It Takes Two to Tumble

by Cat Sebastian

  Alice greeted Ben with a loud, “That was your Captain Angry?” as soon as he entered the Crawfords’ drawing room.

  “Good to see you too, Alice,” he answered. She was sitting in a Bath chair, which was an improvement over being propped up on the sofa like a rag doll. He was conscious that he had perhaps missed a few key stages in her recovery; he had only visited her once in the two weeks since Phillip’s arrival. “And in a chair, rather than Hartley’s death trap or the sofa. I congratulate you on finding a reasonable middle ground.” Hartley was there as well, sipping tea and watching him with curiosity.

  “Your captain behaved like a perfect gentleman,” Alice continued. “I had been expecting a grizzled old man with elaborate mustaches.”

  “What do mustaches have to do with it?” Hartley asked.

  “You should have heard your brother go on,” Alice said, turning to Hartley. “He would have had us believe Captain Dacre was an ogre. And instead he seemed an amiable man. Young, too, unless you consider five-and-thirty to be old. He was talking with you, Ben, while his children frolicked about like monkeys in the jungle, which doesn’t sound like something a strict disciplinarian would do much of, does it, Hart?”

  “No, Alice. I quite agree with you. I think our Ben has slandered his new friend.” He looked shrewdly—too shrewdly—at Ben. Ben sighed. Hartley saw too much. That was the problem with having a brother so close in age to oneself. Hartley could read him like a book.

  Ben thought back to how Phillip had been yesterday, his jaw unshaved, the bridge of his nose slightly sunburnt, a smile on his lips as he watched his family. How very unlike the stiff, cold man Ben had first thought him. Then he thought of Phillip—on him, under him, kissing him, and—no, he could not let his thoughts wander in that direction. Not in Alice’s drawing room, not with Hartley’s knife-sharp gaze on him.

  “Captain Dacre is a prince among men and I viciously slandered him,” Ben said lightly, as if he weren’t dead serious. He was hiding the truth in plain sight, because this was the only way to end the conversation before he said something that confirmed whatever lewd suspicions Hartley was—quite justifiably—currently forming. “I thought you were going to wait until August to visit. What made you come home now?” he asked Hartley. Because he could read Hartley as well as Hartley could read him and he knew those lines around his brother’s eyes hadn’t been there the last time they had seen one another. “Is it Will?”

  Something passed over Hartley’s face. “No,” he said, and they both knew it meant not this time. “He’s much the same.”

  “Good,” Ben said. “But then why—” He stopped short when he saw Hartley’s gaze cut momentarily over towards the sofa where Alice sat. So whatever had brought Hartley home couldn’t be mentioned in front of Alice. That was not a good sign. He doubted his brother was in a scrape, because Hartley was too concerned with what other people thought of him to get into trouble. Perhaps he needed money? No, it couldn’t be that, because Ben and their father were the last people on earth to have cash at the ready. Whatever it was would have to wait until they were alone, he supposed.

  Evidently they were being unsubtle about their intentions, because Alice rolled her eyes. “If you two boys need to be left alone, just chuck me outside. This infernal Bath chair won’t fit through the garden door, but you can just pick me up and toss me out like the contents of a slop bin. I’d hate to stand between you and your very manly conversation.”

  Ben couldn’t help but laugh. “Such a shrew. So unladylike.”

  “I know,” Alice said. “Poor Hartley is going to go into fits. He’s used to traveling in much more exalted circles and dancing attendance upon ladies infinitely more refined than I.”

  “I already knew you were a pair of rustics.” Hartley sniffed.

  “Yes, well, this rustic took three steps without assistance this morning, and I’m dreadfully proud of myself. Hartley brought me a set of paints from London,” Alice said, turning to Ben. “I’m going to paint his portrait as some kind of Greek god. I was thinking Apollo—”

  “Narcissus is more to the point,” Ben interjected.

