A Seditious Affair

by K. J. Charles

  “I am attempting not to learn that,” Dominic said. “Deliberate ignorance, you might say. He does not tell me what he does or where he goes, and I do not ask.”

  “A state of affairs that might fool a blind man in the dark. And you keep your knowledge from him, of the proceedings against radicals?”

  “As far as I can, except—”

  “Harry,” Richard said with him. “Of course.”

  “I am treading the edge of a precipice here,” Dominic said bluntly. “Liverpool’s administration has been savage on the reformists and whipped up a deal of discontent. The Whigs claim the country is ripe for revolution. There is talk of an uprising sweeping the North.”

  “Then, surely—”

  “Talk, it is always talk. If I thought there was a figurehead, a leader of revolution, I should be afraid. There is none, no English Danton or Robespierre. In the end, this is a conservative land. I do not see a tipping point that will force the radicals to act. And I am very afraid that the government needs one.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The Six Acts infringe British liberties. Sidmouth needs to prove that they were justified, that to make any concession to reform is to hand the nation to Jacobins. He needs an outrage. That was to be Lord Maltravers and Mr. Skelton’s coup: the radical Harry Vane made rich by the murders of his noble relatives. That little scheme did not come off, but it has not been forgotten.”

  “Are you telling me that business was not sincerely meant?” Richard demanded. “It was an error, yes, but from overenthusiasm—”

  “Perhaps,” Dominic said. “Mr. Skelton suspects Silas of sedition, and he is quite right to do so. And yet his patron is Lord Maltravers, who dislikes our set, dislikes Harry, and would be ecstatic to see his brother’s friends brought low by association. Let us say that if Silas were arrested and the consequence of his arrest were Harry’s disgrace, Lord Maltravers would be very well pleased with Mr. Skelton. And so would Lord Sidmouth, because the government needs a radical scandal, and I think at this point even the loosest threads may be woven into a conspiracy.”

  “You have to stop Mason. You must see that. You have to appeal to him to keep out of trouble.”

  “I wish I could promise that. I shall try, but I can only hope he is not arrested.”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “There, I think, we are as one.”

  —

  Dominic had not seen Mr. Skelton at work for some time. The encounter at Millay’s had infuriated Skelton and embarrassed Dominic, and in truth they’d avoided each other since. But a month had slipped by without either of them raising the subject, and Dominic felt it was past time to deal with the lingering awkwardness.

  “A moment of your time,” he requested, walking into Skelton’s little office. “I must express my regrets for my intemperate words on that occasion last month.”

  “Most understandable, sir.” Skelton glanced up from his papers, just enough for courtesy.

  “No, not at all. It was extremely rude of me. I may claim preoccupation, of course, but I know you were doing your duty, and had I considered mine I should have supported you, especially in front of the men. It was deplorable, and I can only plead your forgiveness.”

  It rang true. It was true. Dominic would have had no time for any other man who had concentrated on whoring at the expense of work, and the wild need to protect Silas and himself had long since been written over in his memory by the shame of dereliction.

  Skelton looked up, expression a little less frosty. “Well, sir, if you will have it, it wasn’t quite as I expected of you.”

  “I should hope not. It was not what I expect of myself.”

  “Ah, well, sir,” Skelton said with a roguish look. “When a man’s interrupted at his business, he can be forgiven for ill temper, and you were at mighty business there, if I may say so.” Dominic attempted a man-to-man smile, which worked too well, because Skelton went on, “A fine wench, that, if you like them meaty.”

  “Very fine,” Dominic agreed, keeping the smile in place.

  “If I may ask, Mr. Frey, do you frequent Millay’s often?”

  “Reasonably often.” Dominic affected a careless shrug.

  Skelton frowned. “Only, I had heard it was suspected of being, if you will forgive me, a mollying ground. You cannot have seen any such thing?”

  “Mollying? Good heavens, no. Really? Where is that suspicion laid?”

  “I’ve heard it suggested at Bow Street.”

