“I’m not usually like this.” Hartley’s voice was a whisper.
Fox waited a moment before answering. “Like what?”
Jumpy as a cat? Snappish and clumsy and rude? Hartley didn’t even know where to start. “I’m usually very genteel,” he said with what he hoped was an obviously ironic sniff. “Sophisticated, even.”
Fox’s face broke into a wide grin, and Hartley realized it was the first time he had seen the man smile. One of his eye teeth was chipped and Hartley found he liked it. “Your waistcoat is buttoned wrong. Is that what the sophisticated gentlemen of London are doing this season?”
Hartley glanced down, squinted, and saw that Fox was right. “Oh blast. I need spectacles.” Or he needed another valet, but that was dashed unlikely. He bent his neck to see where he had gone wrong. Right at the top button. He was going to have to unbutton the whole thing and start over.
“Don’t,” Fox said, when Hartley had undone the top button.
“Pardon?”
“I really don’t care what state your buttons are in. And, besides, it’s—” He stopped abruptly, as if realizing that he shouldn’t end the sentence in whatever way he had been planning, which only made Hartley absolutely need to know what he hadn’t said.
“It’s what?”
“Rather . . . adorable, if I’m honest.”
Was Fox making an approach? If so, Hartley was on familiar—if uncomfortable—ground for the first time this evening. He cast his eyes down, then looked coyly up at the other man. “You can unbutton them yourself, if you like.” Scripted lines in a bad play, and he was weary of it all. It was a fool’s errand to try this again. It had been ages since he managed to go through with it; there had been a few moderately successful ventures after Easterbrook was through with him, when the pleasure had slightly outweighed the terror of the encounter. But in the three years since inheriting this house, he had hardly even wanted to try, and there was no reason to believe things would be different with Fox.
Fox didn’t move any closer, though. Instead he frowned. “I didn’t think you liked being touched.”
Perhaps he hadn’t been making an approach, which was rather mortifying. But how had Fox figured out Hartley’s problem? Probably when he had gone half off his head during last week’s brandy spill. “I don’t,” he said, pitching his voice low and trying to imbue it with as much of an invitation as he could muster, “but you can do it anyway.” That was what he had done in the span between Easterbrook’s death and inheriting the house: one-sided encounters where he let things happen to him.
Fox let out a sigh. “No, mate, that’s not what I want. I don’t want you to let me touch you. There’s no fun in it if I think you’re just going along with it.”
Hartley felt the words like a slap to the face even though Fox’s tone was kind. Fox’s gentle rejection was a stark reminder of everything Hartley had lost. He smiled tightly and thought of revenge.
Chapter Five
The sun rose on one of those perfectly crisp autumn days that made it hard to believe muck and fog were in the near future. Hartley considered staying in bed until the sun went away.
“You! Wake up!”
Hartley rolled over to see one of his few remaining servants looming over his bed. “Why?” he asked.
“The girls gave notice,” Alf said. “Their mum won’t let them come back. Said you’re depraved.”
Hartley rubbed his eyes. “That’s not giving notice,” he argued, sitting up. “That’s just quitting.” It was just past Michaelmas, one of the quarter days when servants typically came and went, so the departure of a few servants wouldn’t have mattered if he had any hope of replacing them.
“Right,” Alf said. “But where does that leave me?”
“Do you want to leave as well?” Then Hartley would be utterly alone in this house. “I’ll pay your wages through the next quarter.”
Alf rolled his eyes. “You don’t need to worry about my delicate sensibilities, mate.” When Hartley acquired Alf, the boy had been fifteen years old and loitering in an alleyway near the docks infamous for its supply of all manner of prostitutes. Hartley had gone there in one of his ill-fated attempts at liaison; Alf had said what was needful and named his price. Before matters went much further, Hartley saw that the boy was scarcely out of childhood, and offered him a pallet in the kitchen and work around the house.
