“This is bad, ducks.”
Michael shoved a shaking hand into his hair and averted his eyes. “I can sell some books to make up for my losses, if you want. I’m sure it will pass soon enough.”
That only made Rodger angry. “I’m not talking about money, you dumb sod. I’m talking about you. This is bad for you.” Rodger sank beside him on the sofa with a heavy sigh. “Why did you have to go and fuck his lad? God above, but I wish you hadn’t.”
“I didn’t think it would matter. It shouldn’t have mattered.” Michael wrapped himself in the afghan and stared at the floor. “I don’t understand. I’m not upset about it, about what Daventry did to me. I haven’t been for years. I get tense if someone mentions him, and I think it would be bad if I encountered him, but it isn’t as if we run in the same circles. And his son is nothing like him. Albert is kind. Even funny. I enjoyed myself with him. But I’m not even thinking of him. Or Daventry. Not until—” He bit his lip and said nothing more.
Rodger rubbed his chin for a long moment. “Let me have a go.”
Michael drew back and looked at him in horror.
Rodger punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Don’t give me that look. I’ve had that arse more than any man in London.”
“Yes, but not for years,” Michael protested. “We joke about it all the time, but we never actually do it.”
“If you panic with me,” Rodger dogged, “then you know something is truly buggered in your head. Pardon the pun. If you can let me do you…” Rodger gave him a cheeky wink, “…well, then you know you can at least keep up your rent.”
Michael grimaced, but it was mostly for show. He never minded being fucked by Rodger. “Fine,” he agreed. “But you’ll not do me for free.”
Rodger snorted. “I’ll pay your going rate if there’s come dripping out your arse, how about that?”
Michael made a rude gesture, stripped out of his clothes and turned over.
Ten minutes later he was shaking, wrapped in every blanket the servants could find and huddled in a ball at the end of the couch near the stove as Rodger stormed down the hall, swearing so badly one of the men at the door had to ask him to please stop scaring off the customers. Once he was able to stand, Michael dressed, crawled up the stairs to his room, drank warm milk and fell asleep.
In the middle of the night he was screaming again, the nightmare returned in full force. It came the next night as well.
And the night after that.
The night after that too.
Even when Rodger sat beside him all night, or all day, or whenever Michael tried to sleep deep enough to rest, the nightmare came back, over and over and over.
“This is insane,” Michael complained through chattering teeth during the second straight week. Cold, so cold. He wrapped himself in blankets, but they could not warm him. He felt hollowed out from the inside.
Rodger was grim. “You should be getting better, not worse. No one’s touched your arse in ten days.”
Didn’t Michael know it. “Perhaps I’m ill.”
“Only in your head.” When Michael recoiled, Rodger gentled. “Calm yourself. No one’s sending you to Bedlam.”
Michael sagged against the wall. “I was rid of this.” He drew his knees closer to his body. “Until Albert.”
Rodger was silent a moment. “Maybe that’s what you need. Maybe you need to see him again. Hey,” he said when Michael glared at him. “Don’t look at me like that. It might work. Nothing else is, anyway.”
Michael doubted that very much. But talking about Albert made the man linger in his mind. It made him think of his face, guarded, but so soft, so…pretty, really. He had a simple look about him, a shyness Michael knew well, but no desperation. Just quietness. And now that he knew underneath that veneer lurked a tiger…
Rodger’s hand came down on his, and he turned to him, frowning. “What were you thinking of just then? You went all relaxed and quiet. You looked almost yourself again.” He glanced down, then boldly reached over and cupped Michael’s groin.
“Rodger!” Michael snapped his legs together and glared. He was half-hard.
Rodger only pointed an accusing finger at him. “What were you thinking of?” he demanded.
Michael felt his cheeks pinken. “Albert. But I even got hard for you—”
“I’m going to bring him here, and you’re going to fuck him,” Rodger declared. “Or rather, he will fuck you.” He frowned. “Unless that might make you worse. God above, I don’t think I could handle you being worse.” He looked into Michael’s face, stripping him bare. “Do you want him, love?”
