A Gentleman Never Keeps Score

by Cat Sebastian

  He took a sip of brandy as he watched Mr. Fox decide whether he could be trusted. Hartley wondered what it must be like to be able to judge trustworthiness on sight. No, he wondered what it must be like to even want to. It was much easier to simply not trust people at all. Hartley trusted Will. He also trusted his older brother, Ben, but that wasn’t any great accomplishment because Ben was utterly incapable of malice. He supposed he also trusted his youngest two brothers, but they were far away so he didn’t have to put it to the test.

  “It’s a painting,” Fox said.

  Hartley’s glass dropped to the parquet, shattering into bloodred shards. He squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see Fox, didn’t want to see the mess he had made, didn’t want to see the empty spaces on the walls. A second passed, and he willed his composure to freeze him over into something cold and solid and impenetrable. When he opened his eyes, he knew he had mastered himself, at least as far as it was possible for him to do so.

  “Easy,” Fox said. “It’s only a glass. Daresay you have a dozen more like it.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the glass.” He tried so hard not to think of Easterbrook’s paintings, so hard not to remember any of it, and now he could almost smell the linseed oil, see Easterbrook’s leering approval. Fox had come to stand before him. “You’ll ruin your boots,” Hartley managed.

  “Top-shelf brandy isn’t the worst thing I’m like to step in tonight,” he said. “Now, you only have a few drops on your trousers, no harm done.”

  Hartley watched in horror as Fox produced a handkerchief from his pocket, a worn and faded thing that was folded into a neat square. Fox bent and dabbed at the brandy a few inches from the hem of Hartley’s trousers.

  “You don’t—Mr. Fox—that’s quite unnecessary.” From the coolly efficient hands of his valet, Hartley would have endured these ministrations. But Fox’s hands were large and warm, motivated by kindness or pity rather than seeing a job to its end. It was too personal, the single layer of wool too flimsy to prevent Hartley’s skin from feeling exposed. He wanted to curl into a protective ball. “Please stop,” he managed.

  Fox stepped away as quickly as if Hartley had pulled a knife on him. His dark brown eyes looked concerned, damn him. Hartley didn’t think he could maintain the already tenuous hold on his composure in the face of outright kindness. “The—” he forced himself to say it. “The painting that belongs to your friend. Am I right that it’s not the sort of painting that would be shown in polite company?”

  “Ah, no, it isn’t.”

  “I don’t have those.” He gestured at the blank walls with their pale, haunting gaps. “I don’t know what he did with his art collection.” When Hartley inherited, there had been no art except for a few bland landscapes, so he decided the portraits must have been destroyed. That, he now realized, was the delusion of a child, a stupid and gullible child who wanted to believe he had a future. An entirely new wave of fear washed over him.

  “He could have sold them, you mean?” Fox looked dismayed.

  “If he did, I haven’t heard of it. And I rather think I would have. He probably gave them to his son, but he and I don’t keep in touch,” he said dryly. “It would suit me to help you find out exactly where they are. It would suit me very well indeed.” It would be the tiniest of revenges; hardly any revenge at all, since one couldn’t hurt a dead man. But getting his hands on those paintings would be the only victory Hartley had managed in months, and it suddenly seemed entirely necessary.

  Chapter Three

  Sam was busy pouring beer, polishing tankards, collecting coins, and making change. It was a rhythm he knew as well as the jab and feint of a fight. There wasn’t an empty seat at the Bell, and some patrons had taken to standing in a cluster against the wall. That meant Nick, who ought to already be in bed so he could get up before dawn to do the marketing, was bringing around trays of drinks.

  Nick dropped his empty tray on the bar. “That’s it for now,” he said.

  “Ta. Looks like things are slowing down. You ought to go to bed. I can manage on my own until closing.”

  The door opened, bringing in a blast of cold air and a handful of new customers, and extinguishing any hope of Nick getting to bed at a reasonable hour. As they worked for a solid few minutes pouring drinks and taking money, Sam decided they needed to hire somebody, and soon.

