“No.” Ned poured himself another cup of tea. “So what do we do now?”
Julian hesitated. “There are people I could ask – we could ask, if you were willing to come along. Always bearing in mind that people would assume you were with me.”
Ned gave an odd half-smile. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Very well,” Julian said, and told himself that the feeling of relief was because he would be able to keep an eye on Ned, in case of another attack. “I’ll call for you tonight, then – say, nine o’clock.”
“Shall I dress?”
“But of course,” Julian answered, with just the right amount of surprise, and Ned laughed aloud.
Julian called as promised, the nearest church clock sounding nine as the cab pulled up, and Ned joined him. He was looking handsome, Julian thought – taller than usual, somehow, and unexpectedly elegant. He would break hearts by mere presence alone.
They stopped at the Spanish School first, and then at the Admiral, but the company was sparse and mostly older and ostentatiously theatrical, not the sort of group that would have known Freddie. Julian got them away again as quickly as he could disengage, and on the sidewalk, Ned gave a little sigh of relief.
“They can be a bit – tiresome,” Julian admitted.
Ned made a noncommittal noise, and Julian gave him a wary look.
“All right?”
Ned forced a smile. “Not my crowd, really, that’s all.”
“They never were,” Julian said. Ned had never done well with artistic types. “Jacobs’ is better.”
They walked the handful of blocks to Jacobs’, Julian keeping a wary eye on the shadows, but there was no sign that anyone was following them. Maybe it had been robbery gone wrong, after all. He vouched for Ned at the door, and they stood blinking in the gaslit hall while Jamieson brought the book and Ned paid his three shillings for the membership. He signed himself John Smythe without hesitation, and Jamieson took the book away again with equal impassivity.
“Drink?” Julian asked. They’d had several already, but if they were going to stand around not playing cards, they’d need some excuse.
“Might as well.”
The front parlor was beginning to fill up, the hazard table surrounded, a chemin de fer bank in full swing, more games, whist and lanterloo and écarté, at the scattered tables. Julian led the way to the bar, ordered whiskey sodas for them both, and allowed his gaze to sweep the room.
“Do we know who we’re looking for?” Ned asked quietly. “It all seems a bit chancy.”
“I’d know the men I saw before,” Julian said, “and there are one or two others I thought I could ask –”
“Lynes!”
Julian flinched in spite of himself, but managed to face Lennox with a smile.
“Dear boy,” Lennox said. His eyes were on Ned, however, surveying him with definite appreciation. “You’ve brought your paragon at last. I’m Peter Lennox, my dear, since I’m sure Lynes won’t introduce me.”
“Ned Mathey.” Ned held out his hand, and Lennox clasped it just a little too warmly.
Julian could feel his cheeks heating. “It’s – it’s not quite like that, Lennox.”
“If this isn’t what’s been keeping you so busy,” Lennox began, and Julian shook his head. Even though he’d warned him what would happen, he didn’t want to see Ned made uncomfortable.
“No, really, it’s – we’re friends.” As soon as he’d spoken, he realized his mistake.
Lennox’s smile widened. “Oh? In that case, Mr Mathey, I can only hope we’ll have a chance to know each other better.”
“Honestly, Lennox,” Julian said, and Lennox raised an eyebrow.
“Another time,” Ned said, with passable sangfroid, and Julian seized the moment.
“I told you we were working on the Nevett matter,” he said. “And I know you know something about Freddie.”
“And I told you that it’s not my story,” Lennox said. “I meant it, too.”
“Whose, then?” Ned asked.
“We don’t intend to cause anyone any trouble,” Julian said. “You should know me better than that. But the oldest brother has confessed to murdering his father, and we know he didn’t do it. He’s protecting someone, and my money’s on Freddie.”
“If he’s protecting his brother, don’t you think he might know best?” Lennox shook his head.
“I don’t think he does,” Julian said. “And in any case, I can’t see that it’s better for him to hang for it.”
“It’ll come to that?” Lennox looked from one to the other.
“Without a doubt,” Ned said.
Lennox sighed. “I’ll see if he’ll talk to you. But that’s all I’ll do.” He found a slip of paper, and scribbled a note on it before dispatching it with a waiter. “I think he’s playing whist, so it may be a while.”
Julian, who had managed to see only the request for a meeting, ordered another whiskey soda. It didn’t take long, however, before a familiar figure appeared in the doorway. Lennox lifted his hand, and the other man moved toward them. Ned’s eyes widened, and Julian said, “Yes, Geordie MacNab.”
“The painter.”
Julian blinked at that, and Ned sighed.
“I do know there are arts other than poses plastiques, you know.
“Of course,” Julian said, but didn’t think he’d successfully hidden his surprise.
Something complicated crossed Ned’s face, regret and curiosity about equally mixed, but there was no time to pursue the matter. MacNab came to join them, his expression frankly wary.
“Lennox,” he said. “You wanted to talk with me?” His voice was lightly Scottish, like his sandy looks.
“I think you know Lynes,” Lennox said, and MacNab nodded.
“We’ve met.”
“And this is his friend Mathey They’d like to talk to you about Freddie Nevett.”
