by KJ Charles
Definitely not the act. David was a good-enough looking fellow if you liked them sharp and sly, and didn’t mind the powder that caked his hair, but he wasn’t Dominic, and that was all Silas cared to know.
But David knew Dominic, knew Lord Richard as well as any man alive, knew everything, near as damn it. He had a trick of looking at things from other points of view that Silas was aware he lacked, and could have used with his Tory. The valet had even made a third for Jon and Will in the past, as Silas had himself, which was an odd thought, sitting here across from him. If there was a man alive Silas could talk to about Dominic, it was surely David, and with a few glasses of gin inside him and this unfamiliar, unmistakable sense of a friendship taking hold, he found he wanted to know what David thought.
“What you said,” he began, and stopped himself as abruptly. Bloody self-indulgent nonsense. He’d drunk too much.
David smiled. “My reasons for thinking you should be patient?”
I swear, the bugger reads your mind, Will had remarked sourly more than once. It was an irritating trait. Silas was not in the habit of discussing his business with anyone, far less his heart, and it was none of anyone’s affair. And David couldn’t truly know the things that lay between him and Dominic: the gulf of class and wealth and power and principle; the flimsy bridge of trust that had spanned it and now lay broken.
And yet Silas did want to know what David thought, because he’d had a couple of hours with his mind occupied by something other than Dominic gone from his life, and now that memory had come rushing back all the harder for the respite, so that Silas felt empty and airless, as though he had a lung missing.
He shrugged. It was as much as he could do. David’s sharp eyes tracked the movement, and his slightly mocking smile twisted and faded to something a little more real.
“I think,” he said slowly, “I think you don’t understand what Lord Richard and Mr Frey have meant to each other and cost each other over the years. Lord Richard would not have lowered himself to lie for you if he hadn’t known it was necessary for his dearest friend. You have no idea how displeased he was about that,” he added with some feeling. “And I think, if Lord Richard has come to accept what Mr Frey wants to the extent of swallowing your damned radical insolence for his sake, it’s rather lazy that you can’t.”
“Lazy?”
“Mr Frey has already put his life, liberty, reputation, career, and dearest friendship at hazard for you. What the devil more does he have to do? But the fact is, at heart, you believe the gentry are all selfish swine, and you still won’t look past his position, or trust him to do the same. I call that laziness.”
“It isn’t that,” Silas objected. “That’s not it, not at all.” Was it? Surely not. “The problem is he’s got principles—”
David rolled his eyes. “God save me from men of principle.”
“Aye, well, it’s clear enough you’ve got none,” Silas said. “But others do. And not everyone’s ready to break them for the sake of a bedmate.”
David’s eyes widened sharply. For just a fraction of a second he looked as shocked as if Silas had struck him, then his face stilled, smoothing away the self-betrayal. When he spoke, he sounded as calm as ever. “Perhaps so. But I think it’s fairly clear that Mr. Frey isn’t one of those. I’m sorry to spoil your pleasure in martyrdom, but a sovereign says he’ll be down here within the week.”
“Tuppence says I’ll have blacked your eye before then,” Silas said with feeling.
“Don’t do that. Lord Richard wouldn’t like it.”
“Right, yes, Lord Richard. Shall we talk about you?”
David gave him a long look, then leaned forward deliberately, and blew out the candle on the table. “Time for bed. I need to be up betimes to get to London.”
Silas could spot a delicate hint when he was hit round the head with one, but that didn’t mean he had to take it. “How long are you going to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Dance attendance. Wait on him. Be patient.”
David’s eyes met his. They looked at each other in the dim light, a long, silent look, and Silas couldn’t tell what the valet was seeing, but at last he said, as though the words could not be kept in, “I don’t know.” He tapped his fingers on the table a couple of times, then picked up his full glass and knocked the gin back in a single, deliberate swallow. “I...don’t know.”
Silas waited, but that seemed to be all there was, or would be. And in truth, it wasn’t his business. David Cyprian was well equipped to get what he wanted for himself, and if he couldn’t, Silas was in no position to assist him.
He pushed his chair back, leaving David seated, still looking ahead. “Thanks for the drink, then, and the conversation. Good luck with tomorrow, I dare say you’ll run rings round the lot of them. We’ll have that game when you’re back. And—well. Good luck.”
“Yes,” David said. “You too. Not that you need it. I’ll be dunning you for that sovereign soon.”
“We’ll see about that.” Silas wasn’t going to start nurturing the embers of hope on anyone’s say-so, even David’s. “And—” He recognised the bleakness in David’s eyes, a faint echo of his own misery, and felt an urge to offer help, support, something, in the full knowledge that he couldn’t be a damned bit of use. “Well, you know where to find me if you want me.”
“Easy enough, ” David said with a smile that didn’t quite convince. “I’ll follow the trail of books. Good night.”
Silas took up a candle to light his way to bed. He paused at the door to glance back at the solitary, white-headed figure motionless at the little table. “Aye, well. Night.”
David lifted a hand, without looking up. Silas hesitated a second longer, but found nothing more to say, and left him sitting there alone.
******
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David Cyprian and Lord Richard Vane’s story is told in A Gentleman’s Position, out 5 April.
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