Band Sinister

by KJ Charles

  He went outside rather than upstairs, for the evening light and a chance to walk. Exercise usually helped to clear his mind, or at least to let him sort through his worries, and perhaps it might have done now except that as he headed towards the garden, he encountered Corvin and Rookwood strolling the other way.

  He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen them or turn away, so he raised his hand in greeting as they approached, and tried not to read anything into Corvin’s frankly examining look. “Good evening.”

  “Good evening to you,” Corvin said. “I hear you’ve been helping Phil maintain his pose of fascinated concentration. I’m sure John appreciated that assistance. And talking of John, I must find him, so take this one off my hands, will you?” He clapped Guy on the arm and strolled off, leaving him speechless if not breathless. He risked a look at Rookwood, and saw an expression of mingled amusement, annoyance, and affection.

  “Uh,” he managed. “I won’t trouble you.”

  “No, walk with me,” Rookwood said. “You and I need a conversation.”

  “I really don’t want to trouble you,” Guy said desperately.

  “Too late.” Rookwood crooked a finger. Guy found himself following, legs numb, as the man led the way past the orchard, where the apples were just starting to swell, and into an area of lawn. “Right. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Frisby, I take it you saw something you didn’t intend to. That’s not a complaint,” he added. “Entirely my fault; I’m not used to bothering with discretion here. But since you did, I feel we should both know where we stand.”

  “I don’t know anything of the sort,” Guy said. “I— You— What you do in your house is not my business and you’ve been immensely kind to Amanda, and I shouldn’t dream of making trouble for my host. I really don’t think anything else need be said.”

  “Don’t you?” Rookwood said, with a lift of his eyebrow.

  Guy’s stomach clenched. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you do. Frisby—may I call you Guy? We don’t stand on ceremony here. And it’s Philip. I don’t know why all my friends insist in shortening me to Phil; it’s so inelegant.”

  “Of course,” Guy said, because he couldn’t think of a polite way to say no.

  “Guy, then. You’ll have gathered we don’t pay a great deal of homage to, let’s say, conventional morality here. I hope you understand that does not make us monsters. Gossip notwithstanding, it is possible to be an atheist without being a villain, or a democrat without bringing out the guillotine. And that goes for intimate relations as well.”

  “There are laws,” Guy said.

  “Laws are made by man, and plenty of them are absurd.”

  “Well then, there’s right and wrong!”

  “Yes, there is. In my view, what’s right is that one’s partner should be willing. If people freely choose to take their pleasure together, where is the wrong?”

  “I don’t know how you can say that to me,” Guy said. “With our mothers? Really?”

  “If my mother had been permitted to part from Sir George when the sight of him sickened her, everyone would have been spared the obnoxious consequences of my bastardy. Suppose that we stopped the pretence that the sordid financial business of matrimony is a holy sacrament, and permitted people to make their own arrangements?”

  “Society would fall apart!”

  “Instead of being mortared with misery, adultery, and hypocrisy. People already act precisely as they please, Guy. The only question is whether we all have to keep up the pretence they don’t.”

  Guy attempted to formulate an argument, and found himself struggling. “Then maybe people should do better,” he tried. “To be better, instead of simply indulging themselves.”

  “We have three score years and ten on this earth, if we’re lucky. Is it so bad to devote some of that time to enjoyment? What do you achieve by restricting yourself from pleasures that hurt nobody?”

  “But they do hurt people,” Guy said. “Because, supposes aside, what my mother did hurt me and Amanda very much.”

  “That is quite true. And I don’t argue for unbridled selfishness. Nevertheless, it is possible to live outside convention yet not hurt others.”

  “Like Lord Corvin?” Guy flashed, and instantly wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t up to him if Rookwood betrayed his lover with flirting.

  “Corvin doesn’t hurt people,” Philip said, evidently not grasping Guy’s meaning. “He’s never forced himself on anyone in his life.”

  “He’s ruined innocent women’s reputations!”

