The Queer Principles of Kit Webb

by Cat Sebastian

  Kit gripped his walking stick a little more firmly but didn’t break stride. The figure was lean and dressed in nondescript clothes; he bent his head in a way that would shield his face from view, even though the street was dark. A pale strand of hair escaped from beneath the brim of his hat, catching the moonlight.

  “Loitering,” Kit chided when he reached the shop.

  “I prefer to think of it as skulking,” Percy countered. “Maybe even lurking.”

  “You’ll have to work on your technique.” Kit opened the door and held it for Percy to enter before him. Percy immediately sat in his usual seat at the long table. “I wondered if I’d ever see you here again,” Kit admitted.

  “It’s hardly been a day since I saw you,” Percy said, not bothering to conceal how amused he was, damn him.

  “More like a day and a half,” Kit grumbled. And then Percy smirked at him and, really, Kit could not stand for that, so he hauled Percy up by the collar and kissed him hard.

  “It’s almost all I’ve been thinking of,” Percy said, his words little more than a breath against Kit’s cheek. “Well, in between bouts of scheming and coming up with plans to bankrupt and defraud the estate of the next Duke of Clare.”

  Kit’s heart gave a wild thump as he processed the ramifications of that statement. He pulled away just enough to look Percy in the eye. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Rather.” From his shoulder, Percy removed the strap of what Kit could now see was the case in which he carried his swords. “I have something for you. It’s not much, but as you certainly didn’t profit in any way from our job—”

  “I don’t need to be paid for that,” Kit said.

  “No, no, I know that. I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. It’s actually something I got for myself while I was abroad, but I’ve never used such a thing and don’t plan to. In any event, I thought you might like it.” He held out a walking stick.

  Kit took it. It was a little heavier than the stick he presently used, and made of a wood that felt silky smooth and warm to the touch. The handle was carved in a way that made it feel molded to fit his palm. He could tell at a glance that it was a fine piece of craftsmanship and likely cost a pretty penny, but it wasn’t ostentatious. It wasn’t something he’d feel silly using. Frankly, he was surprised Percy would have chosen something so understated for himself. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s a very nice—”

  “Yes, yes,” Percy said impatiently. “It’s all that and more. But you haven’t seen what it can do.” He reached out and did something to the handle so that the body of the stick fell away, revealing a long, thin blade. “It’s a swordstick. Since you always have your walking stick as well as various weaponry, I thought it might be convenient.”

  “I don’t know how to use a sword,” Kit said.

  “Well, you’re very fortunate to know someone who does and who would very much enjoy the chance to teach you.” Percy fiddled with the hilt of the swordstick, his fingers brushing against Kit’s. “If you like.”

  “You ought to be worse than this,” Percy called out half an hour later. They had stripped down to their shirtsleeves, and the only light in the back room came from two lanterns that Kit hung from hooks. Silhouettes of limbs and swords danced across the walls. “Fix your grip and stop making your wrist do all the work.”

  “I don’t see how I could possibly be worse,” Kit panted. In order to make things more equal, Percy used a blunt practice sword in his left hand and was clearly only using a quarter of his skill to parry Kit’s attacks. Kit, meanwhile, was making a shambles of the thing.

  “No, no, I’ve seen dozens of novices make asses of themselves,” Percy said. “You, at least, know how to fight. Yes, see, just like that,” he added as Kit blocked one of his thrusts. “You’re using the strength from the core of your body rather than making your arms do all the work. And you aren’t afraid of hurting me.”

  “I’m terrified of hurting you,” Kit objected.

  “However will you manage when I’m prizefighting?”

  “Badly, I expect.”

  “Well, I suppose we have a few weeks left before we need to worry about that. I’ll be quite sufficiently busy ruining the estate and so forth. Speaking of which, I ought to warn you. For the next fortnight, you’re going to hear people refer to me by my father’s title. No, don’t lower your blade, Kit, for heaven’s sake. The blackmailer said he’d give us until January first, and I intend to use all that time to—well, you’ll see. No sense in being tedious about administrative details with you. What matters is that on the thirty-first of December I’ll make the information about my father’s marriage public. I swear upon everything holy, Christopher, if you don’t stop waving that thing about like a May Day streamer, I’ll take it away from you and bestow it upon someone more deserving. Do not tempt me.”

