“Bollocks,” Silas said, with just a fraction of regret. He could imagine it, great rooms full of books to be held and ordered and put as they should be—findable, so people could read them…
So Richard Vane and his fine family could keep them.
“Bollocks,” he repeated. “There’s a hundred men with university educations and classical learning—”
“Yes, all right, there are,” Dominic said testily. “But you could still do it, and it needs doing. I’m not offering you a sinecure.”
“You’re offering me a job with your Richard.” A little self-inflicted pain every time he said it, like picking at a scab. “You’re back on terms then. Charity, is it? Keeping you happy?”
“And Harry safe. Yes. Do you expect me to say he’s concerned for your well-being?” Silas snorted. “Quite. But I am, Silas.” His voice was raw. “I really am.”
“Why? Or, why now?”
Silence. “I don’t think I should say.”
Silas waited. Dominic’s back was tense against Silas’s legs.
“Don’t think you should say,” Silas repeated at last.
“There are things you don’t tell me, and there are things I don’t tell you. It is a compromise that, in Richard’s phrase, might fool a blind man in the dark, but it is all I have. That, and an offer of honest work in a household where your position would be unassailable—”
“And I suppose that comes with giving up my work.”
“You can’t expect Richard to fund sedition,” Dominic snapped. “Yes, it would mean living like a respectable citizen, and it should. You know what will happen if you have a second conviction, and there are worse fates than transportation even.” He sounded sick.
Did he know something?
“Will you please at least consider it? Please, Silas. I don’t ask this lightly. It was not precisely easy to request it of Richard, come to that.”
Silas could believe that. I say, my lord, will you accommodate the bully your valet engaged to backgammon me? Dominic obliged to grovel to Richard bloody Vane. The oversized swine who’d hurt Dominic so often doubtless making him work for it, because that was what the gentry did, dole out their largesse in crumbs to those who bowed and scraped the most.
As if Silas could stand to be in that fuckster’s house, knowing what he’d done to Dominic.
As if Silas would give up on Lord Richard Vane’s say-so.
“No,” Silas said. “I ain’t that desperate yet. I don’t reckon I’ll ever be that desperate.”
“Silas—”
“No.”
Dominic exhaled, long and slow. “What do you think will happen when you’re arrested?”
“ ‘It’s ‘when’ now, is it?”
“Of course it’s ‘when.’ What do you think we do at the Home Office all day, play croquet between the desks? Sidmouth didn’t pass the Acts for entertainment. There’s trouble coming. There will be a general election, probably soon. His majesty is not long for the world.”
“What, the Regent? What’s he done, eaten himself to bursting?”
“The king.” Dominic’s voice was tense. “The anointed king of England, his majesty King George. Don’t give me treasonous talk.”
Silas had genuinely not thought of the blind old German lunatic, frothing away in some dark palace room. The Regency had lasted nine years now; a cove forgot. “Dropping like flies, ain’t they? The Duke of Kent just this week, now the king. So he’s dying. What’s the difference, except one less belly consuming the country?”
“He is your king,” Dominic said through his teeth. “And change means unrest.”
He spoke as though this were axiomatic, and it grated on every nerve Silas had. “God’s sake. The way you lot fear change, I’m amazed you can spend so much on your fancy clothes. I’d have thought you’d be cowering from your tailors. Oh, sir, please don’t change the fashion!” he mimicked, fop style.
“Stop giving me your claptrap and listen. There is unrest now, there will be upheaval when the king dies, and the Six Acts will be used. They’ll have to be used. You need to understand that.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t understand, nor do I see any right reason for them at all. You change your tune, don’t you?”
“What? That’s not—”
“One minute you’re against the Acts; the next you say they’re needed. One minute you’re going to stop letting your bloody Richard order your life; the next you’re asking me, me, to be his lackey.”