by KJ Charles
“That wasn’t comfortable,” he said once they were on their way.
St. Vincent didn’t even ask. “No.”
“And it probably won’t get more comfortable as we go.”
A huff of dry amusement. “Indeed not.”
“I suppose you’re used to it?”
St. Vincent shrugged. “I live in London. I’ve no need to travel.”
“No.” Theo considered it for a moment, feeling an unfamiliar warmth of indignation on someone else’s behalf. “But why did the Conroys ask you to do this, and not a more, uh, a more unobtrusive traveller?”
“By which you mean, a whiter one.” St. Vincent shrugged. “For one thing, it will not have occurred to them to consider my comfort. They have not been in the habit of that. Nor are they in the habit of leaving London, with or without me. I don’t suppose they have any idea of the inconveniences of this journey.”
“Oh, well. That’s all right, then.”
St. Vincent gave him a look he couldn’t quite interpret, but went on calmly enough. “For another thing, they didn’t want to tell anyone else. You must see that Miss Conroy faces ruin if word of her adventure gets out in the society in which they hope to move. They needed someone in whose loyalty and silence they could place absolute trust. Not someone who would set gossip flying around London.”
Someone who would jump to their bidding, more like, leaving his own business behind to spend a miserable week rattling around over potholed roads in the arse end of nowhere. Theo suspected St. Vincent wouldn’t welcome that observation. “They can’t trust my loyalty,” he pointed out instead. “Do they even know you’ve brought me along?”
“I’m paying well for your discretion. If you break your silence, I’ll break your neck.”
“Oh, very kindly said,” Theo snapped. “Considering you all but pressed me into service—”
“And I don’t think you are a man to destroy a woman for pleasure or profit,” St. Vincent said over him.
Theo considered that from all angles, looking for sarcasm. “You don’t?”
“I think you’d do a great deal for money,” St. Vincent clarified. “But I would guess, probably more to yourself than to anyone else. I certainly don’t think you’re fool enough to try your hand at extortion, considering that I know where you live.”
“Charming. Watch out or you will quite turn my head with your compliments.”
“The truth, though. Do you intend to betray Miss Conroy’s indiscretion when we return? Sell the story to the gossipmongers and ruin her for good?”
Theo flushed, but the answer was unquestionable. “No,” he muttered, as though he were admitting something shameful. “There’d be no profit in it to speak of. And you’d take your fifty pounds back if I did.”
“Forty.”
“Can’t blame a man for trying.”
They exchanged smiles. St. Vincent’s smile was every bit as good as Theo had suspected it might be: slow and wide, lifting his cheeks and crinkling his glinting eyes. It was the sort of smile that made a fellow feel warmed, and appreciated, and liked, even. The sort that made him want to win more smiles like that.
You’re not doing this for smiles, Swann, he told himself. You don’t want his smiles. But still he found he was grinning helplessly back.
Swann’s smiles were dangerous.
Martin had already suspected it, but the conversation after the nuncheon stop had confirmed everything he feared. Swann had a sly, sideways sort of smile, insinuating, tempting; a smile that invited shared glances and secrets, and seemed to make them partners in absurdity.
Martin wanted to be partners in a great deal more than that.
He hadn’t indulged with a man in over a year, since an escapade on the Sodomites’ Walk in Moorfields had led to his arrest. He’d bribed the officer with an eye-watering sum to be released without charge, and decided to keep his prick to himself in the future rather than face the unspeakable consequences of using it as he wished.
He was beginning to think that had been a serious error. Between his long-controlled desires and Swann’s smile, lean body, and grey, observant eyes and the inevitable closeness of this accursed journey, Martin was finding it hard not to think about ways they might spend the evening. About bending Swann—Theodore, his name was—over a bedstead, or putting him on hands and knees. About how he would push and wriggle and demand. Martin was quite sure he’d be demanding.
