A Gentleman Never Keeps Score

by Cat Sebastian

  “Well, good. Glad that’s settled.” Hartley climbed off Sam’s lap and bathed quickly, all the while conscious of Sam’s gaze on him, as hotly as his own gaze had been on Sam.

  Later, upstairs in bed, Hartley settled himself into the crook of Sam’s arm, and within a few moments Sam’s chest was falling and rising with the steadiness of a man fast asleep. Of course Sam was the kind of person who simply fell asleep. No tossing or turning or prolonged exercises in self-recrimination; no worrying about where to put his limbs in relation to his bedmate’s. If Hartley hadn’t been so fond of him he’d have been quite disgusted.

  At some point, Hartley must have fallen asleep, however, because he could hear the clanging of pans from downstairs, which meant it was afternoon and Sadie had returned. One of Sam’s huge arms was draped heavily across his chest, and he felt a rare peace of mind.

  Maybe that was why, after all these years, he finally let his thoughts drift to the room across the hall. He had hardly poked his head into his godfather’s bedchamber in the years he had been living here. Hartley’s memory supplied a dim vision of a large bed with dark velvet hangings, matching window curtains perpetually closed. Easterbrook had commissioned a small cabinet that was festooned with gilt and fashioned with a golden lock; it was in this exemplar of the old man’s terrible taste that Hartley’s portrait had been kept. Upon inheriting the house, Hartley had confirmed that the cabinet was empty, then promptly sent it to the auctioneer, along with all the pricier bits of furniture.

  He pulled the quilt up to Sam’s chin and slid out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb him, and hastily dressed. The door to Sir Humphrey’s room creaked as Hartley nudged it open, his hand sweaty on the latch. The curtains were drawn, letting in only the faintest slivers of wintry light. Hartley had no intention of poking about this room in the dark, so he pulled the curtains open, dislodging a cloud of dust and revealing a tangle of cobwebs, some still bearing ominous-looking shadows. He thought he could hear the skittering of tiny arachnid legs over cold glass, and shuddered to think that this had been only across the corridor from where he slept.

  Walking the perimeter of the room, he saw that, a piece of paneling had come loose. Some wood shavings were scattered atop the layer of dust that adorned the floorboards, suggesting that this damage was new, dating from after the departure of his servants. Around the edges of the panel were a few jagged marks. He shuddered, imagining the creature that had caused this damage. Spiders were bad enough, but mice were—he preferred not to think about mice, and the size of these marks indicated something rather more ambitious than a mouse. He’d call in the rat catcher first thing. But he didn’t want to leave the panel just hanging there. He still lived here, for God’s sake, and he wasn’t going to tolerate bits of his house wobbling about like loose teeth. Using the toe of one bare foot, he tried to press the panel back into place.

  Instead it fell off completely, landing on the floor in a cloud of dust, with a noise that seemed to echo in the quiet of the house. Behind the panel he expected to see exposed stonework or bricks or whatever the interior walls of houses such as these were made of. Instead there was a gap, a dark and shadowy emptiness.

  For a moment his mind reeled backward ten years, fifteen years, until he was in an entirely different house, an entirely different wall but with a similar gap. Then, Will and Martin had tried to convince him it was a priest’s hole, and when Hartley had pointed out that the Easterbrooks were not Catholic, they had insisted it must be a secret passageway leading to a medieval oubliette. That had been almost plausible, quite in keeping with what he might have expected from Easterbrooks of yore.

  This was no oubliette, no passageway of any kind. At closer range, he could see that the panel had been pulled roughly off the wall, not damaged by a hungry rodent. And there were only so many reasons a panel might be pulled off a wall. Biting his lip, Hartley stuck a hand into the darkness. His fingers met something coarse and yet almost slick in places. A tube? Some kind of pipe? He pulled it out and saw that it was a rolled-up canvas.

  There was no sound but the beating of his heart as he unrolled the canvas. Yes, this was one of the paintings that had once hung in the library. He remembered it well. A girl in a yellow wrap that was draped in such a way as to cover nothing of relevance. He didn’t think he had ever met her. In the shadowy recesses of the wall, he could see several other rolled canvases leaning against the exposed lath and plaster, and one small painting that still remained in its gilt frame.

