Southampton Swindle

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  Sebastian had been very tired by the time Nathanial pulled the covers over him, carried the candlestick out with him and closed the door. He hadn’t moved from the spot where Nathanial had left him.

  Now he reviewed the moments in the theatre lane once more.

  When you have recovered, we will talk, Nathanial had said. He had anticipated Sebastian’s many questions, then.

  Sebastian looked around for the dressing robe he had been borrowing, but there were a pair of breeches hanging over the end of the bed, and nothing else. He put them on and buttoned them. They were tight about the waist, and an inch too long, but they covered him.

  He stepped out into the main room.

  Nathanial was sitting in the armless chair closest to the fire, reading by the light of the flames. The big book was spread across his knees. He was wearing the robe that Sebastian had borrowed. He got to his feet as Sebastian halted at the edge of the big square carpet that lay in front of the fireplace.

  “You look better,” Nathanial judged, “although I imagine you are quite hungry now.”

  “And thirsty,” Sebastian agreed. He held up his hand as Nathanial made to move toward the table, which was behind Sebastian. “If I may ask a question, first?”

  Nathanial gave him an odd look. “Just one?”

  Sebastian touched his chest. “What did you do to me? How did you do it?”

  “Ah, not just one, then.” Nathanial turned and picked up the big book. The leather covering it was carved and painted, and the hinges were brass. “Have you heard of Guillaume de Palerme?”

  Sebastian glanced at the book. “William of Palerme? It is a romance, isn’t it?”

  “Set in the court of the Emperor of Rome, yes. It is a fanciful story and quite untrue, but the idea of werewolves is very entertaining.”

  Sebastian frowned. “I suppose. I have not read it. It sounds too melodramatic for my tastes.”

  “You do not like flights of fancy such as these?”

  “I do not understand what this has to do with….” Sebastian halted as he coupled up the idea of fantasy and his original question. “Magic?” he asked, his voice croaky with stress. “You are telling me you used magic on me?”

  Nathanial took a deep breath. “Of a kind,” he agreed. “A very, very old kind.”

  Sebastian wanted to tell him that he was addled, except that he could touch his chest and feel for himself that something had healed him. Nathanial had done that.

  “What did you do? How did you do it?” Another thought struck him. “It wasn’t my eyes failing me, was it? You really were moving faster than I could see.”

  “Yes, I was,” Nathanial agreed softly.

  “You were untouched by their blows…” Sebastian added.

  “Yes.”

  Sebastian’s heart began to thrum hard. It seemed he could feel his blood thundering through him. He felt as if he should be afraid, but there was too much he did not understand.

  “I can hear your heart galloping,” Nathanial told him. “I am scaring you. That was not my intention.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Sebastian told him, although the idea that Nathanial could hear his heart from across the room was also strange and fantastical. “I just do not understand.”

  Nathanial trod across the carpet, stopping just in front of him. “I am a vampire, Sebastian. I have been a vampire for a very long time.” He opened his mouth, and Sebastian watched two long and very sharply pointed teeth slowly descend, to stop with their points a fingernail width below his normal teeth.

  Sebastian leaned closer to study them. “May I…touch them?”

  Nathanial’s eyes widened. For the first time since Sebastian had met him, he looked uncertain. “I…yes, I suppose.”

  “Is that inappropriate?” Sebastian asked.

  Nathanial gave a small laugh. “It is a question that I have never been asked before. Most humans are afraid of my kind.”

  “You are not human?” Sebastian asked.

  “Not anymore. Not since I was made.”

  “Then you were human, once?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Sebastian cocked his head. “So, what is a vampire?”

  Nathanial’s extra teeth withdrew and disappeared. Sebastian decided he would learn more about them, later. He looked at Nathanial expectantly.

  “You had better sit down,” Nathanial told him. “Perhaps you should eat, while I talk. This will take some time.”

  “You will not eat with me?”

