Page 63 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
Sam stood and dried himself off on a length of toweling that Hartley had left in arm’s reach of the bath. “The water’s getting cold. I’ll have to put more on if you’ll be wanting a wash.”
Reluctantly, Hartley tore his gaze away from Sam long enough to fill the pot at the pump.
“It’s odd to see you doing work,” Sam said.
“I can boil water, Sam. I’m not a total incompetent.” With a flourish, he hung the pot over the fire, as if to demonstrate his competence at water boiling. “I didn’t grow up in a house where people poured me baths scented with rosewater or whatever it is you’re imagining.”
“I know you didn’t. But I’m glad to have met your brothers, or I might not have believed it.”
“Ha. I’ll tell Will that you’d never take him for a gentleman. He’ll be delighted.”
“I meant the vicar. Benedict. His hands are rough. And he had some dirt under his nails. It made me think that you might not mind that for yourself. After you leave here, I mean.”
Hartley had explained that he was selling this house and looking for a set of rooms that would accommodate him, Alf, Sadie, and the baby. Theirs was an odd arrangement, and he hadn’t yet come across anything suitable. After the events of the past few months, he couldn’t stow Alf away in the servants’ quarters or put Sadie and Charlotte in the basement. It would feel, somehow, like a lie. And yet he didn’t know what the alternative was.
“I wouldn’t mind it,” Hartley said. “If it meant being with you.”
“I was wondering,” Sam said, “if you’d like to let the rooms above a tavern. There’s a place to let on Shoe Lane. There are four rooms upstairs, two in front and two in back. If you took one pair and I took the other, it wouldn’t look out of the ordinary.”
“Would you really want that? I don’t think I’m precisely easy to be around, and I doubt my ability to be charming at all hours of the clock.”Do you know what you’re getting yourself into,was what he really wanted to ask.
“There’s nobody who’s charming at all hours. Come here.” Sam patted his lap.
Hartley made a show of rolling his eyes but he settled comfortably in Sam’s lap.
“I love you,” Sam said.
“How unwise of you.”
Sam chucked him on the chin. “Maybe you are a prig after all. Offer rescinded. Go find somewhere else to live.”
“I love you too,” he said, dropping a kiss onto Sam’s forehead. “Is there room for Sadie and Alf?”
Sam’s expression softened. “I made sure of it. There’s a pair of rooms on the top floor. Hart, I’ll be honest. I can’t imagine you in rooms above a pub.”
“I see that one day I’m going to have to bring you to blasted Kirkby Barton in the arse end of nowhere so you can see the cottage where I was born. You’ll see that rooms above any pub are a stately pleasure dome by comparison. Let me make this equally clear to you, because I think I’ve failed on this score. I want to be with you, in rooms above a pub or anywhere you happen to be. A cave, a pirate ship, a desert island, doesn’t matter. And while I maintain that it would have been vastly better for you to never have met me, the fact remains that you have. I love you, and I want to be with you, and if I haven’t made that clear then it’s because I’ve made a hash of everything. Frankly, if you actually plan on being such a fool as to keep me in your life, which I dearly hope you are, you’ll just have to get used to my making a hash of lots of things.”
Sam brought his hand to Hartley’s cheek. “If that makes me a fool, then I’m glad to be a fool.”
“Well, good. Glad that’s settled.” Hartley climbed off Sam’s lap and bathed quickly, all the while conscious of Sam’s gaze on him, as hotly as his own gaze had been on Sam.
Later, upstairs in bed, Hartley settled himself into the crook of Sam’s arm, and within a few moments Sam’s chest was falling and rising with the steadiness of a man fast asleep. Of course Sam was the kind of person who simply fell asleep. No tossing or turning or prolonged exercises in self-recrimination; no worrying about where to put his limbs in relation to his bedmate’s. If Hartley hadn’t been so fond of him he’d have been quite disgusted.
At some point, Hartley must have fallen asleep, however, because he could hear the clanging of pans from downstairs, which meant it was afternoon and Sadie had returned. One of Sam’s huge arms was draped heavily across his chest, and he felt a rare peace of mind.
Maybe that was why, after all these years, he finally let his thoughts drift to the room across the hall. He had hardly poked his head into his godfather’s bedchamber in the years he had been living here. Hartley’s memory supplied a dim vision of a large bed with dark velvet hangings, matching window curtains perpetually closed. Easterbrook had commissioned a small cabinet that was festooned with gilt and fashioned with a golden lock; it was in this exemplar of the old man’s terrible taste that Hartley’s portrait had been kept. Upon inheriting the house, Hartley had confirmed that the cabinet was empty, then promptly sent it to the auctioneer, along with all the pricier bits of furniture.
He pulled the quilt up to Sam’s chin and slid out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb him, and hastily dressed. The door to Sir Humphrey’s room creaked as Hartley nudged it open, his hand sweaty on the latch. The curtains were drawn, letting in only the faintest slivers of wintry light. Hartley had no intention of poking about this room in the dark, so he pulled the curtains open, dislodging a cloud of dust and revealing a tangle of cobwebs, some still bearing ominous-looking shadows. He thought he could hear the skittering of tiny arachnid legs over cold glass, and shuddered to think that this had been only across the corridor from where he slept.
Walking the perimeter of the room, he saw that, a piece of paneling had come loose. Some wood shavings were scattered atop the layer of dust that adorned the floorboards, suggesting that this damage was new, dating from after the departure of his servants. Around the edges of the panel were a few jagged marks. He shuddered, imagining the creature that had caused this damage. Spiders were bad enough, but mice were—he preferred not to think about mice, and the size of these marks indicated something rather more ambitious than a mouse. He’d call in the rat catcher first thing. But he didn’t want to leave the panel just hanging there. He still lived here, for God’s sake, and he wasn’t going to tolerate bits of his house wobbling about like loose teeth. Using the toe of one bare foot, he tried to press the panel back into place.
Instead it fell off completely, landing on the floor in a cloud of dust, with a noise that seemed to echo in the quiet of the house. Behind the panel he expected to see exposed stonework or bricks or whatever the interior walls of houses such as these were made of. Instead there was a gap, a dark and shadowy emptiness.
For a moment his mind reeled backward ten years, fifteen years, until he was in an entirely different house, an entirely different wall but with a similar gap. Then, Will and Martin had tried to convince him it was a priest’s hole, and when Hartley had pointed out that the Easterbrooks were not Catholic, they had insisted it must be a secret passageway leading to a medieval oubliette. That had been almost plausible, quite in keeping with what he might have expected from Easterbrooks of yore.
This was no oubliette, no passageway of any kind. At closer range, he could see that the panel had been pulled roughly off the wall, not damaged by a hungry rodent. And there were only so many reasons a panel might be pulled off a wall. Biting his lip, Hartley stuck a hand into the darkness. His fingers met something coarse and yet almost slick in places. A tube? Some kind of pipe? He pulled it out and saw that it was a rolled-up canvas.
There was no sound but the beating of his heart as he unrolled the canvas. Yes, this was one of the paintings that had once hung in the library. He remembered it well. A girl in a yellow wrap that was draped in such a way as to cover nothing of relevance. He didn’t think he had ever met her. In the shadowy recesses of the wall, he could see several other rolled canvases leaning against the exposed lath and plaster, and one small painting that still remained in its gilt frame.
