It was most likely his writings. He couldn’t publish anything lawfully now, since none of his readers bar Harry Vane could afford the crippling sevenpence duty, and when—blast Dominic and his “when”—Silas was caught and convicted, he would be transported. There was no doubt in his mind of that, and he had no delusions as to what it meant. So he did the only thing he could: wrote fiercer words, because if he was going to lose this fight, he was going to lose it hard, and he was damned if he’d let them see he was afraid.
It felt like he was acting out a nightmarishly real form of the defiance Dominic showed on those odd nights, the ones when he had to be forced. I won’t do what you say and you can’t make me—spoken in the full knowledge that his tormentor could and would. The difference was, Dom wanted the consequences. But then, being made to kneel was just a game for gentlemen. The reality was different.
Silas pledged destruction to king, church, and state in an abstracted sort of way and trudged home to the cold of the bookshop. As he strode along Paternoster Row, key already in his hand, a frantic, furious female voice hailed him. “Mr. Mason! Wait!”
Martha Charkin, eyes snapping with anger. “What is it?” Silas demanded.
“I know who took my money. George’s money. It was the Hobhouse boys. Will you help me?”
Silas knew the Hobhouses, a loud, roistering family who lived on Ave Marie Lane, just around the corner. The bully of a father had raised four bullying sons, reducing their mother to a silent, sunk-eyed ghost before one beating too many made it final. Silas had had words with John Hobhouse and his boys more than once. If ever Silas had met a set of men who’d steal a dead son’s money from a widow mother, it was the Hobhouses; if ever Dominic met them, he’d see proof that the lower sort didn’t deserve the vote, freedom, or anything except a good whipping.
Silas sighed. “I’ll get my cudgel.”
—
Dominic was a little late to meet Silas the next Wednesday, and didn’t want to think about why.
It was a week since Silas had walked away from him in anger. Dominic had wanted to run after him, to chase him down the street, to go to the bookshop the next day and say, You mistook me. Let me explain. Let me help.
He couldn’t do any of those things, because he might as well cut his own throat as bring their relations to public notice, and he was aware of a slow-burning anger of his own because of this, one that he suspected echoed Silas’s permanent state of simmering resentment.
Silas had lent him, under strict promise of secrecy, an unpublished essay entitled “Offences Against One’s Self.” It was copied in Silas’s rough, determined hand, but he had sworn the text was by Jeremy Bentham, the lawyer-philosopher. It was without doubt the product of a highly educated and formidably intelligent mind, and it demolished the justification for anti-sodomy laws with forensic skill. Among many other points, the author argued that it was a human failing to condemn other people for their different preferences. From a man’s possessing a thorough aversion to a practice himself, the transition is but too natural to his wishing to see all others punished who give into it.
Dominic agreed with that—he could hardly do otherwise—but the ramifications of his agreement left him unsettled. He could not accept Silas’s arguments for reform. He’d seen too many demagogues calling for riot and chaos; he had no faith in the ability of the masses to govern themselves when they could not even feed themselves. But Silas and his ilk were surely entitled to hold their political beliefs, however wrong and repellent, and entitled to argue for them as long as their argument remained within the law.
Except that the law had been changed in order to silence those arguments, because the government, Dominic’s party, wanted to make the expression of the reformists’ preferences illegal.
Dominic huddled into his coat, pacing to their assignation. He wanted to talk this through with Silas, to pick out a coherent thread from his knotty thoughts that would allow him to make sense of his feelings. He suspected Silas would tell him he was trying to square a circle by thinking.
The damned nuisance that he was. The strain on Silas was visible, marking lines around his eyes. He was obviously going hungry, and Harry had told Dominic why. Silas hadn’t even taken that damned purse Harry had sent. And because he was Silas, distress and need made him more obstinate and more aggressive. Dominic would have handed him a hundred pounds and told him to feed his whole damned street with it as long as he’d fill his own belly, but he knew too well how that would be received.
It was sheer perversity, Dominic thought irritably, as he headed up the stairs. Silas ranted about the rich who didn’t give to the poor, yet he’d be consumed with outrage if Dominic tried to give him money today.