A Seditious Affair Read online

  A few more breaths, then the Tory made a muffled noise of discomfort. Silas wormed his arm free and withdrew with wincing care, ever afraid he’d done damage. When he felt his legs would support him, he managed to stand, and went to the little pitcher of water provided by the house—still warm—to wipe himself down and throw a clean cloth to the Tory. Odd sod that he was, he didn’t like to be observed in cleaning up, so Silas took his time stretching out the kinks and getting the wineglasses before he turned again.

  The Tory lay on his back, eyes shut, sated. His face was flushed, lips reddened, skin marked all over by Silas’s fingers.

  God, he was beautiful.

  “Here.” Silas handed him a glass and sat on the bed. The Tory took it without looking. “What’s this, then?”

  “Hermitage. It’s a French wine, from the Rhône.”

  Silas had no idea where that was, nor why it mattered. But it did matter to the Tory, any fool could see, and it cost Silas nothing to ask.

  He sipped at the Hermitage, which the Tory had pronounced in a Frenchified way. It had that dryness on the tongue at first that he didn’t much like, preferring beer or porter, but he knew by now that once you got a little way down the glass the taste could grow on a man. “Very fine.”

  The Tory opened his eyes then. They looked tired but deeply content, all passion spent. He smiled, and Silas smiled back. “It’s good to see you.”

  Silas moved his glass to chink it against the Tory’s. “You too. Been well?”

  “Not so bad. Work. You?”

  “Aye, busy enough. Lost one of my assistants a few weeks back, did I tell you?” That was understating it. Harry Vane, his old friends’ son, had been reclaimed by the noble family his father had abandoned, swept off to become a gentleman. Silas wasn’t going to mention that, of course. It was Harry’s business, and for all he knew of good society, which was nothing, the Tory might mix in Harry’s circles. He didn’t think much of a good young radical, or even an idle one like Harry, going off to become a gentleman, but he wasn’t going to put the boy’s future at risk with loose talk. “And it’s too damn hot.”

  “That it is. I’m going down to the country this weekend.”

  “Very nice. Back next week?”

  Silas tried to ask it casual-like, but there was a definite twitch to the Tory’s lips when he replied, “By next Wednesday, I think.”

  Silas shoved him, not hard, and the Tory sat up a little, making space. Silas moved to lie alongside him, feeling the heat of his bare skin.

  “I finished the book,” the Tory said.

  “Oh, aye? What’d you think?”

  “Good. Terrifying. Strange. I can’t understand why you like it.”

  “Why would I not?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d agree with it.” The Tory gave him a wry smile. “After all, its burden is the need for man to keep in his place—”

  “What?” said Silas incredulously.

  “The overreaching man dares to play God and pays a terrible price. Abuses the natural order and creates a monstrous thing.”

  “Bollocks,” Silas said. “That ain’t what it’s about.”

  “It’s what happens.”

  “No. What happens is he creates, he’s responsible for, something that should be”—Silas waved his hand—“great and strong, something that he owes a duty to. And he says to it, The hell with you. Go die in a ditch. I’ll have my big house and pretty wife. And it says, You don’t get to live in a grand house and ignore me. Do your duty or I’ll tear you down. Treat me like I’m as good as you, or I’ll show you—”

  “That I’m not,” the Tory interrupted. “The creature murders—”

  “Because he ain’t given a chance to live decent,” Silas interrupted right back. “You treat men like brutes; you make ’em brutes. That’s what it says.”

  “No, you create brutes when you distort the rules of nature and the order of things,” the Tory retorted. “That’s what the book’s about. It’s obvious.”

  “It’s not.” Silas snorted. “You think its author meant that?”

  “Oh, do you know the author?” The Tory looked intrigued. “Who is he?”

  “She.”

  “A woman? A woman wrote Frankenstein?”

  “A girl,” Silas said with some satisfaction. “Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin’s girl.”

  The Tory’s mouth dropped open. “That—female who married that appalling poet?”

  “Mary Shelley,” Silas agreed smugly. “Aye.”

