“I, uh.” Skelton was staring at the other end of the bed now. At, in fact, the cuff on Dominic’s ankle. No wonder he was distracted. Dominic Frey, the upstanding, respectable gentleman, chained to a bed with a whore on top of him. A small part of Dominic’s mind was screaming at how fast this news would spread; a larger part noted that he owed Zoë a pourboire the size of his usual monthly payment. “We, uh, need to search the house, sir.” Skelton was visibly pulling himself together. “There’s a seditionist here.”
“Sedition in my house?” Zoë squawked. “That’s slanderous talk!”
“He was followed here.” Skelton addressed that to Dominic. “A dangerous rogue—”
“Well, get on and find him then. No, somewhere else, clodhopper, do you think I have radicals under the bed in here? Will you leave me to my business!” Dominic shouted. The men who had tried to enter fell back in confusion. “And leave this lady to hers, because she is about my business! Are you all eunuchs?”
“Yes, sir—no, sir. Come on, everybody out. Move, you oafs!” Skelton pushed the men around him back. “Out. I beg your pardon, sir. Uh…” He flailed for words. “Enjoy your evening.” He shut the door.
Dominic looked at the door for a moment and then up into Zoë’s face. She had her lips pressed together, and as she caught his eye, she began to shudder, then bent over him, pressed her face into his chest, and let out a muffled howl of laughter.
“I’m glad that amused you.” Dominic put his hands over his eyes. “Dear heaven. My reputation.”
“Enjoy your evening, sir!” She guffawed. “Fucking nunnery!”
This was not funny, not at all, and he absolutely did not want to laugh. Dominic bit his lip, couldn’t quite tell if the shaking was Zoë or himself, then gave up the struggle to maintain a shred of dignity.
“You two can cackle,” Silas growled, emerging from behind the screen. “What sort of gimcrack place is this? The hell sort of whorehouse has chains that don’t come off?”
“It’s not her fault,” Dominic said, recovering himself. “Mechanisms break.”
“See, that’s a gentleman,” Zoë told Silas. “But I must beg your pardon, sir.”
“Not at all,” Dominic said, with equal courtesy, to the woman straddling him. “It was unfortunate, to say the least, but you run an excellent house, and I suspect you may have saved both our necks. At the cost of my reputation, but…”
“Probably done it a world of good,” Silas growled. “Zoë doesn’t tup just anyone.”
She grinned. “Only the ones with pretty eyes.”
“Yes,” Dominic said. “About that—”
“Aye, well, and you,” Silas interrupted. “That how you talk when you’re in charge?”
“Not often, no. Could somebody, perhaps, get this cuff off my ankle?”
Zoë shifted off him to stand against the door, as Silas set to examining the cuff’s mechanism, and Dominic pulled a sheet over himself, with some relief.
“So, Silas boy. You brought the hounds to my house?” Zoë said.
“Why were they pursuing you?” Dominic put in.
“Don’t know. No idea. Didn’t know they were, any more than usual. Maybe to have a seditionist plucked and ready if the bills pass. Jack Cade, ripe for transportation.”
Dominic couldn’t help but glance at Zoë. She gave him a wry look. “Yes, I knew that. And so did you, Mr. Frey.” She’d never used his name before, always the anonymous “sir.” “So…” She glanced between them.
“What?” growled Silas, crossing to the drawer of toys.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said to Dominic. “But I don’t want you meeting here no more.”
“Why not?” Silas fished out a slim piece of metal that doubtless had some painful purpose and went back to work at the faulty cuff.
“Because I can’t be raided again. They might come for the radicals, but they’ll take the gentlemen if they get ’em. This house is nothing if it ain’t safe. We usually pay ’em off, sir, but it seems like your lot wouldn’t be paid. So if Silas is bringing your boys here, Mr. Frey, and you can’t stop that, well, I’ve other clients to think about. And there’s another thing.” She folded her arms, bringing her chin up in defiance. “Foxy David.”
“Who?” Dominic asked.
“Your pal Richard’s flashman.” Silas bent his strength against the clasp and gave a grunt of triumph as it opened at last, freeing Dominic’s ankle. “What about him?”
