Page 20 of Two Rogues Make a Right
“They’re not the only ones in danger of getting sunburned,” Martin said, and brushed his knuckles across Will’s cheekbone. It was barely April, but Will had been living almost entirely out of doors these past few weeks, and his freckles were proliferating. Now, under Martin’s touch, Will flushed, but he didn’t move away. In fact, he looked like he wanted to move closer. Maybe sharing a bed had gotten them used to being near one another. During the fortnight since that evening at the Blue Boar, Martin noticed that Will’s chair had inched closer to his own, and that Will had started doing things like adjusting Martin’s lapels and clapping a hand on his shoulder in greeting. They had been waking up with arms or legs touching, and sometimes even had conversations like that without bothering to put some distance between their bodies. At first, whenever he and Will touched, the heady rush from that contact overthrew all Martin’s other thoughts. Now, though, it felt almost normal. It felt safe.
Sometimes, they stood so close that Martin thought he could lean forward and brush their lips together. It might be easy. It might not be a disaster. A kiss, and whatever a kiss might lead to, might be just another kind of touch.
“Oi! Will Sedgwick!” called a voice from the lane.
Martin dropped his hand and Will spun toward the new arrival.
“Is that—good God, Jonathan, what brings you here?”
“I’m on my way to Brighton,” the stranger said. He was some years older than Will and Martin, and handsome in a bookish sort of way. Martin disliked him immediately.
“Daisy,” Will called. “You can be done for the day. Martin, this is Jonathan York.”
Before Martin could extend his hand, Will’s friend grabbed it.
“Is this the Martin I’ve heard so much about? Let me see if I can remember. Sir Martin Easterbrook? Lord’s sake, Will,” York said, lowering his voice, “how did you rope a baronet into shacking up with you in a cottage? Not even much of a cottage either, by the looks of it.”
“It’s perfectly comfortable,” Martin said stiffly.
“Oh, is it?” York said, somehow making the words sound like an insinuation. “Will talked about you constantly,” he went on. “Drove himself half mad. Were you missing? In hiding? In prison?”
“Let him get a word in edgewise,” Will said, but not unkindly. Martin rather wished it had been unkindly. He didn’t like this York person, with his cheerful waistcoat and broad smile. He didn’t like that Will had evidently talked about him to this man. He could only imagine what ghastly things Will might have said about him. “Tried to starve his tenants, absolute git, probably evil.” Even as he formed the thought, he knew Will would never breathe an ill word of him, but the presence of this Jonathan York made him unaccountably grumpy.
Now that Daisy and the others had cleared out, York leaned in and embraced Will, kissing both his cheeks and then holding him at arm’s length as if to inspect him. “You look well, I suppose, but when can we expect you back in London? I’m afraid everything’s dreadfully dull without you, and now with the news about your play, dare we hope that you’ll return for opening night?”
Martin couldn’t stand another minute of it. “I’ll leave you be,” he said to Will, then nodded coolly at York. He snatched his hat off the fence post where he had hung it, and made his way down the lane in a way he hoped didn’t look too much like storming off.
He was jealous; that was no surprise. He had been jealous of all Will’s friends since the earliest days of their acquaintance. When Will was at school, Martin silently seethed with jealousy of his schoolmates. He envied children from the village who played at bat and ball with Will when Martin was too sick to join them. Hell, he had even been jealous of Will’s own brothers. During Will’s years in the navy, Martin had found a way to envy his shipmates. He knew jealousy was pitiful, maybe even ugly, and he tried to keep it well hidden from Will. He certainly never acted on it. The jealousy was just always there, along with all of Martin’s other less savory qualities. Logically, he knew that he couldn’t keep Will to himself. He also knew that Will having other friends didn’t make him like Martin less. But Martin was long accustomed to reason deserting him where Will was concerned.
His jealousy of this Jonathan York wasn’t entirely unreasonable, though. The fellow seemed exactly like the sort of man with whom Will could have lasting companionship: affectionate and pleasant, clever and probably educated. His clothes looked respectable and clean, which likely meant he had a steady income. Martin could picture it, and he knew it was the sort of future he ought to wish for Will.
He got to a fork in the lane where Friars’ Gate lay in one direction and the village in the other. With a sigh, he turned toward Friars’ Gate—nothing like a cheerful reminder of one’s failures to properly ruin a day. Thus far, he hadn’t allowed his walks to take him further than the park that surrounded the house, but today he pushed open the creaky garden gate, made his way past overgrown hedges and the desiccated remains of the prior year’s foliage. When he peered through the windows of the ground floor, he could see that the remaining furniture and fixtures were draped in holland covers. The floors were bare, the walls denuded of most art. Not having seen the house in years, and because no house looked the same through windows as it did from inside, he felt like he was peering into a stranger’s home. He was surprised to find that he didn’t hate the sight of the place. He didn’t want to go indoors or linger a moment longer than necessary, but neither did he want to run screaming as if from the harbinger of an ancestral curse.
He could take a reasonable middle ground and figure out how to let the place. But he wasn’t certain how that would work. He couldn’t simply tack a notice to the front door or post an advertisement in theTimes. Presumably, at some point there would need to be solicitors and leases involved. He could start by writing his solicitor in Cumberland, he supposed. It would be even simpler if he could swallow his pride and ask his aunt, but he knew that if he confided in her, he’d find himself living at Friars’ Gate himself within a fortnight, very possibly married off to a coal heiress. His mother’s younger sister and his only living relation, Lady Bermondsey was the sort of woman who couldn’t see a problem without exerting herself to fix it. And Martin hated that the only solution anybody could come up with was restoring him to his place in the world—a place that was better consigned to the dust heap as far as he cared. Letting Friars’ Gate would allow him to delay that inevitability, even though something within him recoiled at the necessity of being Sir Martin, even for the duration of a letter.
Before his courage deserted him, he went to the inn, got a sheet of paper from the landlord, and dashed off a letter to his solicitor.
Jonathan stayed for two hours, most of which he spent in a near unbroken monologue about theater, politics, and mutual acquaintances. Will was glad to see him, but he was also glad when the man left. The world Jonathan talked about felt as remote as a desert island, as unreal as a fairy story.
“Are you quite alone?” Martin asked stiffly, inching open the door to the cottage.
“Yes, and you could have stayed, you know.”
“I didn’t wish to intrude.”
“You wouldn’t have.” Will got to his feet and crossed to the door. “It would have been a pleasure for me to have two friends together in the same place.”
“Were you lovers?”
Will’s eyebrows shot up. “Yes.” Martin was silent for a long minute. “Does that bother you?”
“No, of course not,” Martin said, plainly bothered. Martin already knew that Will sometimes went to bed with men, and implied that his own inclinations were not dissimilar, so Will doubted that was the problem. He supposed Martin might still find something wrong and shameful about it, but Will couldn’t detect a trace of judgment or disgust on Martin’s face. Which left—
Was Martin... jealous? Will had never caught Martin looking. When they woke in the morning, limbs tangled and sleep muddled, warm and snug under the quilt, Martin never let his hands stray. A few times Will wished he would, even thought about doing it himself, because it would be nice to have someone else’s hands on him. The only thing that stopped him was the suspicion that for Martin there was no such thing as a friendly grope, no such thing as a cheerful shag between friends. Anything more than that seemed like it existed on the other side of a locked door, and if Will had ever had a key, he feared that it had gone missing at some point during the ordeals of the past few years.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Will suggested.
“I just got in from a walk,” Martin responded, peeved.