  “I do not eat,” Nathanial told him.

  “Then how do you thrive?”

  “We take in blood,” he said gravely. He was watching Sebastian carefully. “Human blood.”

  “There are more of you?”

  Nathanial looked surprised again. “You keep defying my expectations, Sebastian. Does the idea of my drinking your blood not disturb you?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “You might have done that at any time in the last day or so, but you have not. You have…well, you know what we have been doing together as well as I.”

  “Sex,” Nathanial said flatly.

  Sebastian could feel his cheeks heating. “Yes,” he agreed, “and I don’t think you’re such a hypocrite that you would…have sex…with the man you intend to feed from. I don’t know how things work with vampires, but what I know of you as a man tells me it isn’t possible.”

  “Thank you,” Nathanial said softly.

  “Why?”

  “For attributing me with human values even when you know I am not human. It has been quite some time since I have been thought of so highly.” He stepped out of the way, and waved toward the table. “Sit and eat while I tell you a tale.”

  Chapter Five

  Sebastian had eaten his fill and moved from the table to the sofa by the fire, yet he had more questions. Everything Nathanial told him budded another three or four questions, and every answer Nathanial provided added a few more.

  The vampire culture, like humans’, was old and complex. Nathanial was also old, although he had seemed coy about mentioning exactly how many years he had existed. His age, however, explained one other thing.

  “The language you spoke in the lane,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t recognize it. Was that your birth tongue?”

  “It was Latin.”

  “You are Roman?” It seemed a very strange question to ask someone of the eighteenth century, but most of Sebastian’s questions and Nathanial’s answers had been the stuff of fantasy.

  Nathanial shook his head. “I come from the land that eventually became Italy, but Rome was a crumbling ruin when I was born.”

  “I do not understand why you remain hidden,” Sebastian said finally, for this had been puzzling him all along. “Why not tell the world that you exist?”

  Nathanial’s expression was wise and sad, making him look as old as the centuries he had hinted he had lived. “Humans have proved over and over again that they cannot tolerate a competitive race – a dominant society will destroy another that it thinks might be as strong. It subjugates a weaker one. How do you think humans would react to a species that is more powerful, faster, and lives far longer than any human?”

  Sebastian sighed. Nathanial spoke truly. Human history bore him out. “It is sad that you must hide away, but I cannot dispute the wisdom of remaining secret. Perhaps, one day in the future, things might change.”

  “Perhaps,” Nathanial agreed. “Humans have grown steadily more civilized as time goes on. That is for the future, though.”

  Nathanial was standing by the fire once more. It was as if the flames comforted him, although Sebastian had learned that Nathanial didn’t feel heat or cold the way humans did. He was still wearing the robe and his feet were bare.

  “Come here,” Sebastian told him and pressed his hand against the sofa cushions next to him.

  Nathanial’s eyes narrowed, but he moved slowly forward. “What do you have in mind?” he asked, his voice low.

  “I would have thought t
hat someone with your superior skills and centuries of wisdom would have deduced for yourself what I intend.”

  Nathanial settled on the sofa, but he wasn’t as close as Sebastian would have preferred. “Are you sure, Sebastian?”

  Sebastian curled his hand around the lapel of Nathanial’s robe and drew him closer. “Why would you ask that?”

  “I am a vampire. Many find that off-putting.”

  “You were a vampire when we...had sex. Before. Nothing has changed except that I know more about you now.”

  Nathanial smiled. “You really are an extraordinary man.” His smile grew. “And you simply must get used to words like ‘sex.’ I have a few more that I must teach you, too.”

  “Latin words?”

  Nathanial slid his hand around Sebastian’s hips, his fingers stroking the flesh above his breeches. “Anglo-Saxon words,” he replied and kissed him.

  * * * * *

  Nathanial was stroking his chest while Sebastian spoke. The light in the room was steadily growing as dawn drew closer. They were lying beneath the covers for the pre-dawn air was chilly.

