A Seditious Affair (30 page)

“I don’t think much of your plans.” Silas heard the rasp in his own voice. “Your several steps ahead? The path’s not going that way, friend.”

“Well, perhaps not. One can’t control everything. Still, I’d put money on my opinion before yours.”

Silas had to laugh at that, a rough huff of breath. “What kind of valet are you, anyway?”

Cyprian gave him that vulpine grin. “I am myself alone.”

He had to work for a moment to place the line. Richard of Gloucester, of course, Shakespeare’s scheming hunchback who aimed to be king. His plans hadn’t worked out in the end either.

“Were I you, I’d get some sleep,” Cyprian said. He patted Silas’s arm. “And be patient, friend. This is a long game, and patience is a virtue. You can trust me on that.”

Chapter 16

It was ten days later when Dominic finally stepped down from the carriage onto the gravel driveway of Arrandene, Richard’s country estate north of London. He greeted the butler, an old friend, with a few words, and let himself be ushered into the drawing room with promises of tea and Richard. Both arrived within a very few minutes.

“Dom.” Richard clapped him on the arm. “I’m damned glad to see you. You look exhausted.”

“I am. It has not been a pleasant time. Tell me, how has, uh—”

“He is well, I believe. Not the most sociable member of the servants’ hall, according to Cyprian, but refraining from stirring up radical discontent, at least. And doing an outstanding job on the library, which I had not been aware was quite so appallingly neglected. I think you may have done me a service there.”

“We both know that’s not true. I’m sorry, Richard. I’m sorry for everything that I brought to your door, and I’m sorry that I forced you to lie for me—”

Richard had a hand up. “Firstly, you did not. I chose to do that. Don’t take the credit for my self-sacrifice. Secondly . . . Oh, Dominic, my dear and beloved Dominic. Would you say I had hagridden you since our parting?”

“What? No!”

“I hope not. And yet the phrase sticks in my throat, as insults do when they have the added insult of being true.”

“It is not. Who on earth said—Oh, he didn’t.”

“He told me he would rather hang than allow me to use him against you,” Richard said. “And I believed him. Your werewolf is . . . devoted.”

“Perhaps you could not call him that,” Dominic suggested, without much hope. When Julius bestowed a nickname, it stuck.

“The point is, that’s what he saw. Me set against you. And I am very afraid he saw that through your eyes.”

Dominic put his cup down. “Rich, listen—”

“No, let me say this. I have made mistakes, I become aware, more and larger and further-reaching mistakes than I could have imagined. I find myself unsure of . . . things I have not previously doubted.”

Dominic frowned. “Has something happened?”

“No. No. Let us say, I have held certain beliefs all my life, and I now find myself wishing I had been rather less absolute in my convictions.” Richard gave a rueful smile. “It is very uncomfortable.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I expect you know what I mean. It does seem unfair that one should have to rethink one’s beliefs at the advanced age of thirty-seven.”

“On the other hand
,
‘The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.’ ” Dominic grinned at Richard’s expression. “Blake.”

“I should be extremely grateful if you would stop quoting that lunatic at me. Dom, I don’t know what you want, and when I find out, I dare say I won’t understand. So I will say just this, with my hand and heart on it: While you wish me to offer shelter to your werewolf, and whatever your relations with him may be, I will do so without question, no matter how much he snarls at confinement.”

“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.”