  “Good heavens. No wonder she published it anonymously. A woman.”

  “And what’s her sex to do with it?” Silas demanded, and they were off.

  It wasn’t as if he lacked political debate in his life. Silas ran a bookshop that sold mostly political philosophy. His nights and evenings, except Wednesdays, were taken up with pamphleteering, writing the often seditious libels at which he excelled, and attending meetings of the people who could no longer bear the stranglehold of the rich on England’s neck. He had been in the struggle since he’d had his eyes opened by Euphemia Gordon, a radical firebrand and agitator for the rights of women, at the age of sixteen, and he’d never stopped fighting, not for gaol or flogging or the threat of worse. He believed in the cause, dedicated his life to it, hated the aristocracy and the gentry who let the people starve and wanted the working man kept in his place.

  And then on Wednesdays he went to bed with the most dyed-in-the-wool Tory he’d ever met in his life.

  Millay’s was an assignation house. Not a whorehouse—nothing so honest—but a place where gentlemen who liked gentlemen could meet gentlemen like themselves. It was no place he’d normally set foot, but he’d been asked special. Someone for you to meet, his friend Jonathan had said. Gentleman set to get himself killed. Take a turn at him before he does, why not?

  Silas could see it too that first night. The Tory had all the look of a man who was going to let his desires drive him downward, and Silas had very nearly walked away. He didn’t play games, and he was damned if he’d use any of the filthy toys of violence laid out in the room. Just looking at whips and chains made him sweat, and he’d told the Tory there and then, If you want that, you can get it from someone else. But he’d fucked him all the same, because he was there, and been cursed rough with him too. Well, roughness was what the Tory wanted, and if you had the chance to take a lifetime’s anger out on one of the bastards with his foot on your throat, why wouldn’t you?

  It had been good too. Better than he’d expected, in fact, because something had curled in his belly at the way the Tory responded to his hard hands and curt demands. It was pleasing to know you’d left a fellow satisfied, even if you hadn’t particularly cared to. So when Jon had indicated a return bout might be welcome, he’d thought, Why not? A willing man to fuck, and the house was safe, clean, and dry. Might as well. And he’d come back, and…

  There had been no whips or chains or other toys of the house laid out. Nothing at all but the mirror, the chair, the bed.

  And Silas had remembered the Tory’s fingers skimming the ridged skin of his back where the scars of flogging would never quite fade. He hadn’t asked or commented, but he’d noticed the scars, and maybe even Silas’s twitch at the table of torture implements, and it had all gone away. Consideration, that was what it was, and something inside Silas had shifted, just a little bit, at that moment. That tiny piece of thoughtfulness from a gentleman who wanted to be fucked into the gutter, but who noticed how the man in the gutter felt.

  God knew quite how it had grown from there. How they had between them delineated the Tory’s needs, and the things Silas wouldn’t do, and the ways that Silas could know what the Tory wanted without making him say it. Because that was the Tory’s problem: Silas didn’t understand much of this, but he understood right off that it was no good for him to say out loud how he wanted it, if he even could. That would leave him master still, giving the orders, ruling from his knees. Not what the Tory needed; no
good to him at all.

  So Silas didn’t ask. Instead he’d learned. He’d read the Tory’s body and the pleas in his eyes, puzzled out his wants and needs, and while he was at it, he’d learned to enjoy the games that weren’t games at all. The ways he could make the Tory bend and break. And that had been a pleasure all on its own…but then they’d started talking.

  He couldn’t remember which of them had started it, whose chance comment had begun an argument. Had no idea now when the first bottle had been laid out and waiting on his arrival, what day he had said, Have you read…and how long after that before the Tory had handed him a book and said, Tell me what you think. He didn’t know when the fucking had become just one part of the night’s pleasure, the thing they did before talking.

  That was Wednesdays. That had been Wednesdays for a full year now, only a handful missed, so that Silas’s life ran from Wednesday to Wednesday, everything between marking time, and the very sound of Thursday was enough to make him snarl at his shop boy for the aching, empty week to come.

