Page 2 of A Duke in Disguise
Verity laughed, a merry gurgle that made Ash’s heart almost hurt. “Speak for yourself. I’m an exceptionally good radical. Otherwise I would have let my brother print this bilge unedited even though it would be as good as turning him over to the redcoats. What I meant is that it’s reassuring not to be the only one in the house who has second thoughts about giving up one’s life and safety for a good cause. You heard that Mr. Hone was arrested?” William Hone, another publisher, had earlier that year spent two months in jail on charges of seditious libel. “He’s being treated as a hero. And he is, but I spent the entire summer worried that Nate would be next. I suppose that’s selfish, but so be it.”
Ash raised an imaginary glass in a toast to the idea of not going to prison. He was not terribly keen on imprisonment himself, being fairly certain a seizure on a stone floor would not be one he would survive.
“How long has it been since the last time you lived with us?” Verity asked, tilting her head and looking at him as if she had just noticed he was there.
“Four years? It was in ’13 that Roger and I took the set of rooms near Finsbury Square.” They had lodged with the Plums when first coming to London, and then occasionally returned to stay with them in between hired sets of rooms. They had changed residences often, always hoping that it was the damp of a previous lodging that had left Roger in an increasingly worrisome state of health.
“Truly, Ash, I’m glad to have you back,” she said, with a frank wistfulness that made Ash’s heart thud in his chest. “You’ve always been a stabilizing influence on Nate.”
Ash tried not to be disappointed that Verity had missed him only insofar as his presence helped Nate. She had always thought first of her brother; this was nothing new, although the little worry lines that appeared around her eyes when she spoke of him definitely were.
From beyond the thin sooty window he heard the bells of St. Clement’s chime for the second time since he had come in. It was time to leave. He hoisted himself to his feet and looked down at Verity. She was polishing her spectacles on the hem of her shawl; a tumble of tea-brown hair had worked its way loose to fall into her face, and that smudge of ink remained beneath her right eye. She must have sensed him looking at her, because she glanced up. Their gazes caught and lingered a moment too long. Ash promptly rose to his feet and left, closing the door behind him. If he let looks like that happen, they’d all find out exactly how fragile their arrangement was.
How one was meant to feed all these people on a couple of mutton chops Verity did not know. Supper was supposed to serve four: herself, Nate, Ash, and Charlie. But Nate had come home with three friends he met at the pub, which would have been bad enough even if he hadn’t evidently also invited Amelia Allenby, the half-grown daughter of Verity’s friend. At half past seven, a carriage pulled up in front of the house and disgorged a girl in pearl earbobs and a white muslin frock, dressed as if she were going to dine with the great and good of the land, rather than pick at too few mutton chops and be an eyewitness to sedition. Amelia was seventeen and looked upon Nate with a degree of hero worship that nobody who brought three hungry radicals home to dinner deserved.
Why did it always have to be something like chops when there were unexpected guests? Six days out of seven they had stew of varying consistencies, starting out as something reasonably substantial but stretched and thinned as the week wore on, until it became a sort of watery potato soup. She supposed Nan found a bargain on mutton at the market that morning. At least there were plenty of fresh rolls from the baker. When the dish of mutton was passed around, she handed it to Ash without saying a word. He caught her eye and passed the dish to Amelia on his right without taking any meat for himself.
“Never worry, Plum,” he said in a low murmur that made her remember that he was, unfortunately, a man; if she had learned anything in her quarter century in this city it was that men were more trouble than they were worth. “I have a bottle of wine and some cheese upstairs. I’ll bring you some later.”
“How provident of you,” she said, telling herself very firmly that she was not to lean closer to Ash. “Clearly you remember what it takes to survive in this house.” The Plums had never kept a decent table, not even in Verity’s mother’s day, and Verity often wondered that they had any supper guests whatsoever. Not that Ash was a guest; he was, technically, a lodger, which meant he paid for this nipfarthing supper. She sighed. “But I truly can’t—”
She was interrupted by raised voices from Nate’s end of the table.
“They were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. In 1817.” Nate smacked his knife down with a thump that shook the table. “Of course I’m outraged. A group of men, after being convicted in a sham trial, are to have the entrails taken out of their still-living bodies. Why wouldn’t I be outraged?”
“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” said one of the hearty young men, brandishing an entire mutton chop on the end of his fork. “I don’t recall hearing about Despard and his conspirators being disemboweled, although I was only a boy when that happened.”
“Drawing doesn’t refer to the drawing out of the entrails,” said Amelia in her polished and plummy accent, as if this were normal dinner table conversation. Verity noted that the girl had not taken any meat, and appeared to be contenting herself with boiled carrots and a roll. “It refers to the drawing of the convict behind a horse. I was reading about it in a book on the Plantagenets.”
“Were all those medieval chaps disemboweled just for fun, then?” the young man asked, leaning across the table towards Amelia. “Just a bit of a flourish on the executioner’s behalf, eh?” Verity had the alarming sense that the boy was attempting to flirt with Amelia. Trust one of Nate’s friends to flirt by means of discussing capital punishment.
“We’re eating,” Verity pointed out, knowing it was hopeless. “Maybe we can save the talk of disembowelment for later.”
“Or never,” Ash suggested. “Never would do.”
“You are missing the point,” Nate said, entirely ignoring his sister and directly addressing Ash. “For them to be killed at all is barbaric. It’s nothing less than murder.”
“Of course it’s nothing less than murder,” Ash said in that deep, steady voice that he had always used to calm Nate down. “It’s worse than murder, because it will go unpunished. And of course the trial was grossly wrong and unfair. We all know that. We all agree at this table.” My God, they had been through this often enough in the past months. Verity opened her mouth to say as much but Ash, without looking at her, made a shooing gesture under the table which she interpreted asShut up, Plum. “The only point on which we disagree is whether you’re going to print a lunatic screed that gets us all arrested.”
“What I wrote is the truth,” Nate answered, sounding more like a child of ten than a grown man of past twenty.
“A fat lot of good the truth has ever done anyone,” Verity burst out, unable to hold her tongue. “Besides, even the truth can be couched in words that don’t get anyone brought before a judge.”
“Wooler was acquitted!” Nate protested, referring to a publisher who that summer had been tried for seditious libel after publishing material criticizing the House of Lords. “And I’m certain Hone will be, when he’s tried later this autumn.”
“And Mr. Cobbett went to America to avoid another turn in prison,” she shot back, alluding to a fellow reformer who had once spent two years in prison for a pamphlet that was critical of the government. As soon as Lord Sidmouth ordered the arrest and prosecution of anyone suspected of printing sedition, Cobbett had sailed to New York.
“William Cobbett is an old man,” her brother retorted.
“My father says he’s done with politics,” said one of the young printers, adopting a self-consciously conciliatory tone that made Verity want to crack her dinner plate over his head. “He says he’ll only trade in obscenity from now on. Says people will always pay for that, paper duty or no paper duty.”
“Less time in prison too,” said another man. “And no chance of being done up for treason. Three years hard? Piddling stuff.” Verity could not determine whether he was joking.
“Better than transportation or hanging,” pointed out the first young man.
“Or disembowelment,” agreed the other. They clinked their glasses together in happy salute of the manageable punishment for printing obscenities.
Verity sighed. “I’m so sorry,” she told Amelia once the young men had all resumed their quarrel. “They haven’t any manners at all.”