  “We really need another set of hands,” Nick said after they had a minute to themselves, echoing Sam’s thoughts. He gave Sam a friendly pat on the arm and headed to the back room. Sam took out a rag and started polishing the bar, not because it needed polishing but because he liked to keep his hands busy while he thought.

  Their father, who had always treated the Bell as his personal parlor, regaling customers with stories of decades-old boxing matches, had happily pitched in when they were short staffed. But he had died that spring, and Sam hadn’t seen his way to filling in the gaps his father had left. Occasionally one of his aunts or cousins came to help during the evening rush. But they needed somebody permanent who could help in the kitchen as well as the taproom.

  It was a good problem to have, he told himself. He had bought the Bell as a way to help people—to provide food and money when people had nowhere else to turn, to help people find work. People needed a leg up, and Sam was determined to give it. He had been lucky, born with the build of a boxer and the benefit of his father’s experience, luckier still not to have been killed or injured in the ring. He thought of his father’s tremors, he thought of Kate’s father’s fits of rage, both common in boxers who had managed to survive too many blows to the head. Most of all, he thought of what had happened to the one man he had tried to train. Giving food, drink, and actual coin to people who needed it was the least he could do to make up for that disaster. Not that he could ever make up for it, not fully. But for as long as he could, he would use the Bell to give a helping hand to other people in their small—but growing, if the number of babies Kate was delivering was any indication—community of free black people in London.

  Sam’s gaze strayed to the table where his father had sat every evening. On the wall above there still hung prints of him in the ring and clipped lines from boxing papers describing his victories. Sam had never wanted to keep mementos of his own boxing days. He didn’t want to think about it, really. When someone came into the Bell wanting to talk about boxing, he sent them to Kate, who had been ringside for almost her entire life. Back when Kate’s father owned the Bell, there had been matches in the back room. Sam could still see bloodstains on the flagstone floors, even though Kate and Nick said he was imagining things. But he had shed some of that blood himself, and was pretty sure he remembered where it had spilled.

  “Did you see a rat?” Kate was watching him with her head tilted. She must have come in while he was polishing the bar.

  “What?” Oh God, rats were the last thing they needed. Rat catchers didn’t come cheap.

  “Or a fire? A masked bandit?” When he continued to stare blankly at her, she gently smacked the side of his face. “Because something must have happened to make you look like that.”

  “It’s just what my face does. If you don’t like it, go look at something else.”

  She raised her eyebrows and stepped away slowly, as if backing away from a hissing cat. But then she caught sight of Nick and her expression transformed to pure happiness. Sam watched as his brother slung an arm around her, then caught his eye and smiled. Seeing them together filled Sam with a bone-deep sense of rightness.

  He felt a fresh wave of anger at the thought of the painting. He was fairly certain that if it somehow became public, Kate would be mortified for Nick’s sake and Nick would be angry on Kate’s behalf, but they’d get over it after a few days. The problem was that they wouldn’t know if or when that might happen. Instead, that possibility would lurk in the future, spoiling their happiness, all because some rich old sod had taken a fancy to having the naked portrait of a girl who had been too poor to refuse.
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br />   Those words brought Davey to mind. Sam should never have taught Davey to box, so the fault was his no matter how you looked at it, no matter what Nick and Kate liked to say. But there was also a rich old man to blame for what happened to the lad. After that fight, Sam found out that the man who had backed Davey’s opponent promised Davey five pounds if he let the first blow fell him. Davey had held his end of the bargain; he was unconscious before he hit the ground, dead before sunset. And all for five pounds, when winning the fight could have earned him a dozen times that amount. But Davey had needed the money badly enough to think a guaranteed five pounds was worth more than a chance at sixty. Fixed fights were far from rare, and Sam still regretted putting Davey into a situation that had effectively put a price on his friend’s head. But there was enough blame to go around, and Sam reserved some for the man who had offered Davey the five pounds.

  It wasn’t fair. Nobody should have that kind of power over anyone, no matter how much money they had or if they had a title in front their name. And while Sam had ample evidence that life wasn’t fair and never would be, and that rich folk had all the power they could possibly want and then some, he wanted to make things as right as possible for his family.

