Page 54 of Two Rogues Make a Right
Will almost laughed at the understatement. “He’s been ill, and he needed to go to the country.”
Ben frowned at him. “Walk around for a bit and see if anything occurs to you. I’ll see that a place is set for you at supper.”
Will climbed the steps to the minstrel gallery that surrounded the great hall. Lindley Priory had always been a dark and stuffy place, too far from good roads to be a convenient place for Sir Humphrey to entertain guests and therefore hardly worth the upkeep. Centuries of footsteps had worn depressions on the flagstones of the steps and hall, and everything had the blurry-around-the-edges look of an item that had been handled too much. But on the walls hung portraits of people who looked like Martin. Below, in the great hall, was the hearth around which Martin’s ancestors had gathered. He had been raised to lay claim to this place and it would never sit right with Will that the man he loved had been done out of the life he should have had. Will would always, in some small way, grieve the future that Martin never had, even if Martin didn’t himself care.
Maybe it was the old familiarity of the setting, maybe it was the fatigue after so long on the road, but Will had the sudden memory of his younger self in this house. He had been fifteen or sixteen, home on leave for the first time, and almost overflowing with happiness. His future felt full of such joy, ripe fruit available for the taking, and all he had to do was reach out. Martin had been so proud of him. Will had long since made his peace with his current state, but maybe it was all right for Martin to regret the future Will didn’t have—the loss of that effortless happiness, the narrowing of his prospects. Maybe Martin could be bitterly angry about the harm that had been done to a person he loved, but still love the person Will had become. Will hoped so, because he was fairly certain he was going to die angry with Sir Humphrey for what he had done to his son.
Will wended his way through the maze-like passageways of Lindley Priory. As the home of a single child and his unloving parent, it had been cold and dreary. As a school for boisterous children who were unsuited to typical schools, it was oddly fitting. Nothing in this building of battered stone and ancient oak could be damaged by less than a mortar shell. He heard the sound of a class being dismissed overhead—chairs dragged across floorboards, footsteps just short of a run, barely suppressed laughs, and then a deluge of small bodies pouring out the front door. If anything could chase out the ghosts of Lindley Priory, it was a hundred happy children. If anything was a fair replacement for what Martin had lost, it was this.
He climbed another flight of stairs and made his way to a room on the southerly side of the house, just beneath the attics. The door was ajar, so he pushed it the rest of the way open. Three beds were lined up against the wall, a clothes press overflowed with grass-stained garments, a pair of muddy boots sat on the window sill, and a badly blotted copybook rested on the desk nearest the fire. Any trace of Martin’s solitary childhood had been wiped clean by the dirt and chaos of little boys.
Will descended a set of stairs that had always been reliably deserted, but which now contained several children building what looked alarmingly like a siege engine, but they had a teacher with them so he supposed it was all right. From there he slipped into the kitchen and out through the buttery then into the boot room. Every twist and turn of the house was the same, etched into his memory from dozens upon dozens of clandestine entrances and exits. When he finally stepped out into the warm summer air he knew it was for the last time. He’d never come back.
Maybe that was why he let his path continue along a familiar course, out through the gate and through the little wood, then up and across the hills, and finally to the house where he had spent most of the first fourteen years of his life. He hadn’t been here in—he stopped to count. Certainly not since leaving the navy. His last leave had been only days, not long enough to get this far north. He had been eighteen, just about to be assigned to theFotheringay, still young enough to think his future held nothing but adventure. Martin had been gloomier than usual, not ill but drawn and tired; a few days ago Martin had said it was that summer he realized he was in love with Will, and Will wondered now whether he had known on some level, if maybe that was part of why Will hadn’t wanted to leave him. Of course he had to go, there was no question of anything else, but that leave had been the last moment he was young, the last time he had the luxury of only looking forward, never back.
During that awful visit at Bermondsey House, Will had meant it when he told Martin he didn’t let his mind grapple with what might have been. If he let himself imagine a world in which he had somehow stayed home, he didn’t know how he’d claw his way back to the present. But now, when he thought of his eighteen-year-old self standing in that same spot, the boy he had been seemed infinitely fragile, so easily broken, so hard to put back together. He had done it, though, and if he had gotten through the past few years then he could get through anything.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and took a hard look at the house that stood before him. Fellside Grange was smaller than he remembered, a ramshackle pile of slate-roofed chaos, and it was hard to believe it had once housed five children, various parents, and other adults. He’d go in and see his father; he had long since made peace with what it meant to have as careless a parent as Alton Sedgwick, and while he’d never feel warmly toward his father, any bitterness was merely residual, the faint aftertaste of something long gone.
But he knew when he looked at the house that it wasn’t his home, and hadn’t been for long years. The contours of this house were as much a part of him as the lakes and the hills around him, but any possibility of them being his home was lost to him. This place could join the ranks of things that were lost at sea and in bottles of laudanum and in the clean sweep of time. He had other things instead, things he mightn’t have had if he had somehow stayed that boy of eighteen. No, not instead—it wasn’t like there had been a fair trade, a bargain. There were things this Will Sedgwick had, and which were as carved into him as this northern geography and that sloppy gray house: a way of earning a living, a life, a love, a home.
