A Gentleman Never Keeps Score

by Cat Sebastian

  It took less time than Sam might have imagined for a building to be destroyed. Until there was no more noise from the Bell, no more clattering bricks, no more heaving groans, he held Hartley close; half his attention was on what used to be the Bell, the other half on the man in his arms. When everything was silent except the voices of the people in the street, he could almost convince himself that it was safe to return, that he had imagined the falling bricks. If it weren’t for the weight of the man in his arms reminding him of the seriousness of the danger, he might have gone back inside.

  “Now, what’s going on here?” said a sneering voice.

  Sam looked away from Hartley’s to see Constable Merton.

  “The chimney is collapsing, and this man was hit by a falling brick.” There was blood on Hartley’s forehead, just a trickle but enough to stain his hair dark.

  “At one in the morning? You ought to have closed hours ago.” He held his lantern up to examine Hartley’s face. “He doesn’t look like the sort of man to be prowling about after hours in taverns like yours.”

  Sam could not believe he had to explain this when what he really needed was to bring Hartley to a medical man. “He came after hours to get a cask of ale for a laboring mother. The midwife sent him.”

  “Christ in heaven. He has a baby on the way?” Sam didn’t correct the man, and stayed silent as the constable peered into Hartley’s bloodstained face. “Put this gentleman down,” Merton said. “If he comes to and sees that he’s being manhandled by the likes of you, he’ll faint from terror.”

  Sam gritted his teeth but put Hartley down on the cold pavement. What Hartley needed was warmth and care, not this.

  “Are you certain he wasn’t injured in a fight?”

  Sam gaped. “Do you think he looks like a prizefighter? Look at him, man.”

  There was another ominous clunking from inside the Bell, followed by a broken window. Sam was surprised there was anything left to break.

  “I suppose not,” Merton said, leaning over Hartley once again with his lantern. “So you can be on your way,” he said with a shooing gesture in Sam’s direction. Sam shouldn’t have been surprised. Hartley made a sound and tried to sit up, but the constable firmly shoved him back onto the pavement. “Stay there, young man,” Merton said.

  Hartley’s eyes flew open at the contact.

  “Don’t worry . . . Mr. Sedgwick . . . sir,” Sam managed. “You got hit by a falling brick, but this copper will take care of you.”

  With unfocused eyes, Hartley regarded the constable, and then shook his head. “No,” he repeated, but this time with plain fear in his eyes.

  Merton took hold of Hartley’s chin and turned his head to either side. Hartley whimpered.

  “You mustn’t touch him,” Sam said. “He doesn’t—” Sam didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t expose them both to the constable’s suspicion, so he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked on helplessly.

  Merton was about fifty or sixty, with gray hair. He was broad shouldered and somewhat portly, but the way Hartley was looking at him one might have thought the constable was an ax-wielding giant. With an indrawn breath, Sam realized that this was probably what Hartley’s godfather had looked like.

  It ought to have been a harder decision. He ought to have given serious thought before abducting a man from under a constable’s eye. But either he took Hartley with him now or he left him to whatever terror he was reliving. Really, there was no choice.

  “I need to take this man to his home. It’s a matter of urgency.” That was all he said before scooping Hartley up.

  They were in a pitch-dark alley, the constable’s shouted protestations ringing in his ears before Sam fully registered that Hartley was awake.

  “Thank you,” Hartley said.

  “Damn it, Hart,” Sam said. They were in a narrow space between two buildings, hidden from the street. Sam waited for the sound of running footsteps, tried to imagine what he’d tell the constable this time.

  “You can put me down,” Hartley said. “I think I was only dazed.”

  Sam gently lowered Hartley onto his feet. But instead of stepping away, Hartley burrowed his head into Sam’s coat, and Sam didn’t know what to say. “Oh Sam,” he said after a moment. “I am so sorry.” He wrapped his slender arms around Sam, tucking his head under Sam’s chin, their bodies fitting together as well as Sam had always known they would.

