Page 55 of Two Rogues Make a Right
Hartley, who had taken a cup of tea, held it halfway to his mouth and stared at Martin. “He didn’t walk away from anything. His friends will still be there. Martin, he’s happiest with someone to look after. He always has been. Especially if that someone is you. And Martin, you pillock, you like looking after him when he has the sullens. You know,” he said, staring at his mug of tea as if it contained important answers to life’s mysteries, “he’ll be devastated if you die. So please, for his sake, don’t do anything reckless. You didn’t see how he was last autumn.”
“As much as I’d like to promise that I’ll live out my three score and ten with him at my side, that’s not a promise I can make.” He didn’t add that it wasn’t a promise anyone could make, because while other couples could indulge in the fantasy that forever would last the same amount of time for both of them, Martin and Will would have to deceive themselves more than most in order to participate in that delusion. “All I can promise is that while I’m alive, your brother will be loved, and that I’ll do my best to make sure that after I’m gone he doesn’t regret having loved me. I know that he’ll grieve me, maybe for a long while. But he’s strong and it won’t ruin him. He has other things to be happy about, other people who love him.”
“I see.” Hartley’s voice was thick, and he turned to the windows, his back to Martin.
“I believe that’s quite enough sincerity for one day,” Martin said.
Hartley snorted. But he drank his tea, still standing, both of them eying the chairs as if sitting in them would be admitting some fatal weakness. “I ought to go,” he said, long after his cup was empty, “if I want to catch the mail coach up to London.” He put his cup on the table, brushed his trousers clean, and made for the door.
“Come back, though,” Martin said, after Hartley passed through the door and was a few yards down the lane. “You don’t need to only meet him at the inn. If this is his home—” He swallowed. “You’re welcome here, regardless.”
Hartley looked over his shoulder and gave Martin a quick nod. Martin rinsed the teapot and fed the uneaten crumpets to the pigs, then he swept the floor and took his medicine and did all the needful things that shaped a day.
Thanks to muddy roads and a broken axle, Will didn’t reach Sussex until a full week after he had first left London for Cumberland. Just outside Manchester on his trip back south, he gave up trying to sleep in the coach and paid for a private room at an inn, then paid even more for a bath, and by the time he climbed back into the stagecoach he thought it might have been the best money he had ever spent. No use showing up at Martin’s door—their door—looking like death warmed over, was there.
By the time he reached the Blue Boar he decided he’d be happy never traveling further than London for the rest of his life. Several minutes after the coach deposited him in the inn yard, his bones still rattled as if in memory of every pothole and rut from Carlisle to East Grinstead.
“There you are,” said Daisy, materializing from behind the bar. “We’ve all been wondering when you’d show up.”
“How is he?” Will asked.
“No worse than when he got here. He’ll be glad to see you.” Will could almost hear the unspokenfinally, you horse’s arse, and could not disagree. “Since you’re headed that way, you can bring his supper. There’s enough for two.” She brought a hamper out from behind the bar. “Sandwiches, a couple of cakes, and a jug of ale. Now be gone with you.”
He had been away for less than three weeks, but three weeks in the springtime was the difference between a landscape of lacy delicate green and the heavy verdant abundance that met him on his walk from the inn to the cottage. On impulse, he plucked a fistful of coral bells and a few stalks of foxglove, remembering when Martin had done the same for him. There would be more chances to do this, a rotating calendar of posies to bring one another, from larkspur and apple blossoms to hellebore to sprigs of holly, all laid out before them. They had time. They had time together, and this week apart wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t cut into their time in any memorable way. Martin was fine, he was fine. Will repeated it to himself like a catechism, like a spell.
When the cottage came in sight, he thought maybe Martin would hear his footsteps and come out to greet him, but the birds were calling raucously to one another and the pigs splashing wildly in their muck and Martin wouldn’t have heard his footsteps even if he’d been expected. Will dropped his satchel and the hamper on the bench near the door and pushed open the door, stepping into the single room that was his home, his heart in his throat, his stomach in knots.
Martin was asleep in the bed, his chest rising and falling, a book open on the pillow next to his head, a pair of spectacles crooked on his face. Will pulled off his boots and crawled onto the bed beside him.
“Hey,” he whispered, brushing a hair off Martin’s forehead and straightening his spectacles. “When did you get spectacles?”
Martin made a happy, sleepy noise, unguarded and open the way he only was when on the edges of sleep. Then his eyes flew open. “When—”
“I just walked in the door.”
Something hopelessly fond and relieved flickered across Martin’s face, before being immediately replaced by exasperation. “Cumberland. You idiot. When I’m awake we’re having a proper fight about this.”
“I can’t wait,” Will said, and he meant it. He threw an arm over Martin’s chest and pillowed his head on Martin’s shoulder, and the last thing he heard before he fell asleep was Martin sleepily whispering, “Cumberland. What rot.”
When he woke the bed was empty, the spot where Martin had been already cool. Faint tendrils of light crept through the windows, but Will couldn’t have said whether it was dawn or dusk. Martin sat at the table, one of Daisy’s sandwiches on a plate before him, writing by the light of a candle. The flowers, which Will had left outside with the hamper, were now in a pewter cup at the center of the table.
As Will sat, the mattress creaked beneath him, and Martin put down his pen.
“There’s tea,” Martin said, gesturing at the pot.
Will stretched and felt every sinew in his body reject the idea of getting out of bed, but he crossed the room and collapsed in the empty chair. He picked up Martin’s hand—fingertips inky, nails bitten—and kissed his palm. “I missed you. And you don’t have to tell me again that I was a fool for having misread your letter. I know it.”
“I still can’t believe that you could think I’d say home and mean anything else but here. Except,” he added, stealing his hand back to bring his teacup to his mouth, “I suppose what I really mean is where you are.”
Will was brought up short to hear from Martin’s mouth the sentiment he’d repeated to himself so many times, across years and oceans and continents. He swallowed. “I know better now.” Will laced their fingers together. “In my defense, you really could have been more clear.”
“William. That entire letter was carefully constructed not to get either of us put in the pillory. If I was evasive, it was because I was afraid if I started being honest it’d all come pouring out. A reprehensible degree of sentiment, even if it weren’t a confession to criminal behavior.”
“I wouldn’t mind some reprehensible sentiment one of these days,” Will said.
Martin looked at him narrowly. In the shadowy half-light, Will could see the circles under his eyes and that old disconcerting sharpness to his features. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said lightly, but he squeezed Will’s hand. With the hand that wasn’t trapped in Will’s he brought his teacup to his mouth. “How long are you here for?”
Will stared. “Well, at least I don’t have a monopoly on idiocy.”