  “One. Just one. And, between us, that was by request. The lady in question was desirous of being ruined in order to escape an engagement that was repugnant to her, but on which her family insisted. Corvin made it impossible for any self-respecting suitor to approach her, and she remains blissfully unmarried and in sole possession of her fortune to this day. She’s a very good friend.”

  Guy realised his mouth was hanging open. “Nobody would ask for that!”

  “Believe me, if you were faced with the fiancé her swine of a father had arranged, you’d beg for it.”

  “I would never wish to be ruined,” Guy said stiffly.

  “That’s a pity. You might enjoy it.”

  Guy felt like he’d swallowed his tongue. “I—what—”

  “I beg your pardon.” Philip was smiling in a way that was doing unnerving things to Guy’s stomach. “Feel free to ignore that remark. Or, feel free to act on it. This is Liberty Hall.”

  “Libertine Hall, more like!”

  Philip gave a crack of laughter. “Oh, very good. But we are not villains, despite popular opinion. I would like you to believe that.”

  “Then why are you called the Murder?” Guy asked, feeling that was a winning blow. “Lord Corvin killed a man, didn’t he?”

  The amusement dropped away from Philip’s face. “That is not my story to tell. He had no choice, and it is not something of which he is proud, but—well. It was necessary; if he hadn’t done it I should have, and that is all I shall say on the subject. As to our name, though, have you really not seen it?”

  “Seen what?”

  “Guy, Guy. Surely, to a countryman and a classicist, it should be obvious. Corvin, Rookwood, and Raven? We’ve been the Murder to ourselves since the three of us were boys.”

  Guy looked at him blankly, wondering what classics had to do with anything, then understanding stirred. “Corvin,” he said. “From corvus, crow. And rooks and ravens are of the same family— For heaven’s sake, you’re a murder of crows. That’s appalling.”

  “I thought you’d get it,” Philip said with satisfaction. “May I say that Corvin has been landing us in trouble with this sort of joke for years.”

  “That is outrageous. Why on earth would you lead people to believe the worst possible things of you for a pun?”

  “You’ve met him.”

  “You do it too.”

  “It’s a peculiar thing,” Philip said, “but when one is taunted for years as a notorious bastard, say, or grows up to parents who struggle to remember one’s name, or is treated as a tradeable commodity rather than a human being, one can easily decide that society may go to the devil. I spent eighteen years as the object of society’s contempt because of my birth, and am ever liable to find myself at the wrong end of its arbitrary laws. Why would I seek its praise, or accept an approval that was finally offered simply because my brother died?”

  They had reached the thin treeline that separated the grounds from the fields beyond, and were walking in the dappled-gold green shade. Guy’s mind was too full to think. Too full, he dimly realised, even to worry. He’d thought this conversation might be embarrassing or dreadful; it had gone infinitely beyond that, into vast uncharted waters, as though he’d nervously taken his boat onto the river and found himself on the Pacific Ocean.

  “You were lucky,” he said at random. “With the names, I mean. Three crows.”

  “John’s name is delibe
rate. The old viscount named him Raven as a jest when they bought him.”

  “Bought,” Guy repeated.

  “Naturally; how else would he have grown up with us? He was meant to be a pageboy, but the fashion changed and Lady Corvin forgot about his existence. Corvin has no siblings, and liked having someone to play with, so John remained.”

  “He isn’t still a, uh, a slave.” Guy felt uncomfortable even saying it. He knew people brought slaves to England, of course, but he’d nevertheless always thought of human bondage as a remote thing, a horror that happened on hot islands a long way away. To think of someone he knew being enslaved—not a crowd of faceless victims, or an image on a china plate, but John Raven, a man who smoked cheroots and got paint-smears on his cuffs and argued with his friends—was as jarring and unnatural as to consider himself subjected to the same thing.

  “Good God, no. Corvin had him emancipated at fourteen, once he was old enough to make his will law.”

  “So you all grew up together?”