“But I’m not doing your cooking,” Alf went on. “So either you hire a proper cook or we’re eating pie from that dodgy place in Moorfields you like so much.”
“Pie it is, then,” Hartley said, and flopped back down onto his pillow.
“Let this house, for the love of God. Cross my heart, there are hobgoblins in the attic. I can hear them when the wind blows,” Alf said with the wide-eyed earnestness of someone who had been raised on such vulgar stories. “We can move to lodgings.”
Hartley heard the we and turned his face into the pillow to hide a smile. “This is my house,” he said. He had repeated that phrase a dozen times, to Alf, to himself, to Will. “I’m not letting it go. You’ll need your wages increased, though,” he said, “if you pick up some of the slack the girls left.”
“Won’t argue there.” Alf shuffled his feet and looked as if he wanted to say something. “Here’s what I don’t understand. I’d have thought every maid in London would want to work for you,” he said. “What with how they know you won’t be after them.”
“People think that if a man is so depraved as to go to bed with other men, then he won’t stop at anything.”
“Yeah but have they actually met you? Because all it takes is one glance to know you aren’t going to be bothering any girls.”
Hartley had a mad urge to fling the pillow at Alf, as he would have at one of his brothers who was determined to annoy him. Instead he bit the inside of his cheek to suppress a laugh. “There are people who cheerfully lie with both men and women,” he pointed out gently, thinking not for the first time that Alf might find this reassuring.
“Not you, though. Listen, if we’re staying here in this horrible old place, you need someone to make certain everything’s done right and proper. Maybe sew on a button, that sort of thing. I’m fine with hauling and fixing, but you’ll look like the rag man if you’re left to me.”
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I didn’t grow up with servants to wait on me.” Then he saw the look of disappointment in Alf’s face. “Unless, that is, you know somebody who would be well suited to that line of work.”
“Well, somebody I used to know from, well, you know.” Hartley assumed he meant the streets. Alf shuffled his feet in a way that reminded Hartley of one of his younger brothers confessing to stealing fruit from the neighbor’s orchard. “If you wouldn’t mind hiring a—”
“You know I wouldn’t,” Hartley said quickly, sitting up. “In fact, given how things are, you probably ought to ask your friend whether he minds working for someone with no reputation.”
“Oh, she doesn’t have any parents to fetch her away. Or, I suppose she does, but they turned her out so I don’t reckon their opinion matters much.”
“You say she’s been working the streets?”
“And sleeping rough.”
Hartley sighed. “Bring her round whenever you like. Offer her whatever we paid Polly.” There was one other concern, though. If Alf was keeping in touch with friends from his old days, there was a chance he was still walking the streets himself. Hartley didn’t want to see the boy hurt or arrested. But the lad had always been deeply ashamed and loath to talk about it. “Alf,” Hartley said, carefully weighing his words. “Do I pay you enough, or do you find that you need to supplement your income?”
Alf might be entirely unschooled and unlettered but he was quick. “Nah, no worries. The gent who used to comb your hair left his muffler here, and I thought one of the lads might want it, so I brought it round to the docks. It’s getting cold.”
“Indeed.” He noticed that Alf had no
reservations about giving away other people’s belongings, but it was true that Hartley hadn’t had any intention of sending the muffler on to his former valet, even if he had known where to find the man.
Alf shuffled his feet again. “When I was there the other night, a few gents did think I was offering trade. They may have remembered me.”
“More likely they assume anyone young and dressed like a guttersnipe isn’t there to purchase anybody’s company, so they came to the obvious conclusion that you were there for the other reason. Take care, Alf,” he pleaded.
It was a terrible risk to even have Alf under his roof. Since the gossip had spread about town, Hartley sometimes thought there were constables watching his house, waiting for any excuse to bring him before a judge. They’d see Alf and force one of the lad’s former customers to testify against him; they’d drum up evidence against Hartley and he’d be put in the pillory.
