“Balius doesn’t like anyone very much. Including me,” said Percy. “But he’s strong and fast and he puts up with me. Did he try to hurt you?”
The child gave Percy a withering look. “I know how to take care of horses.”
“Ah. Silly me. Thank you for taking care of him for me, then.”
“Dennis comes from a long line of horse thieves,” Kit said after the child left. “So he really does know how to look after horses.”
“Do I need to worry about my horse being stolen out from under my nose?”
“I don’t think those two are still in the business,” Kit said dryly.
Percy uncovered the basket, revealing a pile of oatcakes. He couldn’t have eaten if he tried, so he handed the basket to Kit. Instead, Percy sniffed the contents of the jug. It was beer, probably home brewed, and really not something Percy would have chosen, but he took a long drink anyway. It was bitter and strong, and Percy suspected that given his empty stomach, it wouldn’t be long before he felt the effects. He passed the jug to Kit, but Kit waved it away.
“Dorothy’s beer is too much for me,” Kit said, and Percy realized that apart from a few sips of ale, he had never seen Kit drink anything but tea and coffee.
“Well, I intend to get fully soused, thank you. You’ll have to tie me to the horse.”
Kit snorted. He was being very patient in not asking Percy too many questions about what had happened during the robbery, and Percy couldn’t tell if Kit didn’t want to know or if he guessed that Percy didn’t know how to talk about it.
“Marian was there,” Percy said when the jug of beer was half-empty and his thoughts had begun to take on a gauzy texture. “She was supposed to be in London.”
Kit paused in shaking the hay out of a blanket. “I gathered.”
“I think—” But Percy didn’t know what to think, or rather he didn’t want to know, so he took another drink.
“If there’s any chance she’s going to identify you as the man who shot the duke, then we need to lie low for a while,” Kit said.
This was putting it very generously, Percy realized. Kit had refrained from speculating about whether Marian had set Percy up, even though he surely had to suspect as much. Hell, Percy had let the idea cross his mind as he lay awake, trying to make sense of what he had seen.
Percy’s instinct was to protect Marian. His instinct was to lie through his teeth if it meant shielding Marian.
But there was something else tugging at him, some sense of—duty, maybe, to Kit. He had brought Kit into this predicament, and he owed Kit at least the bare bones of information.
“My father tried to shoot me. Rather, he did shoot me,” Percy said, gesturing at his leg.
Kit nodded slowly. Presumably, he had guessed as much.
“But he recognized me. Before he shot, I mean. I shouldn’t be surprised. There was no love lost between us, and I knew he valued that book over everything else. I shouldn’t be surprised,” he repeated. “I really shouldn’t be.”
Kit was looking at him very closely now, and for a minute Percy worried that Kit planned to comfort him, as if “I’m sorry your father tried to murder you after you pulled a pistol on him” were a reasonable sort of sentiment, but instead he stayed sensibly across the barn.
“What about the second shot?” Kit asked.
Percy passed a hand over his jaw, cringing at the unfamiliar sensation of stubble. “Marian took the pistol from my hand and shot my father.” She had shot the man in the chest at close range, then all but shoved Percy out of the carriage and ordered the coachman to drive on. Those were the facts Percy was certain of, and now Kit had them as well.
“Do you think she planned to kill him all along?” Kit asked after a minute. This, Percy supposed, was a polite way of asking whether Marian had set Percy up.
“I don’t know,” Percy said honestly. “If she just wanted to kill him, she could have done it a dozen different ways. There was no reason to bring me into it.” He didn’t bother saying that Marian would have let him in on any plan she was concocting, because it wasn’t true. He had known for weeks that she was up to something, sneaking in and out of the house in the middle of the night, dressed as she was.
“There was a moment,” Percy went on, “after my father shot me, when Marian looked stunned. I think she saw that my father recognized me. I could be wrong, but I think she realized that if my father could kill one child, then her own daughter would never be safe.” Percy swallowed. This might be nothing more than a fairy story that he had invented to make himself feel better about being betrayed by not only his father but his closest friend.