  But as he polished a pewter mug to a silvery shine, he thought again of the brandy that gentleman had given him, long fine fingers curled around a glass that must have cost two shillings six. Men like Mr. Hartley Sedgwick didn’t often appear in Sam’s world. The regular customers of the Bell worked for a living. Some worked in nearby Fleet Street, some were servants or tradesmen; some were black, some were white, and a few came from the East. None had clean, smooth hands. There had been the young idiots who sometimes came to see his father, self-consciously ordering a pint of bitter and sitting uneasily on the edges of their seats while waiting for Hiram Fox to hold forth about the art of pugilism. Sam hadn’t needed to talk to them; he poured their drinks, took their coin, and later swept out the cigarillo stubs they left on the floor. Fine gentlemen were blessedly irrelevant to Sam.

  There was no reason for Sam to be thinking of Sedgwick at all, in fact. He wasn’t even that handsome unless you had a liking for fragile-looking men with fussy clothes. But Sam couldn’t forget what had happened when he had tried to blot the brandy off the other man’s trousers. Sedgwick had gone still, as if frozen in place. There had been fear in his expression; Sam knew damned well what that looked like at close range. But he hadn’t been afraid to bring Sam into his home, to shut the door on them during their bizarre conversation. No, he wasn’t afraid of Sam, but of being touched. And that made Sam feel something dangerously like sympathy for the fellow.

  He wondered what Sedgwick’s reasons were for wanting to do one over on Easterbrook’s son. After the man had dropped his brandy, his hands had been as shaky as Sam’s da’s hands had been at the very end. Sam shook his head. He didn’t want to think about whether Sedgwick’s nervousness had to do with whatever the old bastard had done.

  He would be meeting Mr. Hartley Sedgwick again the following Sunday, and if Sam was looking forward to it, he told himself it was purely for the importance of the task they were to complete, not because he had any interest at all in what lay behind those pale, inscrutable eyes.

  Even when you were an outcast, there were some people who had no choice but to speak to you, and that, Hartley supposed, included one’s solicitor.

  He dressed with an even greater level of care than usual, or at least as carefully as he could without a valet. Briggs had given notice two days earlier. Rather than have his chin shaved by someone who didn’t want to be there, Hartley had paid the man’s wages and sent him on his way. He supposed he had been lucky to keep his valet this long after his disgrace; it would do nothing for the fellow’s professional repute for his handiwork not to be seen in public. Hartley told himself it was nothing personal, that Briggs would have given notice if Hartley had been bedridden rather than ostracized. But now he looked back at all their dealings in the past months with the mortified suspicion that Briggs had despised him all along and had been brushing Hartley’s coat and sewing on his buttons resentfully.

  He chose a dark green waistcoat with lighter green embroidery, a bottle green coat, buff pantaloons, and top boots that he had polished with his own hands. His hair was inclined to disport itself in flyaway unruliness, but he had combed and pomaded it into submission. He was quite satisfied with his reflection in the cheval glass. Truth be told, he generally was satisfied with his reflection, but today he was especially pleased with the effect he had achieved: subdued, respectable, dignified.

  Then the solicitor’s clerk made him wait. Not in the sitting room that held the brandy decanter, the Axminster carpet, and the porcelain vase of hothouse flowers, but in an airless chamber that was little more than a glorified cupboard.

  “I sent word to Mr. Philpott that I required an appointment today,” Hartley told the clerk. He had sent two letters, and neither had been answered. In retrospect, that ought to have been his first indication that things were not going according to plan.

  The clerk had only blinked at him.

  After half an hour in the dingy little cell, he poked his head into the clerk’s room to ask when the solicitor might get around to seeing him.

  “Mr. Philpott is quite busy this afternoon,” the clerk said with a proud sniff.

