by J. A. Rock
Hartwell couldn’t hold back a snort of amusement. “Brat.” He stood, stretching, and then winced at the pop of his joints. He noted with some surprise that Warry’s gaze dropped to where the tie of Hartwell’s dressing gown had loosened. “Of course she will. But when she sees the lengths I have gone to in order to make myself a satisfactory suitor, she will be properly awed.”
Now Warry outright snickered, and Hartwell suddenly felt he could sit there all day, trying to make little Joseph Warrington laugh. He reached out to tousle the sandy hair as he had done many times before and halted as Warry flinched away. Hartwell studied the bruises again. Perhaps that was all—Warry flinched because he ached and did not want Hartwell making him ache further.
But a niggling voice in his mind said that perhaps he and Warry had never really been chums. That his only true friend was Rebecca, that she was his sole safeguard against a lifetime of loneliness, and that he must now learn to love her as a wife, even though, in all his unformed daydreams, if he had ever imagined himself with someone by his side at all, it had been a man and not a woman.
“Do not laugh at me, Warry,” he said with feigned severity, which only made Warry laugh harder. Hartwell felt a rush of warmth rise up in him, both tender and acute, and for a moment he wished…
But no.
Where on earth had that thought come from?
Even if he had ever thought of Warry as anything but Becca’s younger brother, which he most certainly had not, he was an only son. And Warry was an oldest son, and wishes were for children, not for men who had a duty to their families.
Chapter 3
The Duke and Duchess of Ancaster, Hartwell’s parents, were clearly not in residence since breakfast was held in the drawing room with both Warry and Hartwell in a state of undress. Warry wore a borrowed dressing gown in a rich burgundy brocade. He tied it snugly, a little uncomfortable to be seen in such a manner, even if it was only by Hartwell. Hartwell didn’t seem similarly bothered; his dressing gown hung open, revealing his shirt underneath as well as his collarbones and a somewhat shocking glimpse of dark chest hair. Warry wasn’t sure why the idea of Hartwell’s chest hair was so shocking, and his head was pounding too much to think about it now.
He ate his breakfast—tea and cakes and brioche—and hoped that Hartwell wouldn’t tease him any further about gambling. But then perhaps it would be better to be teased about gambling than it would for Hartwell to press him on how best to court Becca. It was ludicrous to think Warry might be in possession of some secret knowledge that Hartwell could use to pry open Becca’s heart. Firstly, because Becca didn’t have a secret heart at all. She wore it on her sleeve at all times for the sake of convenience. And secondly, because Warry didn’t know a deuced thing about courting anyone. And Hartwell knew Becca at least as well as Warry did. He’d even known her for longer! Warry couldn’t imagine that his place as Becca’s younger brother had given him any insight into her character that Hartwell didn’t already possess.
He pressed his hand to his forehead, feeling the bandage that was wrapped around his skull.
Thinking about Hartwell and Becca marrying was unhappily confusing and made his head ache even more. And yet it strengthened his resolve to see this blackmail business through and to prevent the cloud of scandal from touching either of their families.
He wondered, with a stab of guilt, if he shouldn’t have mentioned his father having previously wrestled with gambling debts. Not that Hartwell cared about that, but it was obvious he’d been taken aback when Warry had pointed out that Becca didn’t share everything with him. In an attempt to dig himself out of a hole with his lie about seeking out a hell, Warry had unwittingly dug himself another. He’d accidentally struck a nerve when he’d told Hartwell that even Becca had her secrets, and now it seemed Hartwell was determined to know her better and to use that knowledge to court her. What a mess! Warry needed to extricate himself immediately; his life was sticky enough at the moment without adding Hartwell to the mix.
He set his teacup down, and it rattled in the saucer. “I really, um, I really ought to leave. Thank you for your offer, but I cannot continue to impose on your hospitality.”
“Really?” Hartwell leaned back in his chair and crooked a brow. “And how shall you explain your bruises to your family?”