Michael turned away before Rodger could see anything. “And how will you fetch him if I do? Knock on Daventry’s door and ask if you could borrow his son? You have a whore down in your bawdy house you need him to fuck for you?”
“Don’t get smart. I’ll send the boys out to watch for him. I doubt he lives with the marquess, at his age. Don’t know quite where he’d be, but sounds like we should be looking in gardens to start.” He nudged Michael with his elbow. “But is that what you want, Michael? Do you want to see Lord George again?”
Michael stared down at the bed, the hollow cold inside him making him shake. He tried to stammer a lie, but he was too tired. “Yes.”
Rodger smacked Michael’s rump through the blanket. “Get yourself greased for your shy stammerer then, love. I’ll have him for you by the end of the week.”
And so Michael lived in a constant state of terror, half-afraid that Rodger would produce Albert, half-afraid he wouldn’t be able to. Every night he dreamed, and as every day passed, the dreams got worse, and the cold he felt after them grew colder and colder, until he never thought he’d be able to get warm again.
No peer or gentleman in all of England was more venerated, more wise, more admired and more emulated than Wes’s father, the Marquess of Daventry.
All his estates were in perfect order. He kept up the entailed houses, and he had a few others as well. He was active in politics and a vocal and respected participant in the House of Lords. He’d provided the title with two sons, and the first had married well—third daughter of a duke, bringing in a tidy sum to boot. She’d produced two sons and a daughter already, with another child on the way.
Daventry had mourned his wife properly when she died and now kept to the life of a genteel bachelor. There had been a few relationships, Wes suspected, but as with all things Daventry, they were discreet.
One bright March morning, Wes received a summons to visit him.
Daventry House sat in St. George’s Square, boasting a lovely view of the park. Daventry himself was here, doing his duty through the Season to government and society. In fact, as Wes was ushered into his study, his father was in quiet consult with his secretary, trying to decide which balls and dinners he should attend for the next week in between attending Parliament sessions and meetings with the other leaders of his party. But when Daventry saw his second son in the doorway, he put the secretary’s list down and sat back in his chair, giving Wes his full attention.
“George Albert. How prompt you are. Well done.” Pale eyes danced beneath pepper-gray hair as Daventry motioned to a chair across from his desk. “Do sit. We’re nearly finished here, and I shall be with you directly.”
Wes sat as bid, glancing about the room as his father continued to debate in quiet tones with his secretary.
The study had been redone again. That was Daventry, never one to step out of pace. He had given way to the necktie as well. Wes touched his own cravat. He wondered if it was a particularly sad social sin to be more out of fashion than one’s own father.
Daventry dismissed his secretary and turned to Wes. Wes sat forward in his seat, trying to look alert.
“As I mentioned in my note,” his father began, “I have need of your aid. You remember the Presleys.” When Wes only blinked at him, Daventry’s mouth flattened in dismay. “Arthur Presley. Of Devonshire. I believe you knew his son at school, before you l
eft? Garreth?”
Before you left. The words rang in the air between them, as disheartening as the memory of Garreth Presley himself. “Y-y-yes, F-Father.”
Daventry shifted some papers on his desk. “As I said, I’d like you to attend the ball with me. It seems Presley has taken a liking to plants and wants to know how to begin a collection. He’s coming over for a little dinner I’m having. The usual people will be in attendance: your brother, senior members of our party in Parliament, and their wives. I told Presley you’d be there and that he could quiz you all he liked about plants.”
Wes looked up in alarm. His father’s “little dinners” were nothing of the kind. The last one had consisted of fifty people. “I d-d-d-don’t th-th-th-th—”
“I have need of Presley’s influence on a few matters, and this would go a long way to assuring his compliance.” He leaned forward on his desk and looked Wes levelly in the eye. “I would consider this a great favor, George Albert. I should think you would be eager to seize this chance to be of use.” He smiled a sad smile before turning back to his books. “But of course I will let you think on it.” He ran his finger down a line of figures. “So. Are you off to your Regent’s Park garden today? How does your work there progress?”