  He reached into his pocket and found the knife he used to open letters and peel apples. Flicking it open, he knelt before the canvas. Best to get this over with. He slashed the canvas sufficiently that the girl would be unrecognizable. It took more effort than he had expected, this slicing of metal through layers of oil paint on thick canvas. His knife was a delicate thing, made for cutting nibs and trimming candles. It was hardly up to this task.

  “Hartley,” said a soft voice. He looked up to see Sam, wearing only his trousers, standing in the doorway. “Let me help.”

  “No. This is for me to do.” He didn’t want anyone to look at the pictures, even though he knew many of Easterbrook’s London callers must have seen them. He felt, somehow, responsible for seeing this through. “But do you have a knife? This is getting dull.”

  Wordlessly, Sam stepped out of the room, only to return a moment later with a much more utilitarian knife than Hartley’s pretty filigree one. It felt heavy and rough in his hand, but it got the job done.

  The next painting he unrolled was Kate’s. He had tried not to look at the subjects’ faces, because it seemed like an invasion of privacy, but he couldn’t help but notice that Kate looked like she had been having a jolly time as she reclined on the artist’s sofa. He really hoped she had been. He hoped all the women had a grand time, collected their money, and carried on with their lives, never sparing the paintings or Easterbrook another thought. But the painting had weighed on Kate, and he knew a furious satisfaction when he slid the knife through the rough surface of the canvas.

  “That’s Kate’s painting done,” he said when he started on the next canvas.

  “Thank you,” Sam murmured, leaning against the wall near the door, his arms folded across his broad chest. Hartley gave him a watery smile.

  “You can go back to bed,” Hartley managed. Sam only shook his head.

  When he removed the next canvas, he got a good look at the gilt frame. Carved into the bevels of the frame was a pattern of laurel leaves that he surely oughtn’t recognize after all this time. But of course he did, just as he recognized the bare arm painted on the exposed part of the canvas. He ought to abandon the painting he was defacing and move to that small frame. Instead he worked methodically, destroying one painting after the next, until he was kneeling in a drift of brightly colored bits of canvas, the knife handle digging painfully into his palm.

  Sam hadn’t known where he was when he woke up, but he knew Hartley ought to have been there. He slid his hand blindly across too-fine sheets and found only lingering warmth where Hartley’s body had recently lain. When he heard what sounded like a gasp, he threw on trousers and all but ran out of the room, driven by some silly instinct to keep his lover safe, expecting to find that Hartley had tripped over a loose bit of carpet or something.

  He hadn’t expected this. By the looks of things, neither had Hartley. Some other time he’d ask what had prompted Hartley to kick a hole in the wall, or done whatever it was to expose the paintings’ hiding place. But for now, he was just going to be here in case Hartley needed him.

  He watched as Hartley unleashed an efficient hell on those canvases. They were pretty thoroughly destroyed, all except one, which stood framed, inside the wall. Hartley glanced at the one surviving canvas, and Sam followed his gaze. It was a young man, little more than a boy, lying on a sofa, not a stitch of clothes on him. Yellow hair, pale greenish-gray eyes. Sam’s stomach lurched.

  Hartley had never said outright that one of the pai
ntings he wished to recover had himself as a subject, but Sam had suspected as much. Now that he saw the portrait, he knew that its revelation would have meant more than the public embarrassment of being caught without one’s clothes on. Sam looked away from the canvas, but not before noticing that whatever tricks the painter had used, he had made Hartley look like a—there was no way around it—like a whore. Nothing wrong with honest whoring, but when you were that young it wasn’t whoring. It was something altogether different. The bile rose in Sam’s gorge, and he knelt beside Hartley.

  Hartley leaned against Sam’s chest, the knife dropping from his hand. Sam wrapped his arms around Hartley and felt the smaller man sink against his chest, felt the rise and fall of his breathing. Only later did Sam take the knife and slice through the one remaining canvas until nothing was left but unrecognizable scraps.

