A Seditious Affair

by K. J. Charles

  He dug his teeth into his lip for control as he slicked himself. Pushed into Dom without warning or kindness, hearing the muffled cry and gripping his shoulders as if they were wrestling or fighting to the death. Dominic was arched right off the bed with need, and Silas hadn’t even meant to fuck the bugger; he’d meant to keep this going for a lot longer, but he wasn’t made of stone.

  Dom’s hands came off the rail then, and Silas had a fraction of a second to think, Hell, before they clamped on his arse, urging him on, because—Christ—that was Dom spending, thrusting jerkily, and Silas hadn’t even touched his prick. Silas gave up the last shreds of control, driving into his blinded, muted Tory, and came himself before Dom’s shudders had ceased.

  They lay together, chests heaving, until Dominic made a noise of strong meaning.

  “Right. Sorry.” Silas propped himself up and untied first the gag—his neckcloth was dark with saliva now—and then the blindfold. Dominic blinked a couple of times. His face was marked by the cloth, reddened, and his eyes looked drugged. “Was that—”

  “You know it was. You know.” Dom’s speech was a little slurred, as though his tongue felt thick.

  I did that to you. Me. Silas gave a casual sort of shrug.

  “Hell and the devil. What was that you used?”

  “Comb.” Silas fished it from under his leg, where it was digging in uncomfortably, and waved it at him.

  Dominic flopped back on the bolster. “A comb. A comb and a couple of cravats, and I think you may have turned my bollocks inside out.”

  “Aye, well, use what you’ve to hand, I say.”

  Dominic smiled faintly. He said, after a moment, “Did you mean that? About, uh, someone else. Do you—is that something you’d like to do?”

  “Mebbe. If you wanted it. Would you?”

  “It’s got, shall we say, points of interest. As a proposal.”

  “Ha.” Silas gave Dominic a jab in the side and settled by him, skin to skin, considering the idea. It wasn’t unfamiliar. Silas had made a third for Will and Jon a few times, and so had Lord Richard’s valet fellow, one of the few others to know Will’s secret. We’re not like to love you, Will had explained once, after a long night’s drinking, and Foxy’s not going to love us.

  Silas could ask Jon, if Dom still felt like it later. With Will’s agreement, of course, but Jon was trustworthy and a fine figure of a man, and after years of service, he’d doubtless love the idea of giving it hard to one of the gentry. Silas wouldn’t mind watching that at all.

  Because that had been Dom saying what he wanted. Not leaving it to Silas, not silenced by shame. Dominic Frey, Silas’s own peculiar Tory, knowing his pleasure and asking for it.

  Dom could give him clothes, and loans, and all the kindness he wanted, but Silas had given him that.

  “What are you grinning about?” Dom asked suspiciously.

  “Just making a few plans for you, pretty boy.”

  Dominic gave a satisfied sigh, slinging a leg over Silas’s thigh. “I am at your disposal.”

  Chapter 13

  They lay together, talking or companionably quiet. Dominic’s hands hurt like the very devil at first after the death grip he’d had on the rail, but when he made complaint, Silas took one hand between his own rough, powerful ones and massaged it. The sensation of his strong fingers digging in, rubbing over sinew and bone and skin, was extraordinary, a little imprisonment all of its own. Dominic moaned his pleasure.

  “Well,” Silas muttered. “That’s another thing gets you going, is it?”

  Everything you do. Dominic squirmed in lieu of reply and felt the pressure on his sensitive palm increase.

  He hadn’t wanted the blindfold, had had to make himself take it, and the gag had been a genuine shock. That deep, disturbing internal reluctance, that edge of real fear—he wasn’t sure how Silas could give him those when he trusted the man so completely. With his own life, at least.

  His skin felt scraped all over. A comb, damn it. He’d had men use floggers on him to less effect. But this was Silas, who knew him to the bone.

  Thank the stars he’d been here. Dominic had expected to see Silas in the meeting room, and he didn’t want to recall the terrible fear that had gripped his heart when he looked around and found it empty. The few steps to the bedroom door had felt endless. But Silas had been here, and he was showing no signs of wanting to be anywhere else, and Dominic had started breathing for the first time all day.

