A Seditious Affair(68)
He was turning them over, trying to be glad for what he had instead of cursing what he’d lost, when Dominic came in.
“Your hands.” Dominic came to sit by him on the bed. “They look better than I feared. Do they hurt?”
“Not so much.”
“Good. Tell me, have you left this room at all?”
Silas hadn’t left the bloody room since Wednesday afternoon or whenever Jon had brought him there. Four days between the same walls. It didn’t feel like prison—he knew damn well what prison felt like—but it didn’t precisely hold a man’s interest either.
“No, I’ve not. There a problem?”
“I thought you might be bored.” Dominic gave him that quick, flashing smile he used when he wasn’t certain. “Dine with me?”
“Dine with you,” Silas repeated.
“There are rooms downstairs which we, our set, use for private engagements. A meeting room where one can dine, and a bedroom. I’ve taken them for tonight. Nobody else will come.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“You aren’t,” Dominic agreed. “As far as the others are concerned, Harry and Julius have laid claim to the rooms, and they’ve sacrificed themselves to an evening at home accordingly. I’ve ordered dinner. We could have the whole night, Silas. We can talk, and eat together, and sleep in the same bed, without hiding. I’m exhausted by the hiding. I want to dine with the object of my affections and then share a bed. That is all I want to do, it is what everyone else does, and I am so blasted tired of every law and custom and shibboleth that forbids it. Can we not have that, just once more?” He spoke quietly, because he was controlled, careful Dominic. In his head, Silas had no doubt, he was shouting.
Silas put a hand on Dominic’s arm, a light touch because his hands were a little tender still, and felt him shudder. “Aye, Tory. Let’s have that.”
—
It was an excellent meal. Plain fare, Dominic called it. Veal in one kind of sauce, salmon in another, rich but not overwhelming. Silas was not ravenous, for once, after days of rest and feeding up. Turned out you could enjoy food better if you took it slow and talked over it and didn’t need to get every mouthful down as quick as you could. Another privilege of wealth.
Silas didn’t point that out. He had, this night, no desire to argue. So they didn’t talk about politics or about the bookshop and what Silas would do. They talked about Keats’s poetry and Blake’s; about Grimaldi’s pantomime, which they had both seen; and about the new king’s relations with his hated wife. Silas argued for free divorce. Dominic, surprisingly, gave cautious consideration to the idea of divorce in the case of cruelty or irreconcilable difference.
“It was Richard’s parents,” he explained, pouring Silas a glass of excellent claret to go with the cheese. “His father married very late in life, to a very young lady. Their marriage was based on Cirencester’s desire for an heir and hers for a title, and they both got what they wanted, but…”
“Not worth the bargain?”
“No. It was an extraordinarily unhappy marriage. She resented his manner, and his personal attentions, and in due course his children.” His eyes drifted, as they did when he was remembering something. This didn’t look like a good memory. “Not that easier divorce would have helped, since he would never have granted it to her. But there was nothing good or godly in that marriage, nothing at all. She was driven to desperation, and…it did not end well.” Dominic tilted his glass, looking into the depths of the wine, then made a face. “That said, in my view neither his majesty nor Queen Caroline has made the slightest effort to behave as befits their station, and I cannot approve of divorce for no better reason than self-indulgence.”
“Well, then.” Silas raised his glass, accepting the end of that conversation. “Here’s to divorce for them as need it, and the long marriage their majesties deserve.”
“I shall not drink to any such thing. I don’t want to drink, I don’t give a curse for the king’s affairs, and I don’t want to waste any more time on other people’s self-inflicted miseries when we have a chance to be happy. Come to bed with me, you blasted radical. Bring me your revolution.”
—
They lay together after, Dominic’s head on Silas’s shoulder. Most often they’d sit and drink and talk and stay awake, because it would be Wednesday, and that would be all they’d have. This night they had a bed to share and to wake in together. Maybe, if Dom didn’t have to go to work early, time to fuck again. Silas had no idea when Dom started work. For once, it didn’t matter. For once the clock was not the enemy.