Subtle Blood

by KJ Charles

  Will really couldn’t breathe now. Kim’s fingers wrapped around his. “That’s for you to decide when you’re ready to tackle it. For now—well, we agreed to see where we go, and I shouldn’t have tried to change the terms at this damn fool time. I shouldn’t have tied you into my damn fool plans, come to that: this is my decision and my responsibility. I will do what I think best, we’ll cope with what the present has to throw at us, and we can find out about the future once we get there.”

  “That’s not fair. That’s not what you want.”

  “I’ll manage,” Kim said. “All I need to know is that you’re with me today and will be here tomorrow. If I can have today and tomorrow on a rolling basis—”

  “Yes.”

  “When either of us feels the urge to change that, we’ll discuss it again. Until then we’ll take things as they come. Does that work?”

  Will breathed out, not sure if he’d been granted a reprieve or just balked at a hurdle. “It does for me. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I am, though. I should be able—”

  “Stop being strong at me. You weren’t ready for that conversation, that’s all.”

  “No. I wasn’t. Thanks for understanding that. I just...”

  “Panicked.”

  “I did not panic.”

  “I don’t think the less of you for it. But you definitely panicked.”

  “Sod off.”

  “It’s merely an observation.”

  “Sod off.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I’m still more of a shambles than you.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” Will muttered. He brushed his lips over Kim’s fingers, and felt the sense of—not panic, obviously, but extreme nervous tension recede.

  He was going to deal with this. He was not going to keep shoving the tangles of his thoughts into a cupboard that was creaking under the strain, while telling himself it would all come right somehow. He would sort himself out, because if Kim could do it, then Will bloody could. Probably.

  “I’ll think about this, I promise. But listen.” He met Kim’s dark eyes. “I think about you all the time. I see you hurt and it makes me want to burn things to the ground. I don’t know what a future’s supposed to look like or how it would work, but I’m not letting you go without a fight, no matter what. I don’t know what I’d do all day.”

  “That will do nicely for now,” Kim said, and tugged him close.

  Chapter Twelve

  Will feared he’d dream about the trenches that night. In fact he slept like the dead, and woke early to hear Kim breathing softly next to him. Kim, who was going to blackmail an intelligence agency into covering up a murder.

  He could not bring himself to feel happy about that.

  He could probably put his foot down—tell Kim no and make him listen—but he had a bad feeling about that too. Kim’s entanglement with his family went far deeper than Will understood, with tendrils of dry rot reaching back through the years. Will wasn’t planning to trample into that minefield: Christ knew what he’d set off.

  Kim had his reasons to save Chingford’s worthless neck and this wasn’t all about Will by a long chalk. But it was partly about him, and what Kim felt for him, and wanting a life they could share.

  A future. He stared at the ceiling, breathing into the feeling in his chest as he might do the pain in overworked legs. It hurt, but stretching always did.

  He could say thanks but no thanks. He could say that this thing between them was all very well for now, but he was planning to find a nice girl and settle down. That way, Kim might abandon this damn fool plan which was inevitably going to blow up in his face.

  It would be the sort of stupid self-sacrificing lie the heroes and heroines told each other in Victorian novels to string things out for another volume, and Will was fairly sure it wouldn’t work. Anyway the nicest girls of his acquaintance seemed pretty wrapped up in each other. He contemplated offering Maisie babies in a cottage as an alternative to Phoebe in Paris, and grinned to himself at her imagined response.

  Would it have been easier for him to plump for a future like that? Probably. It was always easier to do the things you were meant to do. He’d doubtless have taken marriage and children as they came up if he’d been with a girl, just as he’d taken the bookshop: the next step along a path he was already on, so he might as well keep going. Much as he’d been doing with Kim. Carry on, let things happen, don’t sit down to think about what you truly want or what other people might need from you.

  It was probably a good thing Kim had such a low opinion of himself, otherwise he might have whacked Will round the head by now for being such an arsehole.

