A Seditious Affair (8 page)

Skelton’s mouth was drawn tight as a cat’s arse against that, but Frey was clearly the senior. He gave a tight nod. “We will be back, Mason. We know about you. Think on it.”

Dominic walked up the anonymous side street to Millay’s feeling as though he might be sick.

This was a mistake, a terrible, stupid one. At best, Silas would not be there. Why would he come, after all?

For revenge, perhaps. He’d have every reason. The soldiers had smashed though the shop, and even disregarding that it was the man’s livelihood, Dominic knew how the brute loved books, with a passion that left him silent and incapable of more than turning a precious volume in his hands with reverent care. He wouldn’t be any happier about that careless damage than about the prospect of being gaoled for seditious libel.

Dominic took the little alleyway, nodded to the gatekeeper. The discreet, anonymous door swung open as soon as he raised his fist to knock.

“Welcome, sir.” Mistress Zoë approached in a rustle of skirts as he entered. Millay’s had three madams, of whom he much preferred Zoë, a handsome black woman. She was never bawdy, never jested, never gave a hint of the purpose of the house or his visit. Her grave professional deportment reminded him irresistibly of Shakespeare, the majordomo at Quex’s.

Now he thought of it, the majordomo and Zoë had very similar skin, an unusually deep near-ebony tone. “Do you know Shakespeare?” he found himself asking.

She shot him a glance. “
To be or not to be,
sir?”

“No, I mean—” He had no idea what the man’s first name was, but how many black men of that surname could there be in London? “Shakespeare. A man who works at Quex’s hell.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, sir.” Just a hint of a smile there. “He’s my brother.”

Dominic blinked. “You’re Mistress Shakespeare?”

“Miss, until I married. Our mother was owned by a literary gentleman,” she added, without inflection.

Owned.
Was this handsome, serious woman a slave? The trade in human lives had been outlawed more than ten years earlier, but the state of slavery was still legal. That was not Dominic’s idea of good law. “If I may ask, mistress, are you emancipated?”

She gave him a curious look. “Why, sir?”

“Slavery does not exist under English common law.” Her brows shot up in understandable disbelief. Dominic hastened to explain. “That was handed down by Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, fifty years ago. It is a legal absurdity that anyone on British soil should be counted a slave. If you wish to seek freedom, and you need help . . . ?”

Her smile touched her eyes for a moment. “Thank you, sir, but I was born free.
Slaves cannot breathe in England.
”

“If their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country and their shackles fall,”
Dominic completed. He loved the Cowper poem and had had a blistering argument over it with the brute.
I’ll listen to your sentimental slop when slavery’s against the law and Englishmen not profiting from it.
“I’m glad to know it, mistress.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said again and led the way up the stairs. Dominic followed, wishing she’d keep talking. He needed some sort of human connection, urgently.

He’d said he was going to meet Silas, and Richard’s face . . .

He didn’t think he could explain to anyone. Not to Richard, not even to himself. The only person who might understand why he was going to meet Silas now
was
Silas, assuming the brute didn’t want to kill him.

“Is he there?” Dominic asked.

“In the room? Not yet, sir.”

“I don’t think—I didn’t order wine.” He hadn’t been able to decide what it would mean if he did or didn’t, if it would be contemptible to do so or contemptuous not to. In the end he hadn’t done it and now, panicking, wished he had.

“No, sir,” Zoë said. “I took the liberty of bringing up a bottle of claret from the cellar, in case it was wanted. Shall I remove it?”

“No. No, leave it. Thank you. You do an excellent job here; you always have.” Was he looking for sympathy from a brothel keeper now? “Thank you.”

“Your servant, sir,” she murmured, and opened the door.

As always in cold weather, a blazing fire waited, along with a bottle of wine and two glasses on the table. He had no idea what would happen now. His hands were shaking a little and not with pleasant anticipation.

It seemed a very long time until the door opened and the brute—Silas—walked in.

He hadn’t shaved. That was the first thing Dominic saw, and his heart sank further. He’d a jaw you could break rocks on as it was, aggressively set, and now it was covered with several days’ scruffy beard that made him appear the ruffian he was.

Silas shut the door. He looked Dominic up and down, nodded to himself, took three paces toward him, and punched him in the eye.