But Hartley couldn’t turn Alf out, because the boy didn’t have anywhere else to go. That had always been his downfall. Someone helpless needed aid, and he went out of his blasted way to assist them. Urchins needed a home, and Hartley opened his doors. Will needed a commission, and Hartley went to bed with the only rich man he knew. It wasn’t self-sacrifice—that was for noble-minded decent sorts. Hartley didn’t even like people, much less want to sacrifice his comfort for them. He didn’t give money to worthy causes, he didn’t go to church, and he was utterly confident that if Martin Easterbrook were on fire, he wouldn’t so much as piss on him to put it out. He was motivated entirely by something like anger at injustice, although he hated to admit that to himself; anger was terribly gauche and injustice seemed a topic best confined to badly printed broadsides read by men who dressed like Will.
“You all right there, sir?” Alf asked. He always managed to tack on “sir” like he had only just managed not to say “you bloody great fool.”
“Would you take it amiss if I stressed the need for discretion?”
“I’m pretty keen on discretion myself,” Alf said, his eyebrows raised.
“Right. Of course you are.” Nobody wanted to be put in the stocks. Preferring not to be hanged or pilloried wasn’t some refined preference of Hartley’s. All men in their world knew the price they would pay for a single misstep. “Perhaps stay away from places frequented by people who might mistake you for trade, Alf.”
Nobody in his life would be safe from the taint of scandal if the worst happened. Perhaps it was for the best that there were precious few people in his life at all.
Wisps of fog were already gathering when Sam returned from walking his aunt home. She had come in to help for a couple of hours and Sam wasn’t going to repay the favor by having her make her way through the dark foggy streets on her own. Countless horrors unfolded nightly on these streets, but they were a hell of a lot less likely to happen in the company of a large man.
Sam had been on his feet since morning and was looking forward to collapsing into his bed. It would be one of those nights when he barely managed to get his boots off before falling asleep. To walk his aunt home, he had circumvented the seedier and more raucous streets, but now that he was on his own, he took as direct a path as possible, walking straight through one of the more tumbledown neighborhoods near Grub Street.
When Sam first spotted the man on the other side of the lane, he thought it was a trick of the fog and the darkness, or maybe that his tired mind wasn’t behaving reliably. That his mind, however tired, would supply an image of Hartley Sedgwick, of all people, did him no credit. Perhaps his thoughts this week had been so populated with Sedgwick that his brain was now conjuring the man’s vision out of thin air.
He squinted. That was no vision. It was Hartley Sedgwick, in the flesh. Even from across the street, even through gathering fog, Sam could see the man’s watch chain glimmering in the moonlight. A man had to have a death wish to walk through a neighborhood like this with a bit of gold hanging out of his pocket. Stealing the watch would be child’s play, but the sight of a chain like that would give a thief ideas about what else the man might have in his pockets and what riches a good beating might produce.
Swearing under his breath, he crossed the street. “Mr. Sedgwick,” he called. Sedgwick froze with his back to Sam. Sam didn’t take another step, not wanting to startle him. “It’s Sam Fox.” He could almost hear the other man’s sigh of relief as his shoulders dropped and he turned to look at Sam. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing in a neighborhood like this?” Sam demanded.
“I’d like to know what business it is of yours.” Sedgwick’s voice was utterly frigid, which Sam supposed was no more than he deserved. They had parted awkwardly last week, and Sam winced whenever he thought of it.
“If you want to get yourself killed, that’s your concern, but you could maybe do it in another part of town. My pub is nearby, and it won’t do business any good if word gets about that people are getting murdered on my doorstep.” In truth, the Bell wasn’t so close, and Sam doubted whether any of the regulars would be bothered if half a dozen toffs were killed directly on the premises as nightly entertainment. But Sedgwick didn’t need to know that.
“I’m not going to get myself killed.” The moonlight shifted, throwing a play of light and shadow over Sedgwick’s face. He looked tired. Bored. As if the prospect of getting killed wasn’t so very upsetting.
