Page 66 of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb
Kit dipped the sponge into the warm water and washed the shell of Percy’s ear. He couldn’t imagine anyone being indifferent to this man. Hating him, maybe. Loving him, certainly. But indifference just seemed impossible.
Percy rinsed his hair and stood. Kit watched the water sluice off a body that was unmarred but for yesterday’s wound and felt a surge of relief that nothing worse had befallen the man. He shook out the sheet of linen and held it out for Percy to step into, then wrapped him in both the sheet and his arms and held him there, just for a moment.
The water was still warm, and Kit figured he ought to take advantage of it, so he shucked his clothes and stepped into the tub. He felt Percy’s gaze on him, and didn’t need to check to know that he would have been looking at Kit’s scar. It was a spiderweb of ropy red marks that spread from the side of his thigh to above his hip. His instinct was to hide himself in the water, but he made himself turn to face Percy.
“It looks worse than it feels.”
“I’m certain you’re lying.”
“Yeah, well. No use complaining.” He sat, conscious of how it hurt even to bend at the hip to fold himself into the tub.
Still wrapped only in the sheet, Percy sat on the stool that Kit had occupied. “Have you ever thought about not walking so much?”
Kit snorted. “Every day. Betty only wants to tie me to thechair most afternoons.” He lathered up, using the soap Percy had brought. It smelled like flowers. “Christ, what did this cost? No, never let me know. Look, before I got hurt, I was always either on my feet or on my horse. I’m still figuring out how to be still, how to—how to be me, I suppose, but with a leg that doesn’t work. I’m not there yet.”
Percy’s eyes were fixed on him, clear and wide and filled with an expression that Kit didn’t dare give a name to. “You’re good at figuring things out. We both are.”
Kit nodded, and evidently Percy decided he had had enough of earnestness, because he spent the rest of Kit’s bath alternately insulting his hair and ogling him.
“That was something I wanted to do better,” Percy said after they were both clean and dressed and eating hard cheese and apples. “Taking care of the tenants, I mean. When I inherited, I wanted to be more reasonable about rents and maybe build a school.” His cheeks colored. “I know that’s all a moot point, now. I can talk all day about the fine things I planned to do, but none of it will ever come to anything. And I’ll never know if I’d have been a better landlord than my father.”
“No such thing as a good landlord,” Kit said, his mouth full of crisp apple.
“I— What?”
Kit swallowed. “There are horrible ones, like your father. And there are ones who manage to refrain from doing actual evil. But I’ve never heard of a good one.”
Percy opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. He was turning over Kit’s words instead of immediately protesting, which was more than Kit would have expected.
“Come on,” Kit said, when they had finished eating. “Can youwalk five minutes?” Kit wasn’t sure ifhecould walk five minutes, but he was going to try anyway.
He led Percy along a still-familiar path through the woods, much more overgrown now than it had been ten years earlier, when either he or Jenny or one of the others walked it every day. Now, he supposed, Dennis and Dorothy still walked this route to get to the village, or it would have been completely absorbed by the forest.
He was glad Dorothy warned him that the house had fallen down, because its absence was so disorienting that Kit at first thought he had taken a wrong turn. A couple of saplings were already growing where the floor had once been. Most of the stones had been taken away to repair walls or build new homes.
“This was where I lived when I first got married,” Kit said. “We were eighteen,” he added, as if that were an explanation. “And then—things went wrong.” He wasn’t going to recite the series of events. He was going to give himself that kindness, at least here, in front of the rubble that had been his hope. “The pub was gone and my parents were dead. It all happened so fast. And then Jenny had a baby.” He swallowed, trying to collect himself, conscious of all Percy’s attention on him. “It was a bad winter. She shot a deer. Her lot were all horse thieves, sheep thieves, poachers, coin clippers. I think an uncle was a counterfeiter.” He wasn’t going to get into how he had asked her not to, begged her not to. That wasn’t the point, and he didn’t want to make himself out to be overly bothered by breaking the law, when the ten years since had thoroughly put the lie to that notion. “She was caught and your father sentenced her to be transported. She died on the ship.” He tried not to remember when she had been taken awayfrom him and Hannah; he tried not to imagine her last weeks on that ship. But standing here, it was hard to keep those thoughts at bay. He gripped the end of his walking stick until his fingers cramped.
“And the baby?” Percy asked in a voice that was hardly louder than the sound of the breeze moving dead leaves around the forest floor.
Kit gestured at the base of the ancient oak tree that still stood at the east side of what had been his home. “I thought the tree was as good a grave marker as any, but I was half out of my mind and possibly not making the best choices. Rob dug the hole,” he added, although he didn’t know why that seemed like an important detail.
“What was the baby’s name?”
“Hannah. She was six months old. I did my best after Jenny was gone, but—” He couldn’t go on unless he wanted to start blubbering, and he didn’t think he could stand to start shedding tears about this again. Not after so much time. Not with the bloody Duke of Clare’s son beside him.
But when he dared to look at Percy, he saw that the man was doing a terrible job himself of fighting back tears. Something about Percy’s secondhand grief dragged Kit out of the past, and he was seeing his own grief through the space of ten years’ time, removed enough that he could feel sorry for the person he had been while remembering who he was now.
“I would have thought you’d be a prettier crier than that,” Kit observed, hoping it would cut the tension, and failing miserably due to the catch in his voice. “Percy, love, you don’t want to be that man. You don’t want to be the man handing downsentences, ruining lives. Your life isn’t what you expected it to be, but—” He didn’t know how to finish that. He didn’t know how to say that he was glad to know that Percy would never have the sort of power that could ruin lives on a whim.
Percy nodded. “I’m so sorry. And thank you for telling me.”
They walked back to Dorothy’s cottage in silence.
Chapter45
“I need to see Marian,” Percy said that night when he couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“You don’t know if you’re wanted for your father’s murder,” Kit pointed out. They were lying on the barn floor, tucked under a single blanket, staring at the roof beams as if they were particularly interesting.