  After they had built a fire and watched the remnants go up in flame, Sam looked hard at Hartley.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Oddly, yes,” Hartley said. “That was . . . a lot. It felt good, though. I feel good. But Sam, you realize what this means?”

  “That somebody went to a fair bit of trouble hiding the paintings in your own house. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “Well, there is that. But what I really want to know is what Philpott had in his cabinet.”

  Sam let out a whistle.

  “You know what,” Hartley went on, “I don’t want to know. I don’t care if he was conducting black masses or worshipping devils. I’m glad to be rid of him and everyone connected with the Easterbrooks. Somebody else can deal with that lot. I have my own life.” He settled against Sam’s chest as they watched the paintings burn.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  It was in the snug back parlor of the new premises that they formed a plan, Hartley making notes in his small feathery handwriting while Sam paced the dusty floor, listing what they’d need to buy and what they’d need to build. At first, Sam had only seen the ways it differed from the Bell—no polished counter, too many small rooms instead of one wide taproom, an old-fashioned sort of gallery looking down from the upper floor. But also absent was the back room: no blood stains on the floor, no ghosts of the ring. It was a bigger space, too, and there was room in the kitchens for Nick to have a helper and for Sadie’s cooking range to be brought from Brook Street.

  “We could do a supper from noon to four,” Nick said. They were gathered around a table for the first meal Nick had prepared in the new kitchen. “Like they do at the Crown and Sugar Loaf. Three shillings six, they charge.”

  “I’d pay six shillings for more of this mutton,” Hartley said, gesturing at his empty dish.

  “You would,” said Kate.

  “And there are those parlors upstairs for ladies who might not want to be seen in a public house,” Sadie pointed out. “Or for people who want to meet privately.”

  “Much nicer than the setup at the Cross Keys,” Alf chimed in from where he leaned against the chimneypiece, baby Charlotte in his arms.

  Sam was about to remark that they weren’t running a molly house, when Hartley cleared his throat. “Safer too.”

  Nick didn’t say anything, and Sam might have supposed that his brother had no idea what Alf and Hartley were talking about, but then Nick raised an eyebrow at Kate, and Sam realized his brother had to know. And it was fine—Nick hadn’t been angry or disgusted, he had simply raised an eyebrow and shot his wife a knowing glance. Sam thought he might have been underestimating his brother. After all, Nick had once said he’d gladly help Sam dispose of a body; perhaps accepting a love affair was not more to ask than covering up a murder.

  Later, when Nick and Kate had gone home to their rooms, Sadie had gone upstairs to put the baby to bed, and Alf had gone out, Sam and Hartley were left alone in the empty barroom.

  “I met with a new solicitor,” Hartley said. “After all is said and done, I’ll have about two thousand pounds left.”

  “Oh?”

  “And I don’t want it. I want to stand on my own feet. I’ve given five hundred pounds to Sadie, because it’s the sum she would have had as a dowry—an entirely inadequate dowry, I might add. Also, I signed the deed to the Brook Street house over to Ben, so he’ll get the proceeds from the sale.”

  Sam nearly choked on his beer.

  “It’s not that dramatic,” Hartley went on. “If I know Ben, he’ll spend the majority of it on urchins and stray animals, but he’ll keep the rest safe for a rainy day. So that means if Will or I ever fall on hard times, we’ll at least have that recourse. I know I said I wanted to stand on my own two feet, and you likely think being able to run to my brother is cheating, but—”

  Sam held up his hand. “I don’t think it’s cheating. I’d want you even if you were swathed in furs.” That was no more than the truth, but Sam was grateful Hartley had given up some of his wealth and status to join him on a more equal footing.

  Over the next fortnight, Sam realized that the new tavern was getting fixed up so quickly because somebody was greasing the wheels.

  “How much did you pay that glazier?” Sam asked Hartley. “When I talked to him, he said he couldn’t be bothered until Thursday next. But when I came in this morning, I find I have three new windows.”