“There are other fellows I could stay with,” Warry protested feebly because, apart from Lord Balfour—and Warry didn’t want to humiliate himself by showing up on Balfour’s doorstep looking like a battered peach—he wasn’t sure that was true at all. Warry didn’t have many close friends, a flaw of character he’d been hoping to correct with a membership to the Bucknall Club.
Hartwell cocked a knowing brow, and Warry wanted to strike him. It vexed him to no end that Hartwell still had the ability to make him feel like a child. He had been treating Hartwell coldly these last weeks, he knew. Not that Hartwell had noticed. Nor did Warry believe Hartwell had a clue what had sparked Warry’s animosity, though Warry recalled the incident with bitter clarity: the Gilmore rout.
The Warringtons had arrived in London two months prior, shortly after the Hartwells. Warry did not know why his family insisted on coming to the city in January. He loved the soft snowfalls that covered their country estate—nothing but white hills for miles, the sound of a branch shifting and cracking under the weight of snow, the winding trail of his own boot prints as he traversed the broad acreage. Winter in London was simply dreary. He was not charmed the way his mother and sister were by the warm lights of the shops nor the Christmas decorations that lingered after the holiday had passed. And while there was the occasional ball or rout to attend before the Season fully got underway, the scant opportunities for socialisation were not worth missing the better part of winter in the country.
Still, he had agreed to attend the Gilmore rout with his mother and sister only a few days after coming to the city. The morning of the rout, Hartwell had been in the Warringtons’ drawing room with Warry and Becca, the three of them seated at the Warringtons’ large French-style table, and Becca got up to use the privy. Warry’s stomach dipped as it did every time he and Hartwell were alone together. He was no longer quite certain what to say around the man. A year or so ago, he would have prattled about anything that came into his head. But they were both gentlemen now, and with adulthood came a level of self-consciousness—a sense that the manners they displayed suddenly mattered more than the content of their speech. “The Clarks’ goat has colic,” he remarked. “They wrote me two days past. She’s such a sweet thing. I would be there helping with her if I weren’t here in the city. I hope she pulls through.”
Hartwell shot him a look from under dark brows. “Let us hope so,” he said drily. “I can imagine no greater tragedy than a dead goat. Unless of course it has sacrificed its life to provide my meat.”
Warry ducked his head, chest swelling with anger. He had invited Hartwell’s sarcasm as he had many times before. When would he learn? Hartwell did not care for the things he cared for.
“It is not a tragedy. Goats are only dumb animals,” Warry said sharply, though it broke his heart to say it.
Hartwell glanced up from his attempt to shine the buttons of his waistcoat on his sleeve. “You do not believe that.” His face bore no smile, and yet there was a gentle amusement in his eyes.
Warry shrugged. “It is true, is it not?”
“But you do not believe it.”
He frowned. If he admitted he did not believe it, would Hartwell fire whatever arrow he had nocked? Taunt him mercilessly until Warry felt small and stupid?
“I do like her,” Warry said softly.
Hartwell shook his head slightly and went back to his buttons.
Warry had felt foolish and resolved never to speak to Hartwell again. He resolved to remember that it was Hartwell who was only a dumb animal, and the Clarks’ goat was a beautiful soul who did not deserve to suffer with colic.
Hartwell deserved to suffer with colic. Relentlessly.
Warry stared at him, and eventually Hartwell looked up again.
“You told me about their stomachs, once,” Hartwell remarked. “Goats. They have four. Something happens in one of the stomachs that makes them belch.”
Warry huffed a laugh, surprised Hartwell had remembered. “Yes. Almost as loudly as you.” He surprised himself with the words, and waited apprehensively see how they’d be received.
To his delight, Hartwell laughed—that loud, cracking laugh Warry had always loved. He used to tease Hartwell without a thought. Once he’d gained enough years to hold his own against the older boy, he’d given as good as he got, and they’d often found themselves in rapid-fire verbal sparring matches that had Becca cuffing the backs of both their heads in exasperation. But he hadn’t felt such camaraderie with Hartwell in some time.
“Come here.” Hartwell gestured him closer, as though he wished to tell Warry a secret.