  Suppose he went for it. Suppose he told Kim not to do this damn fool thing on the promise that he’d stick around through the insults and the annoyances, the invasions of privacy, Kim’s father, and all the rest of the shit that would be slung at him. Suppose they made a pact to slog through the mire together, taking whatever misery came their way, in order to do the right thing.

  That was probably what he ought to say, but the thought was a leaden weight. Endurance was easier to promise than to maintain and he’d seen it grind men into shadows too often. People bent, snapped, wore out. And Will had done a lot of enduring in his time, what with the years in Flanders mud, and so had Kim in his own way, and he found himself disinclined to sign either of them up for more.

  He had no idea what to do for the best. This was Kim’s murky, complicated world, where you never seemed to have good options or a clear right thing to do. Not like the good old days when people just ordered Will to kill other people and then gave him medals. His war had been savage, filthy, and inhuman, but it hadn’t been complicated.

  There were faint noises from the kitchen. He eased himself out of bed, put on a gown, and went through.

  “Morning, Mr. Peacock.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Darling. Tea?”

  “You’re a gentleman. How’s Mrs. Peacock?”

  “As well as can be expected, thank you.”

  “Were you talking to Quiller again last night?”

  Peacock shook his head. “He was at work. A sad case, that. Quite institutionalised.” The rolling weight he put on the syllables made them sound like a life sentence to Broadmoor. “Talks of the Club as if his interests and the Symposium’s were one and the same. All too common after years of service.”

  “And employers call it devotion, and sing your praises right up till you ask for a raise.”

  “Were you in service yourself, Mr. Darling?”

  “My ma scrubbed floors at the big house till she married.”

  Peacock nodded. “It seems Quiller has yet to be disillusioned. Forty-nine years’ service to the Symposium Club and wants only to achieve his fiftieth anniversary. Call that a life.” He poured the tea. “May I ask the current situation?”

  “Lord Chingford probably did it, and we’re all buggered unless his lordship pulls a rabbit out of the hat. Problem is, the rabbit’s got rabies.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mrs. Peacock has great faith in Lord Arthur’s ingenuity and benevolence,” Peacock said, straight-faced.

  “Optimistic woman, is she?”

  “Hope springs eternal, Mr. Darling.”

  Will chinked a fingernail against the side of his mug. “There isn’t going to be a tidy way out of this, Mr. Peacock. It might get messier than anyone would like.”

  Peacock met his eyes. “My sole concern is Mrs. Peacock. That’s the start and end of it. I regard whatever Lord Arthur chooses to do through that prism, as the expression is. If he keeps us safe, I say he’s doing right.”

  Will wasn’t going to argue with that. The manservant’s morality was obviously pinned to the well-being of Mrs. Peacock, and Will rather admired his clarity of thought. He could have used a bit of that himself.

  Kim hauled himself out of bed a while later, looking like he hadn’t slept too well. They ate b
reakfast, or at least Will did, while Kim chewed a single slice of toast with distaste.

  “So,” Will said at last. “Today?”

  “I’m going to try and see DS.”

  “Mind made up, then. You realise this brings us into direct conflict with Zodiac?”

  “If Leo had Fairfax killed, we’re already in direct conflict. If he didn’t, then yes, except that if he knew about Miss Jacobs, he’d have gone after her already. I don’t know. It’s a wild card, and there’s not much I can do about it.” He discarded the uneaten crust on his plate. “In any case, I am less intimidated by the possibility of attracting Zodiac’s attention than by the very real probability of Chingford hanging and my life turning to shit.”

  “Yours, mine, Peacock’s,” Will said. “Mrs. Peacock’s. What’s she like?”

  Kim went to check the kitchen was empty before he replied. “In appearance, plain, mousy, and faded. In personality, pleasant and quiet. She is an entirely ordinary, unremarkable woman, and Peacock’s very own Helen of Troy. I know dozens of aristocratic beauties, and I doubt a single one of them will ever experience the devotion Mrs. Peacock receives as her daily due.”

