A Gentleman Never Keeps Score

by Cat Sebastian

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Hartley, still holding the dog under one arm, opened one of the doors off to the side of the kitchen, probably leading to a pantry or larder. He returned with a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese. After setting the dog on the floor by the fire, he took a few steps away. “Here, Dog,” he said, holding out a bit of cheese. “Good Dog.” Eventually, the dog came and ate the cheese. “See,” Hartley said smugly. “He answers.”

  “Of course he comes when you put food on the floor. He’s deaf, not daft.”

  For the next hour, Sam sat by the fire while Hartley trained the dog. He put the bread farther and farther away, and sometimes called the dog even without a bribe. By the end of the hour, the dog was looking at Hartley with wide, pleading eyes every time he heard the man’s voice.

  “I grew up with dogs,” Hartley explained after the dog had fallen asleep at his feet. “Usually sheepdogs that weren’t fit for work, which my brothers took pity on. And they always had the run of the place.”

  “I didn’t. Ever. My mum was house proud. No dogs, not even shoes, only a cat in the kitchen to keep away the mice.” And looking at the amount of filth the dog had tracked onto the stone floors of the kitchen, he could see why.

  Hartley must have caught the direction of Sam’s gaze, because he asked, “Now who’s fussy?”

  “Ha. Point taken. You grew up in the country, then?”

  “In the north. Not far from Keswick.”

  Sounded like the middle of nowhere. “Are your people farmers?”

  “No. My father is—well, more or less an idler. He writes poetry and sponges off his friends. The poetry is supposed to be good, which I daresay counts for something. I haven’t eaten,” he said, rising fluidly to his feet. “The day rather got away from me. Let me see if I can scrape together something for both of us.” He disappeared again into the larder. “Do you care for ham? I still have some bread,” he called, but didn’t wait for an answer. “That cheese was meant for my supper, so I hope you appreciated it, Dog.” He came out laden with a couple of dishes, some pots of what looked like jam or mustard, and a jug that proved to contain ale.

  As they ate, they talked about nothing in particular. The dog sniffed around the edges of the kitchen and made a general nuisance of himself, which Hartley seemed to enjoy. Sam’s shirt dried, so he put it back on. He was warm, his belly was full, and his frame of mind much improved from when he had arrived. Hartley met his gaze and looked hastily looked away, but not before Sam saw the shadow of a smile on his lips. This could be the beginning of something, Sam realized. And while only a fool would believe that a kitchen table supper between a rich man, a black boxer, and a three-legged dog could be the beginning of something good, maybe Sam was more foolish than he thought.

  “What happened to your face?” Hartley asked, gesturing to his own cheekbone.

  “Fight.” Sam saw a pale eyebrow shoot up. “Breaking up a fight,” he added hastily. “At the pub.” Something—either concern or distaste—flickered across Hartley’s face.

  Suddenly, the dog’s ears pricked up and a moment later Sam heard footsteps outside. Without thinking about it, he got to his feet, positioning himself between Hartley and the door, clutching a fire iron in one hand.

  The door swung open, revealing a gangly youth with a shock of unkempt hair, accompanied by a girl in a somewhat disordered frock. Not a likely pair of housebreakers, but still Sam didn’t move.

  “Alf,” Hartley said, coming to stand beside Sam. “This is Mr. Fox. He’s come for supper. I take it this is your friend who is to be the new help?”

  “Yes, sir. Sadie Russell.” The girl managed an awkward curtsy and jabbed the lad in the side. “You could have told me he’d be in the kitchen, Alfred,” she muttered.

  “The housekeeper’s room is down that corridor,” Hartley said. “I’ll leave you alone while you get settled.”

  Sam was suddenly conscious once again that Hartley was a man with servants. It had been easy to forget this essential fact when Hartley had been on the bare stone floor playing with a mongrel. But it was dangerous for Sam to have a damned thing to do with Hartley. “You can’t trust them to look out for you,” had been his father’s constant refrain during Sam’s childhood. Them sometimes meant white Englishmen and sometimes meant rich people, and Hartley was both.