  They still didn’t know each other’s names.

  “If you ain’t read A Vindication of the Rights of Women—” Silas said.

  “Rights, rights, rights.” The Tory drained his glass. Silas reached for the bottle. “You talk endlessly of rights, but I never hear you speak of duties or the proper maintenance of social order. Every Jack or Jill cannot be master.”

  “Speaks a master,” Silas returned. “You’d feel different in my shoes.”

  “In your shoes,” the Tory began, then stopped. “Well, in your shoes, I might feel differently about many things. Do you know what day it is?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “It’s a year.”

  “What’s a year?”

  “A year since you and I first…” The Tory waved a hand.

  “Is it? A year, eh?” Silas had no idea what to do with that information.

  The Tory sat up. “I mention it because…Ah, the devil. I suppose I’ve never told you about Richard.”

  “Who’s that?” Lover? Son?

  “My friend,” the Tory said. “My closest friend, all my life. Boys together. Lovers since we were fourteen. I thought it would be forever, he and I.”

  “Aye? What happened?” Silas asked, since the Tory seemed to want to talk.

  “I did. My damned…whatever is wrong with me that I want this.” The Tory swept a hand around the room.

  “Oi. Nothing wrong with you.”

  “Is there not? I am a gentleman of good family. I should not want men at all, and I should certainly not want men to…abuse me. But I do.”

  Silas had no idea what to say to that. It was damned odd, and he’d often thought so. He’d assumed the Tory knew what he was about. “Well, but it does for you, don’t it?”

  “It does very well for me, and you don’t need telling so, but why does it do? Why do I like these things?”

  “Quot homines tot sententiae,” Silas observed, a little self-consciously, because he was probably saying it wrong.

  The Tory’s brows shot up. “Where did you learn Latin?”

  “Same school I learned the rest.” From the parson, then from his fellow radicals, then from his books. Self-taught, reading day and night. “It’s right, though, ain’t it? This many men, that many opinions. We all got different ways, and yours is different from most, that’s the long and short of it.” And why was the Tory fretting about this now, when they’d been fucking happily for a year? “Something happen? You all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, very well. Just, a conversation earlier this week that made me feel somewhat…A conversation with Richard.”

  Back to him again. Silas frowned. “So what about this fellow?”

  The Tory tipped his head back and shut his eyes. “He is a very kind and caring man.”

  “Ah.”

  “Quite.”

  “No good to you then.”

  “Indeed not. I tried to explain, you see. We were, what, twenty-two? I thought he might understand. He didn’t. He was disgusted. It is…hard, to see disgust on the face of the man you love above all others. He was revolted by what I asked of him, and then…I had to tell him what we had, without that, wasn’t enough for me. That I didn’t love him enough to forget my own filthy wants.”

  His voice ached. Silas wanted to hold him, pull him close. “That’s hard.”

  “I thought it was right, until I saw his face, heaven help me. And one can’t take that sort of thing back once spoken. My poor Richard.”

  “Poor Richard?” Silas repeated. “He couldn’t play a bedroom game or two for your sake, and it’s poor Richard?”

  “He’s a principled, decent man, and I gave him the choice between doing something that repelled him or ending what we had. I hurt him so much.”

  It sounded the other way around to Silas. He felt an urge to take this prig of a Richard fellow and slam his head into a wall, knock some sense into him. Some prancing fop or stick-up-his-arse country squire, no doubt. Some cowardly prick who couldn’t see a good thing when he had one in his bed. It wasn’t as if Silas had made a habit of playing the bully in the bedroom before. He was a heavy-handed man, granted, not one for lover’s knots and soft words, but the idea of hurting or insulting a bedfellow on purpose had still seemed damned peculiar. He’d learned to do it, and like it, for the Tory.

  The Tory, whose voice rang with a pain that scraped Silas’s nerves. He was in his late thirties and still mooning over a boys’ affair fifteen years back?

