Page 47 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
Sam stepped closer. “I understand why, Hart. I just wish you cared for yourself as much as I do. I wish you cared for anything as much as I care for you.”
Hartley looked up at him and for a moment Sam thought he’d close the gap, fall into Sam’s arms. Anything. Instead he shook his head and went back inside, closing the door behind him. At least that meant he wasn’t going off to get himself arrested tonight. Sam waited in the cold and the dark until his feet went numb in his boots, then turned homeward.
Hartley was aware that he wasn’t being entirely rational. Some vital knack for self-preservation had gotten knocked loose from his brain now that he couldn’t hide, now that the option of secrecy and safety had been taken away from him. He heard Sam’s words, knew Sam was correct, and at the same time knew he was going to break into Philpott’s office to search for those paintings. Not tonight, but soon. And this time he’d make sure Sam didn’t find out.
The sensible thing would be to put on his dressing gown, have something warm to eat, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and maybe see if when he woke the next morning he felt better. But he didn’t think he could stand his own company tonight. Alf was out and Sadie had gone to bed early. So he changed his clothes and went back outside, this time heading north and east, avoiding both the Bell and Philpott’s offices, and went to a part of the city he usually had no reason to visit. As he walked, the streets narrowed and the symmetrical facades of Mayfair gave way to a ramshackle hodgepodge of houses that seemed at risk of falling into one another. Lean dogs and hungry children peered out from the shadows. He climbed a rickety wooden staircase that seemed to be stuck to the outside of a narrow building with nothing more than years of grime.
“If you won’t come stay with me,” he said when Will answered the door, “at least tell me why you won’t let me give you enough money to hire a better set of rooms.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my lodgings.” Will opened the door wider, letting Hartley in.
It wasn’t horrible. In fact, it wasn’t that much shabbier than the house where they had grown up. Chipped plaster, bits of damp on the ceiling and walls, the pervasive smell of vague unwholesomeness. “Certainly. If you’re a mouse, that is. I daresay all manner of vermin are quite comfortable here.”
Will didn’t answer. He had a lot of practice ignoring Hartley’s minor tantrums. “I’ll put on my coat and we’ll go get a pint.”
“It just doesn’t seem fair that you’re living like this while I’m living in comparative luxury.”
A rare smile spread across Will’s face. “We’ll make a radical of you yet, Hart.”
“Ha. I mean because you’re my brother I don’t feel right about your living like this. I have more than I need, and I want to share it.” Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true: when he had sold off the silver epergnes and jewel-encrusted snuff boxes that littered the Brook Street house, he had been left with enough capital to invest in projects that interested him—first a pottery in Staffordshire, then a series of canals. But lately he had been toying with the idea of cashing out those investments and doing something else. He hadn’t only been bluffing when he told Philpott that he had a good deal of money and nothing to do with it. Perhaps he could use it to help Will.
“I don’t want your money.” Will proceeded to shake some dust off a coat.
Hartley’s spine stiffened. “I see.”
Will looked at him for a long moment, one sleeve in his coat and one out of it. “Because I don’t believe in having more than I need, not because of how you got your money, you gudgeon. You shagged some fellow to help your family. Nothing wrong with that as far as I care. For some reason he left you his house. Those aren’t connected.”
Hartley goggled at him. “Of course they’re connected. Everybody knows that. Why else would he have left it to me?”
“Maybe to punish the person who would have gotten it otherwise? Maybe to embarrass you both?” Hartley must have looked as shocked as he felt. “You hadn’t thought of that, had you?” Will asked. “Easterbrook rarely bothered to pay his bills. Do you really think he’d leave you an entire house to you as compensation?”
“Why would he have wanted to punish Martin?” Hartley knew why Easterbrook would have wanted to embarrass Hartley himself. But Martin was his son and heir.
“Because he didn’t care much for Martin.” Will was now fully, if unsatisfactorily, dressed, and he took the single step required to cross the cramped room and open the door. “You do remember that, don’t you?” When Hartley didn’t answer, he raised an eyebrow. “You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t remember him being a fond parent,” Hartley said slowly.
Will snorted. “You and Ben were so busy thinking about money and schooling and leaks in the roof, you missed everything else.”
Hartley decided not to point out that Ben had kept them warm and fed when nobody else could be bothered, and that money, education, and functional roofs were matters well worth considering. “I see,” he said gravely. It was oddly thrilling to think that maybe the house wasn’t something he had acquired through greed but rather had foisted on him due to an old man’s ill will. The house had always seemed to have meaning set into its mortar, but now that significance had shifted. Will’s words had shaken the cobwebs loose from a certain corner of his mind, something to do with the paintings, and assets, and blackmail, but he couldn’t quite put it all together now. “Have you seen Martin?” he asked when they had descended the stairs and reached the street.
Will shoved his hands into his pockets. “Not since the summer. Ben wrote that Martin planned to go to the Continent, and I haven’t heard anything since.” They turned into a lane. “I feel certain he’s dead.”
Hartley startled, not from the news—he would not be shedding any tears over Martin Easterbrook, dead or alive—but from the grief in his brother’s voice. “Why do you think he’s dead?”
“Because if he were alive he wouldn’t have left me without a word. He’d know I’d worry myself half mad. Every day that passes I become more convinced that he must have died.”
Hartley tentatively squeezed his brother’s arm. When they got to the public house, Hartley ordered two pints and paid for them before Will could put any money on the bar.
It had been dark in Will’s rooms, and it was only marginally brighter at the table they sat at, but now Hartley could see the shadows under his brother’s eyes, the weariness in his face. He was habitually disheveled, but tonight he was more unkempt than usual. He hadn’t shaved in the last fortnight and the less said about his hair the better. Will periodically went into what Hartley thought of as a decline and Ben called an episode. He didn’t sleep, barely ate, forgot to write whatever he was meant to for those horrid publications, and was forced to seek even more dismal lodgings than before. During one terrifying period the year before, he had turned to opium to calm whatever trouble roiled inside him.
Hartley tamped down a surge of panic. “Have you been eating?” he asked, noticing that Will’s coat was now ill fitting in a new and troubling way. Hartley knew his brother had his reasons for these episodes; Will had served in the navy under an infamously cruel captain, and while he hadn’t volunteered any information, Hartley read the report of a fellow officer’s court martial, and gathered that the conditions on board ship had been grim in the extreme.
“Yes,” Will said, looking thoughtful, as if trying to recollect his last meal, or what meals even were. “I do eat. From time to time.”
“Right. Do they have supper here?”
Will gave a ghost of a smile. “If they did, you wouldn’t want to eat it, and neither would I.”