  They came from different worlds, and while tonight had been cozy and familiar, that would only make it more jarring the next time Hartley chose to look down his nose at him. Sam had to figure out a way to keep a safe distance from this man, otherwise he’d only wind up getting hurt.

  Even though they were once again alone in the kitchen, their earlier intimacy was gone, and Sam finished his ale and bread in a hurry while Hartley kept up a stilted, one-sided conversation. When Sam got to his feet, announcing that he had to go help close the Bell, he headed straight for the kitchen door.

  Chapter Eight

  When Hartley returned from a long early morning walk in the park, he found the house in an unprecedented state. All the curtains were open and the floors and furniture polished to a satiny shine. He followed the aroma of roasting meat and buttery pastry down to the kitchens.

  In the scullery he got his first good look at the new maid. She was a young woman in a faded brown frock, up to her elbows in dishwater. Upon seeing Hartley, she wiped her hands on her apron and executed an awkward curtsey. When she straightened, Hartley perceived what he assumed was the reason her parents had cast her out: a significantly rounded belly. He looked carefully at her face. She was about Alf’s age, which was to say no more than eighteen.

  “I beg your pardon,” Hartley said, trying not to stare at her belly and calculate how much longer before the blessed event. “I wanted to thank you myself for the work you’ve done. The house hasn’t looked so fine in years. Did you do it all yourself?” It had required a staff of five to keep the house reasonably presentable, and he recalled his godfather having had at least eight servants.

  “No, sir,” she said, not taking her eyes off the floor. “Alfred helped.”

  “Nah,” Alf said, emerging from the coal cellar. “I only did what Sadie told me. She knows how things are meant to be done.” He spoke with an audible note of pride.

  “You’re not from London, are you?” Hartley asked. He thought he heard a bit of a burr in her voice.

  “No, sir. Was born near Exeter, sir.” Yes, a distinct country burr. And also a hint of refinement that made Hartley’s ears prick up. Her father had most likely been a gentleman. Hartley felt distinctly uncomfortable by the idea of a young gentlewoman, indeed one who was in a delicate condition, toiling in his kitchen.

  “And how did you learn to cook?” he asked, because she was too young and too genteel to have risen from the ranks of kitchen maids.

  “Sometimes we had a cook who would let me help,” she said, “but when we had no cook I’d have the fixing of the meals to myself, so I learned.”

  Hartley pursed his lips. In the girl’s words he heard an echo of his own childhood: unpredictability of household arrangements, servants coming and going, children pressed into service as unpaid help. But if her family had a cook, however sporadically, they had certainly been well-to-do. She oughtn’t to be scrubbing floors and washing dishes. This was what Will would call reactionary twaddle, but Hartley couldn’t quite rid himself of the notion that some people scrubbed floors and other people paid them to do so. Complicating matters was the fact that his own background placed him more comfortably in the former group than in the latter: his family hadn’t had servants or even a functional roof until his older brother was old enough to take things in hand.

  “Have you found your work and your quarters to your liking, Sadie?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.” Another curtsey.

  “That’s enough with the ‘sir’ and the curtseys.” He was afraid she would pitch forward if she attempted it again. “I assume Alf has told you about my situation, so you know that I’m fortunate to have you.” Her fa
ce reddened beneath her cap, which he took as confirmation. “If there’s anything you need, please tell me. I want you to be comfortable here.”

  Later, when Alf cleared the supper dishes, he said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “Had what in me?” Hartley asked.

  “You were right sweet to her.”

  Had he been? He wasn’t certain whether it was proper to be sweet to one’s servant, or indeed whether he had ever been sweet to anyone in his life. “She’s a very capable cook and housemaid, and I want to keep her.”

  “She’ll be relieved to hear it.”

  Hartley sat back in his chair. “I don’t like that her parents turned her out. Do you know anything about how she got—” He mimed a round belly, then felt foolish for not being able to speak the suitable words.

  “Uh, the usual way, I reckon,” Alf said.

