“I don’t know why you say that,” Richard said stiffly.
“My dear fellow, it is not a criticism. Every Elizabeth needs a Walsingham to effect the tasks beneath her dignity. The monarch in state and the spymaster behind the scenes.”
“I understand you mean to be offensive,” Richard said. “I’m not sure why.”
“For once, I don’t. I simply observe that you and Cyprian are—how may I put this?—a unity. A chimera? A being in two parts anyway.”
“That can hardly be the case since he no longer works for me.”
“True, except in the small detail that he is working round the clock for you now.”
“That’s different.”
“People always say that, you know,” Julius observed. “And yet, somehow, it never is. Here we are.”
They walked together up to the door of Quex’s. It was held open by a liveried footman, who gave a deep bow. “Begging your pardon, Lord Richard, but Mr. Shakespeare requests a moment of your time.”
Richard exchanged a glance with Julius and nodded. By the time the footman had relieved them of coats, canes, and hats, Shakespeare was in the hall.
The majordomo of Quex’s was a serious-looking man, well built, with the air of quiet dignity that marked the best servants; if he had not been the darkest-skinned black man Richard had ever met, he could have been a butler in an excellent house by now. Then again, according to David, Shakespeare and his partner Quex thrived on the house they ran for Richard’s benefit. It was a club, the deepest of gambling hells for men who chose to play as Francis did, and a place the Ricardians’ secrets could be kept. Richard had indicated what he wanted; David had found Quex and Shakespeare to create it. Yet another of those tasks beneath Richard’s dignity.
He pushed that thought away. “Shakespeare.”
“My lord. May I ask you to accompany me to the private rooms?”
Shakespeare led the way. He gave a single rap on the door and pushed it open.
A man was sitting by the fire. He looked around as they came in, and Richard felt a sudden lurch of eerie, unsettled half familiarity, as though he had lived through this before. In fact, he had. Six months ago, he had walked into this room to find Dominic sitting in that chair with the first stages of a spectacular black eye. Now the bruised man in the chair was David.
The memory came and went in half a second, and then Richard was over by the fire. He would have dropped to his knees by the chair, but David rose too quickly.
“What the devil happened?” Richard demanded instead, and heard his voice ring off the walls.
David put a hand up to his own face without touching it. His skin was paler than usual and marred by an ugly red mark and a nasty split over the cheekbone. “Lord Maltravers hit me.”
Richard wasn’t sure what he said to that. He felt nothing but the urgent need to get Maltravers’s throat in his hands, followed, some uncertain time later, by the awareness that Julius and Shakespeare were both hanging on to his arms.
“My lord!” David had darted around and was in front of Richard, hands out. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does!” Richard wrenched his arm out of Julius’s hold, since Shakespeare was not to be dislodged. “God rot it, David, I did not ask you to endure this indignity! What the devil—”
“Let him tell us,” Julius suggested. “Cyprian, I have spent years being offensive to Lord Maltravers without effect. I should dearly love to provoke him to strike me. Do share your methods.”
“It’s easy, Mr. Norreys,” David said. “Just be unable to hit back.”
There was a very slight shake to his voice. Richard wanted more than anything to hold him, to wrap his slim frame in warmth and tell him Lord Maltravers would not touch him again. He clenched his fists.
“Yes, I see.” Julius sounded rather detached, in the way he did when he was very angry. “Of course it is. I beg your pardon.”
Richard extended a hand toward David’s darkening skin and pulled it back before he could touch. “Has someone cleaned that?”
“Will did. He’s very handy.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, truly. It wasn’t—pleasant but no harm done.” David put his hand to his face and winced. His slim, work-hardened fingers were trembling.
He was a valet, not a ruffian or a gentleman with the leisure to spar at Cribb’s or fence at Angelo’s, and the anger fizzed in Richard’s blood. “This is a damned outrage. What the devil was he about?”
David gave a rueful smile. “I provoked him.”
