Page 2 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
Hartley threw back his wine and stood somewhat unsteadily. “Does it bother you to think of why he left me this house?” he asked, looking up at his brother. Even as the words left his mouth he knew he was being pathetic, looking in the wrong place for proof that he hadn’t ruined all their lives. “Is that why you don’t want to be here?”
Will touched his shoulder. It had been so long since anyone had touched Hartley—even his valet had learned to dress him with only the most glancing and impersonal contact—that he was momentarily taken aback.
“Hartley, the question is whether it bothersyou.”
This was precisely the sort of arrant nonsense that Willwouldsay. Hartley stepped away and let his brother’s hand fall to his side.
There was something about an empty pub that never felt right to Sam. Some places were meant to be filled with the warmth of bodies and the buzz of voices; silent, they were haunted by the people who ought to have been there. While there was some relief in seeing the last customer out the door and spending a quiet hour polishing pewter tankards to a satisfying shine and wiping any sticky traces of spilled beer off the bar, Sam was certain the Bell was at its best when it was crowded and a bit chaotic.
He had only started his ritual of rubbing down the bar with lemon oil when the door swung open. Any of the Bell’s regulars would have known it was closed, so Sam turned toward the door, ready for a minor emergency: somebody in need of a hot meal, a clean bed, or a couple shillings to pay the rent. Or maybe they just needed the kind of safety only a looming former prizefighter could provide. Sam was happy to be able to give that kind of safety. Life in London was hard, harder still if you were poor, black, and out on the streets past ten at night.
But it was only Kate. “It’s late for you to be about,” he said, putting down his chamois in order to pull her a mug of ale. There was only one reason for Kate to be out this late, and the lines around her eyes and the disordered state of her hair corroborated that she had been at another lying in. She said it happened every autumn, this rush of new lives, but Sam couldn’t remember her being so thoroughly run off her feet in years past.
“Fourteen hours,” she said, sitting heavily on a stool at the bar. Her voice was hoarse. “Then another two trying to get the babe to nurse.” Even as Kate spoke, Sam heard a scratching of paws along the flagstone floors of the taproom. Every other minute of the day, Sam was sure the dog was as deaf as a stone. But all Kate had to do was whisper and the mongrel materialized at her side. Kate had rescued—stolen, not to put too fine a point on it—the dog from a rat pit near on ten years ago, and it had been following her around ever since.
“Have you eaten?” Sam asked, already reaching under the bar for a dish.
“Not since yesterday.”
Sam had put aside a slice of pork pie for his own supper, but he could have some bread and butter later on. He slid the pie across the bar to Kate, and she thanked him by giving him a tired salute with her mug. Sam poured himself a pint and they drank in companionable silence for a few minutes. After a few years behind the bar, Sam knew the look of someone who needed to talk. He also knew that a person was more likely to speak if he kept busy, so in between sips of his ale he silently set about cleaning the tankards.
“Nick asked me to marry him again,” Kate said. No surprise there. Sam’s brother had been fond of Kate since they were all children together. They both might have thought Sam was a blind man, but he saw Kate coming and going from Nick’s rooms upstairs at all hours of the night and day.
“What did you tell him this time?”
“I reminded him that we’re both too busy to get married.”
That was a poor excuse. It was true that they were busy. Nick was up every day at dawn, cooking the meals they sold at the Bell. And after years of working alongside her mother, Kate was midwife to what seemed like every black woman in London. To Sam’s mind, that was an even better reason for them to get married—two busy people who enjoyed one another’s company would surely be best served by shortening the distance between themselves, but he wasn’t fool enough to tell Kate how to live her life.
“Did my brother pretend to believe you or no?” Sam asked without looking up from the tankard he was polishing.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her crack a smile. “He did, bless him.”
Sam never ceased to be amazed by Nick’s inherent decency; as far as Sam knew, his brother had never done any living thing the least harm. Nick had been born good, while Sam had to learn it secondhand. And, as foreigners often spoke with traces of their old tongue, sometimes Sam feared he would never lose traces of that old blood-soaked accent. “Want to tell me the real reason you don’t want to make an honest man out of him?”
“You’ll think I’m daft.”
“Already do.”
“Here, give me one of those.” She took a rag and began attacking a tankard as if it had done her wrong. She knew her way around behind a bar, Kate did. She had been a barmaid at the Bell back when her father still owned it, long before Sam had bought the place. They had been a good team. They still were: Kate brought people into the world, Nick fed them, and Sam poured their drinks and gave them a place to be warm and safe.
Sam went to fetch the broom, and when he came back he found Kate paused, rag midair. “It’s about the painting,” she said.
“What painting?” He instinctively checked the woodwork for peeling paint that needed to be retouched. That would be an expense that had to wait. This week he had already paid half a crown to the chimney man to do something about the smoke that billowed through the room whenever the wind blew from the north, and then another two shillings to the glazier to mend a window some neighborhood ruffian lobbed a rock through.
“The dirty one I sat for.”
Oh,thatpainting. “That was, what, five years ago?” In her youth, Kate had been a bit on the unruly side. She had been helping an opera girl bring on her monthlies when the gentleman who had gotten the girl in trouble took a fancy to Kate. He had offered her a princely sum to let him paint her in the altogether. Kate agreed, having been a bit pressed for cash due to her father making a habit of losing money on bad wagers and strong drink. “What made you think of it now?”
“Closer to seven years. I don’t like the idea of there being a picture out there of Nick’s wife stark naked.” She hoisted herself up onto the bar, her legs dangling off the edge as they had when she was a kid.
“But Nick already knows. Hell, he’s known about that painting since he tried to persuade you not to do it. If it bothered him, he wouldn’t have asked you to marry him.”
She twisted the cloth in her hands. “That’s why it’s bothering me.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Because he doesn’t care?”
“No!” Smiling, she flung the rag at his head, but he caught it. “Because I remember what he said. ‘How are you going to get a decent husband with your bosoms out there for all the world to see,’” she said in a passable imitation of Nick’s serious-minded way of speaking.
