A Seditious Affair (13 page)

“What about your shop, Mason?” Davidson asked. “Any more trouble there?”

“Another visit, couple of weeks back. Just looking, this time. They’re still sniffing around for the press. Like I’d move it back for their finding.”

“Wise man,” Edwards said with a smile. “I hope wherever you’re printing they’re our people? There are too many turncoats.”

“Aye, safe enough.” Silas had no intention of saying more. Someone had informed on him, Dom had said after the first raid, and that was no surprise. The Home Office and the Runners used informants and spies without shame. He trusted everyone around him, but as Euphemia Gordon used to say,
Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

This discussion progressed as they always did. Bitter anger, today about the six bills moving inexorably through Parliament. Coarse jests at the Government’s expense. Brunt, who fancied himself a poet, read a satirical ballad of his own composition on how Lord Liverpool’s government schemed to plunder and starve the country; Thistlewood sang a revolutionary song. More ale.

It felt so futile.

Silas thought about it pacing home. Was it the threat of the six bills, the appalling truth of how far the Government would go to quell reform? Davidson had said,
They’re frightened of us. They know they’re going to lose.
But it had had a hollow sound. The radicals were the frightened ones, and they knew it.

You could be transported!
Dom had shouted at him, as if he hadn’t thought about that.

He didn’t think that was why it felt futile, though. He was used to being afraid, and to not giving up in the face of fear. He was used to digging in grimly when times were bad. He wasn’t used to wondering if, in truth, there was any point to it.

Perhaps it was Dom. Perhaps a man couldn’t share a bed with a Tory and walk away with his principles intact. Or perhaps he could if the Tory was the gluttonous reactionary swine depicted in the popular press. Not intelligent, questioning, thoughtful Dominic.

Silas wouldn’t change his views in the face of flogging or transportation, but he had a terrible feeling that caring had sapped his will.

That’s what we’re asking for,
he reminded himself.
A voice. If we could speak in Parliament as I speak to Dom, if they’d but listen to us as he does to me . . .

Ha. That was utopian beyond anything Spence had dreamed up. Silas stuck his icy hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders against the cold, and walked home alone.

He got to Millay’s far too early the next Wednesday. Zoë insisted on taking him into the kitchen for a mug of tea rather than have him kicking about the house.

“In a hurry for your appointment?” she asked.

“You watch yourself, minx. How’s young Peter?”

“A stubborn, pigheaded little brute, just like his godfather. Don’t change the subject, Silas Mason. You’re not going to hit my handsome Tory today, are you?”

“Since when’s he yours?”

Zoë laughed, her ample bosom quivering in the low-cut gown. “He’s my best customer. Tips like a king, never makes extra work, and oh, those pretty eyelashes.” She fluttered her own. “They’re wasted on a man. Or maybe you don’t think so?”

Silas glowered, not with any real menace. He’d known the Shakespeares since they were children. Their mother’s master had dumped them on the street when he’d faced financial reversals, on the grounds that they were freeborn and not his obligation. Zoë had been nine, Jon seven. Silas, a few years older, had kept an eye out for them in the rough-and-tumble of the Ludgate streets, until they’d found a perch in Belle Millay’s little empire. She’d dressed them up as pages while they were small enough to be fashionable; as they’d got older, she’d offered them other work around the house and left selling their flesh up to them. Work at Millay’s had given Jon much of the experience he needed to start Quex’s, and when age and obesity restricted her movements too much, Belle had put the assignation house that bore her name in Zoë’s capable hands.

Silas occasionally wondered if any of the gentlemen even knew who ran the business of their pleasures.

Which reminded him. “Do you deal with a fellow called Foxy David, Zo?”

“Doesn’t everyone? Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering. Is this like Will’s place? How secure do you have it here?”

Zoë gave him a look. “Foxy’s master
pays
for security. It isn’t worth anyone’s while to talk. His lordship and friends are the geese that lay the golden eggs.” A filthy grin slid over her face. “We just arrange the stuffing.”

They cackled together; then Zoë sobered. “You worried about something?”

“Feeling skittish today, that’s all. Sidmouth’s bills, damn his eyes.”

“I heard you’ve been raided. You be careful, Silas.”

“I’m careful as I can be.”

