A Seditious Affair (12 page)

There was every chance it would kill him. He would certainly never return. And it
would
happen if that law passed, and he was arrested again, which seemed all too probable because his response to the threat of the six bills was to fight. He was writing furiously as Jack Cade, bellowing his anger at injustice and repression. He’d released two pamphlets on the topic of Lord Sidmouth in the preceding week, either one enough to make a conviction for seditious libel a foregone conclusion.

I really ought not to be sharing his bed,
Dominic thought, staring into the fire.

But, heaven help him, how they were fucking. They kissed now, all the time, and if he’d thought Silas had been brutal before . . .

I own you.
Harsh words breathed into Dominic’s ear as he strained against the padded cuffs that chained his wrists and ankles to the bed. Harsh hands digging into his flesh.
Every scrap of you. You’re mine.

Silas had fucked him to the point of tears the last time. Twice himself, not permitting Dominic to spend, and then again with a china
consolateur
while he’d lain tied and helpless, Silas whispering savage words into his skin along with kisses . . .

“I seem to have lost your attention,” Absalom remarked, rising. “I said, I must go.”

“I do beg your pardon. I have a certain amount on my mind.”

“So I imagine. I shall leave you to your reflections. Or not,” Absalom added as the door opened. “Good evening, Julius. What brings you back to London? No, don’t tell me, I must leave. Tell Dominic, if you can hold his wandering thoughts.”

Dominic waved a hand in greeting as Julius took the vacated chair. He was a very handsome man, if one liked cold good looks, with fair hair and light blue eyes, exquisite in dress and vicious of tongue. He and Dominic had clashed for years, mostly because Dominic’s sense of duty was offended by Julius’s relentless refusal to care about the world around him, but in part because Julius had had the good fortune to share a bed with Richard once and the sheer unmitigated gall to walk away the next morning. In recent weeks, though, as Julius’s successful love affair and Dominic’s disastrous one had progressed, they seemed to have found a quite unexpected mutual liking. It was the first shoots of what felt like friendship, and Dominic was grateful for it.

“Why are you back?” he asked. “I thought you and Harry would be at Arrandene past Christmas.”

“Yes, so did I, but really, my dear fellow.
Richard.
”

“What about Richard?”

“He is as sociable as a bear, but without the charm. What on earth has happened between you two? I mentioned your name, and he was, frankly, explosive.”

“I don’t know.” Julius gave him a look. Dominic turned his hands up. “I don’t. Well, you know that I, uh . . . my Wednesdays.” Julius inclined his head. “I ran into Richard. He made some comments . . .” Not kind comments either. He’d seen the marks on Dominic’s wrists and launched into harsh words of shock and rebuke with a note of anger that Dominic couldn’t understand. “He demanded that I justify myself.”

Julius raised a brow. “How authoritative of him.”

“Well, you know Richard,” Dominic said, automatically defensive. “He has ever been our moral hub.” Julius snorted. “But no. I didn’t quite feel as though I had to. We exchanged a few words. I quoted a line of poetry, somewhat flippantly, I admit, and he turned on his heel and walked away. He has not spoken to me since.”

“That seems an extreme reaction. Unless it was Byron? Richard does loathe Byron.”

“So do I. No, it was a poet and illustrator of entire obscurity, a man named William Blake. He is a radical freethinker and eccentric to say the least, but produces work of quite remarkable beauty.”

“Good heavens, you have the most catholic literary tastes. What was the line in question?”

“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
Julius’s brows shot up. “Written in a contrarian spirit, you understand,” Dominic hastened to add. “The man is insane, of course, but the work is fascinating.”

“I can see why it speaks to you then,” Julius observed. “So you said that to Richard—”

“And he reacted as though I had struck him.”

“I . . . see. Are you aware that he’s in love?”

“What? Richard? With whom?”

“I have no idea,” Julius said with enraging disinterest. “I know only that he has given his heart impossibly—I have this from him, you understand, so I cannot comment on what constitutes an impossibility. Under the circumstances, the restraint of desire may be a sensitive subject.” He gave Dominic a paternal smile. “It isn’t you. I asked.”

“You are ever helpful,” Dominic said. “Who the devil—He didn’t tell me this. He might have spoken to me.”