“That is not an excuse—” Richard began, and then saw the look in David’s eyes. “Do you mean on purpose? You wanted him to hit you?”
“I underestimated how hard he’d do it. My mistake. It may be to the good anyway.”
“I want to know what you’ve been up to,” Richard said firmly. “In detail.”
“I’ll tell you when Mr. Frey and Lord Gabriel arrive. It’s a long story.”
Dominic and Ash came in a few minutes later. They took their seats with startled glances at David’s appearance. Richard stood by the fire watching. He could almost see the patches on the rug where they had fucked that night, where David had claimed him and marked the room forever. He couldn’t believe the others didn’t know it simply by being there.
“Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” David said. “I went today to secure the post of valet to Lord Maltravers.”
“What?” Richard said explosively.
“I made him believe that I was your disaffected servant. He wanted to hear secrets about your lordship’s household and friends, something that would help him in his attack on Lord Gabriel and Silas. He engaged me on the spot—”
“What? Engaged?”
David winced. “I signed a contract.”
“Oh God, no, don’t do that,” Ash said urgently. “He’s a brute. Well, you found that out.”
“You contracted yourself to Lord Maltravers?” Richard asked. “Under law?”
“I needed to be plausible, my lord. I could not approach him for a post and then disappear, especially if a letter was to go missing. He could destroy my professional reputation if he accused me of being a thief.”
Richard opened his mouth to assure David he would never lack for employment but caught himself in time. “No, I see that would not do. But you cannot mean to work for the damned fellow. And why did he hit you?”
“I allowed him to think that I would give him incriminating gossip on Silas, and Lord Gabriel, and you,” David said. “I refused to answer questions until I was engaged with a contract. I made him increase the offered salary two and a half times as well.”
“My God,” Ash said. “That’s not a good idea. Mal hates being bargained with.”
“Yes, Lord Gabriel. I was trying to make him angry.” The cut on his cheek had opened again while he spoke. Richard pulled out his handkerchief and handed it over. David took it, glancing at the fine linen with a tiny twitch of a brow. Richard felt a sudden guilt at the thought that David would be getting the blood out of the cloth himself, then remembered that of course he would not.
“He had the contract of employment drawn up there and then,” David went on. “As soon as I signed, he began to interrogate me about what I knew.”
“Dare we ask what you told him?” Julius murmured.
“That Lord Gabriel—I beg your lordship’s pardon—had made a nuisance of himself with a maidservant who had feared she was with child, but wasn’t. That Mr. Webster is considered to gamble unwisely. Also, that Mr. Mason used to be a radical and Mr. Harry had worked with him in a political bookshop. He did not appear to feel any of that information was worth the salary.”
“I’m not surprised.” Dominic was grinning broadly. “That should teach him to buy a pig in a poke.”
“His lordship was not pleased,” David agreed.
“I bet,” Ash said. “What happened?”
“He asked me some leading questions, your lordship, about you
and Mr. Webster, about Mr. Mason and the Cato Street raid, and then about Lord Richard.” David flicked a glance at Richard. “He demanded to know about your personal, uh, irregularities, my lord. He…speculated.”
Richard could feel the blood rising in his cheeks. He knew very well that Ash had laid that lure under David’s direction, but the knowledge did nothing to stem his sense of outrage.
“I made him spell out what he wanted me to say until he was quite furious,” David went on. “It lowered his opinion of himself, you see, to admit to what he wanted, and Lord Maltravers does not like to have a low opinion of himself. And once he was very angry indeed, I told him I would not say any of it, and that was when he hit me. Several times. And then he, uh, he reached for a stick, and I ran from the house.”
“I am going to kill him,” Richard said. “I will kill him.”
“Don’t hesitate on my account,” Ash said. “I am so sorry, Cyprian.”
“Let’s direct our indignation into whatever Cyprian’s next step is,” Julius suggested. “Since he is building a perfectly serviceable hell for his lordship already. What is our next move?”