The pain flared white through his senses, blotting out everything else. He doubled over, clutching his face, aware at some level there would be another blow coming but utterly incapacitated by the intense, throbbing agony. All he could do was brace himself, but the second punch didn’t come.

He straightened, still holding his face. Silas stood, stance aggressive, but he looked a little shocked.

“I suppose you had to do that,” Dominic managed.

“Aye, I did. My fucking shop torn apart, I accused of arson and murder, Harry being set up for God knows what, and you stand and watch!”

“Did you want me to intervene?” Dominic took his hand away from his face, cautiously. “That hurt.”

“Good. And go bugger yourself.”

“You’re Jack Cade.” Silas’s face darkened. Dominic lifted a hand. “I’m not trying to trick you into an admission. I could hardly use one, under the circumstances. But I
know.
You’re Jack Cade, and you’re spreading sedition, and it is my duty to prevent that.”

Silas folded his arms. “All right, then, say it’s so. Why don’t you arrest me?”

“Good question.” Dominic went to pour two glasses of wine, splashing some on the table. He didn’t try to conceal the tremor of his hand. “Here.”

“Christ’s sake.” Silas didn’t take the glass. “You think this is a social call?”

Dominic put the glasses back down hard. “Listen, curse you. We have each other’s lives in our hands. You could see me hanged as easily as I could you, and we’ve both earned it, come to that. Harry has not, and I’m damned if I’ll allow this nonsense about the fire to be used against him or you, but I can’t and I won’t protect you against the consequences of what you have done.”

“Never asked you to.”

“As I never asked you to hide my crimes. And yet, so far, you have.”

“So?” Silas shifted a little. “I told you, I don’t bow to unjust law.”

“You don’t take thanks well, do you?”

“I don’t want your thanks.” A snarl of pure pain. “I don’t want your thanks or your protection or your wine or any other damn thing of yours, you sodding, fucking, bastard Tory.” Silas’s chest was heaving, and there was ferocious misery in his dark-ringed mongrel eyes. “What the hell d’you call me here for? You want me to fuck you, is that it? It’ll make you that bit harder when you go to your knees now you know I’m a seditionist?”

“I think I always knew your views. It’s not as though you hid them. I didn’t ask your name because I didn’t want to find out.”

Silas snorted. “At least you’re honest there.”

“I shan’t arrest you,” Dominic went on. “I won’t share any knowledge I have—”

“Am I supposed to thank you?”

“Oh, go to the devil, you obstreperous swine. You’re Jack Cade, whom I have wanted to hunt down for a year and more, and I have found you in my
bed,
damn it, and you expect what of me? That I pretend it makes no difference? Protect you from the course of the law?”

“I expect you to do your job just as I do mine,” Silas said. “Unless you’re offering me a bargain, of course. Silence for silence, is that it?”

“No, and you know damned well I’m not. Stop being so awkward.”

“Very sorry, your lordship.”

“Are you
trying
to enrage me?” Dominic breathed deeply, calming himself. “Listen to me. To
me,
not to what you seem to think I’m going to say. For the sake of—Wednesdays—I don’t propose to use what I know of you or to play a part in in your well-deserved punishment. I am well aware that’s hypocrisy and dereliction of duty and anything else you care to call it. And, heaven help me, if you will take a way out, I will give you one.”

“A what?”

“America.” Dominic attempted a smile. It didn’t feel convincing at all, and his eye hurt like the very devil. “Or elsewhere if you prefer. I’ll pay the passage.”

“You’re offering to get me out of the country?”

So far had he sunk. “You’re in trouble. Skelton is determined and he’s on your scent. I can’t, won’t prevent him doing his job if you remain in the country. But I can reconcile it with my conscience to remove you, if it means you take your sedition elsewhere.” Somewhere he wouldn’t make trouble, somewhere he wouldn’t be flogged for it. Dominic could feel the memory of ridged skin on his fingertips, the scars that still marked Silas, and he had to be forty at least. Strong, obstinate as hell, but not young, and sooner or later men lost their resilience. The thought of his brute taking the punishment he deserved churned in Dominic’s stomach. “What do you say?”

“I say, sod you. Born in London, die in London. You’re not getting me to foreign parts.”

