Page 10 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
“Pie it is, then,” Hartley said, and flopped back down onto his pillow.
“Let this house, for the love of God. Cross my heart, there are hobgoblins in the attic. I can hear them when the wind blows,” Alf said with the wide-eyed earnestness of someone who had been raised on such vulgar stories. “We can move to lodgings.”
Hartley heard theweand turned his face into the pillow to hide a smile. “This is my house,” he said. He had repeated that phrase a dozen times, to Alf, to himself, to Will. “I’m not letting it go. You’ll need your wages increased, though,” he said, “if you pick up some of the slack the girls left.”
“Won’t argue there.” Alf shuffled his feet and looked as if he wanted to say something. “Here’s what I don’t understand. I’d have thought every maid in London would want to work for you,” he said. “What with how they know you won’t be after them.”
“People think that if a man is so depraved as to go to bed with other men, then he won’t stop at anything.”
“Yeah but have they actually met you? Because all it takes is one glance to know you aren’t going to be bothering any girls.”
Hartley had a mad urge to fling the pillow at Alf, as he would have at one of his brothers who was determined to annoy him. Instead he bit the inside of his cheek to suppress a laugh. “There are people who cheerfully lie with both men and women,” he pointed out gently, thinking not for the first time that Alf might find this reassuring.
“Not you, though. Listen, if we’re staying here in this horrible old place, you need someone to make certain everything’s done right and proper. Maybe sew on a button, that sort of thing. I’m fine with hauling and fixing, but you’ll look like the rag man if you’re left to me.”
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I didn’t grow up with servants to wait on me.” Then he saw the look of disappointment in Alf’s face. “Unless, that is, you know somebody who would be well suited to that line of work.”
“Well, somebody I used to know from, well, you know.” Hartley assumed he meant the streets. Alf shuffled his feet in a way that reminded Hartley of one of his younger brothers confessing to stealing fruit from the neighbor’s orchard. “If you wouldn’t mind hiring a—”
“You know I wouldn’t,” Hartley said quickly, sitting up. “In fact, given how things are, you probably ought to ask your friend whether he minds working for someone with no reputation.”
“Oh, she doesn’t have any parents to fetch her away. Or, I suppose she does, but they turned her out so I don’t reckon their opinion matters much.”
“You say she’s been working the streets?”
“And sleeping rough.”
Hartley sighed. “Bring her round whenever you like. Offer her whatever we paid Polly.” There was one other concern, though. If Alf was keeping in touch with friends from his old days, there was a chance he was still walking the streets himself. Hartley didn’t want to see the boy hurt or arrested. But the lad had always been deeply ashamed and loath to talk about it. “Alf,” Hartley said, carefully weighing his words. “Do I pay you enough, or do you find that you need to supplement your income?”
Alf might be entirely unschooled and unlettered but he was quick. “Nah, no worries. The gent who used to comb your hair left his muffler here, and I thought one of the lads might want it, so I brought it round to the docks. It’s getting cold.”
“Indeed.” He noticed that Alf had no reservations about giving away other people’s belongings, but it was true that Hartley hadn’t had any intention of sending the muffler on to his former valet, even if he had known where to find the man.
Alf shuffled his feet again. “When I was there the other night, a few gents did think I was offering trade. They may have remembered me.”
“More likely they assume anyone young and dressed like a guttersnipe isn’t there to purchase anybody’s company, so they came to the obvious conclusion that you were there for the other reason. Take care, Alf,” he pleaded.
It was a terrible risk to even have Alf under his roof. Since the gossip had spread about town, Hartley sometimes thought there were constables watching his house, waiting for any excuse to bring him before a judge. They’d see Alf and force one of the lad’s former customers to testify against him; they’d drum up evidence against Hartley and he’d be put in the pillory.
But Hartley couldn’t turn Alf out, because the boy didn’t have anywhere else to go. That had always been his downfall. Someone helpless needed aid, and he went out of his blasted way to assist them. Urchins needed a home, and Hartley opened his doors. Will needed a commission, and Hartley went to bed with the only rich man he knew. It wasn’t self-sacrifice—that was for noble-minded decent sorts. Hartley didn’t even like people, much less want to sacrifice his comfort for them. He didn’t give money to worthy causes, he didn’t go to church, and he was utterly confident that if Martin Easterbrook were on fire, he wouldn’t so much as piss on him to put it out. He was motivated entirely by something like anger at injustice, although he hated to admit that to himself; anger was terribly gauche and injustice seemed a topic best confined to badly printed broadsides read by men who dressed like Will.
“You all right there, sir?” Alf asked. He always managed to tack on “sir” like he had only just managed not to say “you bloody great fool.”
“Would you take it amiss if I stressed the need for discretion?”
“I’m pretty keen on discretion myself,” Alf said, his eyebrows raised.
“Right. Of course you are.” Nobody wanted to be put in the stocks. Preferring not to be hanged or pilloried wasn’t some refined preference of Hartley’s. All men in their world knew the price they would pay for a single misstep. “Perhaps stay away from places frequented by people who might mistake you for trade, Alf.”
Nobody in his life would be safe from the taint of scandal if the worst happened. Perhaps it was for the best that there were precious few people in his life at all.
Wisps of fog were already gathering when Sam returned from walking his aunt home. She had come in to help for a couple of hours and Sam wasn’t going to repay the favor by having her make her way through the dark foggy streets on her own. Countless horrors unfolded nightly on these streets, but they were a hell of a lot less likely to happen in the company of a large man.
Sam had been on his feet since morning and was looking forward to collapsing into his bed. It would be one of those nights when he barely managed to get his boots off before falling asleep. To walk his aunt home, he had circumvented the seedier and more raucous streets, but now that he was on his own, he took as direct a path as possible, walking straight through one of the more tumbledown neighborhoods near Grub Street.
When Sam first spotted the man on the other side of the lane, he thought it was a trick of the fog and the darkness, or maybe that his tired mind wasn’t behaving reliably. That his mind, however tired, would supply an image of Hartley Sedgwick, of all people, did him no credit. Perhaps his thoughts this week had been so populated with Sedgwick that his brain was now conjuring the man’s vision out of thin air.
He squinted. That was no vision. It was Hartley Sedgwick, in the flesh. Even from across the street, even through gathering fog, Sam could see the man’s watch chain glimmering in the moonlight. A man had to have a death wish to walk through a neighborhood like this with a bit of gold hanging out of his pocket. Stealing the watch would be child’s play, but the sight of a chain like that would give a thief ideas about what else the man might have in his pockets and what riches a good beating might produce.