A cold fear gripped Sam’s gut. It wasn’t a good sign when a person acted like staying alive was a chore. “I’m walking you home,” he said.
“That’s entirely unnecessary. I often walk this way.”
“And do you often do it with a gold chain hanging out of your pocket in plain view of God and everyone?”
He heard the man sigh. “Fine. Suit yourself.” Sedgwick resumed walking, leaving Sam to trail in his wake. But Sam was much taller and he soon had to adjust his stride so as not to outpace the smaller man.
“What were you doing in that neighborhood, anyway?” Sam asked, after they had walked in awkward silence a few minutes.
Sedgwick was silent for long enough that Sam thought he was going to get ignored the rest of the way to Mayfair. But then Hartley held up a parcel he had been carrying under his arm. “Getting my supper,” he said.
“What is it?” Sam asked with professional curiosity.
“Pork pie,” Sedgwick said, and Sam would have bet that he was rolling his eyes. “Why, did you want a bite?”
“Not really.” Now that Sedgwick was holding the parcel up, Sam could catch the aroma of slightly burnt pastry and a muddle of different kinds of meat. No kind of herb had even been waved over the dish. “Where’d you get it?”
“The pie man at Moorfields.”
“You walked all the way to Moorfields for a slice of dodgy pie?” Sam’s sensibilities were outraged.
Sedgwick sniffed. “If you must know, I happened to be in the neighborhood, calling on my brother, and I bought the pie because all my servants but one have quit and I don’t fancy starving.”
It was frustrating when someone told you only half a story. It happened at the Bell when people wanted to make themselves sound more interesting, or when they wanted Sam to ask questions that would give them an excuse to talk about themselves. He didn’t much care for that tactic. But he didn’t think that was what Sedgwick was doing by casually mentioning that his servants had quit. It was more as if he assumed Sam knew more than he did, and was airing a source of potential awkwardness to get it out of the way.
“Not starving is good,” Sam said, which for some reason made Sedgwick laugh, a surprisingly low and throaty sound that was at odds with his usual mannered accents. Sam smiled down at him helplessly. When they squeezed closer together to pass beneath an archway that spanned between two buildings, Sedgwick didn’t pull away, and Sam found himself looking forward to the times their sleeves would brush against one another’s.
They wound their way through side streets and narrow alleys, and Sam couldn’t have said whether it was his doing or
Sedgwick’s, but it gave him an odd feeling to think that they both knew the streets well enough to choose the route that cut across London in the path most nearly approaching a straight line. Maybe that was why Sam kept walking even after they had crossed into a perfectly safe part of town, the streets wide and clean and lit with gas lamps. Sedgwick didn’t complain, didn’t tell Sam to turn around and go home. When they got to the Davies Street crossing where Sedgwick ought to turn off to go to his front door on Brook Street, they paused, as if by common consent.
The street light reflected off a strand of Sedgwick’s hair that fell onto his forehead beneath the brim of his hat. He must have noticed Sam’s gaze, because he hastily smoothed his hair before slapping the hat back onto his head. It was such a self-conscious gesture, so unrefined and inelegant that Sam was almost touched. The man was young, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. And while Sam, at twenty-eight, wasn’t much older, he was certain he had done a lot more living than this fair-haired gentleman who didn’t seem to know the value of his own life.
“I’m sorry about what I said last week,” Sam said, wanting to do at least this one small thing right by the fellow.
Sedgwick’s eyes widened, then he looked down at his boots. “It’s quite all right.”
“No, it isn’t. I only meant that I didn’t want you to let me do things to you. I hadn’t meant to make you feel like what you were offering wasn’t good enough.”
“It isn’t good enough, though, and it’s fine for you to say as much.” He performed another nervous adjustment of his hat brim. “This isn’t a dinner party where you’re obliged to sample every dish that’s set before you.”
A Gentleman Never Keeps Score Page 5