“Don’t be so parochial. America’s a republic. A democracy, even. You’d feel quite at home.”

“I’m at home now, and I’m not running from my own bloody city with your jackals at my heels, just to ease your path. Go to hell.” Silas’s face was dark with anger. “You want me to piss off to
America
of all the places, leave my work here, just to get out of your way? Don’t want the inconvenience?”

“You’ll be damned well inconvenienced when Skelton arrests you!”

“And until then I’m a free man. I make my own choice, for myself. I. Not lords, not Home Office, not gentlemen, and not whatever you are.”

“What?”
Dominic’s fist clenched. “What did you say to me?”

“You call yourself a gentleman,” Silas said, very deliberately. “Breaking the law here, bending it there, making damn sure other people obey it, but it’s not for you and your sort, is it, Mr. Frey? You act as you will. It’s
other
people who have to face the laws and the gaols and the gallows. Other people who belong on their knees. And there’s a thing.” His face was set, brutal, cruel in a way Dominic had never seen. “If I said,
You come here right now, get on your knees, and suck my prick,
you’d do it. If I pushed you to your knees and used your mouth right now, you wouldn’t fight it, would you,
Dominic
?”

“Be damned to you.”

“We both know what you want of me. Here to fuck you when you want it and be got out of the country when it’s convenient for the gentry.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Shut your mouth,” Silas snarled. “I’m talking. And I asked you a question, Mr. Frey, standing here in this fucking molly house with me. If I told you—”

“Stop it!” Dominic wanted to hit him or to block his own ears against this hellish distortion. Or perhaps what they’d had had been the distortion, and this was the truth after all. “Stop,” he repeated, and felt the word’s awful familiarity in this room. A humiliation without anything good in it at all.

Silas laughed without amusement. “Stop,” he mimicked cruelly. “There’s my answer. Well, then.” One deep breath. “Lucky for you I don’t want it.”

“What?”

“Just fuck off.” Silas spat the words. “Fuck off back to the Home Office and do your job. Gaol the reformers and anyone who speaks against your mad king and your fat, greedy slug of a Regent. Protect your friends. Dance at balls. What do I know what
gentlemen
do? But I’m not your lackey; I’m not your whore. I won’t take your charity, and I won’t vanish for your convenience. I got my own life, just like you got yours, and mine’s no less to me than yours to you, so piss off and leave me alone.”

Chapter 5

The banging on the shop door came at an unseasonable hour of Saturday morning.

Silas rolled out of bed, snarling. He was dizzy to the point of nausea from nights of sleepless fury, and days of exhausting himself physically in the hope of better nights. The constant, angry, miserable roil in mind and heart.

The knocking suggested urgency rather than soldiery. He blinked his crusted eyes clear and hurried downstairs.

When he unbolted the door, it was to see George Charkin’s mother, Martha, with nine-year-old Amy by her side. Amy looked white, her eyes huge. Martha’s face was crumpled and streaked with tears.

“Mr. Mason,” she said, voice shaking. “Oh, Mr. Mason. It’s George.”

They brought his body to the bookshop. Martha Charkin, a seamstress who worked every waking hour until her eyes failed and fingers bled, lived with her children in a single room. She had no space to lay out her dead son.

The corpse was a pallid, bloody sight. It was stiff with rigor, sodden with rain, icy with the night’s exposure. Someone had shut his eyes, at least.

George’s raggedy shirt was stained with blood, and so was the gentleman’s coat he wore, which was a shade of horribly familiar pink. Except that Harry had called it puce.

“That coat,” Martha Charkin whispered. “Where’d it come from? My George was no thief!”

“No one says he was.”

“They will. That coat! Where’d he get it? He wouldn’t rob a gentleman, not for a coat. He would
not.
”

Only a mother could believe that George had turned apache, idle layabout that he had been. “He didn’t rob anyone. Don’t you worry, he came by it fair. I know who gave him the coat.”

“But—” Her eyes darted around the empty room, and when she next spoke, it was barely audible. “He had a purse too.”

George, to Silas’s certain knowledge, had not had a shilling to his name. What little Silas could pay him went straight to his mother, or to the Spotted Cat inn and his vain hopes of the barmaid. “What purse?”