Page 11 of Two Rogues Make a Right
Chapter Five
“Come for a walk with me,” Martin said, casting aside the worn copy ofBungay Castlehe had been reading. He could see the sun shining from the window nearest to his bed. It was March now, and they had been at the cottage for over two months.
Will put down his pen. “It’s still cold.”
“If I start hacking we’ll come back. Come on. I want to stretch my legs. I haven’t been further than the wood pile yet.” He also wanted to confirm a suspicion that had been lurking at the back of his mind for some weeks. Martin got to his feet and grabbed a coat off the peg by the door. Outside, the landscape was mostly drab browns and grays with shoots of green signaling that winter might eventually end. Further from the cottage, the landscape opened up to a vista of rolling hills, a stand of spindly trees, a yew hedge in the distance. He walked on, past a few patches of bare dirt that might have once been a vegetable garden, past the well, past a rickety fence and straight to the top of the nearest hill. There, in the distance, he could see the barely remembered roofline of Friars’ Gate.
The entire property was entailed, so Martin hadn’t been able to sell it after his father’s death. He had, however, ordered the manor stripped down nearly to the beams and most of the furnishings sold off. That had kept the creditors at bay for a little while, but it had been a drop in the ocean. It wasn’t a large house, just a shooting box located halfway between London and Brighton. His father had used it to host house parties to which Martin had seldom been invited. At the time he thought it was because his father didn’t want the world to know that he had a sickly son. Now he suspected it was because his father didn’t want Martin to know what he got up to in his spare time.
“So you did bring me here,” Martin said, not bothering to make it a question.
Will sighed. Martin didn’t need to turn his head to know he looked guilty, and rightly so. “You needed country air. It was either here or Lindley Priory. Getting to Cumberland would have meant days in a carriage, and you weren’t in any state for that. Besides, you own this place, so, well, I could afford it.”
Martin let out a bitter laugh, but it turned into a cough. Walking so far had perhaps been unwise. Will looked at him with concern, and Martin waved his hand dismissively. “The people here, they don’t know who I am. Daisy calls me Mister.”
“I told Mrs. Tanner that you were a Mr. Smith.”
Martin refrained from rolling his eyes. “Let me guess. John Smith.”
“She didn’t ask for a first name,” Will said, a tiny smile playing at the edges of his mouth.
“Well. Friars’ Gate. You could have told me. I was hardly in any condition to get up and leave.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I figured we could fight about it when you were well enough to fight back. So, do you want to?”
“Do I want to do what?”
“Leave.”
Martin experienced the same ridiculous frisson of excitement that he did on each rare occasion that somebody gave him a choice. “No,” he said after some thought. He was annoyed that Will brought him here—or anywhere—without his permission, but he hadn’t been in any state to give permission, and he could grudgingly admit that Will had done what was necessary to save his life. “It was a good decision. I’m surprised you knew about the gamekeeper’s cottage, though.”
“I looked for you here,” Will said. “In the autumn, after you left your aunt’s house. That’s how I knew there was a cottage standing empty.”
“Thank you for not bringing me into the house itself,” Martin said, and meant it sincerely. He leaned back against the trunk of a tree and crossed his arms in front of him. Will came to stand nearby, and Martin wondered if he were even aware that he had positioned himself between Martin and the wind. Happily, Will seemed blissfully unaware of a good number of things, or surely he would have said something after what Martin thought of as the Shaving Incident. Two weeks had passed, and Will still treated him as a reasonable adult rather than a person who had nearly been reduced to tears by Will’s soft words and the feel of his own smooth jaw. Martin still couldn’t shave without a pang of guilt that didn’t even make sense to him, and he was ready to feel guilty at the drop of a hat.
“Since we’re unburdening our souls,” Martin said, trying to sound flippant and afraid he came off regrettably earnest, “I do suppose I owe you an apology for the unanswered letters.” He swallowed. “I read them—at least all those I received before leaving my aunt’s house—and I kept them.” He nearly admitted that he had kept all Will’s letters. For years, when Will was away at school and later at sea, they had written like paper was cheap and ink free and postage a trifling consideration; they had written pages upon pages, crossed and double crossed, and sometimes when Martin was feeling especially sorry for himself he’d read them all, right from the beginning.
“For a few months,” Will said, his gaze fixed over Martin’s shoulder, “I thought you must be dead, because surely if you were alive you would have written me back.”
Martin felt like he had been slapped. He stepped to the side, placing himself in Will’s line of sight. “You thought—it never once occurred to you that I didn’t want you to disrupt your whole life to come fix mine? Which, mind you, is exactly what happened, so I think that we can agree I was quite right not to answer your letters.”
“No we can’t. We will never agree about that.” Will scraped a hand across the stubble on his jaw, then let it rest beside Martin’s shoulder on the tree trunk. “I thought we were—” He shook his head, and Martin found himself holding his breath, wondering how Will planned to finish that sentence. “I thought we were—I thought we were important to one another. And then it turned out I was wrong.”
“You think you aren’t important to me,” Martin said, his voice an embarrassing whisper. “You lackwit. You spent your childhood watching your mother die and I didn’t want you to spend your adulthood watching me die. Idiot,” he said fondly. Too fondly for someone standing so near. At this distance Will could look at him and see everything. “You know, I’ve had time to think about this,” Martin went on. “I’ve never been well. The consumption is relatively new,” he said, glossing over the details of precisely how new it was, “but the rest isn’t. I’ve had a long time to think about how I don’t want to be a burden.”
Will, damn him, somehow stepped even closer. Martin could almost feel Will’s breath against his cheek. “You aren’t—”
“I see that now. But do you think that maybe, after twenty years of my father treating me as a burden and an embarrassment I might be justified in making assumptions?”
Will nodded. One strand of his hair tumbled across his forehead and Martin thought about how easy it would be to lift his hand and tuck that strand behind his ear. Instead he shoved his hands in his pockets. “That bastard,” Will said.
“You’ll get no argument from me. In any event, I promise I’ll always answer your letters. It is—” he swallowed “—intolerable to me that you thought I didn’t care.” He was saying too much, but if faced with a decision between Will knowing Martin cared too much and suspecting him of caring too little, Martin knew what choice he’d always make.
“Oh,” Will said, and it was little more than a puff of air. Martin didn’t dare meet his eyes.
“Regarding the letters. In my defense, I was not in the most reliable frame of mind last year.”
Will let out a laugh and finally straightened up, putting some distance between them. “Christ, neither was I, for that matter. I don’t think either of us have had two consecutive days of sound thought between us since 1814.”
