by KJ Charles
“But it’s over anyway,” Edmund said, with an odd little laugh. “Don’t you see? I wanted Lugtrout dealt with, but it’s got worse and worse. He promised he’d deal with Lugtrout, and then he asked for more, and more, but the page never came, and then you started blackmailing me—”
“I did not!”
“No, he didn’t,” Rowley said. “Clem, I need to talk to his lordship. Would you step aside? For me? Clem, my star, please.”
Clem did not want to, not at all, but if he couldn’t trust Rowley now, he could never trust again. He stepped sideways, letting his brother’s gun point at his lover’s head.
Rowley came forward, close to Edmund, looking up. “Your lordship? It’s not over.”
“Of course it is.” Edmund sounded almost dreamy. “I thought, if I only had the page back—but now he’s turned on me and it will never end, it will never—”
“No, look,” Rowley said. “For a start, you’re right about me and Clem. We’d do ten years for unnatural offences, no question, so you’ve got something on us, to keep us quiet, so that’s fine, isn’t it? We won’t be able to talk. You were clever there. And Clem’s already sent you the page, so you can burn it when it arrives, right? So all you have to do is deal with the new blackmail business and you’re home and dry. See?”
Clem wasn’t sure what Edmund saw then, if anything at all, but his brother’s expression sharpened a little. Rowley had his attention.
“And look, your lordship, look at this,” Rowley went on. “It might make some sense to you. I got this off your man, he dropped it in the fog when he went for me. You want to see this.”
He slipped his hand in his pocket. Edmund leaned forward, lowering the gun a little, and Rowley—
Clem had never seen him move so fast. His free hand smacked the gun barrel sideways as the other came up from his pocket with vicious force. Blood flew, and the gun dropped from Edmund’s hand as he screamed. Clem recoiled, shocked, as Rowley kicked the gun swiftly under a chair and stood poised, a reddened blade gleaming in his hand.
“ ’My tools is very handy,’ ” he said through his teeth. “And very sharp. I think I got a tendon there, what do you reckon?”
Edmund’s mouth worked. His face was fish-white and he clutched his right hand with his left. Blood was dripping through his fingers.
“All this hurting people,” Rowley said. “Well, do what comes naturally, I say. Why don’t you fuck off before I skin you out through the mouth?”
They stared at each other. The blade in Rowley’s hand was tiny, no more than an inch and a half long, but it glittered with sharpness in the firelight. Edmund backed away, very slowly at first, then turned and fled, fumbling at the door, slamming it behind him. Clem and Rowley watched the doorway, frozen, and the front door shut with a bang.
“Well,” Rowley said. He put the little knife carefully on the desk. “Well.”
“He went out without his greatcoat,” Clem said. “He’ll catch his death. Oh God.”
Rowley walked into his arms, and then they were gripping each other so tightly it hurt, Rowley’s fists wound into Clem’s coat, and Clem wasn’t sure which of them was shaking more. He couldn’t think, couldn’t understand the full awful scope of what had happened here, couldn’t begin to imagine what would happen now. All he could see was Rowley, clutching his vicious little blade, and facing down a half-mad desperate man with a gun, for him.
“I love you,” he said into Rowley’s hair. “I love you so much. How are you so…here?”
“Don’t let go,” Rowley said urgently into his shirt front. “Christ alive, Clem, Clem. Did you see the fire?”
“The fire?”
“It burned blue.” Rowley twisted his head back to look up without moving away. “He put that stuff on the fire and it burned blue, and there’s a lot of things burn blue, but one of them is arsenic. If I hadn’t been watching through the crack in the door—” His voice was ragged. “I wanted to kill him. I could have cut an artery just then and I knew it and I didn’t care. I wanted—” He ducked his head again, shoulders heaving. Clem pulled him close, not finding a word to say, stroking his hair, until Rowley’s shaking stopped.
“God.” He wiped at his eyes and looked up again. “Sorry. Your own brother put a gun to your head, and I just did—that—and I’m the one crying on you.”
“Well, but I’m all right,” Clem said. “I’m all right because you were here.”
