Page 75 of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb
Kit sighed. “I don’t want you to think that I like the idea of him blackmailing you, or anyone else.” His hand tightened on Percy’s knee. “But especially you.”
“I do know that,” Percy reassured him.
“You don’t think Marian might have killed him after all, do you? I really don’t like that they’re both missing.”
“Neither do I.” Percy didn’t care for the implications in the slightest. “But I don’t think she’d have killed him. We have no way of knowing whether he told anyone else. She’s too clever toseriously consider something so shortsighted, however much revenge might please her.” Percy dearly wished he could have made a better defense of his friend. “And besides, it was my father she was most angry with, not the blackmailer.”
Kit looked at him, and Percy knew they were both thinking of what Marian had, in the end, done to Percy’s father. She had, if nothing else, proven that she was willing to kill. “I’ll put it about that I’m looking for him,” Kit said. “I don’t know what good it’ll do, but I’ll try.” With that, he sank back down onto the pillows, bringing Percy along with him. “Our friends are going to give me a heart attack.”
Percy felt almost giddy at thatour, that implication that they shared things now. “I imagine this is how Betty feels all the time.” He stretched out, feeling Kit’s body long and warm beside him. “Do you mind if I start a fire?”
“Are you cold?”
“I want to burn that book.” He had confirmed its location in his pocket no fewer than a dozen times that day, each instance putting him uncomfortably in mind of his father performing that same gesture. And he had slept with it under his pillow the previous night, as if someone might slip in through the window and steal it. Considering the amount of traffic his bedchamber windows had seen over the past month, and considering the steps his father had taken to secure the book, Percy couldn’t feel that he had been entirely unreasonable in his fears.
“There’s a tinderbox on the chimneypiece. But we might as well use the hearth downstairs. I could do with some supper.”
As Percy stepped into his breeches, he reflected that of course Kit could speak of burning evidence of what might amount to treason and eating supper in the same breath and in the samecalm tone. They both were simply things that needed to be done. He had been like that from the start; in the world as Kit saw it, getting supper and committing felonies and attempting to dismantle ancestral power were all equally probable events. That struck Percy as about right.
And so they sat before the fire in the coffeehouse, eating bread and cheese. Percy turned the book over in his hands. One last time, he looked at his mother’s handwriting. What he was about to do would have disappointed both his parents, and quite possibly Marian, but he felt in his bones that it was right for him, and right in a broader sense. The book was a weapon. If Percy were to wield a weapon, he wanted it to be one he fully controlled, not a book that sat in his pocket like an undetonated bomb, threatening to injure people who had done nothing to warrant harm.
He had spent a lifetime thinking about his role in the Talbot legacy, always with the tacit assumption that his role would be to accrue and consolidate power as his forebears had done. But for too much power to be in one family’s hands was a blight on the landscape. Getting rid of this book was a damned good start to making sure that the Talbots’ place in history wasn’t entirely bad.
With Kit’s hand on his shoulder, he cast the book into the fire, and stayed until it was reduced to ashes.
Chapter50
Two peculiar things happened in the next couple of days.
The first was that the broadsides began bringing news of the new Duke of Clare’s latest doings. He altered his tenants’ leases and converted several properties to freeholds. Deeds of manumission were sent off to Barbados. Priceless artworks and a dozen horses were sent to auction. Funds were set aside for the building of schools and poorhouses, along with an endowment to keep them going for a generation. Public opinion was divided as to whether Percy had done these things to spite his dead father or because he had gone quite mad.
The second peculiar thing was that Kit returned from walking Betty home to find a note on his pillow.
“Stop fretting. I’m not dead. Tell your gent that Lady M isn’t dead, either, as she doesn’t seem disposed to do so herself. And for God’s sake, call off the hunt. Much love, R,” the note read, in Rob’s handwriting.
When Kit showed it to Percy that night, he studied it for a long minute. “I can’t be certain, but I think it’s the same handwriting as the blackmail letters. The way the ink blots at the tail of the R and M is distinctive. I might wish for a reassurance slightly moreenthusiastic than ‘not dead’ but it was kind for your friend to put my mind at ease.” He saidkindas if it were a complicated foreign word, as if his tongue and lips didn’t want to shape themselves around it, and Kit knew that Percy was trying to tell Kit that he intended to be civil to Rob and about Rob.
“I saw that you’re selling some horses,” Kit said.
Percy wrinkled his nose. “How do the papers learn these things so quickly? Yes, I’m selling everything that isn’t nailed down. Including Balius, who I can only hope will be as mean and ill-tempered to his new owner as he was to me. Good riddance, and all that.”
Kit had seen Percy croon to and cosset that stallion and didn’t for a minute believe that Percy was taking his loss well. He had little lines around his eyes hinting that whatever divesting half the Clare estate entailed, it was not easy on him. “Let’s go for a walk,” he suggested. “I’ll stand you a pint.”
As they were getting into their cloaks, Betty came over and touched Percy’s shoulder. “Please come back and put him out of his misery,” she said. “Do it for me? You should see how he’s been pining. It’s scaring away the customers.”
“Christ on a cross, Betty, go away,” Kit said, his cheeks heating.
“Since when do you even like me?” Percy asked.
“Who said I did?” Betty answered, blowing him a kiss.
It was cold, the first night of the year that made it impossible to pretend that winter wasn’t waiting around the corner. Their breaths clouded the air in front of them, mingling with the smoke and fog that drifted through the streets. It was, objectively, a foul night, but Kit had a sense of hopeful exhilaration that he hadn’t experienced since that fresh green springtime he courted Jenny. He had been little more than a boy then, andhadn’t known how rare and precious that sort of feeling was. Now he was jaded enough to know that most people never knew what it was like to take a walk side by side with the person they liked best in the world.
“Mind if we stop in here?” Kit asked when they passed the stable where he kept Bridget. It was a little warmer inside, thanks to a brazier the pair of stable boys were using to warm their hands. The boys looked up, recognized Kit, and wordlessly waved him in.
“Her name is Bridget,” Kit said when they reached the right stall. “I can’t ride her as fast as she likes, but she puts up with me anyway. You’re welcome to make use of her as much as you like.”
“Thank you. That’s—”