“I don’t want to lose this place, and I don’t want Will and Jon to lose theirs,” Zoë said. “And we’ve had our instructions from Foxy, which is as much as to say from his lordship, and they’re not to be crossed.” She glanced at Dominic, then raised a brow. “You do know that?”
“I am at a loss as to your meaning,” Dominic said, swinging off the bed to grab his clothes. “Or…By this Foxy, do you happen to mean a redheaded man, of slim build?”
“Hold on,” Silas said. “Foxy David, the flashman, he’s Lord Richard’s valet as well?”
“Cyprian. He really does get everywhere,” Dominic muttered. He did not like Richard’s sly, silent henchman. The valet was a spymaster who put Sir Francis Walsingham in the shade and served Richard with the same single-minded intensity that Walsingham had given his queen. Dominic had often thought the man would adorn the Home Office, but he appeared to be satisfied to black Richard’s boots, which were, admittedly, among the best in London. Dominic had long felt an irrational but deep-seated mistrust of the valet’s amoral devotion. “What has he to do with it?”
“The first rule of this house or Quex’s,” Zoë said. “No harm to Mr. Frey.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Lord Richard’s orders, via Foxy. Games are games, Silas boy, but if you bring him down, Foxy will take it out of my skin and Jon’s too.”
“My affairs are none of Richard’s business, nor his concern,” Dominic said furiously. “None. His opinion is not relevant.”
“Oh, sir,” Zoë said. “It’s all about Lord Richard’s business. How do you think you two met?”
“Through Jon,” Silas said. “Jon said to me—”
“Foxy told me, find me a bully to do Mr. Frey as he likes it, someone who won’t hurt him. I talked to Jon, and he said why not you, and what that means, Silas Mason, is if you ruin the gentleman here, it’s our fault. We brought the pair of you together, and now look.” Zoë was intent on Silas, whose face was slack with shock. “Foxy’s already livid over that shiner you gave him. You think I’m going to lose everything we’ve worked for, me and Jon and Will, to give you a tupping-station?”
“You knew who he was, all along,” Silas said. “You could have told me, you damned sow.”
“We all knew who he was except you,” Zoë hissed, “and we all knew who you was except him, and how the fuck was anyone to know that you two was too stupid to ask each other?”
“Excuse me,” Dominic said.
Zoë pressed her lips together. “I beg your pardon for speaking out of turn, sir. But this is my house, and I want it to stay that way. I don’t want raids, and I don’t want to stand in the pillory for running a disorderly house, and I don’t want Foxy calling in the mortgage and me finding myself without a place at all because you’re bent on showing I can’t be trusted to run it right!”
“I will not have that,” Dominic said. “Absolutely not. I shall have words to speak with Richard. I am not governed by his damned spy of a valet.” He jerked his breeches shut with angry hands. “You have done nothing but your duty, and I shall not see you suffer for it.”
“You say that, sir—”
“Yes, I do. Nor is it contingent on whether we use this house, which I agree we should no longer do anyway. Whatever happens, mistress, you will not bear the consequences.” He sat on the bed to pull on his boots.
“Then what?” Silas demanded. “If we can’t meet here—”
“My rooms—”
“Don’t be a fool.”
“My ro
oms, I was going to say, would be indiscreet. So would your blasted bookshop. Uh, mistress?” Dominic looked up. “If you have any advice…”
“I do, yes, sir,” she said, in a very patient voice that reminded Dominic of his old nurse. “Have you considered maybe finding someone else to serve you that isn’t liable to be arrested any moment? I could—”
“No. No, that is not the advice I seek.”
“Maybe she’s right,” Silas said, voice full of grit. “You just lied to your own men. If they’d caught me here, they’d have had you twice over, for conspiracy as well as sodomy. Did you even think about that?”
He hadn’t thought about any of it except the urgent need to put the law off both their tails. “It could hardly have made things worse.”
“Yes, it could. I don’t want to be your ruin, Dom.”
