This room was empty too. Gone was the old-fashioned clothes press, white with gilt leaves painted on the edges. Gone was the spindle-legged writing table where he had penned cheerful letters home, assuring his brothers that he was having a jolly time with the toffs. Even the bed was gone. It ought to have been comforting to see that the room held nothing to remind him of his past, but instead it was disorienting. His memories became unmoored from reality and took on the cast of a troubled dream.
“You all right?” That was Sam, always checking on him.
“Not really, no.” He could have lied, could have said that he was perfectly well, that being in this house meant he was one step closer to getting what he wanted and that he was glad of it. But his heart was racing, his hands sweating inside his gloves, and he didn’t have the wherewithal to put up a front.
“I hear footsteps,” Sam hissed. “Someone’s here.”
Hartley heard the sound too. Footsteps upstairs, almost directly over his head. “You have time to leave, if you’re quick,” he whispered. “Leave the way we came. I’ll meet you back at the inn.” He could talk his way out of trouble with a caretaker or groundskeeper, he was certain of it. Failing that, he had brought enough money to make up a handsome bribe.
“Hartley, no. This house is empty. There are no paintings. We both need to get out of here.” Sam’s voice was an urgent whisper. “It could be a madman with a pistol. A gang of smugglers. You don’t know who’s been using this place. Come with me. Now.”
“Go. Please. I’ll be fine.” Surely he didn’t need to explain why Sam wouldn’t be safe. “Please,” he repeated.
“I’m not leaving you here, damn it.”
The footsteps were on this floor now, approaching them. Heavy footsteps. Boots, most likely. “It’s too late.” Hartley searched the room. “Get over there,” he said, gesturing to the curtains that covered a large window.
“Sod this all.” Sam sounded furious, but he got behind the curtains.
Hartley’s hands had stopped sweating and his heart had slowed down. He was much more at ease than he had been when they entered the room, far more at ease than he might have imagined he could be when about to be discovered midfelony. He patted the knife that he had brought with him to destroy the paintings. He’d wait for the footsteps to pass, and then he’d go room by room until he found the canvases.
The footsteps fell silent. Hartley was about to step out of the room and peer into the corridor when he saw the shadow in the doorway.
Chapter Thirteen
There was a gap between the curtains, just a hair’s breadth, but through it Sam could see Hartley. The man in the doorway remained frustratingly just out of view. For a moment the small cramped space turned into a corner of a boxing ring; the pounding of his heart and the rush of blood in his head became the cries and jeers of the crowd. Sam realized it was because he was ready to knock that stranger’s teeth out—his own bloodlust on Hartley’s behalf had put him back in the ring.
Sam remembered his da telling him to imagine that his opponent was someone who had done him wrong. But even when the other boxer repeated one of the uglier phrases shouted by the crowd, Sam didn’t want to strike him. Because if he started hitting everyone who looked down on him because of his race or his class, he’d wind up going on some kind of spree. And he knew men who had done exactly that. There were plenty of people all too ready to raise a hand for the wrong reasons, and Sam didn’t want to be one of them.
Despite all this, despite his loathing for violence and his relief to have done with that part of his life, if the man in the doorway took a single step closer to Hartley, Sam knew he would do whatever it took to keep Hartley safe, consequences be damned.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t furious at Hartley for not having left when Sam told him to. Now Sam was risking his safety, maybe even his life, to keep an eye on Hartley. No man was worth this kind of danger. If Sam were arrested for housebreaking, his family would never get over it. And if Hartley’s name was as much a byword for scandal as he claimed, then Sam could imagine what kind of construction would be put on today’s events. His family would never live it down. All the work he had put into the Bell would have been for naught. It wasn’t healthy to care enough about someone to want to take that kind of risk.
But as Sam watched, his heart was pounding so loudly it seemed a wonder that Hartley and the other man couldn’t hear it, Hartley’s expression shifted from tense watchfulness to bewildered relief.
“Will?” he asked. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“Really?” The other man sounded exasperated, rather than upset. “Pretty sure that’s my line, Hart.” Sam wasn’t sure who this Will was, but it seemed that he and Hartley knew one another well.
“I’m here to destroy some paintings,” Hartley said with a shrug.
“Paintings,” the other man repeated, sounding confused. Sam gathered that Will didn’t know what kind of paintings Hartley was searching for. “I won’t ask why. I’ll assume you break into places whenever the spirit moves you. And maybe you do, for all I know. But you can see for yourself that this house doesn’t have anything in it. I’ve been over it with a fine-tooth comb.”
“Why are you here, Will?” Hartley asked.
There was a silence that lasted a few beats too long. “I’m looking for Martin.”
Hartley’s sharp intake of air was loud in the empty room. “I should have guessed. I thought you had gotten past that. After what he did to me, I thought—well, never mind.”
“Jesus. Why will you not listen to reason about this?” Will’s frustration made it clear this was a topic they had discussed many times. “He’s not responsible for what his father did.”
“He exposed me, Will. That was his own doing.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! His father’s reputation was the last thing he had. Why would he throw that away? He has nobody, Hart. He’s alone. He doesn’t have anyone who cares about him, and he never has.”