  “Almost exclusively. Corvin and I were sent to school for a year at eleven, but that left John alone, and I didn’t enjoy being the butt of schoolboy humour, so he decreed that we would have tutors at his home instead, all three of us.”

  “How did he decree that? Guy asked. “That is, surely his parents would have decided?”

  “They rarely remembered we were there,” Philip said. “Lord Corvin was—to say uninterested barely scrapes the surface. His lady was pleasant but almost continually drunk.”

  “Good heavens!” Guy said, as shocked by Philip’s casual tone as his words. “Really?”

  “Oh, indeed. When I was twelve, I encountered his lordship, the then viscount, on the stairs. It was the first time I had met him since my arrival in the house. He looked at me, puzzled, and said, ‘Are you Octavian?’ I said no, I was Philip Rookwood. He looked blank. I said, ‘I live with you,’ and he nodded vaguely and went on his way. I believe I saw him twice more in the six years before his death.”

  “Oh,” Guy said, and then, “Octavian?”

  “Corvin’s first name. Do not, if you value your life or mine, let him know I told you. We called him V before he inherited, as a compromise.”

  Guy could understand that. “So that’s how you’re the Murder.” Three parentless boys holding together, standing for one another and helping one another stand. Guy imagined what it might have been like to lean on someone, to have a friend, when he’d been entirely alone. “You were awfully lucky, all of you,” he said without thinking, and caught himself. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean that.”

  Philip shrugged. “You probably should. I came to the household when not a soul on earth cared if I lived or died, and found the friends of a lifetime. Corvin is dripping with wealth and unencumbered by expectation or obligation, which most people would consider the height of fortune. As to John—well, that’s harder to say. If the elder Lord Corvin hadn’t ordered a present for his wife, perhaps John would have had a free life on his native soil in the bosom of his family. Or perhaps he’d have endured years in some filthy hell of a plantation. We’ll never know.”

  “He doesn’t know where he’s from?”

  “He can’t remember anything. He was only four when he came here. We tried to find something out when we were old enough, but the records had been lost or thrown away; we couldn’t even discover which ship brought him to these shores, far less where it had come from.”

  Guy couldn’t imagine not knowing one’s family. He lived in a house that had belonged to his great-grandparents; he had a family Bible with a list of thirty names in the flyleaf; he had Amanda, and a life deeply rooted in the earth of his native shire, and the remnants of an extended family even if he and Amanda were in disgrace with it. What would it be like to live without those foundations? “That’s dreadful.”

  “He’d tell you that others have a great deal more to repine about. I’m not sure how I came onto this subject.”

  Nor was Guy. He had thought this would be some dreadfully embarrassing exchange, to be kept as brief as possible, and instead they were strolling, chatting together like intimate friends. He needed to drag the conversation back to where it ought to be. “Well, you’ve explained your, uh, friendships. And I see that you must be very fond of one another.”

  “Deeply.”

  “Then that’s all very well, and none of my business,” Guy said firmly. “And I’ve nothing more to add except that—well, in our acquaintance you’ve said several times that one can have, uh, unconventional morals yet not be selfish and still tell right from wrong, and be true to people who deserve your loyalty. I hope that’s the case, and I also hope I will always live up to my own morals, which are conventional. Thank you for clearing the air and I’m sure we need to change for dinner now.”

  Philip’s brows slanted. “I feel I have been rebuked. May I ask—”

  “It really isn’t any of my business, and I must go in,” Guy said, and set off at a slapping pace, not waiting to see whether he was followed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Not to state the obvious,” Corvin remarked, “but I can’t help noticing you haven’t got the little Frisby into bed yet.”

  “Thank you for your restraint. I should hate it if you stated the obvious,” Philip said, somewhat testily. “It would be so dull.”

  “Temper, temper,” John said, puffing out smoke.

  They were upstairs. Guy had retreated to his sister’s side after dinner, accompanied by David, Sheridan, and Harry, who were to give the woman nightmares by telling her all about historical horrors. George and Ned were absorbed in the new piece; the sound of piano and violin drifted up from below. Philip, John, and Corvin had gathered in the parlour-cum-studio upstairs, feeling—on Philip’s part at least—rather snubbed.