  Breathing hard, indeed, as Silas’s fingers continued their kneading.

  It was close to five o’clock. He needed Silas here all night.

  “Is there anything you want?” Dominic murmured.

  Silas’s brow twitched. “What’re you offering?”

  “Anything. What we do is all to my tastes. Is there anything you want, anything different?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve no idea. If you want me to fuck you?”

  That earned him a look. “Not my idea of a good time, Tory.”

  “Ever done it?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know, then?”

  “Same way I don’t need to eat a plate of snails to say I don’t like ’em.”

  “For a radical, you have the most hidebound view of the world,” Dominic told him. “I’ve had snails, in Paris. They were delicious.”

  “Aye, but we both know you’re…” Silas made a turning gesture with his hand to indicate Dominic’s peculiar angle to the rest of mankind. Dominic thumped his arm. “Why d’you ask, anyway? You want to do that?”

  “Not precisely. I want to give you what you want. If you want to turn things about, or fuck without games. If you want…I don’t know. Anything, Silas.”

  Silas ran a hand over Dominic’s face, brushing the tumbled hair out of his eyes. “Not if it ain’t to your pleasure.”

  “It’s your pleasure too, and in equal measure. I just would like to know that there’s nothing you’re missing.”

  Silas snorted. “Missing from when? All the other beauties I’ve had in my bed? No. Or, at least—I’ll think about it.”

  “Can I help you think?” Dominic suggested, trailing his hand over Silas’s hip.

  Thinking led to palming, and heated murmurs, and kisses, and eventually them lying together, prick to prick and mouth to mouth. Gentle stuff, and long drawn out, since neither of them was young anymore, and this mutual pleasuring wasn’t what set Dominic’s blood alight. But it was still pleasure, because of the wonder in Silas’s mongrel eyes and because Dominic knew damned well what Silas wanted.

  He wanted loving. He gave Dominic such brutal fucking, and he wanted love with the hunger of a long-starved man.

  So Dominic kissed and whispered, stroked and cherished, and wove the most devious snare he could around his precious brute’s heart, and tried not to think about the clock.

  They both twitched, some while later, when it chimed seven.

  “You all right?” Silas asked.

  “Yes, of course. I was just startled. You?”

  “Aye. Aye. Thinking of…something, doesn’t matter. I don’t know, Tory. You say take a holiday—”

  “It won’t be much of a holiday, starting up another shop.”

  “No, true. Still.” He dropped an arm over his eyes. “Some people I know, they didn’t like me saying I wasn’t keeping up the work. Called me a coward.”

  “Then they’re fools,” Dominic said.

  “Easy said. Truth is, I am. I’m afraid. You know it.”

  “Fear doesn’t make one a coward. Lack of fear can suggest one’s an idiot.”

  Silas smiled briefly. “Well, there’s that. But if you’re afraid and it makes you back down—”

  “You haven’t. And if you had, well, some charges are futile, and some retreats are necessary. You should hear Julius on the subject of heroic obedience to foolish orders.”

  “Harry’s Julius? What does he know?”

  “He was a cavalry officer at Waterloo.”
/>
  “Bollocks,” Silas said with force. “That fop?”

  “I assure you. He returned from the war with a collection of medals and a very, uh, pragmatic attitude to heroism.”

  “It’s a miracle we won,” Silas muttered. “All very well, but…”

  “But what?” Dominic demanded, sitting up. “But you have to dedicate your life to a lost cause on the say-so of a band of beggars?”

  “It ain’t lost,” Silas said. “We haven’t won yet, but the cause ain’t lost. Never will be.”

  “Yes, it is. When will you see, curse it? People want to be ruled. That’s why there wasn’t the outcry you wanted against the Six Acts. That’s what you democrats don’t understand. Men don’t want votes; they don’t want responsibility. Look at the French. All that bloodshed, all of that Jacobin posturing. May the last king be strangled with the guts of the last priest, they cried. And what did they do? Exchange a king who ruled them for an emperor who wanted to rule Europe.”

  “That’s not what the people wanted.”