  The Bell was crumbling, Sam had exposed both of them to suspicion, but all Sam could think about was that Hartley was safe and in his arms.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  When Hartley opened his eyes, all he could see was a sliver of light making its way through the gap in his bedroom curtains. He squeezed his eyes shut, because even that strip of brightness made his head hurt. He didn’t remember having gotten drunk last night, but from the pounding in his head and the heaviness of his limbs, he was extravagantly hungover. In fact, he remembered nothing at all about last night. He struggled to piece the previous evening together. He had gone out with Will, but only drank half a pint of weak ale. Then he had come home to find Sadie cooking.

  Sadie. He sat up straight.

  “No, no, you don’t want to do that, mate,” said a voice that seemed to come from a shadowy corner of the room. The voice was absolutely correct. Hartley did not want to be sitting up. He did not want to be awake, or possibly even alive, for that matter. Gingerly, he lay back and with some effort turned his head to see Alf seated on a chair in the corner.

  “How is Sadie?” Hartley asked, and the sound of his own voice made him wince in pain.

  “She’s doing well. So is the baby. A little girl.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Hartley felt a rush of relief. “Thank God,” he repeated, and it was the closest thing to a prayer that he had managed in years.

  “She’s downstairs, fast asleep. Kate’s gone home but she’ll be back later.”

  The mention of Kate stirred something in Hartley’s memory. He had gone to the Bell. He dimly remembered something loud, and then—

  “Where is Sam?”

  “He brought you here early this morning. Said you were injured in a chimney collapse.”

  “The chimney at the Bell,” Hartley said, remembering the sound of falling bricks, followed by darkness. No, not entirely darkness, but dreamy confusion punctuated by fear. His godfather had been there, somehow, which was impossible. Except he remembered Sam rescuing him from Easterbrook’s hands. Doubtless he had been deluded from the blow to the head, but he’d figure that out later. For now, he needed to know about Sam. The Bell was everything to him. “Where is he now, though?”

  “I don’t know. He said you needed a doctor, but by then you had come around, so I cleaned you up and put you to bed. A doctor couldn’t do much more, and I didn’t think you’d want a stranger pawing at you.”

  “Quite right. Good thinking. Thank you. I hate to ask you this, because you’ve been up all night, but can you please check on Sam and see if he needs anything?”

  Alf was silent for a moment. “I would, if I knew where to find him.”

  Hartley started to shake his head, but stopped when he felt the contents of his skull lurch painfully about. “I’m certain he’s returned to the Bell.”

  “He may have done, to see if he could get his belongings from the rubble.”

  Rubble. “It was destroyed, then?”

  “Have you ever seen a chimney collapse? There’s not much left afterward. But maybe Sam was lucky.”

  “I need to go to him.” He got to his feet, but the room spun darkly around him. He sat back down and raised his hand to his throbbing head. There was a length of linen wrapped around his temple, and beneath it was tender with pain.

  “All right, sit back down,” Alf said. “I’ll run over to the Bell and see if Sam’s there, so long as you promise not to do anything stupid while I’m out.”

  Hartley agreed on the condition that Alf help him downstairs. He didn’t want to be in his dark lonely
room, two flights of stairs away from any other person. “Go into the top drawer of my desk,” Hartley said, when they passed the library door. “And take out whatever money is in there. Give it all to Sam for repairs and tell him he can have whatever else he needs.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll take kindly to that,” Alf said doubtfully.

  “The Bell is his life.” Hartley held himself up against the doorframe. “I only want to help him have that.”

  “Maybe you ought to tell him so yourself.”

  Hartley shook his head. It felt like it was filled with sludge where his brains ought to have been. “I can’t do that. It’s better if he stays away from me.” The events of last night were slotting into place, and he remembered stray words from a man he thought was a constable. Hartley had been terrified of the man, having gotten him mixed up with his godfather. Sam had risked his own safety by bringing him home, and Hartley knew that he needed to return the favor by not exposing Sam to any more danger.