“I suppose he might,” Julius agreed. “Then again, my dear fellow, you might consider whether Lord Richard Vane has taken kindly to being replaced in your affections by a radical gutter-blood.” Dominic stared at him. Julius returned a sardonic look. “Is that village-idiot expression because you thought Richard approved of your liaison?”

“Richard and I have not been lovers for a long time—” Dominic began.

“But you’ve been the loves of one another’s lives forever,” Julius put in, interrupting him. “Oh, really, Dominic. The pair of you have been mourning that affair for a decade; nobody else has ever taken your respective places. When I went to bed with Richard, you might as well have been in the room. I felt positively crowded.”

“But—” Dominic groped for words. “It’s been years. You just said he was in love elsewhere.”

“So he tells me, dear fellow, but you know, I think Richard is very well used to having your heart, if not the rest of you. You, or at least his youthful idea of you, have long been the ideal against which the rest of us are found wanting. And now his lost love is hopelessly smitten not just with any other man but with a bravo from the slums of Ludgate. One can see why he finds that trying.”

“I am not smitten,” Dominic choked out.

“Well, you’re giving a damned good impression of it,” Julius said. “I assume it’s not just the fucking? Richard seems to believe you’re lost to carnal delights, but then, I don’t think he is considering matters very clearly.”

“My affairs are none of Richard’s business. Or yours.”

“Of course they’re not. So
is
it just the fucking?” He held up a hand to stave off Dominic’s response. “I don’t ask from idle curiosity. Harry cares very much for your Silas. He’s worried.”

“So he should be. Silas is determined to run his head into a noose. These damned bills of Sidmouth’s—”

“I have heard all about that, believe me. It’s why we’re back, in fact. Half the guests down at Arrandene were high Tory, puffing and blowing approval. I had to get Harry out before he made a display of radical sentiment at the dining table.”

Dominic pointed a warning finger. “I tell you, Julius, if Harry mixes himself up in politics in any way whatsoever—”

“He won’t.”

“I mean it. He could destroy Silas just by association at this stage. The entire narrative of Sidmouth’s policy is that reform leads to murder and treason, and that cursed story of the fire—”

Julius’s fine features sharpened. “I beg your pardon? I was under the impression that had been scotched.”

Dominic hadn’t been involved in that. While Harry had lain ill in bed, the Ricardians had mustered a wide range of society ladies to express outrage at a gross calumny against an unfortunate and handsome young man. Even Lord Maltravers’s fiancée, who was remarkable for her beauty, her youth, and her very large dowry, had been persuaded to add her voice. Since there was no evidence to back up the implications, and thus no choice, Maltravers had been magnanimous, and Skelton had been called off.

“As far as possible,” Dominic said. “But Maltravers didn’t tell Skelton to leave Harry alone; he told him not to proceed without evidence. If Skelton turns up anything that he can use, Maltravers will support him, fiancée or no. He doesn’t like our set, he loathes radicals like poison, and the Vanes are not in a strong position thanks to the scandals of the past month. Good heavens, Richard must rue the day that Harry was discovered.”

“He may,” Julius agreed. “I don’t. I shan’t let Harry make things worse, trust me. God knows there are enough people to do that. Quite seriously, Dominic, your Wednesday man—”

“I know. And no. It is not just the fucking.” It was none of Julius’s damned business, but he felt a violent urge to defend Silas, to speak out for once. Something important had happened, something he wished Richard would understand. He did not need Julius to understand in the slightest, but Julius was amoral and unemotional, and that made him easy to confide in. “The fact is, Richard thinks there is—uh—there is something wrong with me.” Such simple words, so hard to face. “Well, Silas does not, that’s all. And I begin to disagree with Richard myself.”

“I should hope so. Of course the uncritical acceptance of a bravo is unlikely to change Richard’s mind.”

“He does not know Silas,” Dominic snapped. “A man may be a lowborn radical without meriting contempt. He has more intellectual curiosity, more fortitude and backbone, than you will find in the entirety of White’s and Boodle’s together, and more commitment to his fellow man in his little finger than you, for example, have in your entire body. He may be wrong, but he is wrong in the right way. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason at all. My urge to meet this fellow Silas is becoming overwhelming.”