MacNab hesitated. “This is about his father, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Julian said.
MacNab’s mouth tightened. “He’s not – look, we can’t talk here.”
Ned waved to the bartender, ordering another round of drinks. Julian said, “Upstairs?”
“Yes.” MacNab nodded. “There’ll be a quiet corner somewhere.”
There was an empty table at the back of the green card room, and after a moment’s hesitation, MacNab claimed it. Julian approved: as long as they kept their voices down, no one was likely to disturb them there. They arranged themselves around the baize-topped table, but MacNab fiddled with his drink as though he didn’t know how to begin.
“So you’re friends with Freddie Nevett,” Ned said, after a moment.
MacNab gave him a look of gratitude. “I was. Didn’t last long, and I made a bit of a fool of myself, but – I was.”
“You know he’s suspected of killing his father,” Julian said, as gently as he could.
“I thought the brother confessed,” MacNab said.
“He did.” Julian considered how best to get a response without actually lying, and Ned looked up from his drink.
“Victor is lying. We can prove that much. But we don’t know who he thinks he’s protecting, and I don’t want to cause more problems for innocent people. But I won’t see Victor hang for something he didn’t do.”
“And will he?” MacNab closed his eyes. “No, of course he will.”
“I’m afraid so,” Julian said.
MacNab took a deep breath. “Freddie and I had an affair. I asked him to model for me a few months back, and one thing led to another. I suppose I’ll have to get rid of the painting now, I can’t possibly show it anywhere –” He shook himself back to his story. “In any case, he broke it off, and I – well, I didn’t want it to end. I tried to talk him back, and the night in question, I persuaded him to meet me here. We had drinks, and he let me talk – oh, yes, he let me make a proper fool of myself – but in the end he went off with someone else. It made his feelings very clear.”
�
�He left the club?” Julian asked.
MacNab’s color deepened. “No. He just – went off upstairs with someone else. I imagine Jamieson can tell you when he left, but I stayed until two, and he never came down. I expect he stayed the night.”
“Back doors?” Ned said, to Julian, and Julian shook his head.
“There’s a watch kept, in case of a raid. We can confirm that later.”
“He’s not a nice boy,” Lennox said. “You’re well rid of him, Geordie. No matter how well set he was.”
“But he was very gratifying.” MacNab managed a smile. “Perhaps I’ll use him for Mordred – I’ve got an Arthurian commission for Grocers’ Hall. It might suit.”
“That’s giving him more credit than he deserves,” Ned said.
Julian gave him a startled look, but had to nod in agreement. MacNab sighed.
“Perhaps you’re right. But in any case, Freddie Nevett wasn’t cursing candlesticks that night. He was here proving that our relationship had ended.”
“I’m sorry,” Julian said. “And thank you.”
“I don’t want anyone to hang,” MacNab said. He forced a smile. “If you really want to make amends, persuade your friend here to sit for me.”
Julian felt the color rising in his cheeks. “That would be up to him.”
“Indeed?” MacNab turned his smile on Ned. “You’re a member?”
“I am.” Ned’s voice was perfectly calm.
“Perhaps you’ll let me persuade you, then.”
“I’d be delighted,” Ned answered. “Once all of this is done.”
Julian swallowed the tart remark born of an entirely unexpected pang of jealousy – this was not the time to make clear to Ned what sitting for Geordie MacNab might entail, particularly when he suspected Ned knew full well – and pushed his chair back from the table. “Thank you,” he said again. “Mathey, we should have a word with Jamieson.”
By the time the cab delivered them back to Julian’s lodgings, it was well past three in the morning, and Ned was beginning to regret the amount they’d both drunk. He felt thoroughly foxed, and Julian was if anything in worse straits. Julian fumbled for his latch-key as Ned braced himself on the railing of the stairs, wishing he’d had the presence of mind to say he’d take the same cab home. In his present mood, it would probably have been for the best.
Instead he followed Julian up to his rooms, where Julian shed his coat to drape precariously over the back of a chair, one arm trailing on the floor, and disposed of his hat by dropping it on the sofa, from which it promptly tumbled.
“Your hat,” Ned couldn’t help saying.
Julian blinked. “What about it?” His shirt was wrinkled under his waistcoat, and he smelled of whiskey and cigar smoke and other people’s overused scent; it was unfair for that to make him even more damnably attractive. The clubs they’d visited had been more respectable than Ned had expected, but the atmosphere had been intensely charged, with men engaging in open flirtation to the point of frankly indecent caresses. It had been startling but not at all uninteresting, and he’d reached the point of wondering whether Julian would mind Ned taking a few liberties with him when Julian had made the answer to that unpleasantly clear.
“Nothing.” It would be absurd to begin quarreling about the hat.
“What’s the matter?” Julian turned up the gas light and then turned to peer at him with searching eyes, as if the question were a great mystery. The unspoken words were a knot in Ned’s throat, and abruptly he could no longer swallow them.
“Is he the one you’d rather have? Lennox?”
“What?” Julian stared at him. “Lennox likes opera.”
That was apparently intended as a definitive dismissal, but it didn’t help much. “You were certainly determined to make it clear to him that you were free.”
“I am free, aren’t I?”
