A Seditious Affair

by K. J. Charles

  “He’s been making himself pleasant then,” Dominic said with resignation.

  “Quite. In heaven’s name, go and cheer him up,” Richard said. “Or put him out of his misery; either will do. You won’t be disturbed.”

  —

  Arrandene’s library was an impressive room even for this house. Panels and shelves and balustrades of oak and books by the yard, leather bound or in bundles of sewn paper awaiting binding. Silas would know what you called those. Quite a lot of them were in piles on the floor, and Dominic could see Silas’s crabbed, determined hand, line after line, on the open pages of the huge ledger on the desk.

  The room was quite eighteen feet high, the shelves reaching to the ceiling, and Silas was up a ladder at the top. His cropped hair was neater than before, and he wore black breeches and a sober black tailcoat, in respectable style. Dominic might not have known that clerkly figure from the back, except that he would know Silas anywhere.

  Dominic waited for Silas to make his way down, a tome under one arm, before he said, “Good afternoon.”

  Silas stilled for a second, as if he were bracing for something, then turned. “Afternoon.”

  “Hard at work, I see.”

  “Lot to do.” His face was guarded, as if anticipating something, like a blow.

  Dominic went over to the desk where Silas was standing and propped himself on the edge. “Let’s get this said. You knew about a plot to murder the cabinet.”

  “Aye.”

  “ ‘Aye,’ he says. Did it occur to you to consider the consequences had they succeeded?”

  Silas folded his arms. “I did consider it. First, they weren’t going to succeed, even if it hadn’t been a put-up job, because there was maybe five of them could catch clap in a brothel without instructions. And second, if they had succeeded, Sidmouth and Castlereagh and the rest could take their chances, just like the people at Peterloo who were cut down and died for their politics. And third, whatever they had planned, did you expect me to inform?”

  “No. I can’t say I did.”

  “I know what you think.” Silas’s jaw was set, a muscle twitching in his neck. “You’d call what they did murder and anarchy. Well, I call what your government does the same thing, and you know it.”

  “Yes, I do. And…Oh, Silas. I don’t know what to say.”

  “No need to say anything. You owe me nothing.”

  “Edwards won’t appear in court,” Dominic said. “The prosecution won’t risk calling him, but they don’t have to. One of the others, Adams, has turned king’s evidence, and that’s all they need. Your friends will swing, no question, and they’ll swing because my colleagues laid out a path to the gallows and lured them along it. That is anarchy. It is lawlessness at the heart of government, corrupt as a rotting corpse. Peterloo was a tragic mishap, but this? This is judicial murder.”

  “Dom? Are you all right?”

  “No. I have tendered my resignation.” He managed a smile. “It’s what took me so long to come here. I had to decide, and it was…difficult. I kept thinking that perhaps I should stay and try to make changes, or perhaps I should wait until the election, see if the Whigs would do anything differently, but…No. This is not my England and this is not my party. I stand for my beliefs, but I won’t stand for this.”

  “You resigned,” Silas repeated, apparently hearing nothing else.

  “I should have done so a long time ago, truth be told. My duty has not been compatible with you, any more than your principles are with me.”

  Silas gave a tight smile. “True enough. We were fooling ourselves there. Or making fools of ourselves.”

  “Or making sense. Silas, I know working for Richard is very far from what you want, and I always said I would not ask you to change your principles. But I am now; I am begging you. Please stay. Please take Richard’s protection, because…” He took a deep breath. “Because I fear for you without it. I don’t trust my colleagues, my former colleagues. Edwards’s testimony and your conviction would have suited certain people very well. I think that you will be watched, in the hope that you can be caught, and I think if Skelton sees a chance for vengeance, he will take it. If you rejoin radical company, you’ll do nothing but get yourself arrested and bring trouble on them too.”

  “Aye.” Silas didn’t sound surprised. “Had a fair idea it would be that way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dominic said. “I know how much your cause meant to you. I’m sorry to have played any part in taking it from you. But it’s gone.”

