A Seditious Affair(84)

“I think my lord will do whatever is necessary for Mr. Harry and Mr. Frey,” Cyprian said. “Will you?”

Silas couldn’t argue. Cyprian was right, even if he was shamelessly pulling the strings that would make Silas dance to his tune. Still, the idea of Lord Richard’s protection stuck in Silas’s craw, and he couldn’t imagine the big nobleman would be any happier about it. Would he truly tolerate that for Dominic’s sake?

Perhaps he would. Silas had seen the expression in Lord Richard’s eyes when he’d hurled those home truths at the man. He couldn’t doubt that Lord Richard cared for Dominic.

And yet the servant who arranged his lordship’s life for his comfort was doing his best to keep Silas safe in England, which might even keep him in Dominic’s life, assuming they had anything left between them after this. Cyprian wanted Silas here; he’d given Zoë the order to find Dominic a lover in the first place…

“You want Dominic out of Lord Richard’s way,” Silas said. “That’s your several steps ahead, isn’t it? You want me around to keep Dominic busy.”

The valet’s eyes met his in the mirror for one long, silent moment. Then Cyprian whisked the white cloth from Silas’s shoulders, leaving him startlingly well-shaved and respectable. “We have interests in common, Mr. Mason, and the first is preserving your neck. Now pay attention because there’s very little time—” A bell rang twice. “Or none at all. It sounds as if they’re here.” His lips tightened. “That was earlier than I’d hoped.”

“Who’s they?”

“The Home Office, I fear. Let’s get on, Mr. Mason. We have a job of work to do.”





Chapter 15


Cyprian left him in the book room. Silas ranged around, fingers automatically reaching for a volume here or there, but he pulled them back. No time for that.

It felt like a year had passed since the morning, though the mantel clock said it was not yet six. He was exhausted, in the full sense of the word. Nothing left, worn out.

Think, Mason.

He didn’t want to die, to be tried and sentenced and hanged for five minutes’ presence on a street. He didn’t want to accept Lord Richard’s patronage, with a bone-deep reluctance that made him feel nauseated at the thought. And most of all, he didn’t want to face the fact that, if it came to the choice, he might rather hide behind Lord Richard’s coattails than swing. That when it was a matter of dying on your feet or living on your knees, the answer wasn’t as clear as you might have hoped.

He’d never taken the coward’s route. If he’d had the choice, he might have turned his back on this devil’s bargain now, just to punish himself for wanting to accept it.

But he didn’t have the choice, because of Harry and Dominic. It didn’t matter if Lord Richard’s sodding charity and his own cowardice stuck in his throat like broken oyster shells. The fact was, if Silas was found guilty, the consequences to Harry and Dominic would be appalling. So Silas would take Lord Richard’s help and play his valet’s game, even if it meant he could never look himself in the face again.

Dominic wasn’t involved in Cyprian’s hastily spun web of lies, which was a good thing. They hadn’t been able to get hold of him since noon, when he’d sent an urgent message advising Lord Richard about Silas’s arrest and that accursed coat. Cyprian had sent a couple of notes back to him at the Home Office, but no response had been forthcoming.

Doubtless he was busy. Or perhaps he and Silas had found the point where they were so far apart there could be no coming back together.

If Dominic wanted nothing to do with him ever again, and he found himself living at the mercy of the Tory’s bloody Richard…Silas laughed aloud, an ugly sound in the empty room, and had to stop himself because it felt like something inside him was stretching or fraying.

He cast around for distraction. There was an octavo volume on a desk, newly bound in a style he knew well: Dominic’s bookbinder. He picked it up and saw it was Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Dominic had asked him to procure a second copy of the illuminated book and hadn’t said why. It had been for Lord Richard.

It was only a book. Anyone could read it, and more people should. It was stupid to feel as though Blake was, had been, just for them.

Silas was reading the poem “London”—In every voice; in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear—when a footman opened the door. “Your presence in the drawing room, Mr. Mason.”

“Right,” he grunted, and then, because he’d wanted to from the first moment and couldn’t restrain the desire any longer, he turned to the flyleaf. There was no reason he shouldn’t anyway. Book inscriptions weren’t private letters, and if Dom had been fool enough to write words of love in a book anyone could pick up…