  “Life had been very simple and so very privileged, until I was thirteen. Then my father found out – I still don’t know how – but he learned that I was not his son. I was a bastard my mother had passed off as his. My father—I should say the earl—tossed both of us off the estate with only the clothes we were wearing, and ordered the staff to ensure we did not return. We were run off.” He recalled the cold winter day, and standing upon the road that led to the gates of the estate, while John the Bailiff stood at the gate with his legs spread and his big hunting rifle cradled in his arms. The full depth of the betrayal had not made itself completely felt on that bewildering and frightening day. As he grew older and looked back on that day and his life before it, Sebastian had understood better the choices the earl had made.

  “We started walking and eventually found a village that could offer us shelter. It was a village that did not know who we were, and that was the beginning of our new life. My mother had no skills other than embroidery, but we had no money for the linens and threads she would need to create anything. So I found work as a farm hand and learned as quickly as I could.” His hands had blistered and bled for a month and his mother had cried over them, but she had sent him out the door the next morning anyway because she had known just as he had that money brought them food and would let her work, too.

  “It was a brutal winter,” Sebastian said. “My mother died only a few weeks later. They told me it was an infection of the chest, but she had said nothing about being ill. Her death was a complete surprise to me.”

  “She didn’t want you to worry any more than you were,” Nathanial said quietly.

  “I think she gave up,” Sebastian said. “She was high born, and had never worked in her life. Scrabbling for farthings and wondering where the next meal was to come from...she couldn’t stand it. All I was left with was this.” He lifted the chain from around his neck and showed Nathanial the lady’s ring hanging from it.

  Nathanial raised a brow. “I wondered what the ring meant to you. I see, now.”

  Sebastian drew in a breath. “Then I met Einrí Fitzgerald.” He paused, wondering if he could speak of this.

  “Fitzgerald was a swindler?” Nathanial asked, his hand growing still.

  Sebastian nodded. “He...liked my looks.” He looked at Nathanial.

  “Ahh...” Nathanial rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. “Your first introduction to the ways of buggers and thieves. No wonder you were so wary, with me. I assume he was not at all considerate when he took you.”

  “I did not know there was a gentle way to it, until I met you,” Sebastian replied.

  Nathanial drew a breath and let it out. “There are some humans whose hearts I would happily tear from their chests.” He closed his eyes. “I will spare you the rest of the telling, Sebastian. I can see it all from here. He took you in, taught you his swindling ways, and in exchange, he used you whenever the mood took him. Is that how it went?”

  “Close enough,” Sebastian said, trying to keep his voice even. “Einrí was a rough-as-guts Irishman, so his swindles were limited. But because of my accent and my manners, he could dream up swindles that targeted the upper class and their rich purses, using me as his entry pass. Because of me, he tripled his earnings every year, above what he had been able to gather before we met.”

  “He is not here in Southampton,” Nathanial pointed out. “Did you kill him?”

  Sebastian found he could smile at the jest. “He tried to fool the wrong man. I was seventeen by then and just about as tall as I am now. Einrí met what he thought was a gentleman, which he judged purely by his manners and speech, which is ironic when he used my accent and my manners for exactly the same thing.”

  “The gentleman was a fellow swindler,” Nathanial guessed.

  “He was a gentleman in fact. Lord Rueben Monday Montgomery lost his lands and his fortune because he liked to gamble and had risked it all on a hand that he thought was unbeatable. Rueben knew more about schemes and plans and tricks than anyone I have ever met. I suspect you know more, Nathanial, but you’ve had time to collect them. What I learned from Rueben was how to use a victim’s wants and pleasures against them. His swindles nearly always worked and it was only bad luck that caused the occasional scheme to go astray. I learned as much as I could from him. He used...well, sex, as one of his tools. The seduction of women and men, to lull them into thinking you could be trusted....I found it ridiculously easy,” he confessed.