“No.” Warry’s lips twitched.
“Come on. I need to tell you something.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because I am going to lean close to you and you’re going to belch in my ear.”
Hartwell clapped a hand to his chest as though pained. “Warry! You wound me. I would never.”
“You would, and you will.”
Hartwell stood, and Warry fairly leapt to his feet. He was aware of his precarious position at the side of the table farthest from the door. If he tried to bolt around the table in either direction, Hartwell, faster than he, would likely catch him. “Hartwell…” he said warningly, gasping a laugh as Hartwell took a step to one side and Warry to the other.
“What?” Hartwell said innocently. “Warry, all I want is to tell you something very important. Won’t you come here?”
“No!”
Warry hesitated for a few seconds and then bolted to his right. When Hartwell lunged, he turned and ran the opposite way. But Hartwell was ready for the move and caught his wrist as he passed, pulling Warry’s back against his chest. Warry struggled so hard they knocked into the table, nearly upsetting an elegant centrepiece of pine and holly. Hartwell put his mouth to Warry’s ear and let out a long, loud belch.
“Hartwell!” Warry shouted, trying ineffectually to elbow him before collapsing against the other man, breathless with laughter. Hartwell’s own laughter was in his ear, their bodies shaking against one another.
“What, precisely, is going on here?” Becca enquired mildly from the doorway.
“Your friend—” Warry finally wrenched free of Hartwell’s grasp and staggered away. “Is a boor!”
Hartwell was fairly in tears from laughing, bracing himself on the back of a chair, and the sight caused Warry to start up again too.
“Warry brought up goat belching,” Hartwell managed at last.
“I did not! For once, it wasn’t me talking of goat belching.”
Becca shook her head. “He is a boor,” she agreed, going to Hartwell and jostling him lightly by the shoulder. “We are going to be late to the Gilmores’ if you do not get hold of yourself. William!” At that sharp but affectionate use of his given name, Hartwell straightened abruptly, wiping beneath his eyes with his thumb. Becca took his arm. And in that moment, Warry could not have been happier. Things felt just as they used to.
“Ohhhh…” Hartwell’s sigh was high-pitched with the vestiges of amusement. “That was good fun.” He grinned at Warry, a huge, open grin. “Come on, pup. Your sister wants to go to the rout.”
“I certainly do not!” Becca insisted. “But we must.”
As Warry stared at Becca and Hartwell’s linked arms, as “pup” echoed in his mind, his good spirits faded. His sister and Hartwell both looked so grown-up in their fine clothes. They touched each other with such familiarity, the two of them sparkling with confidence. Yet Warry was still “pup” to Hartwell—a term that, in the past, he’d sometimes enjoyed but that today sapped the mirth from him. He could not have back the childhood he missed. And going forward, he did not know what, precisely, he desired. He only knew there was a sudden ache in the pit of his stomach that felt like hunger, and a fear that his heart would always be wanting.
Becca and Hartwell left the room together, Becca feigning to chide Hartwell for his behaviour, while he issued overly serious apologies that he did not mean in the least. Warry stood there, watching them go.
Two hours later, he’d entered the Gilmore rout in a sour mood. It was an intimate affair held in the Gilmores’ pale-blue drawing room. The food was mediocre and every conversation tepid. His mother kept nudging him toward the middle Gilmore daughter, who sat sullenly and picked at a cabbage roll and seemed to wish an end to the event with a fervour even greater than Warry’s.
“She is rich, and her nose is not too large. In fact, it may rather be too small,” his mother had whispered to him. His mother had quite a fascination with people’s noses. He sometimes wondered idly what she thought of his own.
“This will be our Warry’s second Season,” his mother announced to a gaggle of women. “He was out last year but found himself a bit overwhelmed by the social whirl. He has gained a great deal of confidence this year and is ready to make a match.”
