A Seditious Affair(57)

That did not mean that Thistlewood had been wrongly arrested. He was a dangerous fanatic, as so many radicals were.

Silas is a Spencean. The thought came to Dominic’s mind, unstoppable. He pushed it away. Silas was not a murderer. He had had Dominic on his knees the night before, wrists bound behind his back, in the little anonymous room Zoë had found them, and if he had wanted to murder a gentleman, he could have started there.

That hard hand around his neck, forcing his head back, caressing the exposed skin of his throat…

Silas was no murderer, and there was more than one Spencean group in London. But Dominic could not help reflecting that Brook’s Market, that filthy sink of sedition, was no great way from Ludgate.

“Tell me more,” he said.





Chapter 9


It was such a sodding cold winter.

It snowed. Of course it snowed, with unemployment and hunger all over the country. If it hadn’t snowed, maybe the people would have spoken out more against the Six Acts. But it was midwinter, and hot food in your belly was a good deal more of a concern than freedom.

Everyone was hungry, and nobody had money. One of Silas’s fellow Spenceans, Robert Adams, had been taken up for debt; James Ings and his family would be starving on the street were it not for George Edwards, still quietly keeping them fed. Some prick had robbed Martha Charkin too, for all her efforts to keep her golden windfall quiet. The twenty guineas were gone and with them her hope of security, warmth, and food for her and little Amy through this endless bloody winter.

And, what was even more wearing, the thief had to be someone Martha knew. Someone of the area who’d be well aware she’d lost her son and who took the money anyway. Just as the informer who’d peached on his seditious writings had to be someone he trusted. It was always someone you knew.

It was hard to keep up the fight for the freedom of your fellow man when your fellow man was a bastard.

Takings at the shop had gone to nothing. Coals were expensive, and most people preferred them to political philosophy. Silas made his way through the winters resentfully feeding his fellows because neither the government nor the church nor any other swine would do it. He was always hungry and cold in winter; it made him angrier. This winter, though, with the cost of his newly illegal printing impossibly high due to its new dangers…Well, it had to be done, and if it meant husbanding the coals, he’d survive. There were other people in worse case.

He was sodding cold, though.

The Tory knew it. They met now in a quiet little room—Silas wasn’t even sure to whom it belonged—which Zoë had set up so that he and Dominic could come and go without seeing another soul. It was as before, Dominic waiting for him, wine on the table, a bed. But now, when he arrived, there was food waiting too.

The Tory wanted to help, Silas could tell. Dominic was poised on the edge of offering money. He’d probably hand over enough to keep half Ludgate warm, but Silas couldn’t and wouldn’t ask because it shouldn’t be fucking charity that kept children from starving and the old folk from freezing, as if the country belonged to the rich by right and everyone else lived at their sufferance and by their whim.

They hadn’t even fucked at this meeting so far. Dominic had said, “Eat first,” and Silas had because he’d been so damned hungry, and now, somehow, he was in an armchair in front of a blazing, extravagantly hot fire with a belly full to hurting, a glass of claret in his hand, his head already a little muzzy from the wine. Dominic sat on the floor, since there was just the one chair, leaning against Silas’s legs as if he belonged there.

“You’re having a hard winter,” Dominic said at last.

“Isn’t everyone? Your lot aside.”

Dominic didn’t reply for a moment. “Harry sends his love. He also entrusted me with a purse for you. Your winter expenses, he told me.”

“Aye, well.”

“Would you take work?” Dominic asked abruptly.

“What work?”

“The Vanes have extraordinary holdings of books. The Tarlton March library alone would break your heart, and Paul Vane, Harry’s uncle, was an obsessive bibliophile.”

“The one who died in the house fire?”

“Yes. Fortunately, the fire didn’t reach his library.”

Silas found himself grinning for the first time in a while. “You’re all heart, Tory.”

“Oh, you take my meaning. There are thousands of books across the Vane properties, in shameful disorder. Richard is in dire need of a bookman.”

“Your Richard.”

“Well, his brother Cirencester, to be strictly accurate, but he leaves a great deal of the running of the estates to Richard. It’s decent work, and he pays well. And I don’t know anyone better suited—”