  “Well, I can’t swear to every man who uses the place,” Dominic said, “and I do believe there are men who attire themselves as a mockery of nature, but on the whole, Mr. Skelton, if Mistress Zoë was one, I think we’d have both noticed.”

  Skelton gave a crack of laughter. “Ha! Very good, sir, very good. No indeed.”

  “In all seriousness, I have seen no such thing, but if the place has that reputation, or if one might meet such men there…” He made a face of distaste, pushing his feelings back behind the mask, where they belonged. “Thank you for that warning.”

  “Glad to be of service, sir.”

  Dominic propped himself on the desk. “You were hoping to find the bookseller Mason there, yes?”

  “Indeed, sir.” Skelton looked wary again.

  “I honestly think you’re barking up the wrong tree with Harry Vane and that story of the fire. Mason, well, you know better than I, but I know young Vane socially, and he has neither the brains nor the courage for any such plot. An empty-headed young fribble, frittering away his inheritance on cards and cravats.” Skelton was giving him a sardonic look. Dominic opened his palms. “I am well acquainted with the Vane family, as you know. Believe me, if I thought for a moment they nurtured a serpent in their bosom, I should not rest until I, or you, had rooted it out. I don’t think they do, and I should not wish to see you come a cropper over this when goodness knows we have enough radicals to be getting on with.”

  “That’s handsomely said, Mr. Frey,” Skelton said, relaxing a little. “And don’t we just.”

  They exchanged a little news, since Dominic was no longer dealing with London radicals. “It seems to me,” Dominic observed, “that the North is set aflame by talk of London uprising and London is on fire with expectation of northern uprising, but neither happens.”

  “There’s plotting in London,” Skelton said. “No question. Murderous intent to overthrow the Government and seize control of the city.”

  “Are you serious?” Dominic asked. The man had spoken with startling certainty. “Are you speaking of an actual, credible plot of revolution?”

  “Undeniably.” Skelton gave a tight little smile that jerked the tips of his drooping mustache. “Of course they’re dreamers and fanatics. But fanatics can do great harm.”

  “Which group is this?”

  “There’s more than one. I’m looking at a set of madmen, Spenceans, who gather at the White Hart in Brook’s Market. Led by one Thistlewood, who was charged with high treason over the Spa Fields Riots.”

  Dominic winced. The Spa Fields Riots had been a huge expression of popular discontent and a warning to the government that mass meetings were a danger and had to be stopped. The ringleaders had been duly prosecuted for high treason. Unfortunately, the first trial had collapsed when it became clear that the chief witness for the prosecution was a governmental agent provocateur who had instigated the greater part of the trouble himself. All the charges had been dropped.

  That did not mean that Thistlewood had been wrongly arrested. He was a dangerous fanatic, as so many radicals were.

  Silas is a Spencean. The thought came to Dominic’s mind, unstoppable. He pushed it away. Silas was not a murderer. He had had Dominic on his knees the night before, wrists bound behind his back, in the little anonymous room Zoë had found them, and if he had wanted to murder a gentleman, he could have started there.

  That hard hand around his neck, forcing his head back, caressing the exposed skin of his throat…

  Silas wa
s no murderer, and there was more than one Spencean group in London. But Dominic could not help reflecting that Brook’s Market, that filthy sink of sedition, was no great way from Ludgate.

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  It was such a sodding cold winter.

  It snowed. Of course it snowed, with unemployment and hunger all over the country. If it hadn’t snowed, maybe the people would have spoken out more against the Six Acts. But it was midwinter, and hot food in your belly was a good deal more of a concern than freedom.

  Everyone was hungry, and nobody had money. One of Silas’s fellow Spenceans, Robert Adams, had been taken up for debt; James Ings and his family would be starving on the street were it not for George Edwards, still quietly keeping them fed. Some prick had robbed Martha Charkin too, for all her efforts to keep her golden windfall quiet. The twenty guineas were gone and with them her hope of security, warmth, and food for her and little Amy through this endless bloody winter.

