Page 8 of Two Rogues Make a Right
The real problem was that he couldn’t imagine what he’d do after leaving. He had been raised to be the owner of Lindley Priory, as had his father and his father’s father and all the Easterbrooks before them. But the priory was gone, the coffers were empty, and there were no more Easterbrooks. There was no place in the world for Sir Martin Easterbrook, and he didn’t know how to go about finding one. Until a year ago, Martin had never so much as combed his own hair or rinsed out his own teacup, partly because he was the pampered heir to the Easterbrook fortune, but also because he had always been told he was too frail to take care of himself. He was disgusted by his own helplessness, but didn’t know how to go about learning otherwise.
With that in mind, Martin decided he could not live another hour without bathing. He knew he was hopelessly spoiled by a youth spent in the lap of luxury, but dabbing at himself with a sponge was simply not going to cut it. As there was no proper bath to be had, and no servant to draw one, he steeled himself, went out to the pump, stripped hastily down to his small clothes, and soaped himself up with the bar of tallow soap they kept by the wash basin. The water was freezing, but he dumped a bucket over his head and began working the soap across his scalp. He poured another bucket over his hair, shivering and shaking all the while, but the sense of weeks—months, even—of grime being rinsed clean away was nothing less than glorious.
“Are you mad?” Will sputtered, coming back from wherever he went when he left the cottage. “Are you trying to kill yourself? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.” He stomped off into the cottage and emerged with a blanket, which he wrapped around Martin’s shoulders.
“I just wanted to bathe,” Martin said, his teeth chattering.
“You could have asked—”
“I could have asked you to bathe me? I think not, William,” he said with as much asperity as he could muster. Will flushed.
“No, damn it. Just get indoors.” He set Martin before the hearth, then climbed a ladder to a loft that Martin hadn’t noticed before. A few minutes later a tin tub came clattering to the floor. Martin, his eyes occasionally drifting shut because of sleepiness and cold, watched Will fill pots and basins with water, then heat them over the fire. He couldn’t have said how long it took before the tub was filled, but eventually Will wiped his hands on his trousers and said, “Come on, now. If you don’t get in, then I’m using the water for my own bath.”
The thought of having to watch Will strip and bathe was enough to make Martin spring into action. He was already naked except for the blanket, his small clothes having been discarded outside. He didn’t drop the blanket until just before stepping into the tub. He was well aware that he wasn’t much to look at these days—not that he wanted Will to be looking, not that hecared, but he knew that he was a sorry sight. He was naturally broad shouldered and large boned, and skinniness didn’t sit well on him. As he stepped into the tub, he saw Will deliberate between turning his back out of decency or coming to his aid out of innate mother hennishness. Decency won, because it always did with Will, the bastard.
“Oh God,” Martin groaned when he sank into the tub, his irritation draining away as soon as he touched the hot water. “This is lovely.” He hadn’t had a proper bath since he left his aunt’s house in the autumn. The warmth and the sense of purification both seeped into his bones. Will had set a flannel, a cake of soap, and a cup next to the tub, and Martin set about scrubbing himself clean. “Thank you,” he said, moved to goodwill by the soap bubbles.
“I should have thought of it sooner,” Will said. He still had his back to the bath, and was busily arranging a stack of books. “I forgot what a finicky little shit you can be.”
“Where did those books come from?” Martin asked. He was certain they hadn’t been there earlier. For the past month they had been rereading the same books Will had read aloud when Martin had been too feverish to pay attention.
“Hartley brought them.”
“Hartley was here?”
“He comes every week or two. I met him at the inn this afternoon.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
Will turned around at that, a quizzical expression on his face. “Yes. He’s the only one who does, though.”
“But you didn’t bring him here? To the cottage?”
“I didn’t think you’d want that.”
Indeed, Martin wouldn’t have wanted to see Hartley, but he resented Will’s assumption. He and Hartley and Will had once been the best of friends, in the way that boys of the same age who live in reasonable proximity will simply fall in among one another. They had traipsed about the hills and gone swimming during Martin’s periods of good health. And during Martin’s periods of poor health, the Sedgwick brothers had gone to great lengths to sneak into his rooms and pass him messages.