  “This is all in shockingly bad taste,” Hartley said languidly, buffing his fingernails on the lapel of his coat. “This is why I seldom leave London. My sensibilities are shocked by these lapses into vulgarity. Take me back to the inn, Benedict.” And with that he rose to his feet, kissed Alice’s hand, and swept Ben out of the room.

  “Do you recall how Sir Humphrey left me that bit of property?” Hartley said when they were out of doors. “Well, Martin is contesting his father’s will.”

  Ben knew nothing about legal matters, but thought one needed grounds to contest a will. “Can he just do that?”

  “He’s saying I had undue influence over his father.”

  “But that’s nonsensical.” Ben was conscious of Hartley’s gaze intently on him. “He was your godfather and he was always very fond of you. People give money to their godchildren all the time.”

  “People give one another money for all sorts of reasons,” Hartley said with a sigh.

  “What aren’t you saying?” Ben stopped walking and turned to face his brother. “And why couldn’t you have told me that in a letter rather than coming all the way from London?”

  “I just . . .” Hartley, usually so polished and confident, looked young and embarrassed. He shook his head. “Never mind. I want you to be careful in case Martin turns his sights on you. Be safe, Benedict. If you’re going to marry Alice, now is the time. She is Easterbrook’s cousin, after all.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Of course you can. She needs to marry and you need a wife. Besides, you adore one another.”

  “Not like that,” Ben whispered.

  Hartley’s eyes widened briefly. Ben knew he didn’t need to fill in the details for Hartley, who would understand that this was the sort of knowledge that Ben would only learn the hard way—by falling for somebody else.

  And he had fallen for Phillip. He had always thought the expression falling in love to be a mere idiom. He knew how to love—he loved his brothers, he loved Alice, he loved the Dacre children, and he loved many other people besides. God commanded him to love, and he did it with his heart and with his actions.

  He hadn’t realized that this other kind of love, the kind he felt for Phillip, had so much in common with falling off a cliff. He couldn’t stop loving Phillip any more than he could stop gravity.

  Phillip found Ben tramping up the hill in his shirtsleeves—did he ever wear a coat?—instead of returning to the hall.

  “We missed you at luncheon,” he said, conscious that he sounded peevish. Ben was under no obligation to attend luncheon, or any meal, or any other damned thing at Barton Hall. He was his own man with his own life, and Phillip would do well to remember that.

  “I missed being there. But I had to call on some parishioners and make sure the church was ready for tomorrow.”

  Ah, that was right. Tomorrow was Sunday. “Where are you heading now, though?”

  “I’m climbing to the top of the fell.”

  Phillip opened his eyes wide in surprise. “Why?”

  Ben frowned. “Restless.”

  Phillip was all too familiar with the need to exorcise his demons by pacing the ship’s deck or taking ill-advised swims. “Can you stand some company? I can keep quiet.”

  Ben appeared to take a moment to consider. “Come along. I’m only in a foul mood. It’s not catching. I usually take pains to avoid people when I’m cranky but . . .” He shrugged as his voice trailed off.

  Phillip felt perversely pleased that Ben had sought him out last night at the height of his ill temper and that he was comfortable sharing his mood today with Phillip. It felt companionable; it felt . . . it felt like something Phillip wasn’t going to want to leave behind at the end of the summer.

  The trees were heavy with leaves and the sun reflected off the lake. He had never properly appreciated how pr
etty this part of the world was. He had always measured out his time here in drips and drabs—a few weeks of leave here, a month between ships there. It wasn’t enough to build a life, and maybe that had been his secret goal all along. Maybe he had been content to envision his family safe and sound, far away. Maybe that distance made it easier to assume all was well. It certainly made it easier to keep leaving.

  This time he wasn’t going to be able to leave with the same equanimity. His children weren’t vaguely anonymous beings in the care of a loving mother. When he was back on the Patroclus, he’d wonder if Peggy was following the ship’s travels on her globe. He’d wonder if Jamie had calculated the cubic footage of the new barn and whether Ned was going to go to university in a few years or stay here and tend to the estate. He’d wonder if they thought about him or if he had faded out of their memory.