“It’s too late for that.” Dominic tried a smile. It didn’t quite work, because Silas was looking at him.
Zoë glanced between them. “Uh, gentlemen? This is a house of assignation, remember? You’re meant to come here to fuck, that’s all. Oh, bollocks, I can’t bear lovebirds. All right.” She sounded thoroughly put-upon. “I’ll find another address, but it ain’t going to be anywhere grand, and you, Silas Mason, if you get followed again, you can do for yourself from then on. And, sir, if you can let it be known I’m doing my best—”
“You won’t suffer through my act, or my neglect, mistress.”
She gave a long sigh. “Oh, I’ve got something to say to that brother of mine. Him and his ideas. You two stay here now, and I’ll let you know when the coast is clear.”
Dominic looked after the closed door, then back at Silas. “Well. That was exciting.”
“Aye. Going to bring you trouble?”
Dominic shrugged. “No laws against a man seeking paid company. I doubt I’ve improved my moral standing at the office, but under the circumstances, I shan’t complain.”
“True. Good girl, Zoë. Thinks fast, and she don’t let you down.”
“I will make sure she doesn’t suffer,” Dominic said. “I had no idea of this interference of Richard’s, you know.” He wondered briefly if Richard had given that outrageous instruction to find his friend a suitable lover or if it had been one of Cyprian’s manipulations, carrying out his master’s assumed will rather than his orders. Either way, Dominic felt a dark satisfaction at how very much Richard would be regretting it now.
Silas gave him a rueful look. “Nor I, of Jon and Zoë’s. Feel a bit stupid, to be honest.”
“Possibly not as stupid as I do.”
“No, probably not. That Zoë, she might save your arse but never your face. You ever had a woman, Dom?”
“What? Uh, no, as it happens. I was with Richard until my twenties, by which time I was quite sure I had no curiosity to satisfy. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering. Way you looked. I don’t know.” Silas shifted. “We’re tangled all to hell in each other’s meshes, and I don’t know anything about you.”
“You know everything about me. You know how I want to fuck and what I want to read and what matters to me. You know all that even when I don’t.”
“I damn near got you caught,” Silas growled. “Led them here and tied you to a fucking bed to wait for them.”
“If you imagine I didn’t notice you trying to free me when you should have been running for your life—”
“I’m not a traitor.”
“You’re a damned fool.” Dominic walked up to him, brushing a hand over his prickly hair. Silas looked away, shamefaced and awkward, and Dominic was almost sure he knew why.
Almost, and there was a wide, deep gap between that and certainty, but if he could not humiliate himself with Silas, where could he?
“Silas,” he said softly. “As Mistress Zoë has deduced, as my friend has told me, as I suspect you know too—”
“Don’t. Don’t say it.”
“I must. I have been coming to love you for a long time, you damned seditious brute, as I almost found the courage to tell you earlier. Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have loved you.” He ran his hands gently down Silas’s sides, to his hips. “I know the burden this puts on you, and that it is a crackbrained, dangerous way to go on, but I also know what it is to lay my life waste. I will not do it again.”
“Say that when I lead the hounds to your door,” Silas growled.
“We’ll have to make sure you don’t.”
Silas made an inarticulate noise of frustration. “Christ’s blood! What am I to do? What the hell do you think I’m going to do?”
“Continue as you were, I expect. I don’t ask you to be less of a radical. I certainly shall not be less of a Tory. It is a matter of personal triumph that I have made you care for me anyway, you revolutionary swine.”
“Who says?” Silas growled, tugging him close. He brushed a hand through Dominic’s hair, pushed at his head in order to kiss the side of his neck. Dominic shivered. “You blasted…ah God, Dom.” Silas’s arms tightened around him, so hard it almost hurt. “Don’t say it, eh? Don’t tell me. It’s bad enough already.”
“Why is it bad?”
“The more you have, the more you have to lose. Your lot have all the advantages and we’ve got one. When you have nothing, you’ve got everything to fight for.” His voice dropped almost to inaudibility, whispered against Dominic’s skin. “And you just gave me everything, so how do I keep fighting now?”