That had all gone to hell in the span of a summer. First, Martin’s father had discovered Will in Martin’s bed after one of those nights he had sneaked in. It had all been innocent, but Martin’s father had the sort of mind that saw prurience everywhere, probably because Sir Humphrey was rather devoted to prurience himself, but Martin hadn’t known that at the time.
Soon after this, Hartley started avoiding Martin. Martin assumed this was because Hartley, too, thought Martin was debauching Will, and Martin was too insulted to bother with olive branches. Soon after that, Martin’s father arranged for Will to get a place in the royal navy as an officer’s servant, which would put him on a path to becoming an officer. It was more than Will could have hoped for without Sir Humphrey’s intervention, but at the time it had been blindingly obvious to Martin that this was an effort to separate Will from Martin. Martin supposed that Hartley came to the same conclusion, because once Will left, Hartley had never uttered another friendly word to Martin.
Around the same time, Martin’s father began pouring money into the Sedgwick household. He paid the oldest brother’s university fees and sent the younger boys to a proper school. He took Hartley about with him to house parties and hunts, to London for the season, to all the events Martin had been excluded from. At the time Martin thought his father regarded Hartley as the son he wished he had—healthy, clever, handsome. He thought his father was punishing him for his failures as a son by bankrupting the estate in favor of his own replacement.
It had taken years for Martin to understand that Sir Humphrey had never had fatherly feelings toward Hartley, and even longer to grasp how young Hartley had been when Sir Humphrey had first persuaded him to trade intimacies for his family’s welfare. Martin had spent his entire life trying and failing to please his father, and it was only after Sir Humphrey died that Martin learned the extent of his father’s evil. By then, he had spent years regarding Hartley as his enemy. Now he suspected that Hartley had first avoided Martin out of shame or embarrassment about the nature of his relationship with Martin’s father. Martin had a long list of regrets, and toward the top of the list was that he had effectively abandoned Hartley at a time when all his brothers were away from home and he was being taken advantage of by a much older man.
Martin felt entirely justified in being leery of seeing Hartley again. He couldn’t do it without a proper apology, but he didn’t know how to even start. Some things couldn’t be apologized for.
Gingerly, Martin got to his feet and reached for the sheet of toweling that Will had left nearby. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Will stepping near. “I’m not going to fall,” he snapped.
“There are clean clothes in the trunk at the foot of the bed.”
Martin dressed himself in a threadbare linen shirt and a pair of trousers that hung off him. God knew where they had come from. Perhaps Hartley had sent these too. Perhaps Hartley was paying for all of this, from the cottage to the soap to the round of cheese. Martin bristled at the thought, but found that he didn’t care as much as he might have a year ago. If Hartley wanted to be stupid with the money Martin’s father had left him, Martin wasn’t going to object.
As he fastened the trousers, he heard a splash and turned in time to see Will lowering himself into the tub. He hastily looked away. Slowly, and with a great deal of shame, he looked back. Will was in profile, backlit by the fire, but even in silhouette Martin could tell that he was whipcord thin. He always had been; he was made of fine bones and a bare minimum of muscle, overlaid with freckled skin. It had been the sight of Will, casually stripping before plunging into the lake, that had been Martin’s first clue that he might not be entirely like other men. And still, a single glimpse of him made Martin’s heart twist around inside his rib cage in a way that the sight of nobody else ever had. The birds weren’t visible from this angle, but the scars across Will’s back were, and that was what finally propelled Martin to behave decently. He climbed into bed, pulled the covers up to his chin, rolled so he faced the wall, and pretended to sleep.
Will was aware of Martin’s gaze on him as he shaved. “What?” he asked, angling the small hand mirror so he could get a look at his jaw. “Hartley’s visiting again today and he’ll act disgraced if I’m scruffy.”
“I’m the one who’s scruffy,” Martin said. Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw him touch his face.
