not incidentally, the only club in London where a black man ruled, although in public he appeared subordinate rather than equal to Will. Wouldn’t want to upset anyone, after all. Jon had authority, Will passed among men unchallenged, and it was Lord Richard’s imprimatur that gave them their freedom. The thought stuck in Silas’s craw.

  “Tell me this,” Jon said. “Are you out to cause trouble, any sort? Because Foxy’s given his views on this. Lord Richard won’t have Mr. Frey hurt—you know, outside his wants—and you’d be ill advised to cross him.”

  “I don’t mean trouble, and Frey’s wants aren’t my business. That’s done with.” The other two men exchanged glances. “But if I don’t talk to him, there’s going to be the devil to pay.”

  They wouldn’t give him Frey’s direction, evidently fearing that he might be free with his fists again, but they agreed to send a note by urgent messenger. That was hard enough to write. For one thing, Silas didn’t want to create incriminating evidence; for another, he couldn’t but feel that everything he wrote sounded like an appeal to a lover. Please come. I need to see you.

  He bent his mind to pale, bloodstained George and scrawled out a few blunt words, too abrupt because courtesy threatened to undo him, and anyway, he could imagine how contemptuously Frey would regard his ugly, uneducated hand. That done, he bade Will and Jon farewell and headed back to Ludgate, and Martha Charkin’s grief.

  He was alone in the shop just after dusk, sitting vigil with the body, when there was a tap at the door.

  “Good evening.” Frey’s face was impassive, his voice neutral, his bruised eye a lurid shade of purple, edged with green. “You asked me to call.”

  Silas stepped back to let him in, giving him a view of the table on which George lay.

  “Dear heaven. Who’s this?”

  “My assistant, George Charkin. Killed Friday night in Leicester Square.”

  “I’m sorry.” Frey took off his hat. “My condolences. What happened?”

  “Stabbed. Don’t know why, or who. But he was found wearing this.” Silas fished the puce coat out from the burlap bag that concealed it and held it up.

  Frey frowned, then his dark eyes went wide with shocked recognition. “What th— Your assistant was wearing it?”

  “Aye. I was hoping you’d say this was a popular sort of coat.”

  “No, it is not, and I’d normally be relieved by that.” He put a hand through his hair. “You know whose coat that is, don’t you?”

  “Harry Vane’s.”

  “Why would your assistant have Harry’s coat?”

  “He needed one. Your men tore his off his back. If Harry met him, maybe he gave it over? And George had twenty guineas on him too, when he shouldn’t have had more than a shilling to his name. I don’t know why Harry would have given him money—”

  “I suspect to keep him sweet,” Frey said, frowning. “I believe he was a little dubious of your assistant’s, uh, steadfastness in the face of questioning.”

  “Paying George to go away, was he?”

  Their eyes met. Frey didn’t reply.

  “That investigation,” Silas said after a moment. “That horseshit about the fire. Still going on?”

  “Indeed. Around the time we last met—possibly while you were punching me in the face—Skelton went after Harry. He threatened Harry with this story of the fire and the old prosecution for riot, tried to get him to inform on you. Harry denied everything. Told him on his word as a gentleman that you were not Jack Cade and not engaged in lawbreaking. He lied through his teeth for you, and embroiled Richard in it as well.”

  It hit Silas in the belly. Feckless Harry, so cheerfully comfortable in his new life, doing that? Silas loved the young idiot, always had, but he had no illusions. Flexible to a fault, Harry was, never taking a stand.

  But he’d done it now, for Silas.

  “Well,” he said, hearing the rasp in his voice. “Good lad. Is he all right?”

  “He is in grave disgrace with his family, and word of his undesirable associations is spreading,” Frey rapped out, and perhaps Silas’s face showed something at that, because he went on in a somewhat more measured tone. “But he has good friends by him too. One in particular is very fierce in his support.”

  “Fop fellow, might that be?”

  “Indeed.”

  Harry’s lover. Silas sniffed. “Doesn’t sound much use to me.”

  “He is, when he cares to be, one of the most offensive men in London. You should have heard him on the topic of this damned coat. Oh, blast it. The fact is, Skelton is rebuffed for the moment only. Down, but far from out. He thinks that Harry has the knowledge to incriminate you. So do I, as it happens.” Frey gave a wintry smile. “I don’t know whether he believes this story about the fire to be true, but if he learns that Harry gave your man a coat and a purse of money, it will certainly lend support to his theory. It does not look good.”

  “That’s what I reckoned.”

  “Has anyone in authority seen this?”

  “Just the watch, far as I know. We’ve not called the crowner yet; I wanted to talk to you first. Well, Harry, but—”

  “You had the good sense to stay well away from him,” Frey completed. “What are your thoughts?”

  “I’m inclined to burn the coat,” Silas said bluntly. “George wasn’t killed for it, or the money either.”

  “Any idea why he was killed?”

  “None. Had a mouth on him, so maybe he spoke sidewise to the wrong fellow. I’d say burn the coat and give the money to George’s mother. God knows she’ll need it. But if I did that, then turns out the watch kept a record of what he was wearing…”

  “It would look even worse for you and Harry.”

  “Or for George, if he’s accused of stealing. And there’s Martha, h
is ma. What if anyone asks where the money came from? Bad enough to have lost her boy.”

  “I see.” Frey frowned. “Presumably the watch were not aware of the large sum on the body?”

  “Or they’d have stolen it? Ha. Can’t say. His father was a watchman, so perhaps…”

  “So it is possible that the coat and the money are a matter of record.” He considered a moment. “Have you a pen and paper?”

  Silas produced them, well aware that the nib was badly cut, the ink thick. Frey made no comment as he bent to write brief memoranda on three separate pages. There was no sound for a little while but the scratch of the pen.

  “There.” Frey straightened. “The coat, please.”

  Silas looked at the first paper, written in a beautiful copperplate hand despite the bad nib. It was a receipt for the coat, with a brief description, and a signature: Dominic Frey.

  “You’re taking it as evidence?” he said, not quite believing what he saw. “Against Harry? What the—”

  “Do try not to be so tediously suspicious. I’m going to burn it,” Frey said, cold and clear. “And I hope that will be the end of this accursed garment, but should any questions arise, you have a receipt. I took it; what happens to it is my responsibility and none of your concern. Give me the purse.”

  Silas thought about that for a moment, then fished it out of his desk drawer and tossed the heavy little bag over.

  Frey’s hand closed around it. “That’s now in my custody. That bag there, please.”

  Silas handed over the burlap sack. Frey emptied the stream of golden guineas into it with a metallic chinking and pocketed the empty purse.

  “Very well. I have, officially, taken custody of the purse. I have also given you a sum of money to pass to the bereaved mother, with my condolences, and with a note to that effect in case of questions.”

  “Taking a lot on yourself, ain’t you?”

  “You know, I’m sure we discussed this. My station in life gives me greater responsibilities.” He gave a superior nod. “Don’t concern yourself anymore. It’s in my charge.”