  That got Will under the breastbone. “You need to make sure they’re all right.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “I know. Ah, hell. Do what you think best, Kim. It’s not the decision I’d make, but I’m not you. So you do whatever and I’ll back you up, and if it’s a disaster we’ll have learned something.”

  “Won’t we just.” Kim reached across the table for Will’s hand. “Thank you.”

  WILL WALKED BACK TO the bookshop, unsettled and unhappy. He would much rather have been at Kim’s side for the negotiations with DS, even if they wouldn’t be pretty. Especially because they wouldn’t be pretty, perhaps. If he was standing with Kim in this thing, he couldn’t shy away from the ugliness of it.

  Although, he doubted Kim would come out with I need you to help my brother get away with murder. Probably negotiations would be conducted with weasel words and implications, to hide the reality of it.

  This stank like week-old fish. Will let himself into the bookshop, unsettled and frustrated, and quite relieved at the lack of customers. He wasn’t in the mood for service, and he glowered ferociously when the shop bell jangled until he saw his visitor was Maisie.

  “Hello, stranger.” He leapt to his feet. “Bolt the door and I’ll make tea.”

  “Don’t you need to sell books?”

  “I’d rather talk to you.” He took in her smart outfit. Possibly it might even have been chic. “Or are you visiting somewhere nice?”

  “I’m visiting you. I wanted to talk. And Phoebe’s gone to see her mother, which—” She pulled a face.

  Will had met Lady Waring briefly, and those five minutes had been quite enough. “Yeah, you stay here. Let me get the kettle on.”

  The topics of Paris, couture, mingling with the rich and famous, learning French, and commercial enterprise got them through two cups of tea and several biscuits. The happiness bubbled off Maisie, and so did the ambition. She’d always had dreams, he knew. Or, rather, he’d always thought they were dreams. Maybe the word was ‘plans’.

  “You really worked for this,” he said. “You knew what you wanted and you went and got it.”

  “I was desperately lucky. To meet Phoebe—”

  “Phoebe couldn’t have done anything for you if you hadn’t had the talent. And ideas, and hard work, and the guts to take a risk and reach for the sky.”

  Maisie flushed. “You’re poetic today.”

  “I’m impressed, is what. It’s not luck, or no more than your fair share of luck, anyway. You deserve this.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Maisie said. “Deserve it, I mean. It feels utterly unfair to be this happy with all the awfulness going on. Everything in the world, of course, but also Phoebe’s father, and this ghastly business with Lord Chingford.”

  “There’s always something. Take the good bits when you can, I reckon. You’ve earned them.”

  “I’m trying. So how about you? Are things going well otherwise? With Kim, I mean? It certainly looked that way the other day.”

  Will could feel he was going red. He wasn’t used to Maisie talking about this stuff. “There isn’t much of an otherwise right now. This business is pretty awful. And Kim—” He broke off there, but who else might begin to understand? “Oh blimey, Maise. I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be with him.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”

  “It’s not that things are bad,” Will said quickly. “It’s been pretty good, honestly, but now he wants to talk about the future. A future. For us.”

  “Oh!”

  He groaned internally. “Don’t say it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s wedding bells,” Will said, maybe a bit brutally, but he felt a bit brutal. “We don’t get wedding bells, him and me, that’s the point. I’m not even sure what a future means.”

  “No. Because if it’s a man and a woman, you’ve got a framework. You can tell people about it and have a ceremony to prove you love each other, and they even give you a list of things to promise so you both know what you’re supposed to do. It all goes without saying.”

  “Yes!” Will said, marvelling at her understanding. “That’s exactly it. And if you don’t have any of that, what do you have?”

