A Seditious Affair(59)
“Silas, that is not—”
“The hell it’s not.” He was furious, and he wasn’t sure why, except that the thought of Dominic swallowing any and every insult at Richard bloody Vane’s hands was enough to make his guts twist. If it was even just insults he was swallowing.
None of it was right. None of it. Not Martha sobbing over the torn floorboard and the loss of her little bit of hope. Not the hunger up and down the street; the pinched, hollow faces; the blue lips and fingers, while men like Dominic had hot baths and fires in every room. Not Zoë straddling a naked man whose neck she’d just saved and still begging pardon for a few hard words. Not Dominic, who said he loved Silas but had another man’s hooks in his soul, one to whom no filthy, ragged ruffian could compare. Not a devil’s bargain that called to the worst part of him, offering a life of warmth and books and Dom there smiling at him every Wednesday, forever, if only he’d turn his back on everything that had ever mattered and every principle he’d ever held.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
Dominic was trying to say that wasn’t what he’d meant. Silas didn’t want to hear it. He stood, too angry and hopelessly wanting and miserable to bear it another moment.
“I don’t feel like fucking. I don’t feel like any of it. I’m going.”
Dominic caught his arm. Silas tried to wrench it away, but the Tory was as strong as he when he chose to use it.
“Stay,” Dominic said. “I’ll leave if you want me to, but the room is taken for the night. You might as well. It’s warm.”
“Christ. You don’t understand a thing, do you?”
“I understand that it’s a bitter winter. I know you’re cold.”
Silas shook his head, suddenly weary beyond words. “Everybody’s cold out there, Tory. Everybody. And if you think it’s enough for me that you make one man warm, you’ve not listened to a fucking word I’ve said.”
He walked away then. Away from Dominic and his expression of bewildered hurt. Away from temptation and back to the hard, cold, hungry places he belonged.
—
The old mad king died three days later, to a predictable accompaniment of sentimental drivel in the newspapers, with people who’d forgotten the very name of George III putting on mourning and long faces. Doubtless a magnificent funeral and an equally magnificent coronation would follow. Speculation began at once as to whether the new King George IV would have his loathed, unfaithful, and long-estranged wife beside him as queen.
“The pair of them can rot in hell for all I care,” Brunt growled, and followed it up with some spectacularly filthy speculations on Queen Caroline’s activities during her long exile abroad.
The Spencean Philanthropists were meeting in Brunt’s back room, in Fox Court off Grays Inn Lane. Adams had been released from debtors’ prison; whisper was that George Edwards had paid off the debt for him. He was there, listening as ever, along with Ings, Davidson, and a few of the others.
Silas wasn’t sure why he’d come, except defiance. The Spenceans, led by the bloodthirsty Thistlewood, were talking about staging a coup now. They would amass arms, the Six Acts be damned, and while the army was preoccupied by the king’s funeral, they would seize power and take control of London.
It was pure, pathetic fantasy, the ramblings of men who drank because they couldn’t afford to eat, who plotted to take over London while squatting in darkness because they couldn’t afford chairs any more than candles, and who had been pushed so far that reality held no appeal. Forty men with pikes seizing a city was lunacy on its own, never mind that they didn’t even have forty men. Thistlewood muttered obscure reassurances when he was asked about where the reinforcements would be coming from, then lost his temper.
It kept them happy, Silas supposed. There was little else to do that.
They had pikes now, or at least piles of staves and blades ready to be assembled. That was more planning than Silas would have thought Thistlewood capable of; it wasn’t clear where the funds for the weapons had come from. What they didn’t have was ferrules to attach the spear ends to the staffs. A man named Bradburn had been given money to buy those some days ago. It didn’t look like he’d be returning.
Silas could hardly blame Bradburn. He had no desire to be sucked into Thistlewood’s madness either. But these men were colleagues and fellow believers, and mostly they were desperate. Every time someone left the group it was a body blow to the rest. Silas couldn’t bring himself to do it when they had nothing remaining except belief.
That didn’t mean he wanted to be picked up for high treason. That was what they were plotting, ludicrous dream though it was, and he couldn’t shake Dominic’s warning. He knew something, he suspected there was trouble on the way, and he wanted Silas out of it.