“Oh Jesus. All I could think of when I thought that man was going to kill me was you. All I could think of when your brother held a gun on you was that—that it would be all right, because if he shot you he’d have to shoot me as well and then it wouldn’t matter so much, you see, because I wouldn’t have to live in a world without you. I lived there for so long and it was miserable, and I didn’t know how miserable it was till you, and…I didn’t actually mean it would have been all right if he shot you. That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know.” Clem bit his lip. “I’m sorry you had to do that. I should have listened to you before.”
“He’s your brother. You should have been able to trust him.”
“But I can’t,” Clem said. “I’ll go to Inspector Ellis first thing tomorrow, and I’ll tell him everything. Edmund’s going to have to take the consequences. There’s no other choice.”
“Uh. Clem?”
“What is it?”
“He’s not exactly in his right mind. And not even he can think he can talk you out of pressing charges. I think you need to be prepared for him to, uh, do the decent thing. By which I mean, put an end to it. Fall in the river. Accident on purpose.”
Clem took that in. “You think…Yes, I see. It wouldn’t be very like him, but none of this is very like him. Or, rather, it’s all like him, but I never knew what he was like.”
“He never knew you. Christ, who knows anyone?” Rowley buried his face in Clem’s front again. “Who knows what bloody awful things people are capable of when—when—”
“I know you,” Clem said. “I know that you don’t like arguing with me because you’re frightened of what you might do, not of what I might do. I know you’re worrying right now I’ll be afraid or disgusted, or start thinking you’re like your father as soon as I think about what you did. You idiot.” Rowley made a stifled noise. Clem tugged him tighter. “No, but honestly, Rowley. I love you, and I know you, and if you’re expecting me to be upset because you stabbed my brother, you can think again. You saved my life. My preserver.”
“You saved mine. Oh God,” Rowley said into his shoulder. “How are you all right?”
“Because of you.”
“No, but…He tried to kill you. Your brother.”
“I know. I don’t think I believe it yet, not really. Once it sinks in I’ll probably wake up screaming.” He tried to say it as a joke, knew it wasn’t. “Will you stay with me? Tonight, I mean.”
“I’ll stay as long as you want me,” Rowley said. “However long that is. There’s nowhere else in the world I want to be while you want me to be here.”
“That might be a very long time,” Clem said. “If you leave it up to me, it might not be far from always.”
“Well, you know me.” Rowley looked up at him with the faintest shadow of a smile. “I like to wait.”
—
Clem didn’t wake up screaming, but that was as much as could be said for the night. They lay in bed together, entwined for comfort and the illusion of safety, but neither could sleep. Rowley’s mind would not stop running through the horrors of the day—the attack, the growing, nauseating awareness of something terribly wrong as Edmund shouted at Clem, the tension as he’d dressed in silence to be ready for something, and the stealthy movements of a man tipping powder into his lover’s drink.
Fucking Edmund Taillefer. He’d better have killed himself, or Rowley intended to make him wish he had.
If he could. If Edmund didn’t somehow use his power and influence to find a way out of this, if he didn’
t somehow use what he knew of Clem and Rowley against them, if he didn’t reconcile with his henchman Spim…So Rowley lay awake and fretting next to Clem’s warm silence, until the reaction set in a couple of hours later. Rowley heard a stifled gasp, and a sob, and he wrapped his arms around his love, helpless to do anything but hold him and whisper useless words as Clem confronted his brother’s hatred alone in the night.
But at least he was alone with Rowley. At least Rowley could hold him and tell him he was safe, and wonderful, and beloved. It was all they had against the darkness, and maybe it was enough.
They were both miserably tired the next morning, waking to the reality of shards of china on the floor and in the fireplace, and a gun under the chair. Neither wanted breakfast; both ate in silence as the other lodgers chatted, fuelling themselves for the inevitability of the trip to the police station. At least the fog was lifting.
“For now,” Mr. Rillington said over his kipper. “It’ll be back soon, and thicker. Mark my words.”
There was a rap on the door and Elsie came in, bobbing. “Mr. Talleyfer? Visitor for you in the parlour.”