  Hartley pressed his lips together. “I mean, does she wish to marry the father?”

  “She won’t talk about it,” Alf said, confirming Hartley’s worst suspicions.

  “Alf, she was raised to be a lady. She shouldn’t be cooking my supper.”

  Alf gave a disappointed shake of his head. “What a sodding snob you are.”

  Hartley didn’t deny it. “I realize that girls are put on the street for far less than—” again he mimed a large belly “—but that doesn’t make it any less galling. The fact is that my father would never have kicked any of us out for anything. He was—is—a bit scattered, and he’s deliberately ignorant about how the world works, but he’d never have turned us out into the cold.”

  “That’s a low bar you have there.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that he always knew about me.”

  “There are newborn babies who know about you, mate.”

  Hartley glared. “Anyway, keep her safe and make sure she has whatever she needs.”

  “You know I will.” Alf’s voice was gruff.

  Hartley was getting ready for bed when he heard the wailing. At first he thought it was an injured child, so he ran down the stairs toward the back of the house, from where the sound was coming. But when he opened the door, he saw Dog. Dog, honestly. Who had a dog for eight years without bothering to give it a proper name?

  “You again? Your mistress will be beside herself.” If he knew the name of the pub where Sam worked, he might have sent word. But it was late, and it was raining again, and he couldn’t stand to leave an elderly three-legged dog standing out in the cold. Sacrificing another apron, he dried the dog and put it in front of the banked fire to sleep. He’d figure out how to get in touch with Sam tomorrow.

  Sam had spent nearly two hours in Hartley’s kitchen the other day, most of that time with his shirt off, and they hadn’t so much as touched one another. They had talked about dogs and ale; Hartley had spoken of his brothers and Sam had talked about some of the patrons at the tavern. Neither of them had mentioned the painting; neither of them had even made a move to get the other’s trousers off. The entire visit had been as chaste as a tea party. In fact, Hartley had enjoyed it more than any tea party he had ever attended. He had been at his ease, eating what amounted to table scraps in his empty kitchen, sitting with a shirtless tavern keeper. He had felt at home for the first time in months, if not years.

  He knew that to be a dangerous illusion. He couldn’t spend a pleasant evening with a man he wanted to take to bed without everything getting muddy in his mind. No—his mind was already muddy. It was an oozing pit of quicksand. There was no way for Hartley to have what he wanted out of a man; his brain wouldn’t let it happen. Every minute together would only remind him of what wasn’t possible, of what his mind was too broken and muddled to allow.

  The dog followed him upstairs, wagging that appalling stub of a tail. It looked like somebody had meant to dock the thing, then only done the job halfway.

  “No. No, sir,” he whispered so as not to wake Sadie. “You stay downstairs.”

  The dog tipped his head again. Hartley couldn’t tell what kind of dog it was supposed to be. He had the pointed muzzle and long legs of a rat terrier, but its fur was long and shaggy. Its ears looked like they wanted to prick up but were too floppy to quite manage the trick. Well, one of his ears was floppy; the other had that chunk missing from it. “Fine,” Hartley said, sighing. “Come upstairs.”

  At the first landing, the dog stopped walking, instead holding one of its paws in the air and mewling plaintively.

  “This is emotional blackmail,” Hartley said.

  The dog whimpered. Hartley picked it up and placed him at the foot of the bed where he would doubtless ruin the coverlet.

  No sooner had Hartley slid between his clean sheets, then the dog started howling.

  As Sam swept the floor, one eye on the straggling patrons who were still nursing the remnants of their drinks, Kate came downstairs. Sam gathered that she had been paying a visit to Nick.

  “Where’s the dog?” she asked, scanning the room.

  “In the courtyard. I gave him a ham bone.”

  Two minutes later she was back. “He’s not out there. And it’s raining again.” She had circles under her eyes, and she really ought to be asleep. “I’m going to go look for him.”

  “I’ll go look if you’ll keep an eye on the till and refuse to give anyone so much as another drop to drink.”