“G-G-Good.” Wes longed to explain how he’d solved the problem with the piping in the south part of the main greenhouse and saved the society several hundred pounds in averted catastrophe, not to mention the cost of replacement for overheated plantings, but he knew better than to try to get such a complicated sentence out. Certainly his father wouldn’t wait for it. “Y-Y-You should st-st-stop b-b-by and s-s-see.”
“Oh, I shall leave the plants to you, boy.” Daventry shuffled through the papers on his desk. “I should like to have nothing better to do with my time than see your trees and flowers. Not a minute of the day goes by without another trouble thrown at me, and here your brother has brought more for me to bear.” He rose, signaling the end of their interview. “I shall look forward to next week. Martin will send the details to your apartments.”
Wes nodded, though his smile was forced, and made his way out of the room as the secretary returned.
The house was quiet, and he wondered absently what else his father had upgraded. He indulged himself in a tour.
The library was much the same, but there were several other prominent changes. The dining room had been papered, and the painting at the foot of the stairs had changed. He climbed up to the first floor, curious to see how extensive the remodeling was. His old bedroom, long since turned into a guestroom, was blue instead of the rich yellow it had been last he’d checked up on it. There was gas lighting down the entire hall as well as within the bedrooms, which made Wes smile wistfully. How he wished he would have had such a luxury when he had been a child. No need to find a bright window to read or squint at the light from a candle.
“You there!”
Leaning on the doorframe, Wes paused, uncertain, but when no one else answered and angry footsteps became louder, he stood up and leaned the other way to glance into the hall. A pinch-faced elderly man stalked toward him, looking very cross. Wes pushed aside his anxiety and forced himself to straighten. This was Daventry House, after all. He stood tall, lifted his chin and stared down at the stranger.
He said nothing at all, either, a trick which had served him well in the past and did not fail him now. The man approaching him slowed, faltered, then stopped entirely. Wes might have an idiot’s stammer, but he could still give a haughty glare with the best of the Westins.
“Pardon, sir,” the man said, bowing. “He’s stolen my glasses again, and I mistook you for a footman from a distance. I am Martin Gibbous, his lordship’s tutor. Is there any chance you’ve seen Lord Alten?” The man’s jaw set in a hard, angry line. “He’s gone missing again.”
Wes frowned. Edwin was here? But term surely had restarted by now. Why on earth wasn’t his nephew back in school? “Wh-Wh-Why is h-h-he—”
He cut himself off as a towheaded figure darted out of a linen closet, ran across the end of the hall and disappeared into a small sitting room.
Understanding seemed to dawn on the tutor’s face and with it a great deal of condescension. “Ah. You are Lord George. I have heard Lord Daventry speak of you.” His tone took on the careful speech one used around the very young, the very old and the very simple. “Have you seen your nephew about today, my lord?”
Wes looked Mr. Gibbous in the eye. “No.”
Gibbous sighed and ran a bony hand through his remaining wisps of hair. “Likely as not he’s gone into the cellars again. I should lock him down there for an evening. That would cure him.” He gave Wes one more simpleton’s smile and did all but pat him on the arm. “Very good, my lord. Thank you so much for your help.”
Wes smiled back and remained standing in the doorway until the tutor was all the way down the stairs and in the main hallway, calling out to a maid and demanding to know if she had seen Lord Alten pass by. When all was silent, Wes pulled off his shoes, stayed close to the wall and proceeded almost as silently as he had when it had been he himself ducking from tutors. Outside the sitting room at the end of the hall, he waited, patiently, until at last he heard the sound of something heavy being shoved across the floor, at which point he smiled. A four-and-a-half-foot tall, gangly blond boy appeared in the doorway, ready to dash across the hall.
The boy froze, then tensed, ready to bolt. But then he got a better look at Wes’s face and relaxed, his face breaking into a bright, wide smile.
“Oh, Uncle George,” Edwin cried. “I’m ever so glad to see you.”
“I was thrown out again.”