And with that he let himself acknowledge the fact that had been just out of sight all day. This wasn’t Martin’s home either. Of course he hadn’t gone to Cumberland, and Will had been badly mistaken to have ever thought so.
He passed a hand across his face and groaned. If he wrote Martin at once, the letter might reach Martin before Will himself did. Three days, maybe four, and he could be at the gamekeeper’s cottage beside Martin, home, where he belonged, a future stretching out as bright and sharp as anything his younger self could have dreamed of.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Three days passed without a letter, and if Martin had been slightly less confident of Will’s regard—if he had been anything less than dead certain that he possessed the entirety of Will Sedgwick’s heart, the idiot—then he might have taken it personally. As it was, he assumed a letter had gotten lost in the post or perhaps that Will had lost track of time what with the excitement surrounding the play.
But when another two days passed without any word from Will, Martin started to worry. He knew that Will loved him, but maybe it was the kind of love that faded with a bit of space. Not the friendship, of course, but the rest of it, the posies and the kissing. Martin had always feared that Will had only been indulging Martin, in the way that he would probably indulge any wish Martin had. That was fine, he told himself. It was better than fine, because this way Will wouldn’t have Martin dragging him down.
So he tried not to think about it. He failed miserably, but he didn’t go to pieces; he slept and he read and he ate everything Daisy brought him. He took care of himself. He tried to fill his days with things that brought him joy, and when he told himself that he deserved all of them, he almost believed it. He was living his own life, making his own choices, and not doing a terrible job of it. When Daisy told him he felt warm, he took willow bark; in the evening when his lungs insisted on behaving like a bellows with a hole in one end, he even took the paregoric. He read all three volumes ofFrankenstein, this time without the delirium of fever, and spared a moment of fellow feeling for creatures reared by perverse villains. Then he wrote a letter to his aunt requesting new books. It gave him a strange pang of guilt, as if he were asking for charity or kindness that would be better directed to a more deserving recipient, but he sent the letter anyway; she enjoyed spending money and Martin wasn’t going to get in the way of her good time. Besides, chances were she’d send him books she had already read, and then he could write her his own opinions, and that would give them something to write about in their correspondence, which apparently was something he was intent on keeping up.
In fact, when he heard the clop of hoofbeats on the dirt path he thought it might be his aunt come herself to verify that he still lived, and he wasn’t even terribly annoyed by it. He got out of bed, pleased to notice that he wasn’t shaky or dizzy or anything other than a bit tired. But when he opened the door, it wasn’t Aunt Bermondsey but Hartley Sedgwick.
The blood drained from Martin’s face as he held on to the door frame for support. “Is he all right—he didn’t write but I thought he was busy—”
“What? No, he’s fine, as far as I know. He’ll be here in a day or two to let you know himself. Your letter said you went home so the idiot ran off to Cumberland. He sent this for you, as he didn’t know if you were well enough to pick up your own post at the inn.” Hartley held out a letter, which Martin took greedy hold of.
“Cumberland,” Martin repeated.
“Well, the next time you write dramatic missives, pay attention to your wording. He assumed—and so did I, until I thought about it—that if you were giving him the cottage, it meant you didn’t intend to live in it yourself.”
“I meant for him to have use of it if I die before him, but I didn’t want to give him a fit by saying so outright. Naturally, if we part ways before that point, he can have the cottage.”
“We both know Will, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening,” Hartley said. He looked at Martin, taking in his slippers and dressing gown, and presumably also his pallor and uncombed hair. “Are you... you’re clearly not well, so I won’t be tedious by asking if you are, but are you in need of anything?” He gazed over Martin’s shoulder into the cottage behind him.
“If you come in, I can fix you tea. Daisy brought butter and crumpets when she came to feed the pigs, if you’d care for some. I don’t need anything, but I’ve read every book in the cottage and it’ll be days before my aunt sends more, so if you happen to have a book somewhere on your person, I’d be grateful to borrow it.”
Hartley’s eyebrows were at one with his hairline. Martin didn’t know whether it was the mention of the pigs or Martin’s daring offer of tea that put them there. “I do, in fact,” Hartley said slowly. “One of Will’s friends left a French novel at the Fox with instructions to deliver it to you. He said you’d know what to do with it, and that he’d come to collect it in three weeks.” He removed three volumes from his traveling bag and handed them to Martin.
“Oh,” Martin said, holding the books. “I’m going to translate them. For money,” he added, and maybe his voice had done something peculiar on those last words because when he looked back up at Hartley, he saw that the other man was staring at him, but not unkindly. Martin decided to hell with it and returned to the cottage and set about making tea. Hartley could follow or they could keep talking through the open door. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hartley looking about, probably searching for something to explain why this was the place his brother was hurrying to, why this was the place Martin referred to as home. Martin poured the tea and set out the basket of crumpets and the dish of butter.
“You can see that it’s perfectly comfortable for Will to visit as much as he likes,” Martin said. “And I’ve hired a girl to look in on me so Will doesn’t need to feel like the only one responsible for me when I’m ill.”
“Visit? He means to stay. If you’ll have him.”
“If I’ll—you must have hit your head. Of course I will. But I never meant to take him away from his life. He has you and his friends and I hate that he’s going to walk away from that.”