  “With your looks, and your manners and speech, that is not difficult to believe,” Nathanial replied. “You eventually parted, though,” he added.

  “Reuben liked to travel. He had been everywhere, and for ten years we plied our trade around Europe and the east, as far as Constantinople. We never did go to Rome, though. I suggested it occasionally, but I think Rueben was a known thief there, for he refused to even consider Rome, or anywhere on the Italian peninsula. But after ten years of it, I wanted to return to England. Reuben did not, so he set me up with a stake of my own, and I arrived in Dover four years ago. I have been on my own since then.”

  “You were in dire straits when we met. Were you just down on your luck, Sebastian? I would have thought, with such experience and skills, you would be very well-heeled indeed.”

  “I grew tired of it. I didn’t simply want to return to England. I wanted to stop it all, just for a while. I wanted to stop and think and spend time being just me. But eventually, the money started to run out. I waited far too long because I was so reluctant to return to the life.” Sebastian shrugged. “But I know nothing else, and I do not have an income, so I did eventually return. Lady Wandsworth was to be my first victim.”

  Nathanial pushed himself up so he was resting on one elbow and looked at him. “You know you can be yourself, with me.”

  “I know that now,” Sebastian agreed. “It is...”

  “Refreshing?” Nathanial suggested.

  “A relief,” Sebastian told him, and kissed him.

  It was only later, when they were bathing and dressing that Sebastian realized that nowhere in the night had either of them raised the question about the necklace and why the thugs had pressed Nathanial for its location.

  Sebastian thought of Anne and her request that he help her steal it from Nathanial and was glad the subject had been put aside in favor of discussing Nathanial’s true nature. He was more than happy for it to remain unspoken forever.

  * * * * *

  Lady Wandsworth’s parlor was an ode to very expensive and very bad taste. It was dark, for the drapes remained closed over the windows, and the carpet smelled and was badly in need of beating. There was only one sofa, which the lady herself used, while other guests propped themselves upon hard, upright chairs, balancing their teacups upon their knees, with no place left to perch plates.

  But Sebastian had been in far worse places, and this room at least was warm
and held no drafts to chill the ankles. The tea was surprisingly good. He wrapped himself in patience, waiting for the moment when he could further his plans with Mercy Wandsworth. The portfolio of his false friend’s considerable business affairs in Spain was sitting in his coat pocket, ready to be produced at the proper moment. Nathanial had proved to be a remarkable forger.

  The doors to the salon opened and were held aside. Anne Beecham glided into the room, a delicate-looking maiden with her eyes downcast, and her waist cinched in to a hand’s width, under the pretty cotton dress.

  Anne gave Lady Wandsworth a smile and a gracious and modest nod of her head, but Mercy was busy talking to her pair of friends, and merely lifted her hand in acknowledgement. Anne did not seem to be offended by the dismissal, which had been identical to the way Mercy had waved off Sebastian. Instead, she moved around the chairs and settled on the empty one next to Sebastian, folding her hands on her lap.

  “Have you thought about my proposition?” she asked him softly.

  “When I have been able to spare a thought, yes,” Sebastian said truthfully.

  “Did you arrive at a decision?”

  “There was no need to make a decision,” Sebastian replied.

  She looked surprised. “Why not?” she asked.

  Sebastian gave the tiniest shrug. “Because I do not believe you. I do not believe the necklace is in England and I most certainly do not believe that Nathanial has it. He would be far more circumspect in his behavior if he did have such a notorious and costly jewel.”

  Anne’s expression did not change an inch. She sat staring ahead, her face sweet and innocent and her posture that of a modest young woman. After a moment of contemplative silence, she gave a small nod. “You are quite right,” she said. “He would most likely behave differently if he really did have the Queen’s stolen necklace.”

  “Thank you,” Sebastian said dryly.

  “I lied when I said he had the necklace.”

  “Obviously.”