  “I don’t know,” Maisie said slowly. “Perhaps that it doesn’t go without saying. Perhaps that’s a good thing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s easy to think there’s a right way to be, isn’t it? There’s a box you’re supposed to fit in, and it’s awfully hard to see beyond the box. When I left Cardiff, Billy Bagshawe next door was on at me to marry him. Nice fellow, steady earner, no need for his wife to work, his ma and mine were best friends: it was obviously what I ought to do. And it probably would have been a good life, too, at least in the way people think about good lives, and it was so hard to say no and upset everyone. It seemed like the right thing to do, and sometimes, when I was first here on my own, I even thought I ought to go home and marry him. It would have been a lot easier. But it would have squashed me into a box marked Wife and put the lid on, and everything I have now, everything I could be, that would have gone away. Gone without saying.”

  Will thought back to the phantom Will Darling’s quiet life as a village carpenter in a world without the war. “Right. Yes.”

  “I expect it’s different for men, because you don’t get put in so many boxes in the first place. And it’s not fair or right how things are for you and Kim, not at all. But you’ve got horizons, haven’t you? Nobody’s telling you what your future ought to look like—”

  “Only that we oughtn’t have one at all.”

  “Yes, but he’s too rich to care what people say, and you never do what you’re told,” Maisie pointed out. “So why don’t you decide what a future means for yourselves and get on?”

  Will couldn’t think of a reply to that. Maisie angled a beautifully plucked brow. “What did he say? I mean, about how it might work?”

  “He didn’t get that far. I lost my nerve. Froze like a rabbit.”

  “He’s let you down before. Are you scared he might do it again?”

  “No,” Will said. “Maybe that’s stupid, God knows he can be a sh—a swine, but not deep down. It’s not very easy to get that deep down, but when you do— I’m not making sense.”

  Her dark brown eyes softened. “You are, you know. Oh, Will. Well, then, if you’re not worried what he might do, is the problem what you might do?”

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  She sighed heavily. “You might not have noticed you haven’t said a single thing about how you feel, but I have. No, you haven’t,” she said as he started a protest. “Because you’re Will Darling, stubborn as a mule and tough as old boots, and you don’t like asking for things. You don
’t say what you want or how you feel, because that opens you up wide. The only time you’ve ever talked properly to me before was when it was all falling apart at Etchil and you thought it couldn’t get worse.”

  “I’m talking to you now,” he protested.

  “Yes, and I’m not the one you should be talking to, am I? You say you trust him. But if you trust someone, that means letting them into a position where they can really hurt you, and believing they won’t. And if you’re afraid to do that, either you aren’t sure of them, or you aren’t sure of yourself.”

  Kim’s words in his mind: You can be vulnerable if you want. “What does that mean?”

  She made a face. “I’m just going to say it. He’s rich and sophisticated and he’s probably going to be a marquess.”

  “I hate that,” Will admitted.

  “And you don’t think you belong with a rich sophisticated marquess.”

  “Would you?”

  Maisie doodled on the table with a finger. “Phoebe’s going to be a viscountess. She had the news from the Committee of Privileges this morning. She’ll be Lady Waring in her own right, and she’s got Etchil and all the money.”

  “Oh, good. Lovely for her. But that’s not the same thing.”

  “Yes it is. It’s exactly the same.”

  “How?”

  She stared at him. “For pity’s sake, Will! Me and Phoebe are together. We’ve been together for months.”

  Will gaped. “You and—”

  “You must have realised. Oh, good grief. No, of course you didn’t. Honestly.”

  “I had no idea. But—When— Well, no wonder you’re all bubbles these days. Come here.” He gave her the sort of hug she deserved. “Maisie Jones. Take a girl out of Cardiff and look what happens.”

  “You should come to Paris. Everything looks different there, I can tell you.”

  “Sounds that way. I didn’t know you liked girls.”

  “I was a bit surprised myself, to be honest.” Maisie reclaimed her seat and poured more tea. “Or maybe I wasn’t, really. Boxes. Anyway I don’t know if it’s possible not to be in love with Phoebe.”