Page 26 of King's Man

While the post-boy started the horses pulling, Nate and Sam ducked in under the chaise to try and lift it enough that the wheel would clear the rut. They heaved and gasped for a good ten minutes, the chaise splashing back down after every attempt. Nate found himself soaked past his knees and sweating from the effort as the sun burned off the clouds and turned the clammy air steamy.

“We need to put something into the rut,” he said, wiping his forehead after the umpteenth attempt had failed. “Planks or something.”

“Planks?” Sam had removed his neckcloth and his shirt hung open at the neck. Nate tried not to stare at the familiar curve of his throat, the glimpse of muscle on his chest. “Where the bloody hell do you think we’ll get planks from?”

Nate blinked the sweat out of his eyes along with the image of Sam’s bare skin. “You sound like a ‘bloody’ Englishman,” he said, in a poor attempt at the accent. “Very highfalutin’.”

Sam looked almost amused. “Highfalutin’? If I sound like anything, it’s St. Giles.”

“Who’s he?”

“It’s a place, you ignoramus.” Sam sobered, as if struck by an unpleasant thought. “Home, I suppose.” After a moment he added, “Maybe we can find a branch in the hedgerow that could help?”

He started making his way to the edge of the road, Nate following. This was the first time Sam had volunteered anything about his life in London and Nate wasn’t about to let it go. “St Giles is a neighborhood, is it?”

“Of a sort.” Sam tugged at a dead branch in the hedge, but it was well and truly stuck. “Hal Foxe gives me a room there.”

“Aroom?” Nate failed to hide his dismay, his mind flashing back to Sam’s beautiful house in Rosemont.

Sam didn’t look like he was going to respond as he concentrated on dislodging the branch. But suddenly, he said, “I had nothing when I came here. They took —” His voice caught, and Nate’s stomach swooped uneasily. “I lost everything. Stepped off the ship in London with nothing but the clothes on my back. The government promised to help, but — Well, there’s thousands of us here, waiting on the Loyalist Claims Commission to compensate us for what we lost back home. And they hardly give out anything, just pennies, and only then if you have written proof of the property stolen from you.” He tugged angrily at the branch. It scarcely moved an inch. “As if you stop to pack your papers when the mob’s riding you out of town or burning down your damned house. But they don’t think about that, do they? Because they’ve never been refugees. They don’t know what it’s like to…to…to loseeverything. Even your country. So we wait. And they give us fuck all. And the devil take them anyway. So yes, Hal Foxe gives mearoom and I don’t much care what I do for it in return. If the Commission won’t give me what I’m owed, then I’ll damn well take it for myself.” He yanked on the branch again. “Damn it, just —”

“Let me help.” Nate stepped forward to grab the branch, but Sam whirled on him.

“I don’t need your help!”

“With the branch,” Nate clarified, hands up. “I meant, let me help you free the branch.”

Sam didn’t reply, jaw working as if he were chewing back an angry response. But neither did he object when Nate cautiously moved next to him and took hold of the branch, their hands side-by-side, so close their fingers were touching.

“On three,” Nate said, and they hauled. With a wrenching crack the branch came free, sending them both staggering back so hard that Nate lost his balance, feet sliding in the slimy mud until, with an unmanly squeal, he landed on his ass. “Mary Mother of God!” he gasped. “It’s cold!”

The bastard snorted, amused. Nate glared, picking at the mud that had splashed up onto his face, which only made Sam laugh out loud, his startling smile so familiar it completely overturned Nate’s dismay.

And then he was chuckling too, hilarity rising like a bubble through the thick tension between them. “Damnation,” Nate said, trying in vain to get up without having to stick his hands into the mud for leverage. “This is disgusting. I have mud — You don’t want to know where I have mud.”

“Here.” Sam leaned down to offer his hand.

Nate stared at Sam’s outstretched hand, his laughter fading. Slowly, with care, he reached up and clasped Sam’s hand. Firm fingers closed around his, warm and strong and painfully familiar. He tried not to react to the sensation as Sam hauled him to his feet, but then they were standing rather close and Nate couldn’t look away, couldn’t let go. “Thank you,” he said softly, gazing into Sam’s clear eyes. Emotion shone there, but Nate couldn’t quite decipher its meaning.

Then, as if suddenly recollecting himself, Sam tugged his hand free. “We need a couple more branches,” he said. “I’ll go look.”

After taking a moment to compose his feelings, Nate followed, and they spent the next hour dragging dead branches out of the hedge and wedging them beneath the stuck wheel — or trying to. It was difficult to see beneath the murky water.

As a rule, Nate preferred not to get his hands dirty. It was why he’d studied so hard at the law — so he could earn his keep surrounded by books and ideas, not mud and shit. Yet here he was, up to his knees in both, and he found he didn’t really mind all that much.

“We’re ready!” Sam yelled to the post-boy, from where he had his shoulder braced against the chaise. Nate stood next to the wheel, ready to guide it onto the branches, soaked to the skin from reaching into the filth, his shirtsleeves pushed up and the rest clinging to him damply. The sun was fully out now, and hot. Not hot like home, but hot enough to dry the mud in his hair.

The post-boy urged the horses on, Sam grunted with the effort of pushing, and Nate hauled on the wheel. For a second — two, three seconds — it teetered on the brink and then suddenly it lurched forward, up and out.

Nate yelped, pulling his hands away from the heavy wheel, jumping clear of the branches as they squelched down into the mud. He whooped and Sam stumbled forward, lost his balance, and ended up on his knees in the dirt. “Hell!”

But he was laughing as he climbed to his feet, the post-boy bringing the chaise to a stop further along the road. Nate laughed too, grinning at Sam who, until he remembered he wasn’t supposed to, grinned back.

“We should walk to the next stage and find somewhere to clean up,” Sam said, eying the chaise. “Cole will drub me if we get all this dirt inside.”

Nate peered along the muddy road ahead, the glare making him squint. “Besides, we might need to push her free again.”

Sam grimaced in a way that didn’t reach his eyes, pantomiming displeasure. Nate wondered whether, like him, Sam was enjoying the suspension of hostilities between them and didn’t want the tentative truce to end.

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