Then stop, Dominic wanted to say. Please. If you do, I can shield you. I’ll drive Skelton off, I’ll make it all go away, and you can—
What? What would a firebrand do once extinguished? What would Silas do without his cause, or his pride?
Dominic held him in silence, listening to distant shouts, and wondered why this had to be impossible.
Chapter 7
They were next due to meet on the last Wednesday before Christmas.
Silas had little enough Yuletide spirit. He had nobody to share Christmas with, for one thing, with Harry gone to be a gentleman. He’d never made a fuss about the day, but Harry, with that irrepressible joy of his, had put up greenery and candles too, when the extravagance could be justified, and usually found something decent to make a meal. Silas, atheist to the core, had grumbled about waste and foolish superstition, but now there was no Harry after six years, and the prospect of a cheerless, lonely Christmas was bleak.
Not that he’d have it different. Harry had been a useless mouth to feed, that was all; if he was now rich and safe, that just spared Silas a responsibility. The boy would be a bloody fool to come back even to visit anyway, and Silas was glad to know he wasn’t. It was for the best.
It was bitter cold these days, the wind howling through the gaps in the bookshop walls and windows, and times were hard. Sales weren’t bad, but so many of the people around him were out of work, all of them needing help that nobody else would give, and then there was the endless, endless expense of printing.
He was running off his pamphlets after hours at his cousin’s printshopprint shop now, finding himself, to his own shame, too fearful to do the work on the handpress. Someone had exerted influence at the Home Office in some way Dominic hadn’t chosen to explain, but Silas hadn’t noticed any shadows on his tail in the last few days. That wasn’t going to last, though. Sidmouth’s bills were still going through Parliament, but Silas had a deep, sick conviction they’d pass, and when they did, the legitimate voices for reform would be silenced or driven underground, and the government’s men would swoop like vultures on them all.
The measures might not pass, he repeated to himself. Even Dominic didn’t like them. Surely there weren’t enough reactionaries, surely the Whigs and the moderate Tories would oppose…
He couldn’t quite make himself believe it.
These were his days. Hunger and desperation around him, writing with ever more anger and a growing sense of furious futility, and all of it harder and sharper because of Dominic, who loved him.
There w
ere, Silas had learned from Zoë, men with tastes far odder than Dominic’s. Men who wore devices all the time, under their clothes: spiked things that dug in or consolateurs that stayed in place while you went about your business. Not something Silas would want. And yet, in some peculiar way, it was what he had, because Dom’s words stayed with him like a spiked collar, scraping at his skin, the points digging in sharp at unexpected moments, but always producing a steady hum of pain.
Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have loved you.
Like Silas hadn’t. Like he didn’t dream of the Tory asleep and awake, like he hadn’t shamed himself with fantasies of lives together, like he hadn’t surrendered in his soul as much as Dom ever had on his knees. Like he didn’t want to give up everything he’d ever fought for, every scrap of it, for his dark-eyed beauty.
He feared in his bones that he’d give in if Dom asked, and Dom knew it and didn’t ask. Silas loved him more for that, with a heart so poorly suited and so unaccustomed to love that he felt it might burst its banks like one of London’s choked, fetid rivers.
He had no idea what to do with what he felt.
If you truly cared, you’d make him stop this before he runs his head into a noose. Silas told himself that every day. He might have been able to do it except that Dom had been left before, by that worthless, oversized prick who’d hurt him again and again, and Silas would not walk in that bastard’s shiny-booted footsteps.
He kept a weather eye out for spies on his way to the address he’d been sent. It was up west, near Grosvenor Square, a place called Bishop’s Yard. He’d had to look that up, and found it backing on to Mount Street, where Dominic lived. Convenient for him; a good few miles on foot for Silas.
That seemed oddly selfish—for Dominic, not for gentry in general—right up to the moment Silas gave the false name he’d been supplied, and the leather-jerkined man in the yard replied, with utter boredom: “Here about the binding? Gawd, him and his books. First floor, up the back stairs and round.”
“Hold on. Where’m I going to?”
A Seditious Affair Page 12