  Phillip determined that this time he’d write. He’d dictate letters and have his lieutenant or one of the younger officers write them out, and he’d figure out an excuse to ask someone to read the letters he hoped he would receive in return. It was always awkward, but he couldn’t go another year or more with no contact with his own children.

  That didn’t solve the problem of Ben, though. He glanced over at the man. His freckles were out in force, and Phillip thought his hair had bleached from flax to nearly white over the past two weeks. His strong jaw was still clenched a bit more rigidly than usual, but it looked like most of his anger had burnt off during their walk.

  Phillip didn’t know how he would get by without seeing Ben every day, without his fearless honesty and unrestrained affection. Even if letters had been an option—and given that Phillip needed intermediaries to both write and receive letters, they most definitely were not—they wouldn’t be enough. He needed Ben near him, with him. As if to underscore the point, he glanced over his shoulder and took Ben’s hand. They were alone, safe.

  Ben didn’t hesitate before squeezing back. Of course he didn’t. That was what Phillip valued about him, this frankness and openness.

  “Come here,” Phillip said, tugging Ben off the path and towards a copse of trees that would shelter them if anyone passed by. There was frank and open and there was utterly suicidal, and Phillip was—well, Phillip was none of those things. And he’d protect Ben.

  He pushed Ben against a tree and kissed him. He meant the kiss to say the things he couldn’t put into words. Affection, fondness, gratitude. Whatever the word was for when you knew you would miss somebody and hated thinking about it, even though the person was still right there before you, in the flesh. He meant the kiss to be gentle, tender, all the things he usually wasn’t.

  But Ben reversed their positions so it was Phillip with his back against the tree. The kiss turned insistent, almost rough, a clash of lips and tongues and teeth. Ben’s hands pressed Phillip’s shoulders, his body somehow seeming larger and more imposing against his own.

  “Benedict,” Phillip breathed. “I want you.”

  “When we get back,” Ben murmured against Phillip’s lips. “Whatever you like.”

  Phillip shuddered against Ben’s chest. Did the man even know what he was saying? “We don’t have to . . .”

  “Please. I’m a grown man and I’m not likely to ever again meet someone I feel this way about. So, let’s just agree to have everything together. While we can.”

  Those words shouldn’t have sounded so melancholy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They managed to get to the summit of the crag with their clothing on, because as much as Phillip wanted Ben, there were some things he was not willing to do, and fucking the vicar en plein air was one of them.

  Phillip sat on a rock that formed a sort of bench overlooking the lake, and Ben sat beside him without waiting for an invitation. Their shoulders touched, and the familiarity of the contact warmed Phillip in a way he hadn’t thought possible. Touching Ben, even being near him, felt like being joined with a half he hadn’t known was missing. He felt newly complete, but couldn’t quite enjoy it because that other half would shortly be wrenched away from him, and he didn’t know how he was going to get on with his life knowing that there was a vital piece of him in Cumberland.

  Ben wordlessly passed him a flask, and Phillip cautiously sniffed its contents. “Cider,” Sedgwick explained.

  Phillip took a long drink before recoiling at the taste. “You call that cider?”

  “It might be a bit stronger than what you’re used to.” Phillip could hear the wicked smile in the other man’s voice, and he smiled back. For a moment it felt like the sun that always seemed to shine on Ben was shining a bit on Phillip too.

  “Right. Because in His Majesty’s Navy we only drink weak tea.” He took another, much shorter, pull from the flask before passing it back.

  Ben drank. “It’s a local specialty. They make it every fall and by the next summer it’s a potent brew.” Unsaid went the fact that Phillip would know this if he had spent more time here. “My father used to have it brought up from the inn in a dogcart. I grew up right over there.” He gestured with his chin to the far side of the hill in the opposite direction from where they had come from. “My father still lives there.”

  Phillip already knew that, but he could tell that Ben had something on his mind. “Did you want to call on him?”