  “What people want is freedom to live their lives, and good rulers to make that possible in an orderly state. Your cries for unbridled liberty are cries for chaos. What sort of society arises from murder and upheaval?”

  “I don’t call for murder,” Silas said. “What I want is to see people rule themselves, not be ruled, and for that they need teaching, and they need a voice. And if men, and women too, don’t want to rule themselves, well, let them say that. Let them who want chains stay in them, but they should have the choice. And you know why your lot won’t give us that choice, why you’d rather take away all those ancient British liberties you’re so strong on than listen to the people?” He jabbed a finger at Dominic’s shoulder. “Because you know damn well you’d find that even the men who want masters want different masters. Better ones. Ones that don’t just leave people to starve—”

  “One minute you want liberty; the next you demand that the government take charge of the bread on every man’s plate.”

  “Are you telling me this government rules in anyone’s interests but its own?” Silas retorted. “You say the people want good rulers. Starving in the fields and being ridden down in the streets, that’s good? What are we supposed to do about it, ask polite-like and wait for your convenience?”

  Dominic set his teeth. He hadn’t meant to start an argument, but they were both on edge, which always made Silas aggressive, and the last thing Dominic wanted to do was discuss why.

  “Mason,” he said, holding up his hands.

  Silas blinked, the anger on his face warring with a smile, reluctant but there. “Giving up? Too much, is it?”

  “Enough! Or too much.” It was a line of Blake’s, and now the smile reached Silas’s eyes. “I am generally delighted to wrangle with you, but not tonight. There are other things I want to discuss, and—ah, tempers are too high. You radicals have pushed too hard, and my government has pushed too hard back, or perhaps it is the other way around, but I don’t like where any of it is going.”

  “I’ll agree with that.”

  “Then let us not bring it in here. We always said each would keep to his own principles—my duties, your ideals. We don’t ask each other to change them. And when I suggest you ignore your radical friends and lay down your arms, it’s because…” He traced a finger over the side of Silas’s face, the lines around his eyes. “Because I care about you, my beloved brute, and you’re so tired.”

  Silas shut his eyes. “Dom…” It sounded stifled.

  “Stay with me,” Dominic said. “We’ll eat, talk, or not talk. But be with me tonight.”

  Silas nodded. They dressed in silence, the tension slackened a little, but Dominic felt a note of something unspoken still hanging in the air. Perhaps it was just his own guilt.

  He went to the privy outside to relieve himself before they dined. When he came back to the room, the bed was a litter of yesterday’s newspapers, haphazardly flung around, and Silas was gone.

  —

  Silas ran up Swallow Street as though the devil were at his heels. It wasn’t the broadest or best lit street, but that meant fewer watched, less chance of being stopped, and he couldn’t be stopped now. It was probably too late already.

  The cold bit at his lungs, and Dominic’s greatcoat was tight on his shoulders. He shouldn’t have taken it, but it had been right there, whereas getting the coat Harry had bought him would have meant a search through the rambling corridors of Quex’s to find the room he’d slept in. He couldn’t afford the time.

  Dominic had known something was up. The panic when he’d arrived, the stress in his eyes. I don’t like where any of it is going.

  Nor did Silas, not one little bit.

  Dominic had gone to the jakes, and Silas, nervy and fretful with what he knew and couldn’t say, had picked up one of yesterday’s newspapers. The London Gazette, as it happened, since it was the first to hand. He’d done his best all afternoon not to think of the Spenceans and their damn fool plan to attack the cabinet dinner, but once he could no longer drive it out of his mind with reading and fucking, as the clock ticked, the thought had been impossible to repress. Would it come off? Could they succeed at all? How bad would it be if they failed?

  There was nothing he could do, not to stop them, not to help them, but the tension was killing him. So he’d picked up the paper, with a vague urge to read the announcement of the Earl of Harrowby’s dinner over again, as if he’d learn anything new.

  It wasn’t there. There was no announcement of the dinner in the notices.

  That had just been tiresome. When he couldn’t find it in The Times, he was confused. Then it wasn’t in The Morning Post either, and at that point, Silas felt fear send its icy trickle down his spine.