“And that’s not very careful. I know. Just don’t bring my sweet Mr. Frey down with you.”

“He’s not yours,” Silas growled. “Ain’t it time yet?”

“Impatient.” Zoë rang the bell and exchanged a few words with one of the girls who slipped through the back ways of the maze-like house to keep the bedrooms decent. She turned back with a frown. “What’s bothering you?”

“Ah, I don’t know.” Silas made a face. “Nerves and imagination. I’m getting old, Zo, that’s the truth. Too much on my mind. These bloody bills, the raids . . . the Tory. Stupid bastard. I don’t know what I should do about him.”

“What’s for you to do?”

Silas shrugged awkwardly. “Make sure he’s all right. You know.”

“Not really,” Zoë said. “He’s gentry. They always come out all right, that’s how it works. Why do
you
care, anyway?”

“Been bedding him for a twelvemonth and more. You get to like a fellow.”

Zoë laughed. “Silas boy, I bedded my husband for years, and I nailed him into his coffin myself in case the bastard climbed back out. You’re in the wrong house for sentimental talk.”

“True. Aye, well.” He met her quizzing look, shrugged again. “Like you say, he’s got pretty eyes.”

“Have it your way.” Zoë tapped his hand. “But, Silas? I said eyelashes. I didn’t say a word about his eyes.”

Mistress Zoë greeted Dominic with her usual calm smile, but he couldn’t help feeling she was looking at him oddly.

“Mistress?”

“I beg your pardon, sir, you have a . . .” She indicated the side of his face with a finger. “May I?” She stopped him there, under a gas lamp, to brush at his temple, regarding him the while, and gave a little satisfied nod. “There, sir. Your companion has already arrived.”

“Thank you,” Dominic said, baffled, as she escorted him on.

She slipped away as he went into the room. Silas was there already. He looked around swiftly, grunting, “Evening,” as Dominic opened the door.

“Good evening to you.” Silas didn’t respond. He was looking at Dominic oddly. “Silas?”

Silas came over and took Dominic’s chin in his hand, tilting his face to the light. Not a move of domination, more as though examining his features, as Mistress Zoë had done. Heaven knew what smear of the streets he had on his face to elicit that intent look. “What are you doing?” Dominic asked.

“Nothing.” Silas let him go. “You’ve got pretty eyes.”

“Pretty?” Dominic repeated, with a ludicrous, unmanning pulse of pleasure.
“Pretty?”

“Pretty as a girl.” Silas brushed a thumb over Dominic’s lips. “Pretty eyes, pretty mouth.”

That sounded as though it would be the prelude to some humiliation. But Silas didn’t continue. Just looked at him.

“Silas?”

“Dom.” He rasped the word. “Ah, hell. I think about you all the time.”

There seemed to be less air in the room suddenly, less light, the space contracting around them. “About me,” Dominic repeated.

“You. I was at a meeting, but all I had in my head was you. What you’d say, what you’d think.” His fingers pushed through Dominic’s hair, over his scalp, making him shiver. “I want to talk to you, not other folk. In the fight twenty-five years, and I’ve never doubted for a minute, and then
you
. . .”

“My friend called me a Whig the other night,” Dominic whispered, and that was perhaps the worst sweet nothing ever offered to a lover but Silas’s expression showed he understood precisely what it meant.

“Ever since I kissed you . . .” Silas moved closer, lips so near Dominic’s, not touching, quite.

“Before. Wednesday by Wednesday.”
Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have become yours for the taking.

“Aye. Aye, that’s the truth.” Silas’s breath over his skin made it tingle. “It’s ruining me.”

“It—”

“Ruining me. Making me doubt, making me fearful—ah, fuck it.” Silas ducked his head and rested it heavily on Dominic’s shoulder. Dominic put his arms around him like an automaton. “Hell’s tits, what have we done?”

He sounded despairing, and Dominic felt a moment’s panic. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Except, I can’t seem to . . . Rot it. I thought about giving up.”

“Don’t do that,” Dominic said without thinking, and Silas’s head came up.

“See? That ain’t what you’re meant to say, is it? Jack Cade tells you he wants to give it up, before these God-rotted bills even pass, and you say
don’t
? What kind of bloody useless Home Office man are you?”

Dominic choked on a laugh, felt Silas’s shoulders shake, but it wasn’t funny and they both knew it. “Are you serious? You want to stop your, uh, work?”