  It wasn’t until late that afternoon, when the crowd of gawkers had thinned a bit, that Sam ventured to reenter the Bell. It hadn’t been a complete chimney collapse, and for that he ought to be grateful, several people cheerfully assured him. And he was grateful: a chimney had collapsed on Shoe Lane a few years earlier, and five people had died, not to mention the building being destroyed. But, surveying the ruins of the taproom, Sam reasoned it might as well have been destroyed. He’d never manage to repair the building. He’d certainly never reopen the Bell.

  Everything he had worked for was gone, and he wouldn’t get it back. The Bell had been his life, his home, the center of all his hopes. When he had buried Davey and stepped away from the ring for the final time, he had gone directly to the Bell. Between him and his father, they had seen ten lifetimes’ worth of blood and sin and evil. He had hoped to use the Bell to balance the scale in the other direction, even if all his work amounted to only a pebble against the mountains of wrong that had been done. Without the Bell, he didn’t even know who he was or what he was for.

  “It’s not that bad,” Nick said, coming in from the kitchen.

  Despite himself, Sam almost smiled at his brother’s unflagging optimism. “Three walls and a roof good enough for you?”

  “Nah, it’s got four walls in there, only a little hole in one of them.” The kitchen had originally belonged to one of the neighboring buildings, so it was set off to the side of the Bell and had been spared the bulk of the damage. “And the stove still works, so I’ll go on making pies just as I did before you bought the Bell. And if you help, we can sell them as fast as I can make them. That’ll do for a bit.”

  It would do, and for more than a bit. A person could make a living selling pies, which is precisely what Sam’s mother had done. She had gone to markets, fairs, hangings, all the usual places. “All right, then,” Sam said, not wanting to crush his brother’s hopeful mood. “And will you sleep in the kitchen?” Even Nick would have to acknowledge that the upper floors weren’t safe.

  “About that,” Nick said. “Kate agreed to have the banns read starting this Sunday. So I might as well go on staying with her.”

  Sam managed a smile. “I’m glad. Good for both of you.”

  “Don’t make a fuss in front of Kate. She’ll have my hide.”

  Nick left, promising to return in the morning after doing the marketing. Sam had just enough good sense not to attempt to climb the stairs to see whether any of his belongings were salvageable, but not nearly enough sense to find someplace more suitable to spend the night, so he bedded down in the cold kitchen. After a while, Daisy appeared and curled around his feet, and Sam let himself drop into an uneasy sleep.

  When he opened his eyes, a faint light was coming through the broken window. It was late enough in the year that this dimness could mean dawn, dusk, or anything in between. The clock had been destroyed by a falling brick, so time hardly existed at all, although the emptiness of his stomach argued that it had been a good long while since he had eaten. A sound came from the courtyard. Muffled swearing, as if someone had stubbed a toe on one of the stones and bricks that now dotted the ground behind the Bell. Sam hoped whoever it was broke a bone. Then Sam registered that there was no good reason for anyone to be behind the Bell. Somebody had probably decided to help themselves to the ale, or the contents of the till, or whatever else they could carry off. Sam grabbed a fire iron and stepped into the darkness.

  He didn’t see the man right away, only a shifting in the shadows. He gripped the iron harder. Then his eyes adjusted to the dark and he could pick out a slight silhouette.

  “I hope that’s you, Sam,” said a voice from the darkness. “Otherwise I suppose I’m about to get myself murdered.”

  “Alf?” He lowered the iron. “What are you doing here? Is it Hartley?” he added, a sick queasiness seizing his insides.

  “He’s fine. I left him sitting by the fire, holding Sadie’s baby, of all things.”

  Hartley was safe. That, at least, was something.

  Alf dug into his pocket and produced a purse. “He told me to give this to you. He wants to help with repairs.”