Edwin swung his legs back and forth after this confession, the heels of his boots clipping the wall behind the wooden shelf he perched on. Wes had smuggled him through the stovehouse and into the gardener’s shed behind it, the gardener’s silence bought with a pair of shillings and the sly touch of Wes’s fingers at his wrist. The latter would cause him an awkward conversation later, he knew, for he had no intention of tupping the man a second time, but all he cared about just now was getting to the bottom of Edwin’s situation.
Wes sat on a bench opposite Edwin. “T-tell me what h-happened.”
Edwin’s feet swung a few times. “My schoolwork.”
Wes frowned. Edwin was a brilliant young man. Something else was going on, surely. He waited patiently for the rest.
It took some time in coming. Edwin continued to swing his feet, though when he lifted his head, he looked at Wes with all the sobriety of an adult. The boy was eleven, that odd age where he was both boy and man, flitting between the two without a moment’s warning.
“They tease me. Everyone does. And this boy across the hall does horrible things to me. Once h-he made me eat soap. In front of everyone. It made me sick, so horribly sick. They salt my food too, and put mud in my sheets, then say that I—” He blushed furiously and averted his eyes.
The sound of the rain beat around them, pelting the windows. It was warm inside, and it smelled comfortingly of plants and damp. But the cold bite of memory washed over Wes.
“Sn-snow,” he said at last. “Th-they liked to put sn-snow into my p-pants. I h-had to stand there unt-til it m-melted.”
Edwin’s eyes filled with unshed tears. “I didn’t want to go back after holiday. I thought if I were a bad student they would kick me out. And they did. But Father says I’m a disgrace. Says I’ve”—he swallowed hard, looking guilty—“betrayed the family and the name.” His tears spilled over. “But I can’t go back, Uncle George. I can’t.” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “I told Father I wanted to have tutors at home like you did. He got very angry. He says he’s going to let Grandfather punish me.”
There wasn’t a lot of terror in Edwin’s voice, and Wes had to hide a wry smile. Punishment from Daventry? Guilty lectures, yes. Possibly some boxing lessons. But punishment? No. Wes felt a tug of envy. How he would have longed for such personal attention from his father.
“If y-you like,” he said, “I c-can ask if you can h-help us at the g-gardens. G-Give you g-grueling work as w-well as an educ-cation.”
It warmed him to see the way his nephew beamed. “Oh! Would you really? That would be so wonderful. I would do any work you asked. As grueling as you like.”
Wes was fairly certain he could astound Edwin with new levels of disgust when he saw the manure sheds, but he also knew Edwin would wade through worse rather than go back to his torment at school. Which he would eventually need to return to, unfortunately. There would be no quiet arrangement of tutors for Edwin Westin, Baron of Alten, heir to the Earl of Vaughn and one day the Marquess of Daventry.
But Wes could give him a few shining moments while the boy was still in town.
He rose and held out his hand. “C-come. If you w-want to h-help me, you must first h-have your l-lessons. Let us s-see where your t-tutor has g-gone.”
It was midafternoon when Wes finally returned to his lodgings—technically he lived only a few blocks away from Daventry House, but once he’d helped settle matters with Edwin, he went to the club for a luncheon and a stiff drink. After dealing with his elder brother for an hour, he’d thought it was the least he was owed.
“I can’t coddle him,” Vaughn had snapped when Wes suggested Edwin be allowed to spend some time with him at the Regent’s Park garden. “It’s all well and good for you to hide out with your plants, but you can’t encourage that in Edwin. He’s the heir. He has responsibilities, and he must learn how to manage them. Everyone has trouble in school. Everyone faces bullies. It’s part of growing up.”
Wes had wanted to argue with his brother, but when he’d tried to pull out his notebook to present his own position, Vaughn had only rolled his eyes.
“Do you see? This is what I’m speaking of. You would have me coddle the boy until he is like you, unable to participate in a simple conversation without a paper crutch. He must be made to be strong. I won’t have him turn out like you, fit for nothing but playing with dirt in the park.”
A Private Gentleman Page 5