Page 5 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
“And so you shall. But first we have matters to discuss. You were lurking in the alley outside my house, which probably ought to bother me, but for how you thought it was the Easterbrooks’ house. People don’t usually lurk for terribly noble motives, which leads me to believe you intended some harm to the Easterbrooks. If so, we may have something in common. We might enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
He was standing under the light now, and Sam could see him quite clearly. His features were refined, Sam might even say pretty, but the set of his mouth was positively malevolent. His eyes were the color of boiled gooseberries, pale and a bit sinister. He did not look like a man anybody in their right mind ought to enter into any kind of arrangement with.
But if he could perhaps bargain with this man for Kate’s painting, that might be worth it. “Fine,” he said, feeling like he had just made a deal with the devil at a crossroads.
Now that he had this stranger in his library, Hartley was having misgivings about the soundness of his plan.
First, this man was significantly larger than anyone needed to be. The Hepplewhite chair hardly contained him. Hartley had good reasons for not feeling particularly at ease around large men, but this man didn’t seem threatening. He sat in that chair as if it were a church pew, his hat politely on his lap. Hartley started to lower himself into the matching chair beside his guest, but then thought better of it and perched on the edge of a table, enjoying a false but comforting sense of height.
Second, it was unwise to trust strangers with his secrets. But Hartley had no secrets anymore; he had nothing to lose. It occurred to him for the first time that he could perhaps take advantage of his situation. He might as well behave fearlessly, if it meant getting a bit of his own back.
He was aware that Will would say he ought to put his grievances to rest, that making peace with the wrongs that had been done him was the only way forward. And he had to concede that Will knew something about that topic. But Will was also kind and decent, and Hartley was neither; he was petty and vindictive, because those qualities were all the sword or shield he had.
He poured some brandy into two glasses and handed one to his guest. “The long and short of it is that I would like nothing more than to do a grand disservice to Martin Easterbrook. If you’d like to join forces with me, then I’m interested. If not, so be it. We can pretend tonight never happened.”
“And if I don’t want anything to do with you? If it turns out this Martin fellow is my best mate and I tell him you’re set against him? What if I tell a gossip rag that you tried to approach me?” The man spoke with a rough London accent that was laced through with something else that Hartley couldn’t identify.
“You’re welcome to,” Hartley said lightly. “My name is Hartley Sedgwick. Hartley with anE. Be sure to have the paper spell it correctly.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his card case with a flourish that was marred by the hinge being stiff from want of use. “For reference,” he said, holding out a card between two fingers.
Something went wrong because the man palmed the card but then politely shook Hartley’s hand. Hartley froze. The man wasn’t wearing gloves and Hartley had removed his own—gentlemen didn’t eat or drink with gloves on, and Hartley couldn’t bring himself to abandon the rules he had worked so blasted hard to master. Hartley didn’t much care for being touched, least of all being touched skin to skin. He felt like he was being flayed alive. Were other people’s hands always so warm, or was this stranger about to succumb to the ague?
“Samuel Fox,” the man said as he finally let go of Hartley’s hand.
“A pleasure, Mr. Fox.” Hartley tried to sound like someone who wasn’t in danger of becoming unglued.
Mr. Fox took a sip of the brandy, and Hartley realized belatedly he ought to have offered ale or cider. Fox wore trousers that were worn at the knees and a coat that strained badly across his broad shoulders; his hands were rough with work. He was plainly not of the brandy-drinking classes, and to have presented him with the drink now seemed farcically affected.
“Who is Easterbrook to you?” Fox asked. “I thought this was his house.”
“It was. It’s mine now. Sir Humphrey Easterbrook was my godfather.” Hartley’s voice only caught a little on that designation. “He died a few years ago and left this house to me. Your turn,” he said briskly. “What was Easterbrook to you?”
“He has—had—something that belongs to a friend of mine.”
Hartley raised his eyebrows. “I’m not going to ask whether you intended to walk in and help yourself to—to what, may I ask?”
He took a sip of brandy as he watched Mr. Fox decide whether he could be trusted. Hartley wondered what it must be like to be able to judge trustworthiness on sight. No, he wondered what it must be like to even want to. It was much easier to simply not trust people at all. Hartley trusted Will. He also trusted his older brother, Ben, but that wasn’t any great accomplishment because Ben was utterly incapable of malice. He supposed he also trusted his youngest two brothers, but they were far away so he didn’t have to put it to the test.
“It’s a painting,” Fox said.
Hartley’s glass dropped to the parquet, shattering into bloodred shards. He squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see Fox, didn’t want to see the mess he had made, didn’t want to see the empty spaces on the walls. A second passed, and he willed his composure to freeze him over into something cold and solid and impenetrable. When he opened his eyes, he knew he had mastered himself, at least as far as it was possible for him to do so.
“Easy,” Fox said. “It’s only a glass. Daresay you have a dozen more like it.”
“I don’t give a damn about the glass.” He tried so hard not to think of Easterbrook’s paintings, so hard not to remember any of it, and now he could almost smell the linseed oil, see Easterbrook’s leering approval. Fox had come to stand before him. “You’ll ruin your boots,” Hartley managed.
“Top-shelf brandy isn’t the worst thing I’m like to step in tonight,” he said. “Now, you only have a few drops on your trousers, no harm done.”
Hartley watched in horror as Fox produced a handkerchief from his pocket, a worn and faded thing that was folded into a neat square. Fox bent and dabbed at the brandy a few inches from the hem of Hartley’s trousers.
“You don’t—Mr. Fox—that’s quite unnecessary.” From the coolly efficient hands of his valet, Hartley would have endured these ministrations. But Fox’s hands were large and warm, motivated by kindness or pity rather than seeing a job to its end. It was too personal, the single layer of wool too flimsy to prevent Hartley’s skin from feeling exposed. He wanted to curl into a protective ball. “Please stop,” he managed.
Fox stepped away as quickly as if Hartley had pulled a knife on him. His dark brown eyes looked concerned, damn him. Hartley didn’t think he could maintain the already tenuous hold on his composure in the face of outright kindness. “The—” he forced himself to say it. “The painting that belongs to your friend. Am I right that it’s not the sort of painting that would be shown in polite company?”
“Ah, no, it isn’t.”
“I don’t have those.” He gestured at the blank walls with their pale, haunting gaps. “I don’t know what he did with his art collection.” When Hartley inherited, there had been no art except for a few bland landscapes, so he decided the portraits must have been destroyed. That, he now realized, was the delusion of a child, a stupid and gullible child who wanted to believe he had a future. An entirely new wave of fear washed over him.
“He could have sold them, you mean?” Fox looked dismayed.
