“Aye, you do.” Silas’s mouth twisted. “That’s the worst of it; that’s what I can’t let go. You understand.”
“So do you.” Dominic didn’t know if it was an accusation or a declaration. “And I do understand, none better. Sometimes one must cleave to what one knows to be right in the teeth of all opposition. Sometimes it comes at an unbearable price. Sometimes one must even face the fact that one’s wishes may be wrong—”
“We still talking about politics?”
“It’s all the same,” Dominic said. “You’re going to get yourself transported for your seditious libels, and they won’t make a damned bit of difference in the end. And I will lose you, and I know it, but I have lost my dearest friend because I cannot lose you yet.”
Silas’s arms tightened around his waist. “Then he’s a fool. Dom—”
Dominic rested his forehead against Silas’s, closed his eyes. “Richard tells me I must be mad. I sometimes feel as though this room is the only sane place in the country.”
Silas gave a huff of dry amusement. “You think so?”
“We disagree without hatred, and fuck as we choose. If I were to give my idea of utopia…”
“Aye. Aye, that’s true enough.”
“There is no fine gentleman for me,” Dominic said softly. “I had the finest gentleman in the land once, and I didn’t want him. I want my firebrand. And I want no after. I will fight against after with everything at my disposal, and if—when—there is an after, it will be bleak indeed.”
“Tory…” Silas whispered.
“Ssh.” Dominic kissed him gently. “I know it is not your habit to lean on anyone. You are the tower of strength out there, aren’t you? Always taking the brunt of it all. But in here, at least, let me bear your weight.”
Silas made a little noise in his throat. His chest heaved, just once, and they stood in silence as Dominic held him.
“Christ,” he said at last, into Dominic’s shoulder. “You know how to unman a cove.”
“Not my intention.”
“No. Ah, Tory.” He took a deep breath and straightened. “I got you the book.”
Dominic accepted the change of tone, because Silas needed it and because he’d been hoping to hear that ever since he’d asked Silas to act in his capacity of bookseller rather than revolutionary. “Thank you. May I see?”
It was a slim volume of medium size, the pages stitched together but not yet bound. Silas handed it over with something like reluctance. “Just look.”
Dominic opened it and gave a little gasp. “My stars.”
“Ain’t it?”
They sat on the bed together, since there was nowhere else for two to sit in a room designed for fucking, and leafed through the pages. “My stars,” he repeated, awestruck. “It’s stunning.”
The printed text was not set in type but in a flowing hand, cramped at points and irregular. Dominic brushed a finger over the page, felt the slight contours of the letters under his skin.
“You can feel it, can’t you? It’s what he calls relief etching,” Silas said. “Most engravings are what you call intaglio, right? You cut into the plate, and the cuts hold the ink, and that goes flat onto the paper. He uses a stuff that acid can’t burn and then burns away the plate round it so the printing surface stands proud instead of being carved in. So when the plate meets the paper, as well as the inks you get debossing, the sunken-in effect. Gives it a feel.”
The technicalities of printing were not Dominic’s area of interest, but he’d listen to anything for that intense fascination in Silas’s tone. “So he prints back to front, as it were?”
“Well, all printing’s back to front. His is back to front and inside out.”
I can see why it speaks to you, Julius had said. Dominic smiled to himself, leafing through images of a gloriously orange-red tiger, a worm-eaten rose. “Remarkable. How would you recommend it bound?”
“However you like,” Silas said gruffly, and, after a moment, added, “But if you want to treat it well, Morocco. Proper goat leather, none of your imitation. Shows off the gilding. Citron, maybe; that would look very fine.”
Dominic committed citron, Morocco, goat to memory. “And this is his collection of poetry?”
“Makes more sense than the other, I reckon you’ll say.”
Dominic stopped at random on an illustration of a severe, kneeling monk, and read aloud.
“I went to the Garden of Love.
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,