“He may,” Julius agreed. “I don’t. I shan’t let Harry make things worse, trust me. God knows there are enough people to do that. Quite seriously, Dominic, your Wednesday man—”
“I know. And no. It is not just the fucking.” It was none of Julius’s damned business, but he felt a violent urge to defend Silas, to speak out for once. Something important had happened, something he wished Richard would understand. He did not need Julius to understand in the slightest, but Julius was amoral and unemotional, and that made him easy to confide in. “The fact is, Richard thinks there is—uh—there is something wrong with me.” Such simple words, so hard to face. “Well, Silas does not, that’s all. And I begin to disagree with Richard myself.”
“I should hope so. Of course the uncritical acceptance of a bravo is unlikely to change Richard’s mind.”
“He does not know Silas,” Dominic snapped. “A man may be a lowborn radical without meriting contempt. He has more intellectual curiosity, more fortitude and backbone, than you will find in the entirety of White’s and Boodle’s together, and more commitment to his fellow man in his little finger than you, for example, have in your entire body. He may be wrong, but he is wrong in the right way. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason at all. My urge to meet this fellow Silas is becoming overwhelming.”
“No,” Dominic said comprehensively. “He is not a spectacle at Astley’s for your entertainment.”
“Indeed not. He’s Harry’s mentor, and your motivation to haul yourself out of Richard’s shadow at last. I may tell you that we have all become quite weary of that particular tragedy. I can’t abide melodrama.”
“Go to the devil. Considering the spectacle you and Harry made of yourselves here—”
Julius threw up his hand. “Touché, enough said. Jesting aside, my dear Dominic, your, ah, strange bedfellow is no concern of mine except as he may affect Harry. And if Richard is impelled by the alienation of your affections to pursue his own elsewhere, that will doubtless be a good thing for him too. However, I feel it only fair to warn you that he does not appear to think so at the moment.”
Dominic grimaced. “I’ve no desire to fall out with Richard. You know that. I love him dearly and always will.”
“But it is, perhaps, time to stop seeing yourself through his eyes.” Julius gave him a surprisingly sympathetic glance. “I think that might be good for both of you.”
—
“They’re going to pass, aren’t they? The bills.” John Thomas Brunt strode up and down, turning every two paces because that was all the room allowed. “They’re going to pass.”
“Of course they are.”
Silas sipped his beer. It was sour, ill brewed, the kind of thing he’d drunk all his life and never complained. It wasn’t a patch on imperial Tokay.
He was in Robert Adams’s room, a little human rat’s den in Hole-in-the-Wall Passage, off Brook’s Market. It was precisely as filthy and sordid as the street’s name made it sound, and the men Silas was with were precisely as wretched and ragged and fanatical as gentlemen would imagine radical conspirators to be.
This was a meeting of the Spencean Philanthropists. An odd name for a radical group, but Thomas Spence, dead now after years of imprisonment and persecution, had loved his fellow man. His beliefs had been extreme to the point to madness: the end of class distinction, of aristocracy, of private landlords; a vote for every man and woman; a legal right for children to be free from abuse and poverty. Dom called that utopian, unrealistic nonsense, clean against human history and human nature. Perhaps you would have more success if you looked beyond fantasy and saw men as they are.
Perhaps he would. God knew the Spencean group around him was no great advertisement for man’s better nature. Arthur Thistlewood was disgruntled ex-militia, brought to radical politics by resentment and disappointment, and he had gathered other angry men to him. Richard Tidd had profited from the war by repeatedly signing up in disguise and deserting with the bounty he was paid. Neither of them was a man Silas could respect. But there were others. Adams, not a clever man but a decent one, who had been a soldier in the Blues. James Ings, the burly butcher, almost destitute now and desperate to keep his children fed; his benefactor, George Edwards, a quiet, listening sort of fellow, who was giving the Ings family money to live on. William Davidson, the Jamaican, a Sunday-school teacher driven from his place by accusations of indecency. He insisted those charges were motivated by distrust of his race, which Silas could well believe.