  And, what was even more wearing, the thief had to be someone Martha knew. Someone of the area who’d be well aware she’d lost her son and who took the money anyway. Just as the informer who’d peached on his seditious writings had to be someone he trusted. It was always someone you knew.

  It was hard to keep up the fight for the freedom of your fellow man when your fellow man was a bastard.

  Takings at the shop had gone to nothing. Coals were expensive, and most people preferred them to political philosophy. Silas made his way through the winters resentfully feeding his fellows because neither the government nor the church nor any other swine would do it. He was always hungry and cold in winter; it made him angrier. This winter, though, with the cost of his newly illegal printing impossibly high due to its new dangers…Well, it had to be done, and if it meant husbanding the coals, he’d survive. There were other people in worse case.

  He was sodding cold, though.

  The Tory knew it. They met now in a quiet little room—Silas wasn’t even sure to whom it belonged—which Zoë had set up so that he and Dominic could come and go without seeing another soul. It was as before, Dominic waiting for him, wine on the table, a bed. But now, when he arrived, there was food waiting too.

  The Tory wanted to help, Silas could tell. Dominic was poised on the edge of offering money. He’d probably hand over enough to keep half Ludgate warm, but Silas couldn’t and wouldn’t ask because it shouldn’t be fucking charity that kept children from starving and the old folk from freezing, as if the country belonged to the rich by right and everyone else lived at their sufferance and by their whim.

  They hadn’t even fucked at this meeting so far. Dominic had said, “Eat first,” and Silas had because he’d been so damned hungry, and now, somehow, he was in an armchair in front of a blazing, extravagantly hot fire with a belly full to hurting, a glass of claret in his hand, his head already a little muzzy from the wine. Dominic sat on the floor, since there was just the one chair, leaning against Silas’s legs as if he belonged there.

  “You’re having a hard winter,” Dominic said at last.

  “Isn’t everyone? Your lot aside.”

  Dominic didn’t reply for a moment. “Harry sends his love. He also entrusted me with a purse for you. Your winter expenses, he told me.”

  “Aye, well.”

  “Would you take work?” Dominic asked abruptly.

  “What work?”

  “The Vanes have extraordinary holdings of books. The Tarlton March library alone would break your heart, and Paul Vane, Harry’s uncle, was an obsessive bibliophile.”

  “The one who died in the house fire?”

  “Yes. Fortunately, the fire didn’t reach his library.”

  Silas found himself grinning for the first time in a while. “You’re all heart, Tory.”

  “Oh, you take my meaning. There are thousands of books across the Vane properties, in shameful disorder. Richard is in dire need of a bookman.”

  “Your Richard.”

  “Well, his brother Cirencester, to be strictly accurate, but he leaves a great deal of the running of the estates to Richard. It’s decent work, and he pays well. And I don’t know anyone better suited—”

  “Bollocks,” Silas said, with just a fraction of regret. He could imagine it, great rooms full of books to be held and ordered and put as they should be—findable, so people could read them…

  So Richard Vane and his fine family could keep them.

  “Bollocks,” he repeated. “There’s a hundred men with university educations and classical learning—”

  “Yes, all right, there are,” Dominic said testily. “But you could still do it, and it needs doing. I’m not offering you a sinecure.”

  “You’re offering me a job with your Richard.” A little self-inflicted pain every time he said it, like picking at a scab. “You’re back on terms then. Charity, is it? Keeping you happy?”

  “And Harry safe. Yes. Do you expect me to say he’s concerned for your well-being?” Silas snorted. “Quite. But I am, Silas.” His voice was raw. “I really am.”

  “Why? Or, why now?”

  Silence. “I don’t think I should say.”

  Silas waited. Dominic’s back was tense against Silas’s legs.

  “Don’t think you should say,” Silas repeated at last.

  “There are things you don’t tell me, and there are things I don’t tell you. It is a compromise that, in Richard’s phrase, might fool a blind man in the dark, but it is all I have. That, and an offer of honest work in a household where your position would be unassailable—”

  “And I suppose that comes with giving up my work.”