Which was neither here nor there. It was too dangerous. It was all dangerous: Swann’s smile and Martin’s rogue thoughts and this closeness in a jolting carriage, and the fact that the more he told himself not to be a fool, the more he wanted to be one.
That thing Swann had said. What else will you have from me for your money? If ten shillings had been enough to buy him Swann’s arse, God knew what forty pounds would pay for.
No amount would buy the light in his eyes when he’d really smiled, when it had been spontaneous and gleeful and shared. But that sort of thing was the most dangerous of all. That was where a man or woman became a fool and put everything to hazard for the sake of a fantasy. Like Miss Jennifer, throwing away her future and her reputation for the thrill of a romance with a man she didn’t even know.
Christ in heaven, he hoped she was well. Please God Troilus was wooing her gently. Please God she had not been compromised against her will. The thought went some way to quelling his own desires for his travelling partner.
They talked idly as the coach rolled and bounced them through the afternoon. There was nothing else to do.
“How is it that you publish your newspaper?” Martin asked at one point. “Why matrimonial advertisements, of all things?”
Swann shrugged. “Profitable.”
“Is that all?”
“What else is there? If you’re asking whether I am a matchmaker by nature . . .”
“It seems to me there are other things to advertise.”
“None of which I know about. Not that I know a great deal about matrimony, truth be told. But matrimonial publications speak to a wide audience, and I have no trouble filling my pages. A man has to live somehow.”
“It’s not what you’d have chosen?” Martin asked curiously.
“Eh.” It seemed as though Swann might leave it there, but after a few minutes he said, “My parents destined me to be a curate.”
“You?” Martin said with, he realised too late, rather more incredulity than was quite polite.
“Yes, well. They had a number of hopes for me which I did not fulfil. And made great efforts to help me achieve them, but . . . Suffice to say, I found myself at twenty with no degree, no prospects, and a deal of disgrace. I had to— Well, I shan’t bore you with the sordid details.”
Martin turned to look at him. Swann had on a hard smile, shaped to show how little he cared.
“I was left with debts to pay and a regrettable need to eat. And since my family were unable or unwilling to assist me further, and I had nothing to offer any employer but some insincerely held knowledge of theology, I struck out on my own. I run the Advertiser, I make a certain amount by my writing, I live.”
He sounded startlingly unenthusiastic about that last. Martin frowned. “Have you reconciled to your parents?”
“No. Perhaps we might have, one day, but it’s too late for that. Typhus.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Swann gave another of those one-shouldered shrugs. “Well.”
“I’m sorry,” Martin said again. “It is not easy to make one’s own way, or to redress mistakes. I should not have been so scornful when we met.”
“If I could not tolerate the scorn of others, I should be a very unhappy man.”
The bareness of that took Martin’s breath away. He sat for a moment, absorbing it, and said at last, “That is not . . . Why should you tolerate it?”
“I earned it. My parents were not wealthy, and they sacrificed more than I realised to give me the future I threw away.” His voice was raw with old bi
tterness. Martin realised he was reaching out a hand to give a comforting touch, pulled it back.
“And as for the Advertiser, of course everyone mocks those fool enough to admit their hopes in public,” Swann went on. “After all, what is more absurd than a lonely woman hoping for a husband, or a man who cannot command a wife for himself? Are those not laughable spectacles? I make my money from hopes and dreams laid bare, and those are too important, too revealing, to be treated with anything except scorn.”
The chaise lurched sideways, righted itself, bowled on.
“I see what you mean, I think,” Martin said. “The poets and playwrights and novelists write about love, and we devour it, but the actual business of matrimony—”
“Is a business,” Swann completed. “And to be unbusinesslike is to be ridiculous, or ruined. Look at Miss Conroy, becoming soiled goods in the marketplace by following her heart, instead of gaining the world’s approval by exchanging her cu—her person for a title.”
Martin shifted slightly. “You cannot think a man who runs away with a young lady means well by her.”
