Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 (13 page)

He found them in the stables. Ashbrook stood, shadowed and still, brushing one of the horses in long, hard strokes while Cade paced and fretted, saying nothing.

“I have the paper,” Joshua said by way of greeting, closing the wide door fast behind him. “Is there anyone else in here?”

Cade shook his head. “We are alone.” He gulped from the glass of wine he held like a ship’s lifeline clenched tightly in his fist. “Read on. What has London to say for itself?”

Ashbrook buried his hands in the horse’s mane and hung on, his knuckles white. Joshua could run over, gather him up in his arms, hold him and promise to keep him safe, force Ashbrook to make the same vow to him—but he did not.

“The rumors are true,” Joshua said, his heart heavy and solid as a stone inside. He flipped to the correct page and began to read from the small print there. “About eleven o’clock last Sunday evening, three separate parties of the patrol, attended by constables, were detached from Bow Street upon this service.”

He skimmed ahead, the self-congratulatory notes in the text churning his stomach. He could envision the scene all too easily. Men, tired from their long day’s labors at tanneries and butchers’ blocks, bricklaying and store minding, gathered together for drinks and storytelling.

Once, he had been a fixture at just such events, one lover or another sprawled easily in his lap.

They would have felt free to give affection, to kiss their lovers’ lips, to be greeted with amused catcalls rather than fists for daring such an unruly display. Couples would have been going up and down the back stairs to the rooms above, to lie together, rut together, explore the pleasures and secret places of each other’s bodies.

Until the heavy fall of hobnail boots outside, the banging of fists on wooden doors, the screams and crashing glass, fallen lanterns, muskets and fire. And everything, everything in ashes.

“This paper says twenty-four arrested, which is better still than thirty,” Joshua carried on, swallowing against the prickle of hay in his nose and the dryness in his mouth. “They are to have a hearing in two months’ time, to be tried for crimes against nature and man.”

“If the magistrates have no evidence,” Ashbrook suggested, resting both palms flat against the horse’s steady flank, “perhaps they shall all be released.”

“Perhaps,” Joshua replied, though it seemed unlikely. Such things had happened before. Three years ago, a hanging; four years ago, another raid; three years before that, arrests that saw three men executed. “But there is more here. Two days ago, a young man named Dickenson was convicted of sodomy with a drum boy in the guards.”

“I know him,” Cade interrupted. “He is younger than we are, not yet two and twenty. The same as his pretty Ganymede. They fancy themselves in love. What of them?”

“Dickenson was pilloried for it, his drummer boy hanged.” The words were ashes and bile in his mouth.

Ashbrook’s shoulders sagged miserably, and for a moment it looked as though he might drop to the ground under the weight of it all. He remained standing, however, and after a moment he resumed brushing. “Read on,” he commanded, pale as the grave.

“They placed him in the pillory at Charing Cross,” he began, paused, then carried on when neither Cade nor Ashbrook interrupted him, “where he received the most pitiless pelting from the indignant multitude, with mud, eggs, turnips and other missiles… In the course of the first ten minutes he was so completely enveloped with mud and filth that it was scarcely possible to distinguish his back from his front, and it was with the utmost difficulty that the peace officers could prevent him from being torn to pieces by the mob.”

“No more,” Cade snapped, his voice as quick and sharp a lash as any whip. “I’ll hear no more. They were incautious. They should have known—anyone could see that Cook and Yardly were not our friends. They were landlords who cared for nothing but coin, and the fastest way to get it.” His voice cracked, broke, and he drew in a breath, put on an elegant face of uncaring, like drawing curtains across the final act of a tragedy. “And now we see the folly of trusting anyone who does not have as much as we to lose.” He drained his glass and flung it, shattering the crystal against the back wall of the stables. The pieces hung in the air, a thousand broken rainbows, before falling to vanish into the dirt and scattered hay.

He turned on his heel and stormed away, slamming the doors open to the day, then closed behind him.

Ashbrook started to follow, his face dark, then stopped. He walked across the floor to join Joshua instead, sinking down to sit beside him on the hay bale.