  Hartley had been attempting to hang a picture, but he let the hammer fall to his side. He gave Sam a smile that might have looked sly if not for the plaster dust on the tip of his nose. “I didn’t pay him anything at all. If you want to know more you’re going to have to talk to Kate. And that’s all I’m going to say on that subject.” He closed his lips tightly and mimed turning a key in a lock.

  “I’ll have the truth out of you later,” Sam muttered.

  “I’ll bet you will.”

  Sam stepped out onto the street, ducking under a ladder that was propped against the side of the building. A freshly painted sign swung above the entrance. Instead of a picture of a bell, it bore a bright orange fox. The Fox, it read. And stenciled on the door were the words:

  The Fox

  Public House

  Samuel Fox, Publican

  It still felt both silly and more than a little prideful to name the place after himself, but his brother and Hartley had insisted that he was the main draw.

  He found Nick in the kitchen beside the old Bell, packing tankards and dishes into a battered old crate. “What’s this about the glazier?” Sam asked. He spotted the peeling paint on the wall and thought of something else. “And the paper hanger and plasterers.”

  Nick looked up from the crate. “Kate,” he called. “What day is it?”

  Kate appeared from the back room, where she was packing up tankards and dishes and anything that could be salvaged and moved to the Fox. “The twentieth of December.”

  “You owe me three bob,” Nick said.

  Kate looked at Sam. “Blast. I had bet you wouldn’t figure it out until Christmas.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Kate’s running a racket,” Nick said. “She’s got all the regulars pitching in whenever your back is turned.”

  “It’s not a racket,” Kate protested. “Not really, at least. But everybody wants the Bell—or the Fox, rather—to be up and running as soon as possible. The King’s Arms over in Popingjay Court has a nasty barman who pinches girls, and the Bull’s Head in Gough Square serves watered-down ale. But really, people miss one another. That’s what we all liked about the Bell, seeing one another, and seeing you.”

  Sam felt his face heat. “That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t explain about the workmen.”

  “Well, I was at a lying in for the glazier’s sister-in-law. Her husband is a paper hanger, and they’ve all been living together in a pair of rooms because last summer the brother-in-law fell off a ladder, broke his leg, and has been out of work since. So I told the glazier that we’d find work for his brother-in-law if he took care of the windows first thing.”

  “And the plasterer?”

  “Alf
ie did it, along with some help from Johnny Newton. Johnny was looking for work down at the wharves, which I suppose is a step up from picking pockets or whatever it was he was doing before. But his mother wanted him out of harm’s way, so he plastered and whitewashed the entire ground floor.”

  “How come I didn’t see any of this?”

  “It was meant to be a surprise,” Kate said. “Hartley kept you out of the way.”

  “Three bob, Mrs. Fox,” Nick said.

  She fished around in her pocket and slapped some coins onto the table. “That’s two and six. I’ll make up the balance in trade.” Then Kate laughed at her own joke while Nick stammered and Sam pretended not to understand, but as he walked back to the Fox he caught himself whistling.

  Empty of furnishings, the house on Brook Street seemed to have lost some of its power. The kitchen was stark and lacking without the big iron range, which Hartley had hired a man to cart off to the Fox. The shiny copper pots and pans were in crates by the door, along with the few belongings Hartley had packed up. He had been surprised by how little he wanted to take with him: a few changes of clothes, some fine linen sheets, a looking glass, a few odds and ends. Everything else had already been sent to the auctioneer.

  He had been prepared to spend the rest of his life in this house, among objects that had belonged to a life he hadn’t chosen. Now, a few weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, he had a chance to start fresh, a chance to live a life that meant something, a chance to let go of everything this house had once meant to him. Stripped to the floorboards, though, it was just a house. Nothing but bricks and wood and plaster. Memories didn’t live in a place, but in a person, and Hartley, now that he had a future, was at peace with his own past. Alf had said that the house was haunted, but it had been his own mind that was beset by dark spirits.

  As if to prove him wrong, there came a thumping sound from the attic. Hartley supposed some enterprising squirrels had decided to winter in one of the old box rooms. He decided to inspect the situation for himself, partly to prove to himself that he was above any base superstition.