  “I know. Well.” Silas tipped his head back, as if examining the ceiling. Dominic wished he dared step forward and hold him.

  “Richard is a powerful man,” he said instead. “If you stay under his protection, at least for a while…” Silas made an impatient gesture of understanding. Dominic took a deep breath. “And if you are my best friend’s bookman, I will always have an excuse to see you. If you wish to see me. May I hope you will?”

  That got Silas’s eyes back on him, staring as though Dominic were speaking Hottentot. Silas started to say something, shook his head, and finally got out, “I thought—you weren’t going to want to— Didn’t know if you were coming.”

  “I?” Dominic had spent the last days with an increasing fear that it would happen again. He’d dreamed it asleep and imagined it awake: Silas seeing him as part of the apparatus of entrapment and murder, complicit by his silence. His lover, turning away in disgust. “You thought I wouldn’t—”

  “You fucking walked away. You turned and left—”

  “Is there nothing I have got right?” Dominic propelled himself off the desk and pulled Silas to him, cupping a hand around his lover’s bristly scalp. “Silas. Dear heaven. You idiot.”

  “You walked away,” Silas repeated harshly. His body was rigid.

  “I couldn’t stay. I felt as though I’d betrayed everything. You, and my office, and my friends, I turned traitor on you all—”

  “Bollocks,” Silas said. “You were right there for me. Right there.”

  “I tried. And I do know my friends chose their own paths, heaven bless them. I wish I’d seen Ash’s performance: I understand it was remarkably Ashish. As for my office…I came to see that I had it wrong. It was my government that betrayed me, me and every other honest man in their service. I know that now. But in that room, at the time…”

  “Aye. Aye, I see that.”

  “I had spent the afternoon knowing that you were charged with high treason. You may imagine my feelings when some damned clerk stuck his head through my door to ask why a conspirator was wearing my coat.” He still felt sick thinking of those terrible, frantic hours, scrabbling through paperwork, desperately seeking some kind of proof of Silas’s claims against George Edwards, finding none. Dominic had walked into Richard’s house armed with nothing but memory, deduction, and bluff. “High treason, you seditionist sod. I thought you’d hang. Have you any idea what that felt like, thinking I was going to see you hang?”

  “Aye, just a bit of it,” Silas said, and Dominic began to laugh. Couldn’t help it, because Silas’s arms were closing round him now, they were holding each other, and dear heaven, Silas was safe.

  Silas’s shoulders were shaking. “I’ll make you laugh on the other side of your face for this. You bugger.”

  “Please do,” Dominic said. “Can you do this? Stay here? I’m asking everything of you, I know. And I can’t offer anything to sweeten the deal, because you have everything of me whether you stay here or no, but it really would be easier. And I should so like things to be easier for us. You are all the difficulty I can manage as it is.”

  Silas’s hand, paper-dusty as ever, was on Dominic’s neck, making him shiver. “You know that thing of Dr. Johnson’s? When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s horseshit. I couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t think anything, except I wanted more time with you. I knew that for certain.�
� His fingers ran through Dominic’s hair. “That, and I wished I hadn’t taken your coat. Sorry.”

  “Thank heavens you did, or we would have had no warning of what had happened at all. That said, you ruined it. I’ve had to buy another one. I liked that coat.”

  “Aye, well, life is hard. Dom, listen.” Silas pulled back a little to look at him. “I’ve thought about this already. I talked to David—”

  “Who?”

  “David Cyprian. Interesting cove. He has this way of looking at things, he says you turn round the situation till you find your advantage. So you might say, not many people care about a Ludgate bookseller’s opinions. But if you’re Lord Richard Vane’s bookman, and you’re writing on causes his lordship cares about too, about abolition or education, say, well, you might find more people with power listening.” Silas grimaced. “And you can imagine what I think of that. But you use what you got to hand, right?”

  “Quite right,” Dominic said fervently.