“Except you,” Hartley interjected, his mouth curling into a sneer.
“I’m looking for him because I’m afraid he’s done something stupid.”
“I hope he has.” Hartley’s voice dripped with venom.
“We can’t see eye to eye there,” Will said. “I can’t find him. And he’s all alone. Hartley, he has nobody, and you have so many people if you only looked around.”
Hartley gave a bitter laugh. “I haven’t had a single caller at my house in months.” Sam felt Hartley’s words like a slap. He had suspected that he didn’t count as anything in Hartley’s life, not as a visitor, not as a friend, certainly not as anything more; he was a bit of rough trade, and now he was hearing it for himself. This was the man Sam had been willing to risk his neck for.
“You have Ben and Percy and Lance, which you might know if you ever bothered to answer their letters. Ben is worried sick. And I suspect you also have whoever the fellow is in the window.”
Sam had to give Hartley credit; he didn’t even glance in the direction of the window. He was a born deceiver, and it made Sam smile inwardly despite his sense of betrayal. Hartley raised his eyebrows. “Back at the opium, are you?” And there it was, more of that casual cruelty in Hartley’s voice. Sam hardly knew how to reconcile that coldness with the kind words and gentle touches they had shared last night.
Sam could hear Will suck in a breath. “I see that we’re done here. I’m leaving. Call on me in London, Hart. I miss you.”
Hartley didn’t respond to that. Sam waited until the footsteps had died away before shoving the curtains aside, feeling like a fool. But Hartley was now sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up and his head cradled in his arms, and Sam couldn’t stop himself from crouching beside him, wrapping his arm around Hartley’s shoulders, offering whatever comfort he could.
“I’m getting you out of this house,” Sam growled, pulling Hartley to his feet. “And then we’re talking.” He made it sound like a threat, but Hartley was t
oo worn out to complain; besides, he liked the feel of Sam’s arm around his shoulders as they left the bedroom.
The sun was high in the sky when they stepped outside. Somehow it was only noon. Hartley winced at the light; he felt as though he had spent hours in the dusty shadows of Friars’ Gate, but it couldn’t have been more than ninety minutes.
“That was your brother?” Sam asked when they reached the edge of the woods where they had left the hamper from the inn.
“One of them. I have a lot of brothers.”
“He must be one you’re not particularly close with, I suppose, seeing as how you’ve never mentioned him and he’s mates with your godfather’s son?”
“We’re close.” Hartley sat on the ground, not caring about the state of his trousers. “Or, we were.” When had things gone so drastically wrong? It had been two weeks since he had seen Will, and they lived in the same city.
Sam sat beside him, leaning his back against a tree. He didn’t angle himself toward Hartley or place his hand palm up beside him. He didn’t do any of the things that silently let Hartley know that touching was an option, should Hartley be so inclined. Hartley hadn’t realized how much he depended on this silent conversation of unspoken questions until it was absent. Sam’s body was oddly rigid against Hartley’s, and he didn’t know why. He supposed he had bungled something, stepped on Sam’s toes, said something unfeeling. Somewhere along the way, Hartley had lost the knack for friendship, if he had ever had it to begin with. He thought of the pile of letters on his desk, thought of how he had just treated Will with deliberate callousness.
He took a long drink from the jug of brown ale that the innkeeper’s wife had tucked into the picnic basket. “I’ll visit my godfather’s solicitor,” Hartley said. “He must know something.”
“About what?”
“The paintings,” Hartley answered, holding out the jug to Sam. “Isn’t that what we were talking about?”
Sam shook his head and waved away the offer of ale. “Forget about the paintings. You don’t know where they are and you’re not going to get them back.”
So, it was you now instead of we. Hartley put the stopper back in the bottle. “I thought you wanted Kate’s painting.” Hartley’s voice sounded small and peevish.
“I did, but not anymore. Kate would have my hide if she knew what we just did.”
“That’s fine,” Hartley said. “I can manage it on my own.”
Sam made a sound of frustration. “Are you going to spend the rest of your life alone in your grand house, scheming to get those paintings back? You’re what, two and twenty?”
“Three and twenty.”
“Do you have any reason to think you won’t live for another half century? Are you going to spend all that time alone in your house?”
“I want to go away,” Hartley said, the idea occurring simultaneously to the words leaving his mouth. “I’ve never been to Paris. Or really anywhere at all.” During the past two days away from London he felt as if a weight had been removed from his chest. He wasn’t certain exactly what he wanted to run away from, only that the prospect of doing so was soothing. “Would you come with me? Someplace warm, perhaps.” A terrible idea, an utter fantasy. But he could imagine weeks and months of lazy picnics with Sam, nothing to do but amuse themselves and explore one another. He wanted that daydream of a future more than he had wanted anything in a long while. “Italy,” he said, remembering how he had once meant to run off to a place with blue seas and cheap wine.
“I can’t afford to bugger off to Europe,” Sam said slowly.
“I’d pay your way, naturally,” Hartley said quickly.
Sam regarded him with an expression that Hartley couldn’t quite decipher. “I have the Bell.”