  “Why bother?” Kit asked. “With your father dead and the estate in your hands, you could afford to pay off the blackmailer as long as you pleased.”

  “Paying off blackmailers does not appeal to me,” Percy said primly. “I’ve known that from the start. But it turns out that being the Duke of Clare does not appeal to me, either.”

  “Is that so,” Kit said.

  “There are choices a commoner can make,” Percy said, looking Kit hard in the eye.

  “That’s a fact.” The gift of the swordstick made sense now. Not only was a sharp blade Percy’s idea of a lover’s gift, but it was a gift that put them on an equal footing. Kit had always enjoyed the democratizing effect of a weapon in his hand, although that was usually in quite another context.

  “Oh, you approve, do you?” Percy’s effort at sardonic archness instead landed somewhere near giddily thrilled. He let his guard down on his right side, just the slightest bit. If Kit hadn’t spent a month sparring with him, then he might not have noticed, but it was enough for Kit to advance on him.

  “That’s right, I do,” Kit said, pressing forward. “And you’re glad about it.”

  “Lamentably accurate,” Percy sighed, and took a step back, then another. Kit pressed forward again, then dropped his sword, deciding that he didn’t much care for the idea of a sharpened blade too close to Percy. It landed on the floor with a clatter.

  “Now I’m going to have to sharpen it,” complained Percy as his back met the wall.

  Kit took hold of the wrist of Percy’s sword hand and turned it, pressing the blunt edge of the practice sword against Percy’s neck. “You just wanted me to shove you up against the wall,” he growled. “You shouldn’t let me win.”

  “Can’t blame a man for trying,” said Percy, sounding abominably pleased with himself. He was short of breath, and Kit knew it wasn’t from exertion.

  “I wonder what I’ll do with you,” Kit said, casting Percy’s sword to the floor and crowding against Percy. Only when their chests were pressed against one another did Kit bring a hand up to Percy’s jaw, angling his mouth for a kiss. He took his time about it, sliding a leg in between Percy’s, then tucking a hair behind Percy’s ear, before finally closing the gap and kissing him. Percy was soft and pliant, the way he rarely was. He opened his mouth against Kit’s as if he had been waiting for that kiss all day or even longer.

  Kit couldn’t have said how long they stayed like that, sharing kisses that were long and slow and only a little heated. “When do you have to go?” Kit finally asked.

  “I don’t, actually,” Percy said, sounding the slightest bit shy about it. “I told my valet not to wait up.”

  “Stay,” Kit said.

  Chapter 49

  Percy couldn’t help but feel a little smug about finally seeing Kit’s bedroom after spending hours downstairs nearly every day for a month and even seeing the office a few times. He could tell from Kit’s awkwardness that he rarely, if ever, let anyone enter it. He nervously pointed out things like the ewer and the window, as if Percy were unfamiliar with ewers and windows. Finally, Percy had taken pity on him and hauled him down to the bed, slowly stripping
him of his clothes and showing him how glad he was to be there.

  “So,” Kit said later on, his hand carding through Percy’s hair. “What are your big plans for defrauding the estate?” Kit’s bed was barely wide enough for two people, but it didn’t matter because they were all tangled together, Percy’s head on Kit’s arm, Percy’s knee over Kit’s leg, a warm quilt tucked around them both.

  “You’ll see,” Percy said. He didn’t want to tell Kit yet, because he didn’t want to sound like he was asking for credit for good intentions. Only if he were successful with his schemes did he want Kit to know.

  “What does Marian think about it?”

  “I wish I knew,” Percy said. “I haven’t seen her since the robbery. Neither has her brother. I’m rather worried.” In truth, he was more than a little worried. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d have already started a full-blown search, but these were far from ordinary circumstances, and there was a good chance she had reasons of her own for lying low. He didn’t very much like to think about what those reasons might be.