  “Very bright man, David. Plays a vicious game of backgammon. So what I mean is, this won’t make me useless, unless I let it. Reform can’t be my fight any longer, but like you said, I’ve done my term of service. For what that was worth.”

  “Something, perhaps,” Dominic said. “Not now, not yet. But if my party had to sink so low to win a single battle, I wonder about our chances in the war.”

  “We’ll see,” Silas said. “And talk. But, for now, doing this…Yes.”

  Dominic could feel it as a physical thing—happiness closing over him like warm water, soothing the cuts and burns. “You’re going to stay.”

  “Well, this library’s a disgrace. Someone needs to get it sorted out.”

  “You’ll stay.” Dominic rested his forehead against Silas’s, felt for his hands. “You’ll stay, and I can come and go as I please. We can see each other as we like. More than just Wednesdays even.” It seemed impossible. He wanted to sit down, except that he never wanted to move from this moment, holding Silas safe.

  “Aye, well. Don’t want you underfoot.” Silas’s fingers tightened, denying his words.

  “We’ll have to see how that will work. I, uh, have been offered another post.” He coughed. “The Board of Taxes.”

  “Taxes? God almighty. You don’t like to be liked, do you?”

  “I have to find some way to provoke you.” Dominic pulled Silas close, felt his chest rise and fall, felt his own muscles relaxing in giddy relief. His precious firebrand, warm against him. “But if you’re here, if I know you’re safe, I can rest easy. For the first time in months, I may add. I might actually feel comfortable again.”

  Silas’s fingers hardened on Dominic’s, thumbs digging into his palms. “I wouldn’t bet on that if I were you, Tory.” There was that little growl in his voice that made the hair rise on Dominic’s arms. “No, I wouldn’t bet on that at all.”

  Epilogue

  MAY 1820

  Silas was in the book room at Albemarle Street, staring into the fire lit against the cool of the evening, when Dominic entered. He latched the door behind him. Silas didn’t turn.

  “You’ve seen the newspapers,” Dominic said.

  “Aye.”

  “You didn’t go, did you?”

  “No.”

  Dominic came up behind him and put a light hand to his shoulder. “Good.”

  The trial of the Cato Street conspirators had been as much a farce as the conspiracy itself. The prosecution had declined to call George Edwards, and in his absence the judge had refused to consider any evidence of his involvement. The mysterious notice of the dinner was dismissed as irrelevant. No question of an agent provocateur had been admitted. Robert Adams had stumbled his way through his highly coached testimony, and the sentences of high treason had been handed down.

  Five of the conspirators, including Thistlewood, had hanged the previous morning. As an act of clemency, they had been spared drawing and quartering; instead, the corpses had been decapitated and the heads displayed, as traitors deserved. Five more had had their sentences commuted to transportation. A clean sweep, much as Lord Liverpool’s Tories had made of the election, holding on to power with an increased majority. It had all been a triumph for the government. In another life, knowing less, Dominic would have been jubilant.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Aye, well, we knew it was coming. They died well by all accounts, and there’s an end to it. Enough.” Silas turned from the fire, or from his thoughts, and gave Dominic a long look. “Very nice.”

  Dominic knew he looked well. He was dining here, a private meal with some of the Ricardians. It was intended to be a regrouping after the events of a dramatic twelve months that had tested old friendships and forged new ones, and he was looking forward to it. He was plainly dressed, in silent opposition to the peacock feathers Julius and Harry would doubtless be sporting, but he was pleased with his new waistcoat and with the subtle silver watch chain he wore across it.

  That had caught Silas’s eye. He lifted it with a finger. “Chain, eh? What’s that for?”

  “My watch.”

  “Is it.” Silas gave it a tug, and Dominic swayed forward in response. “I reckon I should be the one putting chains on you.”

  “You are,” Dominic said softly. “You have.”

  Silas twisted his finger in the chain, tightening it. It was attached only to Dominic’s waistcoat, it was just cloth that pulled over his chest, but he still gave a little flinch at the shadow or anticipation of pain and saw the response leap in Silas’s eyes.

