Page 50 of Two Rogues Make a Right
“So,” Martin said, as they lay together afterward, “that’s buggery, is it?” and Will had laughed himself silly while Martin stroked his hair and smiled, unaccountably pleased with himself. They fell asleep to the sound of fiddle music coming from downstairs and the steady rhythm of one another’s hearts.
So when Martin woke with a tightness in his chest and the beginnings of a wheeze, his fingertips cold and pale and a trace of blood on his handkerchief, he wasn’t surprised. He had been expecting it for a while now, and he supposed he ought to be grateful he had gotten a few more days. For the first time since he had fallen ill, he felt the unfairness of it, as if he were being shoved into a sickroom and kept away from everything that was good in the world.
He slipped into the sitting room, shutting the bedroom door silently behind him, so he wouldn’t wake Will with any further coughing. But a moment later Will came out and wrapped his arms around Martin’s waist.
“Bad?”
“Not good,” Martin answered.
“Too much smoke and damp?” Will asked after a moment.
“As always.”
“I’m embarrassed that it took me this long to figure it out,” Will said.
“Figure what out?”
“That you first got sick when you were looking after me. The other day you said that smoke and damp don’t agree with your lungs, and that describes pretty much every opium den you fetched me from.”
“Sweetheart.” Martin put his hands over Will’s and leaned back against his chest. He was ready to lie—it would have been the easiest thing in the world to say that he had the first signs of illness before Will even returned from sea. But this morning, this closeness, felt too sacred to defile with lies or evasions. “I think it was the city, not the opium dens,” he said. “And even if it were, neither of us knew so at the time. The first time I got sick was mild and I didn’t pay much attention to it.”
“Because you were too busy worrying about me, probably.”
“Could be. In case it isn’t obvious, I’d do it again.”
“You make terrible choices where I’m concerned. Hauling yourself across London after my incident at the park. Refusing to take the paregoric the doctor prescribed. Harrowing your tenants. What’s next, Martin?”
Martin remained still, hoping Will would change the topic. He could feel Will’s body go rigid when he realized. “Tell me you aren’t planning to marry because you want the money to look after me. Tell me that much.” When Martin said nothing, Will sucked in a breath. “Martin, how could you?”
“I’d do anything to make sure you were safe,” Martin said. He couldn’t tell Will that he no longer meant to marry, because that would mean confessing the full precariousness of his future, and that needed to wait until after Will’s play. There were tears in his eyes, and he hoped Will couldn’t tell in the dark. He didn’t know if it was the early hour or the lack of air to his brain or just the fact that Will had rested his chin on Martin’s shoulder, but he wanted to fill the quiet with things better left unsaid. “I’ve loved you since you came home on leave the summer I was seventeen.”
Will stayed motionless, then pressed a kiss to Martin’s neck. “I didn’t know.”
“You weren’t meant to. Obviously, Will,” he said, striving for archness and failing miserably.
“And when did you realize that I loved you?”
Martin raised his eyebrows, not having expected that question, but knowing the answer anyway. “When you woke up early and made tea for me that morning after we first went to bed together. You looked troublingly fond and I thought to myself, well this is going to be a proper disaster.”
He turned his head to kiss Will, soft and slow, with one hand cupping his jaw, trying to convince himself that his opinion had changed since that day. But he couldn’t lie to himself. Will deserved a full life, a real life, more than what he’d have in an isolated cottage in the country. He turned and pressed an absent kiss to the birds that were inked on Will’s shoulder, a reminder that he couldn’t keep Will to himself.
Chapter Twenty
“At least let me send for the physician,” Aunt Bermondsey whispered as Martin stifled another cough.
“We’ll talk during the interval,” he answered, and then returned his attention to the stage. He had read the play and seen the dress rehearsal, but still he was riveted by the spectacle of the cast arrayed on stage, the chandelier lit with hundreds of candles, the audience equally glittering in their opening night finery.
“This is going well, yes?” he whispered during a scene break.
“Yes, darling,” his aunt answered, patting his knee as she had done the previous fifteen times he asked. “Your friend ought to be proud.”
It was odd to be sitting high up in the theater and to know that Will was behind the curtain. He wondered if Will could spot him among the hundreds of almost identically dressed men in the theater’s upper levels. Regardless, they were meeting backstage after the play; Will had shown Martin where to go and whom to speak to and told him what to say.
When the curtain dropped for the interval, Martin rose to his feet to greet the theatergoers who stopped by his aunt’s box. But after a few minutes upright, he began to feel unsteady. He gripped the back of a chair. “I beg your pardon,” he told a matron whose name he had already forgotten. “I’m afraid—my health—a minor complaint.” He sat, despite it being gauche for a man to sit while a lady remained standing, because he thought he might faint if he spent another moment on his feet.
When the box cleared and the audience hushed in anticipation of the play resuming, his aunt leaned over. “If I send for the apothecary, he can be waiting at Bermondsey House when we return.”
Martin shook his head. “I already have willow bark and camphor. There isn’t anything else to do except rest and wait and—” he took a deep breath, or as deep a breath as his lungs would presently allow “—get out of London.”