Their sides pressed together, comforting and solid, as nothing else had been this morning, and Joshua could not stop himself from leaning over farther. There was this, at least, in a world gone entirely mad. Normal people would look at them and see nothing but evil; he could only feel desperate, clinging on to distant hope.

Ashbrook laid his arm across Joshua’s back and his head upon his shoulder, his solid presence a comfort.

“Did you know them?” Joshua asked quietly after hours seemed to have drifted by.

Ashbrook nodded, and there was exhaustion laced through his voice when he replied, “Yes, though Cade knew them better. I don’t understand all this hatred,” he continued, not moving from Joshua’s half embrace. “Unless this is our punishment for sin. Why can we not be left alone to live our lives as we choose?”

The question cut to the core of things, and Joshua closed his eyes. Pain sliced through his heart, knowing the things that were impossible. And a glimmer of hope, for the things that weren’t. “In some places, we could be. England is not the sum total of the world.” A different sort of image of his own future began to build itself behind Joshua’s eyes, wheels already set in motion.

Ashbrook turned his face in to press his lips against Joshua’s throat. “Perhaps,” he sighed, his eyes closed. Joshua buried his face in Ashbrook’s curls and hung on. “But it is the only one I know.”

The door dragged against the dirt. His head jerked up and he looked around, only to see Sophie flying in at top speed. She had been running, her hair in disarray, and she gestured at the two of them with wild hands.

“There you are!” she proclaimed, and gave them both disgusted looks. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she addressed Joshua alone. “I told you to be careful, but do you listen? The old bat has her wind up, now that you three vanished together, and one of the scullery girls said she saw you coming down this way.”

Cade was already gone, but the two of them alone together, the paper in his hand— No, it would not do at all to be found here.

“We need to run,” Ashbrook said, coming to the same conclusion.

“There’s no time!” Joshua could see movement and people out the window, coming down the path. “If we leave by the door they’ll see us.”

Ashbrook looked around, then lit up. “Then we’ll have to find another way.” He bolted up the ladder into the hayloft like he were a circus performer or a sailor’s monkey, too rapidly for Joshua to copy.

“Here.” He handed the paper to Sophie, about to try his best regardless, but the door at the far end creaked as someone pushed it open.

Sophie jammed her hands through his hair to rough it up, grabbed pieces of straw and shoved them down her bodice.

“Sophie!” he hissed, and she stomped on his foot.

Shuffling and rustling came from the hayloft, and a flash of boot gleamed in the light as Ashbrook squirreled himself away.

Sophie pressed the paper to her suddenly heaving bosom and set her eyes wide, as Downe and Lady Horlock entered the stables together. “Of course I’ll…” she began breathlessly, pressing close to his body and—

What in God’s name was she playing at?

“Mr. Beaufort!” Downe called out.

Sophie squeaked and jumped away from him as though she had not just been pressing herself up against his thigh like a cat in heat, “…take this message up right away, sir,” she said in the breathiest, worst attempt at faking a conversation he had ever heard, glancing sidelong at Downe and Lady Horlock, and managing to blush crimson across the tops of her cheeks.

He needed to revise whatever he might have thought about her acting abilities. The girl should be on the stage full time, instead of mending Lady Horlock’s linens. “Yes, thank you.” He was red himself now, though not from the falseness of the scene they were apparently now committed to playing out.

“Ah, Lady Horlock, Lord Downe…” he turned his attention toward the others and Sophie, managing to look both demure and debauched simultaneously, scurried out the door under Lady Horlock’s heavy glare, “…what a surprise to see you. Here.”

A noise came from the hayloft that sounded suspiciously like a strangled cough.

“Apparently so.” Lady Horlock turned the full force of her steely-eyed anger on him now. “Were we interrupting something, cousin?”

“I was just…er…” he was a terrible liar when put on the spot, that was what he was, “…looking at the horses. I had a thought to paint some of them, perhaps in the field, and wanted to get a look up close.”

“I am confused as to how my abigail became involved. You don’t need her for that.”

“No,” Downe said, and he was smiling with more sympathy than Joshua had ever seen on him before, “no, but she certainly brightened up the place.”

“Armand happened to be passing and I asked her to take a…message for me. Up to the house.”