“I wonder if anyone does,” Swann said. “Look at us all in this affair. The Conroys want to offer their daughter in exchange for a title, and Troilus, like all her respectable suitors, wants her money, and she wants to pursue her foolish ideas of pleasure without regard for the future or her parents’ wish, and I want fifty pounds—”
“Forty.”
“And what do you want?” Swann asked. “What do you get from this? Are you here in this damned uncomfortable contraption, leaving your own business untended for a week or more, simply because you are a chivalrous knight riding to the rescue? Why are you dancing to the Conroys’ tune?”
Martin couldn’t answer that for a moment. He stared out of the little window, trying to formulate words, and realised the chaise wheels were grinding more slowly under them.
“We’re at a staging post,” he said, and offered nothing else.
Southoe was worse than Stevenage. There were only two horses to be had, which would slow their pace, and the ostler examined the coins Martin handed over, with a suspicious eye that made him set his teeth. The postilion whispered to his replacement as they changed the horses—about what, Martin could not tell, but they glanced at him, and a couple of barmaids and drinkers drifted outside to take a look as he walked around the yard stretching his sore legs.
He hated this. Hated travelling outside London, hated being a novelty. He wanted to ask them what the devil they were looking at.
Doing no harm, he told himself over again. Just curious. As the men who followed him to the jakes were doubtless just curious to get a look at his privy parts. That also was nothing new.
He walked back to the inn yard, keeping his breathing calm and even. Swann was there, talking to an ostler with what looked to Martin like a great deal too much friendliness. He raised a hand, and Swann came across to meet him, dodging a pile of dung.
“Well?” Martin said, and regretted his curtness at once. This wasn’t Swann’s fault.
“Well, we’ve their scent. That fellow told me. A young lady, veiled, and a gentleman escorting her. Flash look, light-brown hair, and he cursed the men for not changing the horses quickly enough. They’re travelling— Are you all right?”
“Very well.” Martin had to listen; this was important. This was what they were here for. “Go on, please.”
“They’re travelling in a private coach and evidently at speed. It seems the postilion complained that he’d been shouted at to spring the horses the whole way. And the gentleman didn’t tip well.”
“Which is to say he may be short of money.”
“Certainly if I were a runaway and plump in the pocket, I’d pay for silence,” Swann said. “But he may simply be a grasping skinflint, hard to say. The postilion who drove them has gone back London-wards already.”
“How far ahead are they?”
“They passed through at around noon.”
Martin glanced up; it was six o’clock now. “So we have six hours yet to make up. We need to press on while the light lasts. They may do the same, and we cannot afford to lose the time.”
Swann made a face. “Troilus is travelling with a lady. He may give her tender parts more consideration than you’re giving mine.”
“Your tender parts are at the forefront of my mind,” Martin said. It was intended to be sarcasm, but as the words emerged they sounded more like regrettable accuracy.
“That much is obvious,” Swann told him, leaving him quite without retort. “Come on, the hell-trap awaits.”
They didn’t speak for a while after the chaise jolted off, both settling onto the hard seats that Martin’s arse was coming to hate. Since he was brutally uncomfortable anyway, he made himself ask the question he had wanted to avoid.
“Swann. Did you happen to enquire if the young lady was travelling with a maidservant, or other attendant?”
Swann grimaced. “I didn’t have to. The ostler volunteered that she was not.”
“Hell’s teeth.”
“It was one of the reasons they were memorable. And this will be their second night.”
Martin shut his eyes briefly. “I know.”
“Even if we catch them before the wedding—”
“I know.”
“That will be his intent, of course. Make it impossible for her not to marry him.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure why you dragged me on this farrago of a journey if you know everything already.”
Martin shot him a glance. “Tender parts paining you?”
“Oh, be quiet.” Swann shifted resentfully in his seat.
“You’re right, of course,” Martin said after a while. “But the situation still may be salvageable. At least we can try.”