  “I haven’t heard from Rob, either,” Kit said, his hand stilling in Percy’s hair.

  That did very little to settle Percy’s mind, and from the way Kit’s body had gone tense beside him, he thought Kit might be harboring similar suspicions. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at Kit. “You said that you grew up together in Oxfordshire. Is that where Rob’s mother is from?”

  “Scarlett? No. She got in trouble, then sent Rob out to be fostered in the country. I don’t think she ever laid eyes on him until we came to London ten years ago, and by then he was grown.”

  “Who was his father?”

  Kit raised his eyebrows. “A customer, I imagine.”

  “But wouldn’t it take a good deal of money to send a child out to be fostered for such a long period of time?”

  “I think Rob’s parents—the ones who raised him—thought of themselves as having adopted him.”

  “You don’t happen to know Scarlett’s real name, do you?”

  “Percy, what’s this about?” Kit asked.

  He didn’t know how to tell Kit this and only hoped he didn’t botch it up too badly. “I might be wrong—Christ, I hope I’m wrong—but I think your friend Scarlett is my father’s legal wife. Her daughter has a Bible that’s identical to my mother’s. God knows I wasn’t paying attention when she showed it to me, but I’d wager that it’s even bound in the same green leather.” Percy forced himself to stop and braced himself for Kit’s inevitable protest that Percy was jumping to conclusions, that he had no proof, et cetera.

  But Kit remained silent, his hand tracing an absent circle on the side of Percy’s knee. “That fits,” he finally said.

  “It does?” Percy asked. “Fits with what?”

  “Well, I’ve wondered how Scarlett knew Rob’s foster parents. It’s not the sort of thing you can ask, though, and they didn’t volunteer. But it makes sense. It also fits in with Rob’s disappearance. He was furious with his mother and told me I wouldn’t want to know the truth. I had the impression that his mother had given him bad news. He mentioned that it took him months to decide what to do about it.”

  “Evidently, what he decided to do was blackmail Marian and me.” Percy had gone over this in his head a dozen times. At first he thought that Scarlett was blackmailing him herself but couldn’t figure out why she’d do that while also deliberately showing him the Bible. Now he was fairly certain that she and Flora had been subtly trying to sell him the book, which might contain the key to the code his mother had used in her own book. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and Scarlett wanted his Bible—from what Percy understood, she was a woman who would know precisely how to make use of a book of secrets.

  “Scarlett was born Elsie Terry,” Kit said.

  “And what year was Rob born?” Percy asked faintly.

  “He just turned twenty-five, so 1726.”

  “Well, that’s him, then.” Percy thought he ought to feel something, anything at this confirmation of his worst fears: Cheveril would go not only to a commoner but to a very, well, common commoner.

  “You really could pay him off, you know,” Kit said after a long while. “He might be an arsehole about it and keep coming back for more money, but he doesn’t want to be a duke.”

  Percy looked down at Kit and felt a rush of intense affection. Kit hadn’t needed to tell him that, hadn’t needed to make it easy for Percy to slide back into a life Kit hated. It was tempting, truth be told. He could return to the world he had come from as if the past few months had never happened. Surely, Percy could do more good as a wealthy and titled man than he could as a disgraced commoner. He could be a principled duke, one with the highest ideals. He could make good on all his plans and then some.

  Or he could do something different. He could be his own man, and do right in his own way. “I find that I don’t want that anymore,” Percy said. It wasn’t entirely true, and from the look Kit shot him, he knew it, too. “What I mean is that I’ve made my choice.”

  “Why?”

  Percy looked away and fiddled with the hem of the bedsheet. “Do I really have to spell it out for you?”

  “If it’s because of”—Kit gestured between their bodies, as if reluctant to say what they were to one another—“then you’ll only wind up resenting me.”

  “It’s not,” Percy said. “The fact is that you’ve ruined me for a life of leisure, Kit Webb. How can I go back to all that when the most principled man I know thinks it’s evil.”