“She may also have realized that you’d never be safe,” Kit said.
And that was the kindest thing Kit could possibly have said. It settled something within Percy’s chest. “When do you want to leave?” he asked.
“I think you and your horse—and me, really—could do with another day of rest. I’d like to know your leg has stopped bleeding before I put you back on a horse.”
“All right,” Percy said, and for a moment let himself enjoy the novel sensation of being looked after.
When Kit stepped out to talk to the old woman, Percy rooted through his satchel until he found the book. Other than the cover now being splattered with blood, it was exactly as he remembered. He ran a finger over the faded gold leaf on the cover, the worn leather of the binding.
When he opened it, he saw that it was indeed a Bible, as his cousin had insisted, and Percy hadn’t believed. It was a Bible, with a list of names, dates, and locations written in his mother’s tight, spidery handwriting. When he flipped through the pages, he saw what appeared to be random words underscored, and with a dizzy sense of realization, he understood that he was looking at either an encrypted message or the key to a code.
Chapter 44
Dorothy looked at Kit as if she half expected him to disappear. When Kit took her kettle outside to fill at the pump, she seemed surprised that he came back, as if maybe she expected him to run off and take the kettle with him.
“I’ll send Dennis to the village to see if there’s any news,” she said. “I reckon that whatever brought you here might be the sort of news that travels. He knows better than to talk about any strangers who might be sleeping in the barn.”
“Thank you,” he said sincerely. “I don’t suppose the—” His voice caught, and he broke off. “Is anyone living at my old cottage?”
She gave him a look that was equal parts soft and reproachful. “It fell down years ago, Kit.”
He swallowed. “Of course it did.” He went outside then, desperate for fresh air. He found Percy hauling buckets of cold water from the pump to fill an old tin washtub that he had set up in the barn.
“Are you going to heat that water?” Kit asked.
Percy’s cheeks turned pink. “I didn’t want to bother anyone.”
“Well, you freezing to death would be more of a bother. Dennis!” Kit fished a halfpenny from his coin purse and gave it to the boy in exchange for his trouble, and then leaned against the barn wall.
Percy came to lean beside him. “Do you know,” he said in a confiding tone, his forehead wrinkled, “I saw that child walk past earlier with a brace of pheasants. I think these people are poachers.”
Kit laughed. “That they are. And so was I. And so was my wife. So were a lot of people who lived on your father’s land, if we wanted to make ends meet.” After the words left his mouth, he held his breath, not knowing how Percy would react.
“I wondered why you hated my father. If you were one of his tenants, that would certainly explain it,” Percy said, not without bitterness. He didn’t ask about Jenny, but he took Kit’s hand and squeezed it, as if he knew the story there wasn’t a happy one.
Once the bath was full, Kit closed the barn door to shut out the worst of the drafts. He watched in some amusement as Percy drew a bar of pure white soap from his satchel, followed by a sponge and a sheet of linen.
“Wh
at else do you have in there?” Kit asked. “A feather bed?”
“I assure you that if I had a feather bed, I would have brought it out last night. Not that I’m complaining about your friend’s hospitality,” he quickly added.
Kit didn’t pretend not to watch as Percy stripped. First, he wanted to be sure Percy wasn’t hiding any wounds—there was only so much he had been able to see by the lamplight the previous night. And second, well, he wanted to.
Percy pulled his shirt over his head and cast his eyes around, obviously looking for somewhere to put it, before finally shoving it into his satchel, unfolded. Presumably, he was used to always having a servant at hand to deal with things like clothes that needed washing. Kit wondered what Percy’s plans for the future were. If the duke were dead, what did that mean for Percy’s extortion scheme? Would Percy know how to live without fine soap and hot baths? And then Kit felt stupid for even wondering—of course Percy would figure it out. He had gone from being the pampered scion of a noble family to consorting with criminals and prizefighters. Kit knew a bone-deep longing to be around long enough to watch Percy find his feet again.