“Are you fond of her?” Swann asked. “Miss Conroy?”
“Fond?” Martin repeated. “Uh . . . I have known her since her birth. She’s lively. Laughs a great deal. Strong-willed, overindulged, but, yes, I’m fond of her. I shouldn’t wish to see her suffer.”
“Is that why you’re dragging yourself and me through the dunghills of England? Your fondness for her?”
“You don’t give up easily, do you?” It was well past six in the evening, and they had at least another two hours in the coach, maybe even three, if they were to manage another two stages before dark. Martin wanted a pint of ale, and a seat that didn’t move, and a hot meal, and he wanted . . . “Why does it matter?”
“Curiosity.” Swann hesitated, and then went on, “As I said, this is no small task you’re about. I wondered what the Conroys have done to deserve such friendship.”
Friendship. Martin stared out of the dirty little window, at the monotonous green of fields, feeling his cravat a constriction about his neck. “I spent my childhood in their household.”
“Ah.”
Swann understood what that meant, Martin was sure he did, but he said it anyway. “As a slave. Household slave. I wore a silver collar, engraved with their name.” He didn’t look around; he didn’t want to see Swann’s expression. “They fed me well, and gave me an education—reading, writing, mathematics. My tasks were not onerous. I was never beaten except in the normal way of mischievous children. I was always well treated, always, and when I was eighteen they freed me with a gift of money to set up for myself. And Mr. Conroy presented me with the, uh, the collar. As a memento.”
“Christ alive,” Swann said. “I wish you’d rammed it back in his teeth.”
Martin looked round then, and the breath he heard himself give sounded like a sob in his own ears. “So do I,” he said harshly. “And I shouldn’t. They were the best possible masters—”
“Bloody end to me,” Swann muttered, the oath slurred into something like enemy. “Was there much competition for that title?”
“Yes,” Martin said. “Mr. Conroy has sugarcane plantations. Do you know about those? He could have shipped me out there when I grew, sold me, he could
have— Do you have any idea what he could have done? What the law permits him to do?”
“I— Some. Yes.”
“I was always well treated,” Martin said again. “I could so easily not have been. I know how my life might have played out. There was a time, during the revolution in France, when Mr. Conroy’s business went through difficulties, and it seemed he might find it necessary to sell me—”
“Sweet King Jesus.”
“But he didn’t. Instead I was kept in the household, and freed on such generous terms that I have been able to prosper ever since, and how can I resent that?”
“That sounds to me the kind of generosity that could kill a man.”
Martin let his head thud back against the leather rest. “It is. It sticks in my throat like thistles, it chokes me.” His hand was at his throat, he realised, that old habitual gesture. He let it drop and repeated, quietly, “It chokes me.”
Swann bit his lip. “You know, speaking as a trained theologian and potential parson, I don’t think you have to be thankful that someone refrained from doing something terrible to you. You could break my neck now, I’m sure, and I am not remotely grateful that you aren’t doing so.”
“But I should hang if I broke your neck,” Martin said. “Breaking necks is not a legal trade that earns men knighthoods for their success. I don’t lose profit by not breaking your neck. Do you know how much the Conroys gave me as a gift? A hundred pounds. That was Mr. Conroy’s estimate of what I would fetch at the auction block.”
“Christ Jesus fuck,” Swann said. “Fuck them both and their brat. Let’s leave her to her sluttery and go home.”
Martin pressed his lips together to prevent something. A laugh, or not. “Is that how you’d have written your sermons, Reverend Swann?”
“Theo, for God’s sake.” He exhaled hard. “And, very well. Let us grant that a man is entitled to copulate with his wife. Should she give thanks, every time she is not in the mood to oblige him, that he does not throw her down and force her to it? Should she consider him a good husband merely for that restraint?”
“I know,” Martin said, more harshly than he meant. “You don’t need to tell me what I should think. I know.”