  Because he’d seen it in the New Times. The paper Edwards had named, the paper Edwards had specifically said to buy—not It’s in the newspaper, but It’s in the New Times! The paper on which they’d based their conspiracy to murder the lawful government of the land, and that conspiracy had been set off by who else but Edwards? Don’t you see? They’ll all be there….We can do every one of them in at once!

  There was a term for it: agent provocateur. Frenchy words, because Englishmen weren’t supposed to sink to such things. Aye, right.

  Edwards had helped the Spenceans buy their illegal weapons. Helped them keep going until the noose was around their necks. He’d even persuaded Silas to agree to write seditious libel in support of a treasonous plot. Silas was the only writer of the Spenceans and, what with the Six Acts, it would be very useful indeed for Lord Sidmouth if Silas was caught in this net too.

  Had George Edwards taken coin to betray his fellows? He was one of those who least needed it, as far as Silas could tell: well-spoken enough, decently dressed. Or maybe that was because the government was paying him.

  Anyway, of course they wouldn’t have a wretch as their agent again, after the Spa Fields debacle. It was the turncoat’s notorious bad character that had done for the prosecution then. This time they’d have picked a man with nothing against him. Someone who wasn’t obviously a villain, who could sound plausible and decent as he testified in court to every damned thing he’d heard them say and seen them do.

  Silas couldn’t doubt it. Edwards was a traitor, and the plan was a trap, set to snare desperate men. It would prove that radicals were murdering villains and the Six Acts were necessary and just at the right moment for the general election, due to begin in a few weeks. Plenty of time for news to spread. Plenty of time for a trial.

  Unless he could stop them, he thought, and heard St. George’s clock chime eight as if in mockery of that hope.

  It was a bloody long way to Cato Street. Two miles, he reckoned, maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes at his jog-trot pace. He stuck his hands in his—Dominic’s—pockets, hoping for money for a hackney, and found them empty. Useless bugger, Silas thought, though it would not have felt right taking Dominic’s money for this.

  Had Dominic kno
wn about the entrapment? Silas could swallow the Tory views, because he knew Dom held them honestly, but something so low as this, where men were lured into crime for the sole purpose of ensuring their deaths by torture? If his lover had had a hand in this filth…

  No. He couldn’t believe that. Dominic would not have been part of this. Surely not.

  Dom had talked about murder, though. Had it on his mind. If he hadn’t planned it, had he nevertheless known?

  Silas cut along Oxford Street, dodging a couple of hackneys. He didn’t much know what he was going to do, only that he had to do something. He couldn’t dine in comfort with his Tory lover while his brothers were led to slaughter. His Tory lover, who might have known of that murderous plan.

  As Silas had known of a murderous plan. He’d been aware that men intended to kill ministers of the government that Dominic served, and he’d no more said a thing than Dominic had. And Dominic would know that Silas knew, because he had stolen his coat and run.

  Silas had been wondering if he would be able to bear to look Dominic in the face again, if he’d see guilty knowledge. It came upon him absurdly late, like a terrible awareness in a dream, that Dom would feel the same about him, and the thought curdled in his belly like foul meat.

  He took Mary-le-bone Lane off Oxford Street, cursing the way every westward road angled south when he needed to go north. Zigzagging through fine rows of fine houses, snarling at a would-be rampsman who approached with a smile and a cudgel. Try it. I’ll rip your arm off, friend. Running at last up Queen Street, almost there, and now he could hear the shouting.

  He should have gone then. Turned and walked away, knowing that it was too late, that he’d taken Dominic’s coat and lost his respect for nothing. At least he’d have saved his skin.

  But there was yelling, men’s bellows, women’s screams, the pounding of feet, and then the report of a gun. Shooting on the street. He had to know.

  He came through the little alley that opened into the end of Cato Street as a man fled past him in the opposite direction, head down. It was a little narrow, obscure road, now alive with people. There was no gaslight here, and the swaying lamps and torches seemed to cast far more shadow than light. He hurried toward the other end, where the crowd gathered, and by about midway could see officers of Bow Street. They were heavily armed, swarming a stable.