It was the sort of bald-faced lie a Tattersall’s auctioneer might tell about a bone-setter on the block. He’s as sound as they come! Be the name on everyone’s lips as this high-stepper carries your chaise through Hyde Park. Warry had not gained much of anything, except for a disagreeableness he was fairly certain he had not possessed last year. He did not know what was the matter with him, only that everything seemed so suddenly strange. One moment, he had been a child, playing happily in ponds and mud puddles, rolling down hills, attempting to ride the neighbour’s cow, Freda. Hartwell and Becca had been right there with him, their gay laughter carried by the breeze in the summer and ringing out across the white world in the winter, as fine and lovely as the ice crystals that clung to branches. Now, all anyone seemed to talk about was making matches. Boys whom Warry had grown up around suddenly cared about the cut of their coats and what style knot to use for their cravats. Girls who had loved books and ponies now talked of nothing but their gowns. Even Becca and Hartwell, who had no interest in marriage, began rejecting his pleas to go out exploring, to play games.
Those two now spent their time talking, and Warry was bored of their conversations. With each year that had passed since Becca came out, the Warringtons had grown more fretful. “How has she not made a match yet?” he’d overheard his mother say to his father one night. “There is nothing wrong with her. She’s quite handsome, has charming manners when she chooses to apply them, and her nose is so very pert.”
“She has too much wit,” Earl Warrington had replied. “Men do not like such wit in a woman.”
“It’s because she spends all her time with William Hartwell. I thought it a good thing at first, for I assumed the young man would have proposed to her by now. But he does not seem inclined to, and she seems quite content to wait.”
“Let her wait.”
“She is three-and-twenty!”
Half listening to his mother prattle on about how eager he was to make a match of his own as she attempted to gracefully steer the conversation away from her unmarried eldest daughter, Warry had glanced across the room. And there was Lord Balfour.
Tall, commanding, with that unnerving smoothness to both his look and his manner, he seemed a cut above everyone else at the party. Warry had thought how much easier life would be if he were such a man. Someone who could take charge of a conversation, whom others flocked to, as a group was now flocking to Balfour. Lord Balfour, it was said, had a fine sky-blue curricle pulled by a pair of matched grey horses. His waistcoats were always immaculately fitted and vivid without being garish. His shoes were as shiny as his handsome face.
There was another facet to Warry’s desire beyond the need to imitate Balfour. Warry either didn’t understand i
t at the time or was afraid that he very much did understand it, and he found himself drifting away from his mother and her audience, heading toward Balfour’s crowd.
Balfour, remarking on the conformation of one of his horses, looked up and caught Warry’s eye. He smiled, making his dark eyes appear kind. After holding court a bit longer, Balfour announced that he should like to go out onto the terrace. “It will be cold, yes, but there is no sight I like better than fresh snow.”
Warry was the only one who volunteered to accompany him.
They stayed outside until Warry’s fingers were numb and red, and there they spoke of many things. Warry was amazed at how Balfour seemed to have a solution to any perplexity of life that might discommode an English gentleman. The advice he gave, unsolicited but wholly welcome, made Warry feel that perhaps there was a future for him that wouldn’t be all misery. Balfour spoke of playing the ’change, how rewarding it was, and what a generous sum a man might rake in by investing smartly. “It is our duty as gentlemen to envision what we want from life…and take it.” Even the snap of Balfour’s fingers impressed Warry because his own fingers were too numb to snap. “It is true, Warrington, that he who hesitates is lost.” He looked Warry up and down appraisingly. “An exceedingly handsome fellow such as yourself should not be so meek.”
Warry was surprised, for he had not yet heard Balfour remark on any subject but himself. Any anecdote recounted, any piece of gossip spilled, and Balfour could twist it to relate to his own life. Yet he did it in such an engaging way that Warry did not mind at all listening to his tales. Yet now Balfour’s focus was entirely on him. Perhaps the only person’s focus that had ever been entirely his.
And Balfour had called him handsome.
He suddenly could not feel the cold at all.
“I require no Spanish coin,” he said softly.
“I pay you none. You are truest, purest gold, Joseph.”
Warry turned to him, startled. He could not believe the man knew his full name. “I go by Warry.”