  “Repairs, my arse.” He gestured toward the ruined taproom. “It’s all gone.” Saying it aloud was like ripping an organ out of his chest. “And I don’t want his money.” The Bell had been his. It was the shape and size of his character, not the charity project of a man in a fancy coat nor a favor to bestow on a lover. Hartley’s money—mixed up as it was with his pain and shame—was all this situation needed to get worse. If Sam took this money from Hartley, it would bring all of that confusion into their friendship. It would change everything between them, change what had already been a precariously unbalanced partnership and make it completely unstable.

  At the sound of a knock on the front door, Hartley assumed somebody had the wrong address, so he ignored it. When, five minutes later, there was a knock on the back door, he swore. The baby was with Sadie, at least, so he didn’t have to worry about dropping her while making his unsteady way to the door.

  In the doorway was an older man, portly in a rather Henry VIII sort of way. Hartley vaguely recognized the man, but couldn’t quite place him.

  “Ah,” the man said. “I see I do have the right address. Mr. Sedgwick?”

  “Yes,” Hartley said, confused. “I’m Hartley Sedgwick. I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.”

  “Jerome Merton, constable. I’ve come to ask you about the events of this past Tuesday.” His accent was pure cockney, but without Sam’s soft edges.

  “Oh, I see.” If this had been the constable from the night of the chimney collapse, Hartley must have been entirely off his head to mistake him for his godfather. “I’m quite well, as you can see,” Hartley said, gesturing to the bandage.

  “I understand there’s been a blessed event,” Merton said, his beady eyes darting around the kitchen. “I daresay your household has been in a bit of an uproar. No, the reason I’m here, not to put too fine a point on it, is that the circumstances of your injury were a bit unusual.” He paused, as if waiting for Hartley to supply details. When Hartley remained silent, he went on. “You were carried out of a public house, quite unconscious, by a black man of a very low sort. Very dirty and rough. And at a most unusual hour. I thought you might have been attacked.”

  Hartley realized that this constable was the same one who habitually made trouble for Sam. He kept his voice steady. “I wasn’t attacked. The chimney collapsed at the Bell and I was injured by a falling brick.” Surely the constable already knew this.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what were you doing roaming about town in such low company in the middle of the night?”

  “I believe Mr. Fox explained that,” Hartley said, hoping Sam had come up with something plausible to tell the man.

  “Sam Fox said you visited his public house at that late hour for a cask of strong ale the midwife required for your wife.”

  Hartley let out a crack of laughter. Of all the lies, Sam
had come up with the least plausible one. He was about to set the man straight—really, what else could he do, when two minutes of inquiry would inform the man that Hartley most definitely had no wife—when he heard Sadie’s door open.

  “That’s right,” she said. “The midwife specially directed him to get the strongest ale. Something about it helping the babe nurse.” Hartley got to his feet and offered Sadie his chair.

  “I asked around,” Merton said. “I had to ask quite a few questions to find the right Mr. Sedgwick, you understand. And part of my confusion is that when I asked for a Mr. Sedgwick of your description, everyone agreed that there was no Mrs. Sedgwick.”

  Hartley saw Sadie go rigid. With Sadie sitting right there, he couldn’t very well insist that the baby wasn’t his, because that would seem to be repudiating Sadie. He remembered how Sam had reacted when he had failed to consider him a proper visitor; this would be even worse.

  “Gossip is so often wrong,” Sadie said in her most refined tones. “That’s why I never pay any attention to it. Merton, you said your name was? I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure of being introduced to any Mertons.”

  Hartley was quite in awe. So, evidently, was the constable, who twisted the brim of the hat he clutched in his meaty fingers. “I beg your pardon,” Merton stammered.

  “Truly,” Sadie went on, “we owe Mr. Fox a debt of gratitude, don’t we darling?” She cast an appealing look up at Hartley. “He saved my baby’s father.” She blinked quickly, as if fighting back tears. “Mr. Fox will always have us for allies, will he not, dearest?” She gazed up at him with the most appalling sheep eyes.

  “Of course,” Hartley said, scrambling to think of a suitable endearment. “Of course, my, ah, pet.” He placed his hand on her shoulder in a proprietary manner and kept it there until Merton stammered an apology and hurried out the door.