“You could hire someone to cover while you’re gone.” Hartley looked eagerly up into Sam’s face, and was perplexed not to see answering enthusiasm. “I’d pay for that too.” He didn’t have unlimited funds, but surely money went farther on the Continent than it did in England, which was why people were always running off there. He would have to figure out how that worked.
“It’s not that simple.”
Hartley couldn’t see why not, but he nodded anyway. “No, no, of course not. I thought you might like a break.”
“A break?” Sam repeated the words as if they were an insult. “I earn my keep. I do my job. I have a place in the world, even though there are plenty of people who don’t want me to have that much. And that place is the Bell. That’s where my life is. There’s Nick and Kate, my aunts and cousins and everybody else. It’s where I do some good.” He said those last words with a ferocity Hartley had never heard from him. “And you want me to walk away from it, as if none of that matters to me. It sure as hell doesn’t matter to you.”
“Of course it—”
“And all that when not an hour ago you told your brother nobody had visited you in months. Either you like lying or you don’t count me as a person.”
Hartley froze. “Of course I count you as a person. When I said visitors, I meant—” Too late, he realized he had no way to end the sentence that didn’t put Sam into a different category of person than himself. “I meant ladies and gentlemen, all right?” Hartley was a gentleman, however loose his upbringing, however disgraced his current status. Sam wasn’t. “I meant people from my old life.” The people who gave him the cut direct when they passed in the street.
“You meant your equals, which I’m not. True enough.” Sam’s usually warm, open features were closed and hard. He was angry. And Hartley had earned that anger. Really, he ought to be accustomed to being the object of contempt or disdain, but there were some things a person couldn’t get used to. And some sad, pitiful part of him had been so glad that Sam liked him despite knowing what a mess he was.
Hartley sighed, resigned. He pulled his gloves out of his pocket and began tugging them onto his hands. “I don’t know what to say to that,” he said, smoothing the soft leather over his fingers, carefully fastening the buttons. He didn’t know what Sam wanted to hear, but he had a sinking feeling that whatever it was, he couldn’t say it.
“Listen, Hartley, I don’t want to spend time with people who don’t count me as their equal.”
“I do! You are!” Hartley protested. He clenched his gloved hands in his lap.
“When you told Will that nobody had visited you, it sounded like you meant it.”
“Honestly, Will isn’t even my social equal, so I don’t know what you’re going on about.” Hartley felt Sam’s body go rigid beside him.
“Jesus, Hartley.” Sam was on his feet now. “Let’s go back to the inn.”
Every spot on Hartley’s body where they had been touching now felt like it had been plucked bare. He rubbed his side. “I didn’t mean—”
“I’d stop,” Sam snapped. “You’re not going to make it better.”
Hartley half wanted to admit that while he had spent his entire adulthood as a gentleman, despite being all too conscious that he hadn’t come by that designation properly, he now doubted what that status was even worth. It certainly wasn’t doing him any good. The only people he spoke to these days were Alf, Will, Kate, and Sam. All were decidedly not gentry.
But Sam had already started toward the inn, the picnic basket hefted in one strong arm. They walked back in silence.
Chapter Fourteen
Hartley had been prepared to retreat to the house on Brook Street and lick his wounds. He had no reason to leave; he had surprisingly excellent meals brought to him regularly and he subscribed to a lending library, so perhaps he’d simply spend the remainder of his three score and ten as a hermit. At the back of his mind he suspected that most recluses either enjoyed solitude or found it spiritually fulfilling, whereas Hartley, having grown up in a busy household and seldom even having a bedchamber to himself until he moved into this house, found solitude somewhat disturbing. Silence let his mind swarm with unwanted thoughts; solitude filled the room with the difficulties of his
own flesh.
He tried to tell himself that it was for the best that Sam keep away, that this estrangement would save Sam from exposure and ruin. But this knowledge was not as sustaining as he had hoped, and he had to admit that he would rather have Sam’s company than his safety. When Sunday came and went without Sam’s knock on the door, Hartley was dismayed rather than satisfied.
He maintained his habit of long walks, timing them to even more improbable hours of the early morning and late afternoon, wishing to avoid any attention at all. Every pair of eyes saw through his fine clothing and recognized him for the shallow, hurtful person he truly was, so it was best that nobody see him at all. He returned from one of these walks to find Sadie sobbing in the kitchen and Alf apologizing for the fact that there would be no dinner.
“It’s my fault,” Alf said.
“That’s right it is,” Sadie said in between sobs.
Hartley was about to make himself scarce, when the light caught Alf’s face and he remembered he was dealing with two very young people. They were both about eighteen, and while Hartley wasn’t so much older, he was at least out of that fraught period of adolescence. Both, effectively, were children, and he was the only responsible adult they had.
“Let’s not worry about dinner,” he said. “But what’s the matter?”
“There were some blokes at the market,” Alf said. “One of them needed to be punched in the jaw and so that’s what I did.”
“But now where am I supposed to do the marketing?” Sadie asked. “I certainly can’t go back there. I’ll have to walk all the way to Fleet Market and that’s no small matter with my feet all swollen like this.” She held out one booted leg.
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