“I recall talk of a blasphemy prosecution, some time back.” He recalled it because he’d looked into the damned place just a few months ago, but his admirable memory was well enough known that Skelton simply nodded.
“That’s the one. The prosecution didn’t come off in the end, but the man’s an atheist without question.”
“Tell me, how sure are you that this shop, or its owner, is linked to Cade? What are our chances of success?”
“Fair, I’d say. George Edwards, my man, is certain there’s something there. The owner’s one Mason, a man of bad association. He was part of the Gordons’ group a decade back, if you recall that precious pair. Flogged for his part in their riot of the year eight, did four months for seditious libel three years later, but we’ve not made anything stick since. A slippery fish, but he’s on the hook now. If he’s not Cade himself, he’ll lead us to him, and if not that, there’ll be something else. I smell it.” Skelton twitched his long nose as illustration and grinned.
“I shan’t argue with your nose,” Dominic agreed. “Excellent. I will be with you tomorrow.”
Skelton went out. Dominic got up, closed the door behind him, leaned against it, and said aloud, “Hell’s teeth.”
Theobald’s Bookshop. The nest of sedition from which Richard had plucked his long-lost cousin Harry Vane just a few months ago.
Harry had worked there for six years, and it would be some tiny place with one or two assistants at most. Of course he would have been involved in whatever sedition was brewed there. And as for “the Gordons’ group”…
Harry Vane’s parents, who had called themselves Alexander and Euphemia Gordon, had been a pair of rabble-rousing demagogues who had fled England to escape retribution for their part in provoking a riot. Now their son was mixing with the cream of London society. Richard had sponsored him to join the best clubs, arranged him a voucher for Almack’s, presented him to the world as cousin and friend, and given the little swine lodging in his own home. If this man Mason—Harry’s old friend, his former employer—wrote treason as Jack Cade and Harry was implicated in his crimes, if it became widely known that both Harry and his father were revolutionary democrats…
This was a disaster in the making, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it.
He couldn’t stand in the way of the law. If this Mason was Jack Cade, he had to be stopped. Cade wrote his bloodthirsty snarling attacks on the state too damned well, with a vicious, hate-filled power that got under the reader’s skin, and appeals for justice and fairness that were fallacious but sufficiently emotional to push at the most rational reader’s beliefs. A very talented man.
Dominic couldn’t prevent the raid for Harry’s sake. Cade was too important.
Dominic made himself think it through. It had been months since Harry had worked in the bookshop, and he had done so as Harry Gordon. Could anyone link that name to the young gentleman Harry Vane?
Yes: Mason could. Mason, who might be Jack Cade. And such a dyed-in-the-wool radical might well feel no fondness for the apprentice who had deserted him to become a gentleman.
Harry—that smiling, likeable young man for whom Richard had pledged his credit—was almost certainly going to find himself in very bad trouble and infect Richard with it too. And there wasn’t a great deal that Dominic could, in conscience, do about it.
—
He still didn’t know what to do by the time the brute arrived at Millay’s.
Dominic stood by the grate, watching the flames. The room was blissfully warm, though it was a chill autumn evening, and cold rolled off the brute as he tramped in. There was silence for a moment as he shed his coat—too damned thin and patched for this weather. Dominic stared into the fire. He could feel the brute’s gaze like a touch as he approached.
“You.”
Dominic looked around. The brute’s shrewd eyes were on him. They were a muddy, mongrel mix of shades, a dirty blue-brown-green sort of blend with no name, and Dominic had an unnerving feeling that they read him too well.
“You look like you’re thinking about something.”
Oh no, no, he didn’t need talking now. He needed to forget it all, so he could deal with it after. He opened his mouth to protest, but the brute put one cold, powerful hand over it, a deliberate insult, and his lips curled into that mastiff grin that made Dominic’s scalp prickle. “Who the fuck said you could think about things that I don’t tell you to?”
And there it was. The rush of humiliated arousal that flooded everything else, washing it all away. Dominic bowed his head, or tried to, as the brute’s fingers tightened on his jaw.