  “I’ve got better ideas for you than a dinner, Tory.”

  “I can’t be late,” Dominic said, telling himself as much as Silas, because Silas’s other hand was moving downward and taking commanding hold. Dominic shifted his legs apart, giving access. “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t what?” Silas murmured in his ear. “Don’t put you on your knees and give you a mouthful? Don’t bend you over the desk and make a mess of your pretty clothes? Or…” Silas’s hand tightened. “Don’t pack you off to the drawing room with a stand you could use to poke the fire?”

  “Please don’t do that.”

  Silas’s strong fingers were working him through the cloth, with unquestioned ownership. His other hand was wound in the chain, keeping Dominic close. As though he could have pulled away. “Aye, that sounds good. You go mix with your gentry friends with your prick aching for it. Me, I’ll have a drink, put my feet up. Maybe I’ll pay David a visit, see if he fancies losing at backgammon.”

  “I thought he mostly beat you.”

  Silas tightened his grip punitively. Dominic whimpered.

  “And when you can’t stand any more waiting, you come and find me, Tory, and we’ll see about a bit of backgammoning for you too.” Silas brushed his lips over Dominic’s ear, sending shivers over his scalp. “No doubt about who’ll win that round, is there?”

  None at all. Dominic squirmed against him. “Couldn’t we—”

  “No.” Silas’s hand pressed harder against Dominic’s constricted prick. “You’ll just have to wait.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” Dominic objected breathlessly.

  “Nor me.” Silas gave him a wolfish grin. “The difference is, I don’t have to. Get on your knees, Tory. I’ll spoil your supper for you.”

  In half an hour, he was due to be in the drawing room. He’d be flushed, his hair disarranged; he’d have Silas on his breath and an ache between his legs that would render the entire evening a torture. “You can’t do this to me,” Dominic protested. “You swine.”

  “That right? And here was me thinking I can do anything I want to you. Going to tell me otherwise?”

  “No.”

  “What can I do?”

  Dominic shut his eyes. “Anything you want.”

  Silas’s lips, open and demanding, met his. There was a tongue in his mouth, hard knuckles digging into his chest, a hand between his legs working his straining prick, and Dominic gave himself up to those long,
commanding, hungry kisses. Anything at all, my brute. For the taking.

  Silas pulled away too soon, looking dazed, though his grip was unmerciful as ever. “That’s for later. A lot more of that. For now…got anything to say?”

  Anything meant Mason, which meant No. No, I don’t want you to fuck my mouth and send me off with swollen lips and an aching prick; I don’t want my friends quietly speculating about what I’ve been up to; I don’t want to spend the night shaking with anticipation…

  “Nothing at all,” Dominic said.

  Silas smiled at him, that look of conspiratorial understanding between the two of them, and Dominic felt his own lips curve in response. “I’m glad to hear it, Tory. Now get on your knees.”

  Author’s Note

  This is a romance, but the tragic farce of the Cato Street Conspiracy was real. I have taken all the details and much of the conspirators’ dialogue from the accounts given at the trial. They really were that deluded, that desperate, their plan really was that bad; and they really were set up by George Edwards, acting as agent provocateur for a reactionary government, and a judge who ensured their trial could go only one way.

  Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, Richard Tidd, John Thomas Brunt, and William Davidson were hanged on May 1, 1820.

  For May Peterson, who is definitely Team Radical

  Acknowledgments

  Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green is extraordinarily generous with his help, and his slang timelines and dictionaries are invaluable to any lover of historical slang, swearing, and abuse. Follow him on Twitter @MisterSlang. Tim Heath of the Blake Society was very kind and helpful in explaining the production of Blake’s illuminated books. I have been heavily reliant on John Stanhope’s book The Cato Street Conspiracy, a detailed and comprehensive account of this sorry affair, and Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld. Any errors on the topics they cover are of my own making.