“I see that you’d rather be.” Ned had his own hat still in his hand, and realized he was crushing it in his fist.
Julian seemed at a loss for words, an unusual state for him, but not surprising considering the last few whiskeys. Which probably made it unsporting to demand explanations from him in his present state, but at the moment Ned didn’t care. Better to have it out and be done with it.
“As opposed to what alternative?” Julian asked finally. “It’s not as if you’re serious.”
“Aren’t I?”
“Are you?” Julian looked as if this were the most unreasonable idea he’d ever heard. Ned found himself momentarily tempted to hit him.
“I should think I’d done everything in my power to make that clear,” he managed instead.
“You can’t be serious,” Julian said. “What about all those girls?”
“What girls?”
“At Oxford,” Julian exploded. “There were dozens of them. They followed you around.”
“Well, yes. They were very pleasant company.”
“Yes, I should think. I particularly remember Sophie.”
“She was interested in bird-watching.”
“She kept getting her clothes caught on things.”
“Skirts must be a nuisance, yes.”
“So that you would have to untangle them for her,” Julian said, his voice rising hotly on the words. “She was pursuing you, in case you somehow failed to notice! She wanted you to embrace her!”
“Yes, that was the problem with the girls.”
Julian let out a disbelieving breath. “Do you mean for me to believe that you didn’t encourage them?”
“Not to embrace me.”
“You went on picnics with them. You took them punting.”
“I enjoyed their company, certainly – their conversation –”
“And so you led them on?”
“I did not,” Ned said, stung. “I never led any of them to believe my intentions were serious.”
Julian smiled without pleasure. “They never are.”
“They are at present.”
“You said before you weren’t serious.”
Ned frowned at him. “I never did.”
“You did,” Julian said, the same desperately stubborn note rising in his voice as when he’d been expected to repeat falsehoods at school. “When we were at Oxford. You said we were too old for that sort of thing.”
“I suppose I might have,” Ned said, feeling suddenly a bit ashamed of himself. He hadn’t thought Julian remembered that, although Julian had an unfortunate tendency to remember everything one ever said. “I was young, and stupid, and I suppose I thought that if I spent enough time in the company of young ladies, some kind of appropriate feelings might develop.”
“You mean to say that all that time, you thought –”
“And then they didn’t.”
“You said we ought to give up schoolboy vices.”
“I said I was sorry,” Ned said, and then realized he hadn’t exactly. “At least, I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that. And it didn’t work.”
“I thought it did. You spent all that time playing cricket.”
“I like cricket,” Ned said, very precisely.
“But if…you could have come about with me. There were parties at Oxford, like-minded people…”
“Oh, yes, I met your friends at Oxford,” Ned said, bitterness spilling over before he could decide whether to try to hold back the words. “They mocked me to my face, remember? Made it clear they thought sportsmen were dull fellows too lacking in intellect to be worth conversing with.”
Julian looked startled. “I suppose they did, didn’t they.”
“They most certainly did. And you didn’t say a word to stop them. You sat there looking amused.” It was surprising how fresh the hurt was. There had been a time before Oxford when he’d trusted that it would always be the two of them against the world.
“I shouldn’t have let them do that,” Julian said after a moment. “I suppose it was just that they were very clever.”
“For God’s sake.”
; “I know. I know. I am sorry,” Julian said, and sounded as if he meant it. “It was unfair, and I shouldn’t have let it go on.”
“You know, cricket does involve watching athletic young gentlemen in cricket whites take exercise,” Ned said after a moment. “And undress, for that matter.”
“I suppose it does,” Julian said, looking amused himself for the first time.
“It can be very frustrating.”
“I had no idea.”
Ned shook his head and set his hat down, hoping that constituted some sort of gesture of good faith. Besides, he was mangling the brim. “You thought I was planning to break things off with you and marry,” he said, testing his understanding of the situation.
“It was a logical conclusion.”
“And so you’ve been trying to fend me off because you thought my intentions weren’t honorable?”
“I certainly hope they’re not,” Julian said, in a tone that suggested he hadn’t quite taken Ned’s meaning.
“I mean, you were planning to reject me preemptively before I could leave.”
“Well…I suppose something like that.”
Ned shook his head. That was believable enough of Julian, and yet – “Not because I’m not up to your friends’ standard?”
“Never,” Julian said, his voice heated. “You can’t think that. You’re a brilliant metaphysician, for God’s sake. And I’m with you, aren’t I?”
“Are you? When you were talking to Lennox –”
“I didn’t think you’d like to be introduced as… Well, I thought you wouldn’t like it,” Julian said. “And I wanted to fend him off before he could make a play for you himself. You’re exactly his type. Not that you couldn’t do worse, but…”
“Would you care if I did?”
“I… Well, we’ve never said…” Julian looked so much at sea that Ned took pity on him.
“I don’t suppose there’s some sort of etiquette manual for this situation? Some language of which I’m ignorant?”
“Well, yes,” Julian said. “To a certain extent, yes.”
“Is that what you were being tutored in at Oxford?” Ned said, unable to resist.
“Among other things,” Julian said, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile. “You’ve had the benefit of that instruction, though.”
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