“Honestly—” Lady Horlock drew herself up to full height, but was then interrupted herself.

“Yes, well.” Downe shook his head and tut-tutted. “We shall let you get back to your…er…horses,” he added, more amused than Joshua felt, certainly. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen either Ashbrook or Cade around, have you?”

The hay rustled. Joshua froze. “Not since breakfast, my apologies.” Inspiration then— “I believe Mr. Cade was heading for the gardens. But he would certainly be better able to tell you than I.”

Lady Horlock drew breath to say more, but Downe caught her by the elbow and guided her toward the door. “There, you see?” he said as they left. “Nothing more exciting than what you already knew…”

The door swung closed behind them. He counted to ten, then collapsed onto the hay bale, his breath coming fast and shallow.

Up in the hayloft, Ashbrook let out a string of sneezes.

“I am starting to hate that woman,” Joshua said with feeling.

Ashbrook slid back down the ladder, straw in his hair and a smile on his face that wasn’t there ten minutes ago. “You’re terrible at that,” he informed Joshua, and what was there to do but laugh?

Joshua shook his head ruefully.

“I had no idea what she was going to do,” he confessed. “I suppose we should be grateful that it worked. This time.” Because they would not be able to pull off that kind of trick again.

“I am,” Ashbrook said firmly, and he sank his fingers into Joshua’s hair and pressed his lips in a tender, closemouthed kiss. “Now, check me over,” he requested, brushing straw from his trousers and shaking his head to settle his hair. “I cannot have straw about me if I’m supposed to have been walking the gardens with Cade.”

“We’ll have to be more circumspect.” Dreadful, terrible, awful thought. But necessary. “At least for the next little while.”

Ashbrook seemed more hopeful, watching the door with careful eyes as Joshua straightened his clothing a little more diligently than was perhaps called for. “This will settle,” he said, more wistful than sure. “It always does. And then we can go back to being as we were.”

“Perhaps.” Joshua finished, and tended to his own repairs. “I shall leave first; they know I was here. You follow in ten minutes, as long as the coast is clear.” He hesitated, Ashbrook’s face still pale and his eyes rimmed with a hint of red.

Joshua cupped his cheek, rubbed his thumb over Ashbrook’s lips in an unspoken promise, then turned and left. Before he did or said something that he was going to regret.

“You’re ridiculous,” he told Sophie later as they passed in the hallway.

“And you’re still alive,” she retorted, her jaw set. “It’s worth a little ridiculous.”

She had a point.

A few days passed with no more bad news, only watchful eyes following their movements. Slowly, with every report of another man released for lack of evidence, Joshua’s temper and his nerves began to ease. He kept his careful distance from the other men during meals and after dinners, balancing that out with his desire not to have any new distance remarked upon.

If Cade found himself making a fourth for cards more often than not, however, while Ashbrook instructed one of the girls at the pianoforte or was prevailed upon to play for dancing, and Joshua spent his time at spillikins or silhouettes…that was the beauty of good company and a house party. There were always so many clever diversions to choose from.

Night followed night, and there were no more murmured invitations.

On the seventh day, Joshua stood on the terrace and stared out at the setting sun, the soothing wash of oranges and reds not as much a balm to the nerves as they should have been.

“Would you be content with your paint box, a cottage and an endless parade of different sunsets?”

“But give me the company of one beloved friend, and a village with a good tavern not too far away, and I would say you had described paradise.”

Now, though, he should add “freedom from the magistrates” to that list.

His heart ached.

A scuff, a cough, and Joshua turned, his heart palpitating wildly in his chest at the sight. Ashbrook stood there, ill at ease, silhouetted, in the doorway, by the firelight behind.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t realize there was anyone out here.”

“No matter.” Joshua shook his head. There was a great deal that still needed to be said, but this was not the time. They needed to be prudent, at least for a little while longer. “I was about to return indoors; you may take your ease in as much solitude as you desire.”

Ashbrook made a soft noise and strode two long steps onto the terrace, to where he would be hidden from viewers inside by the pillars. “Please,” he said quickly and quietly, “I know there is good reason for it, but promise me this separation will not be forever.”