A Seditious Affair(24)

“Be damned to you.”

“We both know what you want of me. Here to fuck you when you want it and be got out of the country when it’s convenient for the gentry.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Shut your mouth,” Silas snarled. “I’m talking. And I asked you a question, Mr. Frey, standing here in this fucking molly house with me. If I told you—”

“Stop it!” Dominic wanted to hit him or to block his own ears against this hellish distortion. Or perhaps what they’d had had been the distortion, and this was the truth after all. “Stop,” he repeated, and felt the word’s awful familiarity in this room. A humiliation without anything good in it at all.

Silas laughed without amusement. “Stop,” he mimicked cruelly. “There’s my answer. Well, then.” One deep breath. “Lucky for you I don’t want it.”

“What?”

“Just fuck off.” Silas spat the words. “Fuck off back to the Home Office and do your job. Gaol the reformers and anyone who speaks against your mad king and your fat, greedy slug of a Regent. Protect your friends. Dance at balls. What do I know what gentlemen do? But I’m not your lackey; I’m not your whore. I won’t take your charity, and I won’t vanish for your convenience. I got my own life, just like you got yours, and mine’s no less to me than yours to you, so piss off and leave me alone.”





Chapter 5


The banging on the shop door came at an unseasonable hour of Saturday morning.

Silas rolled out of bed, snarling. He was dizzy to the point of nausea from nights of sleepless fury, and days of exhausting himself physically in the hope of better nights. The constant, angry, miserable roil in mind and heart.

The knocking suggested urgency rather than soldiery. He blinked his crusted eyes clear and hurried downstairs.

When he unbolted the door, it was to see George Charkin’s mother, Martha, with nine-year-old Amy by her side. Amy looked white, her eyes huge. Martha’s face was crumpled and streaked with tears.

“Mr. Mason,” she said, voice shaking. “Oh, Mr. Mason. It’s George.”

They brought his body to the bookshop. Martha Charkin, a seamstress who worked every waking hour until her eyes failed and fingers bled, lived with her children in a single room. She had no space to lay out her dead son.

The corpse was a pallid, bloody sight. It was stiff with rigor, sodden with rain, icy with the night’s exposure. Someone had shut his eyes, at least.

George’s raggedy shirt was stained with blood, and so was the gentleman’s coat he wore, which was a shade of horribly familiar pink. Except that Harry had called it puce.

“That coat,” Martha Charkin whispered. “Where’d it come from? My George was no thief!”

“No one says he was.”

“They will. That coat! Where’d he get it? He wouldn’t rob a gentleman, not for a coat. He would not.”

Only a mother could believe that George had turned apache, idle layabout that he had been. “He didn’t rob anyone. Don’t you worry, he came by it fair. I know who gave him the coat.”

“But—” Her eyes darted around the empty room, and when she next spoke, it was barely audible. “He had a purse too.”

George, to Silas’s certain knowledge, had not had a shilling to his name. What little Silas could pay him went straight to his mother, or to the Spotted Cat inn and his vain hopes of the barmaid. “What purse?”

Martha pulled out a pouch from under her shawl. It was heavy, not too far off half a pound, and it clinked, and when Silas opened the drawstring, he saw the glint of gold.

“What the—”

Harry Vane, of course. It had to be. Harry had given George his coat, that ugly pink thing; if George also held a purse of more money than he’d ever have seen in his life, that must have been Harry too. With Skelton’s threats hanging over him, the accusation that he’d had radicals kill his own kin, he’d handed George a fortune.

The bloody fool.

“What am I going to do?” Martha demanded. “Twenty guineas! If the Runners come after us…” The grief in her face was mixed with fear. Silas couldn’t blame her. For a woman in her position, simply holding that much money would feel like guilt.

“Who found him?” he asked.

It was watchmen, it seemed. They had stumbled across the body in the dark ways of Leicester Square. George’s father had been watch, before the drink carried him off. The men had known George, and that recognition had meant they’d showed him a little respect, or at least that they’d refrained from stripping the corpse of valuables.