“A moment,” Richard said. “Cyprian, you will oblige me by speaking to my lawyer about this contract with Maltravers. He is to be ready to deal with it as soon as you give the word. And if you go back to that man’s establishment, I shall break his neck with my own hands, and be damned to your plans. Understood? Then carry on.”
“Thank you, my lord.” David sounded very demure. “The next move is to retrieve the letter.”
“You know where it is?” Ash demanded, sitting bolt upright.
“I have an idea.” David took the bloodstained handkerchief from his face. “Lord Maltravers told you it was in safekeeping. I think that’s true. Certainly he was not concerned about allowing me unsupervised in his house. And, gentlemen, if you had a crucial letter that your opponent would be desperate to retrieve, would you leave it in Lord Maltravers’s possession?”
“Well, no,” Julius said. “I doubt Lord Maltravers would see it that way.”
“No, but Mr. Skelton might,” David said. He looked a little worn, but his lips were curving in that foxy smile. “Lord Maltravers’s valet told me that his lordship and Mr. Skelton had argued. Mr. Skelton had shouted that he would not be let down again.”
“Let down,” Dominic repeated. “You think Skelton doesn’t trust Maltravers to hold his course?”
“Precisely, Mr. Frey. Lord Maltravers did not come up with that demand against Mason on his own. I think he went to Skelton for advice on what to do with the letter, and I suspect that Mr. Skelton made it a condition of his involvement that he should hold it, because—”
“Lord Maltravers has pulled the rug from under him once already, over that business with Harry,” Dominic came in over him. “Skelton cannot afford another damp squib like that.”
“Wait. Wait.” Ash’s eyes were stricken. “You think Mal went to this fellow and said, Look what my brother’s been up to; here’s the letter? Mal did that?”
Richard put a hand on Ash’s shoulder. David shook his head. “I doubt it, Lord Gabriel. Mr. Skelton is not a highborn man, entitled to hear a noble family’s secrets. I suspect Lord Maltravers told him, I have a hold over my brother and not what it is.”
“Ash said Skelton spoke to him separately, that he did not mention the blackmail,” Dominic told David. “And he and Francis have not been followed. I feel quite sure that if Skelton knew what was going on, his first step would have been to get supporting evidence. It would certainly have been mine. I think you’re right, Mr. Cyprian. Skelton can’t know what’s in the letter. But you still think he has it?”
When Dominic applied his full attention, Richard well knew, it was an almost tangible thing. He was applying it to David now, focusing on him to the exclusion of all the others, and Richard could see the gleam in David’s eyes as the unspoken alliance took hold. The two loves of his life, plotting together. He felt a little breathless.
“I think there’s a good chance he holds it,” David said. “Perhaps his lordship may keep it at his bank or in a strongbox, of course. But what I see is a balance of mistrust. Lord Maltravers has power over Lord Gabriel, lacks the brains to use it without Skelton, but is too proud to take him into his confidence. And Skelton has been badly stung. Twice now he has made an attempt on Silas and Mr. Harry and been thwarted. I don’t think he would risk serving as Lord Maltravers’s weapon once more when he has misfired already and when he is being kept in the dark. Not without a safeguard.”
“The past incidents have done his career no good at all,” Dominic agreed. “A third failure—I think you’re right. If I were him, I should protect myself. And if he is doing that—”
“We can take him off the board altogether. How is that progressing, Mr. Frey?”
“All set up, Mr. Cyprian.” Dominic smiled, and David smiled back, and their expressions sent a shiver down Richard’s neck. “Name your time.”
—
David was exhausted by the time they had finished their discussions. His ribs hurt, and his face hurt, and he felt miserably shaky on his feet. He hadn’t been hit since he was a child, and the assault had been a more frightening, unmanning experience than he’d believed possible.
