Page 12 of Two Rogues Make a Right
Martin snorted. It shouldn’t be funny. There was nothing funny about what happened to Will, and only in his darker moods did Martin find much humor in his own predicament. But still he was laughing, and when he looked over, saw that Will was smiling, one hand over his mouth. It felt like—he couldn’t think of anything less theatrical thanmiracle—that they were standing here, alive, relatively well in mind and body, and laughing about everything that had happened. Maybe that same thought struck Will, because for a moment it looked like he was going to embrace Martin. But then he stepped away awkwardly.
Feeling that far too much had been said and done between them for one afternoon, Martin turned and made his way back to the cottage, Will falling into step beside him.
“I saw your young gentleman up and about,” Mrs. Tanner said when she shouldered her way into the cottage, Daisy trailing sullenly behind her. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Will said, putting down his pen and sanding the topmost sheet of paper. “He’s recovered about as well as could be expected.” Since that first walk they had taken a few days earlier, Martin had made a habit of exploring the grounds every morning. Will didn’t quite like it—it was cold, and Martin wasn’t strong yet. But he also knew that arguing about it would only make Martin do something even more reckless, so he let it go, and tried not to look too anxious when Martin returned to the cottage, flushed and short of breath.
“Poor lad.” The older woman hung a pot from the hook near the fire, and Will caught the scent of herbs and meat. “Now. Be gone with you. There’s a jug of ale and some bread for your breakfast,” she said, pressing both items into his hands. “Take them and go. The cottage hasn’t been aired since old Jackson lived here and it could do with a thorough turning out. Daisy and I will do the wash and hang it to dry.”
“Thank you.”
“No need to thank me. Fair’s fair.”
In the past few months, Will had whitewashed the Tanners’ cottage, inside and out; he had mended bucket handles and windowsills and everything that could be fixed; he had rounded up sundry geese and ducks and coaxed the milk goat down from the top of the chicken coop. More than once it had occurred to him that Mrs. Tanner had been getting by for quite a while without anyone’s help but Daisy’s, and he wondered why she hadn’t years earlier come to an arrangement such as that she had with Will. But he remembered the way neighbors had steered clear of his mother—sickly, French, and openly living with a married man—and reckoned that there was no shortage of reasons a woman might find herself shunned by her neighbors.
Will put the ale and bread into his satchel and took his coat off the peg. They had arrived at the cottage in January with little more than the clothes on their backs. In the loft, Will had found a couple of shirts and a coat that was only slightly moth-eaten, and Hartley brought even more. By Will’s standards, they were pretty well set up, but whenever he saw Martin shrug into that tatty old coat he felt a pang of remorse that he couldn’t have done better by the man.
It was cold, but not windy, so not a terrible day for a walk, Will supposed. The skies were a shade of grayish blue that made Will think of the ocean. He shoved that thought aside and wrapped the coat more tightly around himself. He was fairly certain that Martin typically walked to the top of the nearest hill and then returned to the cottage, so that was the direction he headed. Sure enough, he found Martin sitting against a fence post.
“Checking up on me?” Martin asked, but not impatiently so much as almost indulgently. Sometimes he looked at Will with naked fondness, as if the usual prickliness had slid off his face and he forgot to put it back on. Will was so used to seeing the fondness through the mask of surliness, that seeing it plain and unadorned on Martin’s face took his breath away.
Will sat beside Martin on the cold, hard ground. “Got chucked out of the house by Mrs. Tanner and Daisy. Here.” He took the bread and ale out of his bag.
Martin tore off a chunk of the bread and ate it in a few quick bites. “I passed Mrs. Tanner on her way to the cottage and I think she recognized me. Or, rather, I think she noted the resemblance to my father.”
“You take after your mother,” Will said. It was a poor lie, and the incredulous look Martin cast him told him so. There was certainly a superficial resemblance between father and son, but Will could never see much of the florid, ill-tempered old man in Martin. Well, apart from the ill temper, he supposed. Will had only ever seen a portrait of Martin’s mother, but in that painting she had an expression he often saw on Martin’s face—a wry twist of the mouth, a knowing glint in the eyes.
Will turned his head and regarded Martin. The sight of him was so familiar that sometimes he forgot its component parts. His hair, which had been wheat blond during childhood, was now the dark ash blond of driftwood, and his eyes were the dangerous gray of the North Sea but sometimes, rarely, flecked with the shifting blues of sea glass. It seemed so strange that Will had only learned these things after traveling thousands of miles away from Martin, but now he couldn’t look at his friend without thinking of the ocean. It was as if his mind had taken the source of all his nightmares and mapped it onto the face of the person he loved best, as if to remind him that maybe the sea wasn’t all bad.
“What?” Martin asked, turning to face him fully, one eyebrow hitched in question. He had a crumb at the corner of his mouth, which rather undercut the archness of his expression.
“Just looking at you,” Will said, and when Martin flushed, he knew he had overstepped. He cleared his throat and looked away.
“In any event, I suppose I’m hardly the only person in this part of Sussex who bears a resemblance to my father,” Martin said grimly.
“What? Oh, right. I suppose not.” God only knew how many children Sir Humphrey had fathered over the years. He uncorked the jug of ale and took a long sip, then passed it to Martin. “Is it going to be a problem, do you think?”
“It’s a problem every time I look in the mirror,” Martin said. “Although I suppose I could do with the reminder that I have his blood in my veins.”
“You’re not him.”
“Aren’t I? You’re unconscionably biased where I’m concerned.”
Will stared. “You’re nothing like him. He went to bed with—” He stopped, not liking the euphemism. “He took advantage of people who were too young and too poor to say no.” That was what had happened to Hartley, and it stood to reason that Sir Humphrey hadn’t stopped there. “You would never.”
Martin drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, looking terribly small. “I took advantage of my tenants,” he said. “Not in the way you mean. But I did it anyway.”
“Your father ran his estate into the ground, leaving you with nothing but debts.”
“And I handled that beautifully, did I not,” Martin said, his lip curled in a sneer.
Martin spent a year raising rents, enclosing property, and in general trying to drain as much as he could from his Cumberland tenants to make the estate solvent. “No, you handled it like a horse’s arse, but you were one and twenty. And, I might add, you made things right in the end. Furthermore, your father hadn’t taught you how to manage an estate. He hadn’t taught you a damned thing.”
Martin bristled. “I’m not entirely ignorant.”
“That’s despite your father’s efforts, you know.” Martin spent his childhood with his nose in a book and learned as much as he could teach himself. But some things, like how to run a large and failing estate, couldn’t be learned within the pages of a book.
“Hmph.”