Percy pulled off his boots and buckskins and stepped into the bath.
Kit had known that Percy was strong, but it was something else to see the lean muscle that lay under his fair skin. And he had known Percy was beautiful, but it was something else to see the span of his shoulders and the curve of his arse.
Percy looked over his shoulder at Kit before lowering himself into the bath. “If you’re staying, you should come over here.”
Not needing to be told twice, Kit dragged a stool beside the tub and sat. “There something you want?” Kit was decidedly not in the mood himself, but there were stranger things than getting aroused by narrow escapes from danger.
Percy swallowed and shook his head, not meeting Kit’s eyes. “No, I just had too much of that beer and I’m maudlin. I figure having you nearby will stop me from crying into the bath as I wash my father’s blood from my hands, almost literally.”
“Sometimes you need to cry into the bath.”
“Somehow I doubt you ever do that,” Percy said, soaping up his arms. The cut Kit had dressed over a week ago was now an almost invisible pink line, soon hidden by soapsuds.
“You’d be surprised. Well, not into the bath. For me it was crying into my gin, but same principle.”
Percy slid lower in the tub, wetting his hair and working some suds through it. “Collins will be outraged that I used bath soap in my hair. He probably won’t speak to me for days and will leave bottles of hair tonic around my apartments in retaliation. Assuming, that is, that I’m not forced to flee for my life. A life of anonymous exile probably doesn’t involve much in the way of hair tonic.”
Kit could have reassured him that the duke was almost certainly dead, but that wasn’t what Percy needed to hear. “You’ll get by,” he said instead. “You’re clever and you’re strong.”
Percy gave him as incredulous a look as a man could deliver with bubbles all over his head. “I’m the opposite of strong. It’s all a facade. It’s acting.”
Kit’s heart twisted with some unspeakable, unwanted fondness. Percy was somehow still young or naive enough to think that there was any difference between being strong and acting strong. And again, Kit found himself wanting to be there when Percy figured it out, when he learned what he was worth.
As Percy struggled to wash his back, Kit wordlessly took the sponge from his hand and took over.
“My father used to let me win at chess,” Percy said as Kit ran the sponge over the nape of his neck. “I thought it was because he didn’t want me to feel bad about losing, but then I realized it was because that made the match faster.”
Kit didn’t understand at first why Percy was telling him that, why that fact mattered now, more than any other detail he could have called up about his father. But he realized that Percy was sharing with him one moment of stark disappointment, when a gesture he had thought to be one of love was revealed to be one of indifference. He had been shot by his father, who had been indifferent to him. And now he was trying to figure out how—or whether—to grieve a man who simply hadn’t cared.
Kit dipped the sponge into the warm water and washed the shell of Percy’s ear. He couldn’t imagine anyone being indifferent to this man. Hating him, maybe. Loving him, certainly. But indifference just seemed impossible.
Percy rinsed his hair and stood. Kit watched the water sluice off a body that was unmarred but for yesterday’s wound and felt a surge of relief that nothing worse had befallen the man. He shook out the sheet of linen and held it out for Percy to step into, then wrapped him in both the sheet and his arms and held him there, just for a moment.
The water was still warm, and Kit figured he ought to take advantage of it, so he shucked his clothes and stepped into the tub. He felt Percy’s gaze on him, and didn’t need to check to know that he would have been looking at Kit’s scar. It was a spiderweb of ropy red marks that spread from the side of his thigh to above his hip. His instinct was to hide himself in the water, but he made himself turn to face Percy.
“It looks worse than it feels.”
“I’m certain you’re lying.”
“Yeah, well. No use complaining.” He sat, conscious of how it hurt even to bend at the hip to fold himself into the tub.
Still wrapped only in the sheet, Percy sat on the stool that Kit had occupied. “Have you ever thought about not walking so much?”
