Page 61 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“He’s a . . .” Oliver had no idea what to say. A month ago, he would have said “criminal” or “scoundrel,” which were true enough. Instead he said, “He’s a friend,” which was by now as good as a lie.
“Ha!” his father spat, with more emphasis than Oliver had thought him capable of. “I offered him money to stay away from you, you know.”
Oliver’s fingers clenched around the back of the nearest chair, squeezing hard enough to hurt his own hand. “Did he accept? Because if he did, you made a bad bargain. I’m afraid he definitely hasn’t been staying away from me, Father. Far from it.”
If the earl understood Oliver’s meaning he did not betray it. “Listen, my boy, you have no idea what you’re dealing with. His mother was a whore, among other things. His father—or the man who was married to his mother, at least—was a common street criminal who raised your Mr. Turner to bring in money by whatever means necessary, including stealing from his employers and most likely whoring himself.”
Oliver felt his ears start to ring, as if he were standing too near an organ at church. His father’s words were barely distinguishable above the hum. The room around him seemed to lose coherency, the old-fashioned chairs and faded draperies blending into one another in an alarming way. He knew he really ought to sit but he’d be damned if he displayed any kind of weakness in front of his father.
All Oliver could remember was Jack sinking to his knees before him, Jack’s body beneath his own. He had sensed at the time that those actions somehow cost Jack something they didn’t cost Oliver, but he hadn’t known why. Now, he thought he understood, and felt another pang at having thrown away that man’s friendship and companionship.
And then, like a blow to the back of the head, he remembered the money he had left behind at Branson Court, and what that must have looked like to Jack.
“He is depraved, Oliver. A criminal through and through,” his father said in his most stentorian tones, forcing Oliver’s attention back to the present.
Hearing his own darkest fears spoken aloud by his father caused Oliver’s world to pivot on its axis. He felt his thoughts reshape themselves as if for no other reason than to disagree with his father, and the new shape they took felt like a revelation.
“Likely so.” Oliver straightened his back and donned his best manners as if they were a newly tailored coat. “He acts without any regard for whether something is a crime.” He thought of what criminal behavior Jack had engaged in since Oliver had met him. Besides trespassing in his client’s house, his only other crimes had been those he committed with Oliver. “Thank God for it,” he said, and he meant it. If those acts were crimes, Oliver suddenly felt less confident that it mattered whether anything was a crime. “He does what he knows to be right. He helps people, sir. And you know that, because he helped Charlotte when nobody else did.” It wasn’t that nobody else could, Oliver realized, but that nobody else wanted to risk their neck.
Lord Rutland regarded Oliver for a long moment, his eyes hard and cold. “I think you’ve gone stark mad. You’re not the same man since you’ve returned to England. You hear tales of men who survive battle only to be not quite right in the head afterward, and I worry that you’re one of them.”
Oliver knew his father said this to wound him. He knew the words were picked out less because they were true and more because they would cut to the bone. But they hurt because they touched Oliver’s own lurking suspicion.
“No,” he said in the same voice he would use to order tea. “I’m not mad, but it’s quite true that I’m not the same man I was before . . .” Before what? Before his injury. Before Badajoz.
Before Jack.
Everything Oliver had experienced during the war had turned his world upside down, and he had come home trying to set it right side up again, only to fall in with a man who set the entire operation even more radically askew. And now, in this moldering old room, he felt that he had his feet firmly planted for the first time in years.
But he wasn’t going to say any of that to his father. “I’m capable of making my own decisions. I understand that you disapprove of my acquaintance with Mr. Turner, and I regret if it reflects poorly on you, but I’ve made up my mind.” He gave his father his most correct bow before heading out the front door.
Jack threw his belongings into his valise and headed out on foot towards the nearest coaching inn. Or, at least, in the direction that he hoped would bring him to the nearest coaching inn. Truth be told, on the way to Branson Court, he had been paying closer attention to Oliver’s hands on the ribbons than he had to his surroundings. He had a laundry list of depravities he wanted those hands to commit, and not a single idea how to get to the inn.
Blast and hell and fuck. He shouldn’t feel half so ripped apart by Rivington’s departure. Some inane part of him felt betrayed, as if he didn’t know perfectly well what betrayal actually looked like. A highborn man leaving twenty pounds—twenty pounds, for the love of God—on a nightstand and then buggering off was no betrayal. It was boringly predictable and nothing more.
This was not heartbreak, nor was it grief. Oliver hadn’t owed him anything. Not friendship, not trust, certainly not twenty pounds, so really Jack ought to count himself ahead of the game.
He had known it would end badly, dallying with such a dazzlingly perfect piece of goods as Oliver Rivington, a man who by all rights he should never even have met. Oliver deserved to be surrounded by cleanliness and virtue, ladies and gentlemen who drank wine and wore silk and pretended the rest of the world was either invisible or irrelevant. Jack felt ashamed, but also sickly thrilled that he had dragged Oliver into that sordid and shabby underworld of whorehouse kitchens and stolen letters.
He kicked a rock to see if it made him feel any better.
It did not.
For years, Jack hadn’t needed anybody, hadn’t wanted anybody. He trusted Sarah and Georgie, at least most of the time, but had always known it would be ruinous to trust anyone else. That principle had been implicit in everything he had learned from his father, mixed in with how to nick a pocket watch and how to cheat at cards.
But Jack had trusted Oliver. Call it love, call it want, call it whatever you please, but the plain fact of the matter was that Jack Turner had abandoned what had always been a core tenet of his life.
Which was why he was not only miserable but also lost and stranded in a strange place.
To make matters worse, the countryside he was walking through was appalling, almost jeering at him with its completely unnecessary cheerfulness. Birds sang, fluffy little sheep dotted wildflower-strewn hillsides, all of it so goddamned charming and picturesque. Oliver would love it. Jack hated it all, not only for his usual reason of hating the countryside’s failure to be London, but for the more pressing reason that on a day like today there ought to be nothing around him but fire and rocks, an outrageous hellscape mirroring his state of mind.
He stopped to take his coat off, not even sure why he had put the blasted thing on in the first place. He had nobody to impress right now. His job was done, Oliver was gone, and Sarah would never hear about any of today’s sartorial transgressions. He could wear a nightcap and ball gown. He could wear pantaloons and dancing slippers and nothing else. And who would care? Bloody nobody, that’s who.
Just for the sake of the thing, he took his waistcoat off too. “There!” he said, trying to sound satisfied. Nobody was around to hear him but the sodding sheep.
He turned down the lane that led, with any luck, to the inn, but something made him balk. Now, why in hell did he feel like he ought to be heading back to Branson Court? There was nothing left for him to do there. Mrs. Wraxhall had her letters, Jack had his money, everyone was satisfied.
Except for how they weren’t. Mr. Wraxhall was under the impression that his wife harbored pornographic longings for a former lover. Mrs. Durbin thought her daughter had been about to commit an act of hardened criminality. And he had left Mrs. Wraxhall alone to sort it all out, which was especially poor payment for her having gone out of her way to protect a perfect stranger.