Lord Maltravers had bellowed abuse at him, face red and distorted with rage. He was a big man, and he had struck without restraint, his fists heavy with sharp-edged rings, and then strode over to seize a thick walking stick that could have broken bones. David had run, wrenching at the door handle and taking the stairs three at a time with blood trickling down his face and a savage pain in his ribs, praying that the doorman would not stop him. He had been utterly, physically terrified; it still hurt like hell.
Richard’s fury at his injuries almost made them worthwhile.
Richard sent the gentlemen off with thanks and turned back to him. “Are you hungry?”
“Very.”
“I’ll have them send something up.” He rang the bell over David’s protest and gave the order to a footman, then pulled up a chair to sit by David. “Are you sure you’re able to tackle Skelton tonight? You look shaken.”
“It needs to be done. And I have no intention of tackling him. With luck, he won’t know I’m there.”
Richard nodded. “Good. Nevertheless, I want to come with you.”
“What? My lord—”
“Richard, damn it. And if you are doing this for me, then I should do it with you.”
“Yes, but—”
“I heard yes.”
“But you can’t go housebreaking,” David said. “You’re far too big.” Too big, too assertive in his movements, too used to making as much noise as he chose, and a great deal too encumbered by nice notions, no matter what he might think now. Delicate feelings were not a luxury David could afford for himself, and he didn’t need Richard’s getting in his way. “And it’s a job best done by one man.”
“I bow to your experience in these matters,” Richard said, with a touch of dryness, “but I’m sure I can be your…I believe the cant term is pair of eyes?”
Lord Richard Vane serving as a thief’s lookout. “That’s a foolish risk.”
Richard lifted a brow. “May I not judge risk for myself?”
“Well, but—” Of course he could. David still wanted to say no. Every instinct screamed it: Richard should not lower himself. He should not take risks that David could take for him.
You wanted to stand equal, David reminded himself. You wanted him to be part of this. He’s doing precisely what you asked, so what are you afraid of?
“Oh, very well,” he muttered. “If you must.”
Richard gave a decisive nod. “What if Skelton doesn’t have the letter after all? What if Maltravers did the sensible thing and lodged it at his bank?”
“Then we’ll need to force him to bring it out. How would you feel about kidnapping?”
“I’ll consider anything short of murder, and I might make an excepti
on for my lord Maltravers.” Richard stroked the side of David’s face very gently, the backs of his fingers caressing the skin. “How dare he spoil this. How dare he lay a hand on you.”
“He throws things at his valet.”
“Then it is about time a valet threw something back,” Richard said. “I know very well you can look after yourself, but you’ve made an enemy, David, a cruel one. I did not intend you to put yourself at risk like that.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you I was doing it.”
“And then you presume to tell me I can’t come crib-cracking with you. Hmph.” He slid his fingers through David’s hair. “I’m quite sure you knew what you were about, but that does not allay my outrage on your behalf. And I claim the right to make Maltravers pay for this, one way or another.”
“As what?” David asked, watching his face. “What particular right is that?”
Richard’s fingers tightened a little. “The right to stand by my friend, and act when he cannot. The right you have always claimed over me.”
David caught Richard’s hand and lifted it to his lips. He ran his lips over the knuckles, nipped the top of a finger, slid his mouth along to tease the skin between finger and thumb with his tongue.
“Dear God.” Richard shut his eyes as David turned his hand over and attended to his palm, swirling his tongue over the thumb pad. “How do you make that feel so?”
“It’s just a touch.”
“It is not just a touch. It never was, over all those years. I have never felt a touch like yours.” David sucked a finger deliberately, with tight lips and a scrape of teeth, and Richard groaned aloud. “In the name of mercy. You torture me.”
“I love you,” David said into the palm he held, and Richard’s eyes snapped open. They stared at each other in the candlelight.
He had not meant to say that.
Richard’s eyes were on him. They were such a very deep blue, almost indigo in the candlelight. “You told me so once before, and it frightened the very life out of me. It frightens me now. David— Ah, hellfire.” Richard jerked his hand away.
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