  “You can’t expect Richard to fund sedition,” Dominic snapped. “Yes, it would mean living like a respectable citizen, and it should. You know what will happen if you have a second conviction, and there are worse fates than transportation even.” He sounded sick.

  Did he know something?

  “Will you please at least consider it? Please, Silas. I don’t ask this lightly. It was not precisely easy to request it of Richard, come to that.”

  Silas could believe that. I say, my lord, will you accommodate the bully your valet engaged to backgammon me? Dominic obliged to grovel to Richard bloody Vane. The oversized swine who’d hurt Dominic so often doubtless making him work for it, because that was what the gentry did, dole out their largesse in crumbs to those who bowed and scraped the most.

  As if Silas could stand to be in that fuckster’s house, knowing what he’d done to Dominic.

  As if Silas would give up on Lord Richard Vane’s say-so.

  “No,” Silas said. “I ain’t that desperate yet. I don’t reckon I’ll ever be that desperate.”

  “Silas—”

  “No.”

  Dominic exhaled, long and slow. “What do you think will happen when you’re arrested?”

  “ ‘It’s ‘when’ now, is it?”

  “Of course it’s ‘when.’ What do you think we do at the Home Office all day, play croquet between the desks? Sidmouth didn’t pass the Acts for entertainment. There’s trouble coming. There will be a general election, probably soon. His majesty is not long for the world.”

  “What, the Regent? What’s he done, eaten himself to bursting?”

  “The king.” Dominic’s voice was tense. “The anointed king of England, his majesty King George. Don’t give me treasonous talk.”

  Silas had genuinely not thought of the blind old German lunatic, frothing away in some dark palace room. The Regency had lasted nine years now; a cove forgot. “Dropping like flies, ain’t they? The Duke of Kent just this week, now the king. So he’s dying. What’s the difference, except one less belly consuming the country?”

  “He is your king,” Dominic said through his teeth. “And change means unrest.”

  He spoke as though this were axiomatic, and it grated on every nerve Silas had. “God’s sake. The way you lot fear change, I’m amazed you can spend so much on your fancy clothes.
I’d have thought you’d be cowering from your tailors. Oh, sir, please don’t change the fashion!” he mimicked, fop style.

  “Stop giving me your claptrap and listen. There is unrest now, there will be upheaval when the king dies, and the Six Acts will be used. They’ll have to be used. You need to understand that.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t understand, nor do I see any right reason for them at all. You change your tune, don’t you?”

  “What? That’s not—”

  “One minute you’re against the Acts; the next you say they’re needed. One minute you’re going to stop letting your bloody Richard order your life; the next you’re asking me, me, to be his lackey.”

  “Silas, that is not—”

  “The hell it’s not.” He was furious, and he wasn’t sure why, except that the thought of Dominic swallowing any and every insult at Richard bloody Vane’s hands was enough to make his guts twist. If it was even just insults he was swallowing.

  None of it was right. None of it. Not Martha sobbing over the torn floorboard and the loss of her little bit of hope. Not the hunger up and down the street; the pinched, hollow faces; the blue lips and fingers, while men like Dominic had hot baths and fires in every room. Not Zoë straddling a naked man whose neck she’d just saved and still begging pardon for a few hard words. Not Dominic, who said he loved Silas but had another man’s hooks in his soul, one to whom no filthy, ragged ruffian could compare. Not a devil’s bargain that called to the worst part of him, offering a life of warmth and books and Dom there smiling at him every Wednesday, forever, if only he’d turn his back on everything that had ever mattered and every principle he’d ever held.

  It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

  Dominic was trying to say that wasn’t what he’d meant. Silas didn’t want to hear it. He stood, too angry and hopelessly wanting and miserable to bear it another moment.

  “I don’t feel like fucking. I don’t feel like any of it. I’m going.”

  Dominic caught his arm. Silas tried to wrench it away, but the Tory was as strong as he when he chose to use it.