  Bloody idiocy. “Maybe you did, but nature can’t be helped. You got your nature, and if this Richard fellow wasn’t man enough for it”—he rode on over the Tory’s protest—“that’s his loss. There’s no way around it with you. A man needs to be cruel to be kind.”

  The Tory spluttered into his wineglass. “Damn you. And you’re right. Not that it was Richard’s failing, but that it had to be done.” He sighed. “It was hard, though. It affected our friendship for a long time. And I couldn’t find what I needed, and it wasn’t safe trying.”

  “No.” Silas had heard all about that. He’s going to get himself killed, Jon had said. Can’t get what he wants from whores, so he goes looking in alleys. Silas didn’t want to think about that, about the Tory and the stupid risks he’d run. How easily he could have been lost, broken and bleeding. “So what’s this to do with today?”

  The Tory hesitated, then grinned, a sudden boyish smile that made him look much younger. “Well, that it has been a good year. That you understand what even Richard does not, and I appreciate your understanding, my friend.” He moved his glass to chink it against Silas’s. “Thank you.”

  “Cheers.” Silas could feel his face redden. He drained his glass to cover his confusion, then plucked the Tory’s away and set them both down. “Well, seems to me, if this is an anniversary, it calls for a celebration.”

  “Oh yes?” Those dark eyes hooded, already anticipating. He stretched out, arms above his head, something like a lazy movement, but one that brought muscle and sinew into play.

  Silas swung a leg over the Tory’s chest and sat firmly, his bulk as effective a prison as any chains. He leaned forward, grabbed the Tory’s wrists, and pushed down, digging his fingers into the flesh till he was sure he’d leave marks. A little anniversary gift for his Tory to cherish till next week, and if that bloody Richard fellow saw them, so much the better. The Tory moaned in helpless protest, attempting to twist free.

  “Celebration, I said,” Silas told him. “And I’m going to celebrate you till you won’t walk straight for days.”

  Chapter 2

  OCTOBER 1819

  “I could wish I’d never found my blasted cousin,” Lord Richard Vane said with force.

  Dominic stretched his legs out in front of the fire. It was a Tuesday night. One day before Wednesday.

  He was tired; he always was. His position in the Home Office was no sinecure, although it could have been. There were plenty of gentlemen who drew a wage and did very li
ttle to earn it. Dominic did not choose to be one of them.

  His work was not enjoyable at the moment. Since the unfortunate incident at Manchester, when concerned magistrates had ordered overzealous yeomanry to control a dangerous crowd, accidentally killing a handful of demonstrators, the country had been aflame. The incident, nothing more than a tragic misfortune, had been given the melodramatic nickname of “the Peterloo Massacre” and stirred up into a crisis by journalists and polemicists, with accusations of murder thrown at the lawful government. Seditious pamphlets circulated ever more widely, fanning the flames of radical dissent, attempting to turn popular anger into revolution.

  Dominic didn’t intend to let that happen. But it was hard and draining work controlling the waves of popular fury, and he was tired, and he had very limited patience for Richard’s current problem, his newfound relative Harry.

  Still, this was Richard, who very rarely sought help, and Dominic had known for some time he had a weight on his heart.

  “You have my every sympathy, dear fellow. What’s the problem with Harry?”

  Richard made a face. “I don’t wish to be unjust. He scrubbed up very well. He’s acquired a good manner. He’s very likeable.”

  “All that granted, feel free to be unjust. What’s the problem?”

  Richard sighed. “Oh, curse it. In confidence, he is…not entirely free of his past.”

  “I told you,” Dominic said. “I beg your pardon, Richard, but I told you this would happen. What has he done?”

  Harry’s father had turned his back on the noble Vane family to elope with a radical agitator. Their son had been brought up in the midst of sedition; when Richard had found him, he was working in a bookshop that peddled radical politics. Richard had claimed that Harry had rejected revolution and sedition in his quest to become a gentleman. Dominic did not believe leopards changed their spots and had a wager with Julius that the boy would disgrace himself by Christmas.

  “He’s got a stack of the Peterloo pamphlets in his bedroom,” Richard admitted. “Some of the worst kind.”