  He slapped his hat onto his head and went into the rain. “Dog!” he called, which sounded ridiculous enough to earn him a glance from a passerby. After a quarter of an hour, Sam still hadn’t seen any trace of the animal. Constable Merton, however, was trailing a few paces behind, as if waiting for Sam to step out of line. In defeat, Sam headed back toward the Bell.

  From the shadows came the gleam of moonlight glancing off a row of silver buttons. Even if Sam hadn’t been preoccupied by buttons lately, the sight would have been arresting enough in this neighborhood, even more so at such a late hour and in such bad weather, and when the wearer of the expensively buttoned garment was being propelled through the streets by a scruffy dog on a string.

  “Oi!” Sam called, when he saw Hartley twice walk past the alley that led to the Bell. The dog was jumping and barking, and generally looked like he was going to have some kind of fit if Hartley didn’t turn where he was meant to.

  Hartley turned his head and spotted him. “Thank God,” he said, sagging with relief. “Did you know this dog can bay like one of the hounds of hell? When I left him outside my bedchamber door, I thought he’d wake the neighborhood. I put him at the foot of the bed—”

  Sam realized that the little bastard had gone back to Hartley for some more bread and cheese. “You put that—” he gestured at Dog, who was at least fifty percent filth at this point “—in your nice clean bed?”

  “I wanted to sleep! I would have shared my bed with half a dozen piglets if it meant an end to the racket.” A man gave Hartley an odd look, but he didn’t notice, and Sam bit back a smile. “I didn’t know which pub you worked at, or if you’d even be there, so I put the dog on a lead in the hope that he’d find his way home.”

  “It looks like it worked.”

  “Ha! No. This imbecilic mongrel has led me on an impromptu walking tour of what must be half of London. I’ve brought him to a dozen taverns in this neighborhood alone. It’s been quite the adventure.” He didn’t sound too put out, though. Even in the moonlight, Sam could see that Hartley was smiling despite his wet hair and muddy clothes.

  “I can take him from here,” Sam offered. Hartley didn’t quite flinch, but the smile momentarily dropped from his face. “I didn’t—”

  Hartley waved his hand imperiously, cutting Sam off. “Quite.”

  Sam wasn’t in the habit of turning away people who needed warmth and rest, certainly not people he was growing rather troublingly fond of. But Hartley seemed to accept as his due that he would be cast out, alone, into the cold. Sam knew he’d have to turn that over in his mind, but for now he only gestured at the small gap between buildings that w
ould bring them to the Bell. “Follow me,” he said. “If you think I’m sending you home without a pint of something to warm your way, you can guess again.

  To get to the Bell, you had to turn down a small street that ran somewhat perpendicular to Fleet Street, and from there you had to know where to look for the lane that led to the courtyard that fronted the Bell. Leading Hartley along this path, Sam wondered that they did any business at all. But the regulars knew the way, and that was good enough.

  When he opened the door, he was greeted by the sound of Kate’s laughter and the scent of hops, wood polish, and a bit of sawdust. These scents belonged to the Bell and it was disconcerting to have them mixed with Hartley’s cologne, or hair soap, or whatever it was he used that smelled like spring woods. He hesitated on the threshold, but he couldn’t keep Hartley standing in the cold and rain, so he stepped inside.

  Hartley looked around the way anyone did when entering a new place. Not disapproving, not inspecting, just getting the lay of the land. Sam feared that he was being measured and coming up short. Then Kate looked up from the table she was wiping—he would have to remind her that nobody was paying her to do that sort of work anymore—her face stern as if she were about to turn out a late-arriving patron. When she saw that it was only Sam, her face relaxed.

  When she caught sight of Hartley, she dropped the rag and ran to him.

  “Oh my God,” she said, staring. “Hart?”

  Hartley stared at her in return, his pale eyes wide and his hand clapped over his mouth. Then they sort of fell into one another’s arms. Sam started to warn Kate that Hartley didn’t care for being touched, but Hartley was hugging her back while they both laughed and cried. It seemed Sam didn’t need to perform an introduction.