Page 64 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
He reached into his pocket and found the knife he used to open letters and peel apples. Flicking it open, he knelt before the canvas. Best to get this over with. He slashed the canvas sufficiently that the girl would be unrecognizable. It took more effort than he had expected, this slicing of metal through layers of oil paint on thick canvas. His knife was a delicate thing, made for cutting nibs and trimming candles. It was hardly up to this task.
“Hartley,” said a soft voice. He looked up to see Sam, wearing only his trousers, standing in the doorway. “Let me help.”
“No. This is for me to do.” He didn’t want anyone to look at the pictures, even though he knew many of Easterbrook’s London callers must have seen them. He felt, somehow, responsible for seeing this through. “But do you have a knife? This is getting dull.”
Wordlessly, Sam stepped out of the room, only to return a moment later with a much more utilitarian knife than Hartley’s pretty filigree one. It felt heavy and rough in his hand, but it got the job done.
The next painting he unrolled was Kate’s. He had tried not to look at the subjects’ faces, because it seemed like an invasion of privacy, but he couldn’t help but notice that Kate looked like she had been having a jolly time as she reclined on the artist’s sofa. He really hoped she had been. He hoped all the women had a grand time, collected their money, and carried on with their lives, never sparing the paintings or Easterbrook another thought. But the painting had weighed on Kate, and he knew a furious satisfaction when he slid the knife through the rough surface of the canvas.
“That’s Kate’s painting done,” he said when he started on the next canvas.
“Thank you,” Sam murmured, leaning against the wall near the door, his arms folded across his broad chest. Hartley gave him a watery smile.
“You can go back to bed,” Hartley managed. Sam only shook his head.
When he removed the next canvas, he got a good look at the gilt frame. Carved into the bevels of the frame was a pattern of laurel leaves that he surely oughtn’t recognize after all this time. But of course he did, just as he recognized the bare arm painted on the exposed part of the canvas. He ought to abandon the painting he was defacing and move to that small frame. Instead he worked methodically, destroying one painting after the next, until he was kneeling in a drift of brightly colored bits of canvas, the knife handle digging painfully into his palm.
Sam hadn’t known where he was when he woke up, but he knew Hartley ought to have been there. He slid his hand blindly across too-fine sheets and found only lingering warmth where Hartley’s body had recently lain. When he heard what sounded like a gasp, he threw on trousers and all but ran out of the room, driven by some silly instinct to keep his lover safe, expecting to find that Hartley had tripped over a loose bit of carpet or something.
He hadn’t expected this. By the looks of things, neither had Hartley. Some other time he’d ask what had prompted Hartley to kick a hole in the wall, or done whatever it was to expose the paintings’ hiding place. But for now, he was just going to be here in case Hartley needed him.
He watched as Hartley unleashed an efficient hell on those canvases. They were pretty thoroughly destroyed, all except one, which stood framed, inside the wall. Hartley glanced at the one surviving canvas, and Sam followed his gaze. It was a young man, little more than a boy, lying on a sofa, not a stitch of clothes on him. Yellow hair, pale greenish-gray eyes. Sam’s stomach lurched.
Hartley had never said outright that one of the paintings he wished to recover had himself as a subject, but Sam had suspected as much. Now that he saw the portrait, he knew that its revelation would have meant more than the public embarrassment of being caught without one’s clothes on. Sam looked away from the canvas, but not before noticing that whatever tricks the painter had used, he had made Hartley look like a—there was no way around it—like a whore. Nothing wrong with honest whoring, but when you were that young it wasn’t whoring. It was something altogether different. The bile rose in Sam’s gorge, and he knelt beside Hartley.
Hartley leaned against Sam’s chest, the knife dropping from his hand. Sam wrapped his arms around Hartley and felt the smaller man sink against his chest, felt the rise and fall of his breathing. Only later did Sam take the knife and slice through the one remaining canvas until nothing was left but unrecognizable scraps.
After they had built a fire and watched the remnants go up in flame, Sam looked hard at Hartley.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Oddly, yes,” Hartley said. “That was... a lot. It felt good, though.Ifeel good. But Sam, you realize what this means?”
“That somebody went to a fair bit of trouble hiding the paintings in your own house. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Well, there is that. But what I really want to know is what Philpott had in his cabinet.”
Sam let out a whistle.
“You know what,” Hartley went on, “I don’t want to know. I don’t care if he was conducting black masses or worshipping devils. I’m glad to be rid of him and everyone connected with the Easterbrooks. Somebody else can deal with that lot. I have my own life.” He settled against Sam’s chest as they watched the paintings burn.
Chapter Twenty-five
It was in the snug back parlor of the new premises that they formed a plan, Hartley making notes in his small feathery handwriting while Sam paced the dusty floor, listing what they’d need to buy and what they’d need to build. At first, Sam had only seen the ways it differed from the Bell—no polished counter, too many small rooms instead of one wide taproom, an old-fashioned sort of gallery looking down from the upper floor. But also absent was the back room: no blood stains on the floor, no ghosts of the ring. It was a bigger space, too, and there was room in the kitchens for Nick to have a helper and for Sadie’s cooking range to be brought from Brook Street.
“We could do a supper from noon to four,” Nick said. They were gathered around a table for the first meal Nick had prepared in the new kitchen. “Like they do at the Crown and Sugar Loaf. Three shillings six, they charge.”
“I’d pay six shillings for more of this mutton,” Hartley said, gesturing at his empty dish.
“You would,” said Kate.
“And there are those parlors upstairs for ladies who might not want to be seen in a public house,” Sadie pointed out. “Or for people who want to meet privately.”
“Much nicer than the setup at the Cross Keys,” Alf chimed in from where he leaned against the chimneypiece, baby Charlotte in his arms.
Sam was about to remark that they weren’t running a molly house, when Hartley cleared his throat. “Safer too.”
Nick didn’t say anything, and Sam might have supposed that his brother had no idea what Alf and Hartley were talking about, but then Nick raised an eyebrow at Kate, and Sam realized his brother had to know. And it was fine—Nick hadn’t been angry or disgusted, he had simply raised an eyebrow and shot his wife a knowing glance. Sam thought he might have been underestimating his brother. After all, Nick had once said he’d gladly help Sam dispose of a body; perhaps accepting a love affair was not more to ask than covering up a murder.
