Page 37 of Once a Gentleman
Chapter Sixteen
“What the hell do you know about my father?” His own words echoed, hollow and throbbing, through the ringing in his ears. He had outrun his sordid past. Hehad. No one knew him here, and no one cared.
But Turner knew. Somehow, he knew, and Kit couldn’t bear it. Turner already pitied him, the secretary he had employed out of curious lust and noblesse oblige, the man who’d gone to his knees for him like a whore and then lurked in his locked bedchamber listening for evidence of Turner’s amours and bemoaning his abandonment like a jealous, betrayed wife.
And now he knew Kit’s father had been believed to be a fraud and had taken his own life, that Kit had been cast out of decent society, that he was nothing but a shabby little tradesman with a blot on his dishonored name.
Really, Kit was only fit to be one of the earring-bedecked pretty-boys men like Dowling brought to Turner’s evening parties.
And Turner knew it, had possibly known it for some time.
Turner hadn’t answered him, standing there staring at Kit with his lips parted and those strikingly pale eyes now dark with some terrible emotion.
“How do you know?” Kit gritted out, his head feeling as if it might detach and float away. Black spots swam in his vision. “How?”
Turner straightened his back and put his hands behind him, clasping them, Kit knew, in the way he did when he meant to face something head-on. “Robinson insisted upon looking into your antecedents,” he said at last. “When I told him I had employed you without references. He feared you might not be what you seemed.”
A short, bitter laugh forced its way out of Kit’s throat, leaving him raw and aching. Not what he seemed? He had seemed to be no one, no one at all, and the reality had indeed been worse than that.
“Robinson. I see him each week and exchange letters and messages with him nearly every day—” The words choked him, and humiliation brought stinging tears to the backs of his eyelids, hot and shameful. He had thought Robinson respected him.
Even Turner’s bloody solicitor pitied and despised him.
“Yes, you do, and he has told me more than once how very well you manage my affairs.”
“Kind of him,” Kit snarled, cut to the quick. Condescension from a middling Portsmouth solicitor; yes, that put the perfect cap on his night of falling down the stairs, assault, pity, and the interruption of his hard-won bloody quiet cup of tea. HelikedRobinson, that was the worst of it. And he’d thought the feeling mutual.
“Yes, it was, for Robinson,” Turner retorted, stepping to the side and rounding the corner of the table that had separated them. Kit fell back a step of his own. God, no, he could not be near enough to Turner to feel the heat of him, to fall under his spell. “Robinson’s not an effusive man, in the way that bricks aren’t effusive. He all but admitted he was wrong to suspect you. And I’ve never heard him admit to being wrong about anything.”
“I don’t require Robinson’s approval! And it matters little, since I’m going as soon as it’s light—”
“I beg you will not. I beg of you, Hewlett,” Turner said, very low, his voice rough, leaning forward a little as if he could compel Kit to obey by the sheer force of his intent gaze. “One week, that’s all I ask of you. I have no right to demand a period of notice, and I won’t, but I’m asking you. One week. Remain that long, and if you still wish to go at the end of it, I shall write you a letter of reference that sings your praises and have the carriage take you anywhere you wish.”
The candlelight flickered on Turner’s face, all leaping shadows and illuminated planes. He seemed to loom out of the darkness of the kitchen, filling Kit’s vision, filling the room, filling all of his senses.
Kit’s heart pattered and his head felt light. Good God, he ought not to listen. His resolve must not waver.
And yet it did, as the thought of what it would truly mean to leave the house forever dawned upon him.
Kit shut his eyes to blot out Turner’s piercing, pleading eyes, and leaned a hand on the table to keep himself from swaying with the dizziness that came over him.
He would be alone again. Alone in the world, with no one at all to care where he went or what befell him. Even Robinson, with his grudging acceptance, and over-clever, over-managing Samuel, with his plans to murder Mattson in his cups, and Mrs. Felton, the cook, who might not be particularly skilled at actual cookery but who set aside cheese and fruit under a cover on the kitchen sideboard each evening so that Kit needn’t hunt through the pantry for something to eat late at night.
He would lose them all.
And he wished that were the sum of his unhappiness, but he couldn’t lie to himself: he would never see Turner again, and that thought left him numb with something very like misery. Despite everything, he could hardly bear to think of it. Residing in this utterly chaotic mess of a house, with Turner at the center of it, had made him feel as if he were living again, rather than counting down the miserable, meaningless hours until he could no longer keep himself on this side of the grave.
Another dreary boardinghouse, another wearing search for employment that would inevitably be beneath his education and his abilities.
Oh, God, but it wasn’t that. It was Turner, and his mesmerizing light eyes, and his rare genuine smiles, and the breadth of his shoulders and strength of his hands, and the utterly foolish hope Kit couldn’t quite shed that the man he glimpsed now and then was real, and not simply a mirage he’d conjured up out of his own infatuated imagination.
He opened his eyes at last. Turner still gazed at him, his expression intent and his whole body rigid with tension—waiting for Kit’s answer. As if it truly mattered that much to him.
What determination he had left evaporated under the force of Turner’s eyes, like a pond in the summer sun.
Oh, he would despise himself for this once he returned to the solitude of his bedchamber. “One week,” he said, and then added, as a sop to his self-respect, “I ought not to go without any notice at all, and without organizing your papers for Robinson or whomever you might employ in my place.”
Turner let out a long breath and closed his eyes for an instant, as if overwhelmed by relief. It couldn’t be so. He could not possibly mind so very much if Kit left, could he? He felt his honor had been tainted by what had occurred under his roof, at the hands of one of his own guests, that was all. He felt the responsibility any halfway decent man would feel.