“No. I don’t. I can’t. That’s my life, understand? All my life, everything I’ve worked for, my people.” He didn’t say
friends.
He never spoke of friends. It had occurred to Dominic to wonder if his grim, snarling, driven lover had friends. “I don’t want to, but I’m thinking about it. Because we fuck on Wednesdays? Because a highborn Tory deigns to look down into the gutter?”

“Don’t give me that,” Dominic said sharply. “You know that’s not what this is. You’re finding yourself less certain in your certainties? Well, so am I.”

“And you shouldn’t be,” Silas gritted out. “Where does this leave us after? Me turning my back on everything I ever believed? You handing in your resignation? Where?”

“
After.
After
what?”

“After . . . Christ, I don’t know. There’ll be an after, though, won’t there? After I’m arrested, after I’m transported. After you find some gentry-man—”

“I had fifteen years to do that and failed,” Dominic said. “Why would that change now?”

“Because you got pretty eyes.” Silas sounded lost. “Such sodding pretty eyes.”

Dominic grasped his face, pulled him close, kissed him. Hard, leading this time. Pushed him backward, the pair of them stumbling together, mouths locked, until Silas’s back hit the wall, until he made a noise in Dominic’s mouth and grabbed his hair in one hand, arse in the other. They kissed ferociously, silently, each pulling the other closer, gentleman and ruffian locked together, until Silas broke off with a gasp.

“Coming on a bit strong, Tory.”

“I kneel for two reasons only, and the other one is prayer. It’s not how I am, not usually.”

Silas snorted. “Think I didn’t know that?”

“I know you did. That is one of the many reasons . . .” He didn’t know whether to say it. Whether Silas, with that dreadful look of shaken ground on his face, needed to hear the words or whether truth would just add to his burden.

Get on with it, Frey.
“Listen to me,” Dominic continued. “I would very much like you to stop breaking the law of the land, particularly if these damned bills pass. I know why you do it, I—damn it—I respect why you do it, and I don’t want to see you lessened in your own eyes. You are an extraordinarily courageous, dedicated, wrong-headed sod. I know you love your country as much as I, even if it is a different country that we see.” He was staring into Silas’s eyes, willing him to hear. Nobody could call those eyes pretty, that nameless muddy mixture. “If you want to change your battle pitch to firmer ground, as it were, to stop risking your neck like the pigheaded oaf you are, it would be nothing more than good sense. But if you do not . . . I understand.”

“Aye, you do.” Silas’s mouth twisted. “That’s the worst of it; that’s what I can’t let go. You
understand.
”

“So do you.” Dominic didn’t know if it was an accusation or a declaration. “And I do understand, none better. Sometimes one must cleave to what one knows to be right in the teeth of all opposition. Sometimes it comes at an unbearable price. Sometimes one must even face the fact that one’s wishes may be wrong—”

“We still talking about politics?”

“It’s all the same,” Dominic said. “You’re going to get yourself transported for your seditious libels, and they won’t make a damned bit of difference in the end. And I will lose you, and I know it, but I have lost my dearest friend because I cannot lose you yet.”

Silas’s arms tightened around his waist. “Then he’s a fool. Dom—”

Dominic rested his forehead against Silas’s, closed his eyes. “Richard tells me I must be mad. I sometimes feel as though this room is the only sane place in the country.”

Silas gave a huff of dry amusement. “You think so?”

“We disagree without hatred, and fuck as we choose. If I were to give my idea of utopia . . .”

“Aye. Aye, that’s true enough.”

“There is no fine gentleman for me,” Dominic said softly. “I had the finest gentleman in the land once, and I didn’t want him. I want my firebrand. And I want no
after.
I will fight against
after
with everything at my disposal, and if—when—there is an
after
, it will be bleak indeed.”

“Tory . . .” Silas whispered.

“Ssh.” Dominic kissed him, gently. “I know it is not your habit to lean on anyone. You are the tower of strength out there, aren’t you? Always taking the brunt of it all. But in here, at least, let me bear your weight.”

Silas made a little noise in his throat. His chest heaved, just once, and they stood in silence as Dominic held him.

“Christ,” he said at last, into Dominic’s shoulder. “You know how to unman a cove.”