  “I never want to call on him.” Ben scrubbed a hand through his messy hair. “No, that’s not fair. He doesn’t mean any harm, but we don’t see eye to eye about anything, really. He thinks that by being a clergyman, I’m serving my oppressors. He’d rather I live with a pair of lovers on borrowed funds while writing tracts about free love.” Another long drink.

  “A pair of lovers?” Phillip echoed.

  “Or three. He doesn’t believe in monogamy, which is all well and good. He believes in beauty and truth and while I’d like to think there’s some overlap there with my faith, the fact is that he doesn’t see the point in what I do. He thinks taking jam to invalids isn’t something a grown man ought to devote his life to.”

  “You do much more than take jam to invalids. You’re a very good vicar.”

  “What do you know of good vicars or poor ones?” There was more heat in Ben’s voice than Phillip was accustomed to.

  “I know that my children adore you.” And so do I, he wanted to add. “And so does everyone else,” he said instead. “They speak of you as if you hung the moon. That has to count for something.”

  Ben still looked out over the lake, across the water to the houses in the village. “Well, I hope so. I know this likely sounds half-baked to someone like you, but I think that by helping people—sometimes in small ways and sometimes in larger ways—I’m doing what’s right. That . . . that I’m serving God. But it’s hard to explain that to people who don’t believe.”

  “I don’t need to believe in God to see the value of what you’re doing.” Phillip didn’t know how to talk about this in a way that didn’t insult either Ben’s beliefs or his own.

  When the silence dragged out perilously long, Phillip feared he had bungled things. But then Ben finally turned to him and took hold of his hand. “You’re a lovely man, aren’t you?”

  Phillip felt that he was being condescended to, and bristled despite himself. He made a dismissive noise, hoping to change the topic.

  “I’ll miss you when you’re gone,” Ben continued.

  “I’ll miss you too,” Phillip said, his voice gruff.

  “There’s nothing to be done about it.” Ben rose to his feet and dusted off his breeches.

  “You really are in a foul temper.”

  “It happens so seldom I think I lack practice on how to best shake it off,” the vicar said wryly, and flashed Phillip a smile only slightly dimmer than his usual one.

  Phillip suddenly felt like he had stolen that smile, stolen this moment and this entire summer. He was only a temporary presence in Ben’s life, and he didn’t have any right to intimacy like this. Phillip meant nothing. He had once again become a convenien
t friend.

  “Let’s go back to the house where I can try to help with that mood of yours.” He wanted to push this conversation away from the future, away from the things that divided them, and to the familiar ground of kisses and touches.

  Maybe his effort worked, because Ben laughed. “You really are lovely.” He pulled Phillip behind the rock, safe from view. And right there, on the summit of a mountain, he took hold of Phillip’s lapels and kissed him. And the kiss felt stolen too.

  Ben left Phillip at the place where the lane diverged, one path snaking over to Barton Hall and the other leading further down the hill to the village.

  “We’ll see you at dinner?” Phillip asked, and Ben could have wept at the frank hope in his voice.

  Ben ought to spend the night at the vicarage instead of getting even more tangled up with Phillip. If he were even halfway prudent he’d head straight to the village, send for his valise, and not go back to Barton Hall until its master was away at sea. He ought to do whatever he could to protect his heart, to protect Phillip’s heart, and try to save some remnants of the stable life he had worked so hard for.

  “I’ll be there,” he said instead. He wasn’t strong enough to say no. Or maybe he just knew that whatever he was feeling was worth more than mere prudence.

  As if to fully commit to this path of guaranteed ruin, he reached out and took Phillip’s hand. It was a handshake, nothing overly intimate, but when he looked in Phillip’s eyes he thought the other man could see everything in his heart. Oh, blast it. They were both going to be miserable at the end of this, even without Easterbrook’s machinations.

  “I’ll be there,” he repeated, Phillip’s hand rough and warm against his own.

  Ben stood at that fork in the road for a few minutes, hoping to compose himself a bit before heading to the village. He was surprised to hear footsteps coming behind him, from the path he and Phillip had just traveled down. He turned to see his housekeeper, bearing what seemed to be several empty dishes.