Clem looked startled. “Visitor? Is it the police?”
“Should it be?” asked Mr. Power, with a comical lift of the brows.
“It’s a Mr. Taillefer,” Elsie said, with a slightly confused look. “Mr. Timothy Taillefer. He says he’s got bad news.”
Clem insisted Rowley should come with him, and introduced him to his cousin Tim. He was a very pleasant-looking fellow of Clem’s age, fair-haired and blue-eyed, but Rowley could see a resemblance in the cousins’ expressions and demeanour that hinted at their relationship, and the warm greeting they exchanged said everything about their friendship.
“Rowley knows all about Edmund’s business,” Clem said, after introducing him. “More than you do, Tim, I suspect. So, did he kill himself then?”
Tim looked a little startled at that blunt question. “He did, yes, if you mean Edmund. I’m afraid he shot himself last night. How did you know?”
“He didn’t fall in the river?”
“N-no. Were you expecting him to?”
“We weren’t expecting him to shoot himself,” Rowley said. “Are you sure about that?”
“I saw the body,” Tim said mildly. “It wasn’t pretty.”
“No, but…” Rowley glanced at Clem. “The thing is, I sort of stabbed him in the wrist last night—”
“Oh, that was you, was it? The police are wondering. Er, why?”
“And I’d swear I cut a tendon,” Rowley finished in a hurry. “I don’t see how he’d use that hand. Or did he use his left?”
“The gun was in his right hand,” Tim said. “Going back to why you stabbed him…”
They told him the story, all except the personal parts. Tim listened to the whole thing mostly in silence, with a few incredulous exclamations, and at the end drew a deep breath. “Well. He had good reason to end it, then. What a damned thing. What a terrible mess to have made. And poor Peter, too.”
“What can we do about that?”
“Nothing,” Tim said firmly. “For one, you still need to give this story to the police. It makes no difference that Edmund’s dead. Your lodger fellow’s dead too and Rowley here could have been killed, let alone you, Clem. The treacherous old buzzard. Er, whether you tell the police that part is up to you, of course. But in any case I don’t propose to play into a blackmailer’s hands by lying for Peter’s sake when the fact is he’s got no right to inherit.”
Clem made a face. “I know. But I’m sorry for him.”
“I’m sorry for the father he had,” Tim said. “Edmund was a rotten husband, and a rotten father to do this to his son, and, since we’re on the subject, an utterly rotten brother too. Not to speak ill of the dead and all that, but the way he treated you was a disgrace. Not that Phineas will be any better when it comes to his turn, but at least he doesn’t go round assassinating his relatives like an Ottoman sultan. Honestly, what a thing to do. Edmund must have been quite mad. Thank God you saw what he was up to, Rowley. I say, it really is a stroke of luck that you lodge here.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Rowley said, as neutrally as he could.
“Yes.” Clem shot Rowley a smile. Just a normal, unexceptional smile, nothing to get excited about, but the curve of his lips and the warmth in his eyes promised a world just for the two of them, and did quite extraordinary things to Rowley’s heart. “You know, I think so too.”
Epilogue
They met up with the others in the Jack and Knave a few days later, when it was all over but the shouting.
“The police aren’t sure about Edmund’s wrist wound,” Rowley told them. “I’d nicked his tendon, it turned out, but so far the surgeons can’t decide if that would have stopped him holding the gun. One says probably yes, another says probably no. The servants weren’t aware of any intruder or visitor in the house, although the mews door was unbolted. And he did have every reason to shoot himself, after all. I don’t know. I just…Well.”
“What’s on your mind?” Mark asked. “You think Spim shot Edmund?”
“I wouldn’t say think. It’s absurdly far-fetched, I know,” Rowley said. “I just, somehow…I would have put money his right hand wouldn’t have been any great use, that’s all.”
“What bothers me is the house,” Clem said.
Nathaniel looked at him, eyebrows raised. Rowley sighed. “We just wondered, in a fog like that, why would he walk all the way back to Haymarket to end it when he had the river at hand?”