“No,” Dominic said comprehensively. “He is not a spectacle at Astley’s for your entertainment.”

“Indeed not. He’s Harry’s mentor, and your motivation to haul yourself out of Richard’s shadow at last. I may tell you that we have all become quite weary of that particular tragedy. I can’t abide melodrama.”

“Go to the devil. Considering the spectacle you and Harry made of yourselves here—”

Julius threw up his hand. “Touché, enough said. Jesting aside, my dear Dominic, your, ah, strange bedfellow is no concern of mine except as he may affect Harry. And if Richard is impelled by the alienation of your affections to pursue his own elsewhere, that will doubtless be a good thing for him too. However, I feel it only fair to warn you that he does not appear to think so at the moment.”

Dominic grimaced. “I’ve no desire to fall out with Richard. You know that. I love him dearly and always will.”

“But it is, perhaps, time to stop seeing yourself through his eyes.” Julius gave him a surprisingly sympathetic glance. “I think that might be good for both of you.”

“They’re going to pass, aren’t they? The bills.” John Thomas Brunt strode up and down, turning every two paces because that was all the room allowed. “They’re going to pass.”

“Of course they are.”

Silas sipped his beer. It was sour, ill brewed, the kind of thing he’d drunk all his life and never complained. It wasn’t a patch on imperial Tokay.

He was in Robert Adams’s room, a little human rat’s den in Hole-in-the-Wall Passage, off Brook’s Market. It was precisely as filthy and sordid as the street’s name made it sound, and the men Silas was with were precisely as wretched and ragged and fanatical as gentlemen would imagine radical conspirators to be.

This was a meeting of the Spencean Philanthropists. An odd name for a radical group, but Thomas Spence, dead now after years of imprisonment and persecution, had loved his fellow man. His beliefs had been extreme to the point to madness: the end of class distinction, of aristocracy, of private landlords; a vote for every man and woman; a legal right for children to be free from abuse and poverty. Dom called that utopian, unrealistic nonsense, clean against human history and human nature.
Perhaps you would have more success if you looked beyond fantasy and saw men as they are.

Perhaps he would. God knew the Spencean group around him was no great advertisement for man’s better nature. Arthur Thistlewood was disgruntled ex-militia, brought to radical politics by resentment and disappointment, and he had gathered other angry men to him. Richard Tidd had profited from the war by repeatedly signing up in disguise and deserting with the bounty he was paid. Neither of them was a man Silas could respect. But there were others. Adams, not a clever man but a decent one, who had been a soldier in the Blues. James Ings, the burly butcher, almost destitute now and desperate to keep his children fed; his benefactor, George Edwards, a quiet, listening sort of fellow, who was giving the Ings family money to live on. William Davidson, the Jamaican, a Sunday-school teacher driven from his place by accusations of indecency. He insisted those charges were motivated by distrust of his race, which Silas could well believe.

They were beggar revolutionaries, driven by anger and despair, but they were good men, most of them, who believed passionately and unquestioningly in the prospect of a just world, in Spencean ideals, in the things Silas needed to be true, and it was a relief to be among them. This was where he belonged. He needed to remember that amid the dizzying pleasures of Wednesdays and their relentless assault on everything he held dear.

Not that he disliked arguing with Dom. Arguing with Dom was damn near as good as fucking him. When those dark eyes narrowed in thought, when he bent that formidable determination to confront Silas’s beliefs—not to ignore or dismiss, but to take them on at equal value, so that the pull of his attention became a physical thing—then Silas understood what it was to be important. He
mattered,
and not for what he could do to Dom’s body either. Dom cared what he thought, and that was sweeter than the Tokay, and more intoxicating too.

No wonder the gentry would fight to the death to keep their privileges. Silas might himself, after a taste of what it was to count.

But he wouldn’t forget who he was, and he wouldn’t give up the struggle in the face of a new wave of reactionary tyranny.

“I don’t like it,” Brunt growled. He was a cadaverous man, hungry looking—wasn’t everyone?—with sallow skin, lank black hair, and deep-set eyes, reminding Silas irresistibly of the creature in
Frankenstein.
“They’ll come for us. Blood-drinking bastards that they are.”