Kit snorted. “Every day. Betty only wants to tie me to the chair most afternoons.” He lathered up, using the soap Percy had brought. It smelled like flowers. “Christ, what did this cost? No, never let me know. Look, before I got hurt, I was always either on my feet or on my horse. I’m still figuring out how to be still, how to—how to be me, I suppose, but with a leg that doesn’t work. I’m not there yet.”
Percy’s eyes were fixed on him, clear and wide and filled with an expression that Kit didn’t dare give a name to. “You’re good at figuring things out. We both are.”
Kit nodded, and evidently Percy decided he had had enough of earnestness, because he spent the rest of Kit’s bath alternately insulting his hair and ogling him.
“That was something I wanted to do better,” Percy said after they were both clean and dressed and eating hard cheese and apples. “Taking care of the tenants, I mean. When I inherited, I wanted to be more reasonable about rents and maybe build a school.” His cheeks colored. “I know that’s all a moot point, now. I can talk all day about the fine things I planned to do, but none of it will ever come to anything. And I’ll never know if I’d have been a better landlord than my father.”
“No such thing as a good landlord,” Kit said, his mouth full of crisp apple.
“I— What?”
Kit swallowed. “There are horrible ones, like your father. And there are ones who manage to refrain from doing actual evil. But I’ve never heard of a good one.”
Percy opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. He was turning over Kit’s words instead of immediately protesting, which was more than Kit would have expected.
“Come on,” Kit said, when they had finished eating. “Can you walk five minutes?” Kit wasn’t sure if he could walk five minutes, but he was going to try anyway.
He led Percy along a still-familiar path through the woods, much more overgrown now than it had been ten years earlier, when either he or Jenny or one of the others walked it every day. Now, he supposed, Dennis and Dorothy still walked this route to get to the village, or it would have been completely absorbed by the forest.
He was glad Dorothy warned him that the house had fallen down, because its absence was so disorienting that Kit at first thought he had taken a wrong turn. A couple of saplings were already growing where the floor had once been. Most of the stones had been taken away to repair walls or build new homes.
“This was where I lived when I first got married,” Kit said. “We were eighteen,” he added, as if that
were an explanation. “And then—things went wrong.” He wasn’t going to recite the series of events. He was going to give himself that kindness, at least here, in front of the rubble that had been his hope. “The pub was gone and my parents were dead. It all happened so fast. And then Jenny had a baby.” He swallowed, trying to collect himself, conscious of all Percy’s attention on him. “It was a bad winter. She shot a deer. Her lot were all horse thieves, sheep thieves, poachers, coin clippers. I think an uncle was a counterfeiter.” He wasn’t going to get into how he had asked her not to, begged her not to. That wasn’t the point, and he didn’t want to make himself out to be overly bothered by breaking the law, when the ten years since had thoroughly put the lie to that notion. “She was caught and your father sentenced her to be transported. She died on the ship.” He tried not to remember when she had been taken away from him and Hannah; he tried not to imagine her last weeks on that ship. But standing here, it was hard to keep those thoughts at bay. He gripped the end of his walking stick until his fingers cramped.
“And the baby?” Percy asked in a voice that was hardly louder than the sound of the breeze moving dead leaves around the forest floor.
Kit gestured at the base of the ancient oak tree that still stood at the east side of what had been his home. “I thought the tree was as good a grave marker as any, but I was half out of my mind and possibly not making the best choices. Rob dug the hole,” he added, although he didn’t know why that seemed like an important detail.
“What was the baby’s name?”
“Hannah. She was six months old. I did my best after Jenny was gone, but—” He couldn’t go on unless he wanted to start blubbering, and he didn’t think he could stand to start shedding tears about this again. Not after so much time. Not with the bloody Duke of Clare’s son beside him.
But when he dared to look at Percy, he saw that the man was doing a terrible job himself of fighting back tears. Something about Percy’s secondhand grief dragged Kit out of the past, and he was seeing his own grief through the space of ten years’ time, removed enough that he could feel sorry for the person he had been while remembering who he was now.
The Queer Principles of Kit Webb Page 23