  For God’s sake, he paid Philpott, not the other way around. If it were so important that Hartley’s shocking presence be kept away from the sensitive eyes of his other clients, Philpott ought to have suggested a time to meet when Hartley could have been discreetly brought up through the back stairs. Hartley considered barging into Philpott’s office; there would be something satisfyingly theatrical about that, but it was so ill bred. For a moment Hartley wondered what it would be like to throw out his notions of manners; they weren’t doing him any good at the moment, etiquette being rather beside the point when one is all but marooned on an island. But his standards, like his house, were his. He had earned them, and they couldn’t be taken away. He was a gentleman, and so he’d quietly wait.

  After another half hour the clerk ushered him into the solicitor’s office with obvious reluctance.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Sedgwick?” Philpott’s expression was pained. He was about forty, with thinning gray hair, a somber coat, and a belly that suggested a lifetime of good living. He looked exactly as a solicitor ought to look, which his clients no doubt found reassuring. His firm had been the Easterbrooks’ solicitors for generations and had executed Sir Humphrey Easterbrook’s will. Hartley had always been dimly aware that Philpott wasn’t overly fond of him, but now the man regarded him as if expecting him to do something felonious or lewd at any moment. He didn’t offer Hartley a seat.

  “I’m inquiring about the status of the Easterbrook art collection.” Hartley suppressed a cringe at the formality of his speech, knowing it was a primitive defense.

  “Art collection?” Philpott’s brows furrowed. “I heard you sold the landscapes that used to be in the grand salon.” He said this with probably the same tone he’d use to accuse a man of whipping a dog.

  “I refer to the paintings that hung in the library. I saw them when I was last a guest in the house, but that was some years before Sir Humphrey’s death.”

  Realization dawned slowly, the solicitor’s face reddening and his expression turning nauseated. “Those,” he nearly spat. “Sir Humphrey’s will granted you ownership of the house on Brook Street and everything in it at the time of his death.”

  “Quite.” Hartley was intimately familiar with the terms of his godfather’s will. “The library walls were most certainly bare when I took possession. I assure you that paintings of naked women are not to my taste.” Hartley knew he shouldn’t be trying to antagonize the man, but it was most satisfying to watch him turn scarlet. “I suppose what I’m asking is whether he disposed of the paintings in a separate bequest.” They certainly hadn’t been mentioned in the body of the will; Hartley could not
have failed to notice that. “Or perhaps he sold them prior to his death?” In the event that he had transferred the collection to another of his properties, possibly one that was entailed to his son, Hartley wanted to know about it.

  “Mr. Sedgwick,” the solicitor said, as if Hartley were a lax student and he a frustrated schoolmaster. “I was appointed to execute Sir Humphrey’s will and administer the Easterbrook estate during his only son’s minority. I cannot approve of how he disposed of his property. It goes against prudence and responsibility and . . . and . . . decency.” He slapped his hand on his desk, causing a cloud of sand to rise off his blotter. “And for you to come to this office to speak of that filth, I simply will not stand it. No, sir. I will not. I have done what was required of me by Sir Humphrey’s will, and now, if you have any other legal matters, I suggest you engage another solicitor. One who has different standards for his clientele.”

  Hartley wasn’t exactly shocked. He had known all along that Philpott would have preferred Sir Humphrey’s son and heir to the baronetcy to inherit the entirety of the Easterbrook estate. Instead, Sir Humphrey had overspent and gambled, leaving his son only an overmortgaged and entailed property, while granting Hartley his only valuable asset, the house on Brook Street.

  What surprised him was the venom in the solicitor’s voice. He expected grudging tolerance from Philpott, not outright contempt. After all, Hartley paid him an outrageous sum for his services.

  “I see you’ve heard the gossip,” Hartley said, picking a bit of lint off his sleeve.

  Philpott’s face went red. “I don’t wish to discuss this.”

  “Neither do I, but Sir Humphrey’s conduct and Martin’s nasty tale-telling have made it so I have no choice.” He wanted the solicitor to have no illusions about the characters of the men he apparently still esteemed higher than Hartley. “I’ll leave presently. But first please tell me whether you know where Sir Humphrey’s art collection is. If the paintings were indeed in the London townhouse at the time of Sir Humphrey’s death, that affects my legacy.”