  Kit stared at him. “You’ve gone daft.”

  “I love you.”

  “Like I said.”

  Percy kissed him, because there was no use arguing with a man so stubborn.

  “You all right?” Kit asked after a while.

  “Entirely,” Percy said, and it was mostly true. “How about you? You seem remarkably unbothered by everything I’ve told you, I have to say.”

  “I am bothered, though. Poor Rob.”

  “Poor Rob?” Percy sputtered, pinching Kit’s shoulder. “He blackmailed me!”

  “Of course he did.” Kit captured Percy’s hand and held it. “He doesn’t want to be a duke. But here he is, presented with a chance to make aristocrats miserable while also lining his pockets. Of course he blackmailed you. I’d be shocked to hear he did anything else.”

  “Do you know, that’s almost exactly what he said in one of his letters to Marian.”

  Now, that made Kit sit up. “One of his letters? How many letters did he send? And what kind of blackmailer talks about his motives?”

  “Not a particularly good one. He wasn’t going to get a farthing off us. And there was a period of time when Marian wasn’t exactly opposed to murdering him. Blackmail isn’t good for one’s health.”

  Kit sighed. “I don’t want you to think that I like the idea of him blackmailing you, or anyone else.” His hand tightened on Percy’s knee. “But especially you.”

  “I do know that,” Percy reassured him.

  “You don’t think Marian might have killed him after all, do you? I really don’t like that they’re both missing.”

  “Neither do I.” Percy didn’t care for the implications in the slightest. “But I don’t think she’d have killed him. We have no way of knowing whether he told anyone else. She’s too clever to seriously consider something so shortsighted, however much revenge might please her.” Percy dearly wished he could have made a better defense of his friend. “And besides, it was my father she was most angry with, not the blackmailer.”

  Kit looked at him, and Percy knew they were both thinking of what Marian had, in the end, done to Percy’s father. She had, if nothing else, proven that she was willing to kill. “I’ll put it about that I’m looking for him,” Kit said. “I don’t know what good it’ll do, but I’ll try.” With that, he sank back down onto the pillows, bringing Percy along with him. “Our friends are going to give me a heart attack.”

  Percy felt almost g
iddy at that our, that implication that they shared things now. “I imagine this is how Betty feels all the time.” He stretched out, feeling Kit’s body long and warm beside him. “Do you mind if I start a fire?”

  “Are you cold?”

  “I want to burn that book.” He had confirmed its location in his pocket no fewer than a dozen times that day, each instance putting him uncomfortably in mind of his father performing that same gesture. And he had slept with it under his pillow the previous night, as if someone might slip in through the window and steal it. Considering the amount of traffic his bedchamber windows had seen over the past month, and considering the steps his father had taken to secure the book, Percy couldn’t feel that he had been entirely unreasonable in his fears.

  “There’s a tinderbox on the chimneypiece. But we might as well use the hearth downstairs. I could do with some supper.”

  As Percy stepped into his breeches, he reflected that of course Kit could speak of burning evidence of what might amount to treason and eating supper in the same breath and in the same calm tone. They both were simply things that needed to be done. He had been like that from the start; in the world as Kit saw it, getting supper and committing felonies and attempting to dismantle ancestral power were all equally probable events. That struck Percy as about right.

  And so they sat before the fire in the coffeehouse, eating bread and cheese. Percy turned the book over in his hands. One last time, he looked at his mother’s handwriting. What he was about to do would have disappointed both his parents, and quite possibly Marian, but he felt in his bones that it was right for him, and right in a broader sense. The book was a weapon. If Percy were to wield a weapon, he wanted it to be one he fully controlled, not a book that sat in his pocket like an undetonated bomb, threatening to injure people who had done nothing to warrant harm.

  He had spent a lifetime thinking about his role in the Talbot legacy, always with the tacit assumption that his role would be to accrue and consolidate power as his forebears had done. But for too much power to be in one family’s hands was a blight on the landscape. Getting rid of this book was a damned good start to making sure that the Talbots’ place in history wasn’t entirely bad.