  “I did my best,” Corvin added. “All but pushed you into his arms.”

  “Have you considered he might not want Phil in his arms?” John enquired.

  “Of course he does. Look at him, the poor boy is smitten.”

  “Smitten, yes. Game for a tupping is another matter. We’re in the country.”

  John loathed the countryside. He resented being stared at as though he were a raree-show, and had been known to respond uncharitably when people asked Philip or Corvin, “Does he speak English?” It was yet one more reason they brought their own staff and admitted no visitors. Philip had heard David out on the topic of Amanda Frisby’s need for entertainment but put his foot down about Yarlcote guests. She could have as much company from the assembled Murder as she wished and Guy allowed; he was not filling the house with gawpers at his friends’ cost.

  “Country folk fuck,” Corvin said. “Well, they must; it’s not as if other entertainments present themselves. Plant things, dig things, knit things, fuck things. Make cheese.”

  “Cheese?”

  “They may do in general,” John said, before Philip could be dragged down this particular byway. “Fuck, I mean. But I bet you the plank doesn’t.”

  “He’s not a plank,” Philip said. “There’s more to him than meets the eye.”

  “I thought the whole point of this conversation was that anything more hasn’t met your eye.”

  “Not yet, perhaps,” Corvin said. “Put some effort in, Phil, it’s a matter of time.”

  “Achieving what?” John asked. “Serious, now. For one thing he’s a Frisby, for another he’s a neighbour and we talked about fouling your own nest. You don’t want to come back here and learn your labourers have downed tools because he’s spread word all over the county.”

  “I don’t think he’d do that. And, since he walked in on me and Corvin in flagrante, that cat is well out of the bag anyway.”

  “And for a third,” John went on without remorse, “what about him? Bloke’s a bag of nerves, doesn’t look like he knows what to do with his own prick, let alone yours. What are you going to do, give him a few lessons and then get in the carriage and drive away for another six months?”

/>   “A few lessons might be what he needs,” Corvin said. “You normally argue for knowledge, rather than ignorance, John.”

  “Yes, well, some people are quick learners, and some people spend the rest of their life blue-devilled and fearing damnation because they decide they committed a terrible sin and there’s nobody to tell them otherwise.”

  Philip sighed. “I have thought of that, you know.”

  “Then why not just leave him be?” John demanded. “Are you that bored?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Corvin said. “Phil’s not bored, the very opposite. He’s interested.”

  John twisted round to examine Philip. “Really? Nah.”

  “He is.”

  “No he isn’t. He’s never interested.”

  “I am here, in this room,” Philip said. “Sitting next to you.”

  Corvin ignored that. “Interested. What’s interesting about the plank, Phil?”

  “He is not a plank. I don’t know. I think he has a good mind under the swaddling blankets of convention, and a depth of feeling. A delightful mouth, you must have noticed. And a great deal of courage.”

  “Courage?” John said. “Bloke looks like a scared rabbit nine-tenths of the time.”

  “But stands up for his sister despite being afraid,” Philip said. “And, I suspect, doesn’t have many friends around here, if any. As one would not, if his schooldays were anything like mine, and they were probably worse. The sins of the mothers visited upon the children. Is there something against Amanda Frisby’s name, Corvin?”

  “Good Lord, how should I know? Why do you ask?”

  “Something he said. I wonder— Well, anyway. Let’s say I have fellow feeling for him.”

  “That doesn’t have to lead to feeling the fellow, though,” John said, making Corvin yelp with laughter.

  Philip glared at them both. “You are no help. Either of you.”

  “What assistance do you want, oh light of my life?” Corvin asked. “I did try to lead your horse to water.”

  “That didn’t help in the slightest, and don’t do it again. John is right; I’m not going to cause trouble for someone who has quite enough on his plate as it is.”