“An easier way out, or at least a more comfortable one?” Mark suggested. “Perhaps he wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“I suppose.” Rowley didn’t like to think about Edmund’s last hours, no matter how much the swine had deserved them, and certainly the man had been trapped by the demons he’d raised, racked with fear and guilt. Still, it nagged at him. “Oh, I don’t know. I told the police, so it’s up to them now. And truly, I can’t see why Spim would want to kill Edmund. He could have testified to what Spim did, I suppose, but so could Clem and I, and nobody’s tried to kill either of us for the best part of a week.”
“Amazing,” Nathaniel said. “You must be bored rigid.”
“Yes, it’s been dreadfully dull.”
It had not been dull. It had been fragile and nerve-wracking and wonderful and alarming as the new reality of lives that might be lived together, the possibilities of the future, sank in for both of them. Rowley saw the smile in Clem’s eyes, smiled back at him. Mark made a noise of mild disgust.
“Oh, leave them be,” Nathaniel said.
“Billing and cooing. Spare me.”
“Shut up. What about the boy, Clem?” Nathaniel looked much as he had on their last meeting, with dark-ringed, exhausted eyes. “And her ladyship? Is she disputing the evidence of the register?”
“Not at all, no. She wasn’t precisely happy, but it does mean that she’s free to do as she wishes, for herself and Peter. She’s taken him out of Eton, which he hated, to live with her. And also apparently she’s had a, um, a long-term admirer, a Swiss gentleman, for some time. Her family wouldn’t allow her to marry him in the first place, which may be part of the reason she and Edmund didn’t get along very well, but now she’s a widow, or possibly an unwed mother, so she’s going to take Peter to Switzerland whatever her family may say. Tim says it’s a jolly good thing she’s got an alibi for Edmund’s death, she’s so pleased about it.”
“Good Lord,” Nathaniel said. “Can I use that for the paper?”
“Not the last bit,” Clem said hastily.
“And your uncle whatsit is claiming the title, is he?” Mark asked.
“Desmond. Yes, he’s the earl now. The lawyers are still poking at it all, but since it’s clear Edmund didn’t have an heir—”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “About that.”
Rowley glanced at Clem. Nathaniel spoke for them all when he said, “What do you mean, ‘about that’?”
“Well. Emmeline Godfrey married Edmund in secret, right? And he abandoned her not long after the wedding night, and then she upped sticks and vanished, right?”
“Right,” Rowley said cautiously.
“Anyone wonder why she had to go off like that? Away from her family and her employment to hide a marriage nobody knew about?”
“What are you leading up to?” Nathaniel asked.
Mark turned over the folded newspaper he’d arrived with. There was a ring around an advertisement. “This.”
Clem, Rowley, and Nathaniel leaned forward at once, and read.
REWARD
A reward of £20 is offered for information that assists in the location of
REPENTANCE and REGRET GODFREY, aged 23, originally of Norfolk.
Offspring of Emmeline Godfrey.
Contact E.P. at Box 2018.
“Repentance and Regret?” said Clem. “What sort of names are those to give children? The poor things. The poor woman.”
“Twins, I suppose,” said Rowley. “And twenty-three. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“But if this is genuine…” Nathaniel picked up the paper. “Good Lord, you do see what this suggests? If this is true, and if one or both of these absurd names belongs to a boy—”
“Then Clem’s got a new head of the family,” Mark said. “And somewhere out there is a brand-new earl.”
—
To be continued…
For Michele Howe, with thanks and twirling
Acknowledgments
It never ceases to amaze me how generously people give of their time, knowledge, and expertise. I’d like to thank my advance readers for their kindness and their invaluable assistance: Eddie Clark, Dr. Anand Patel, Michele Howe, D. C. Williams, Rebecca Jansen, and Susie. You lot made all the difference and I appreciate it more than I can say.
I relied heavily on the work of Dr. Pat Morris in learning about Victorian taxidermy. His A History of Taxidermy is a fascinating and wonderfully illustrated read. I based Rowley’s dragon on Dr. Morris’s reconstruction of Charles Waterton’s technique in the magnificently titled Charles Waterton and His Eccentric Taxidermy.