Read A Private Gentleman Online
Authors: Heidi Cullinan
flatly at Daventry. “I shall look forward to it as I have little else,” he said, clearly indicating he looked forward to it not at all.
Daventry laughed nervously. “Nonsense. George Albert, explain to the man
there’s nothing wrong with you but a scholar’s quirky disposition.”
He nudged Wes hard in the small of his back. Wes tried to smile, but he
didn’t dare open his mouth. He’d taken too many pills. He wasn’t relaxed; he
was ill.
Another laugh, this one almost dangerous. “Come, boy.” Daventry nudged
him harder and lower in the center of his back.
Wes’s mouth came open as he cried out in pain—and then vomited all over
Presley’s shoes.
Daventry hauled Wes away, weaving him through the crowd, the painful
grip on Wes’s arm the only thing that kept him from being sick again. Once they
were in the hall he didn’t let up, only dragged Wes to his study. As soon as the
door shut, he shoved Wes away and paced angrily across the floor.
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“God’s teeth, but I don’t know what to do with you.” He stopped at the
window and stared out at it. “All the years I have supported you and allowed
you to slip into the shadows of life. I need your aid for this one small thing, and
yet you are so self-centered, George, that you cannot give me even this.” He
turned enough to look wearily over his shoulder. “Or perhaps it is me who has
failed. Failed to believe them when they told me you were broken. Determined in
my pride not to let my son be so.”
Wes had to work harder than ever to form words. “I-I-I am s-s-s-s-s-sorry.”
His father wasn’t listening. “Power and control. It is everything. And yet
you’ve never had it. And heaven help your brother, but I think we have another
one of you in his son. He started to stammer this week. I’ve been telling Richard
we can aid him, but perhaps I’m only fooling myself. He is as worthless as you, it
seems.” Daventry pushed off the window, shaking his head. “Rest assured,
George Albert. I won’t ask favors of you again. I shall call a carriage for you and
have it take you back to your apartments, and I will make your excuses at
dinner.” He sighed, then nodded. “Excuse me.”
His father left, and Wes stood for some time in the dark room, shaking,
feeling angry, feeling guilty, feeling deep pits of despair expand before him.
Once in the carriage, he rallied. He thought of Michael, of Dove Street. He
thought of going there, of dragging him into a bedroom and losing himself inside
the beautiful whore. He thought of how good it would feel to hear Michael shout
out his name.
Unless, of course, he recoiled from him too.
Wes pulled the pill case from his pocket, emptied the remainder of them into
his hand and swallowed them down. He was unconscious before the footman so
much as opened his door.
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He had no idea how he came to be in his rooms. All he knew was that one
moment he was in the carriage and the next he was lying in his bed, soaked in
sweat, the taste of vomit in his mouth and a worried maid whispering to the
butler beside him.
Wes grunted at them, rolled over and went back to opium-soaked dreams.
As he had the night before, Michael woke in the middle of the night in a
puddle of sweat, voice hoarse and still ringing with a scream. He stared into the
shadowy darkness, cold, shaking hands clutching at the covers.
Then he threw the covers back, reached for his dressing gown and stumbled
toward the stairs.
Three girls were giggling and whispering to one another as they fussed at the
mirror in the bathroom, but when they got one look at Michael, their smiles died.
Michael tried not to think of what new gossip they would spread and slammed
around as he drew his bath and heated water to fill the great porcelain tub. He
had just bathed the day before, but he felt gritty and filthy from head to toe, as if he’d slept buried in a heap of dirt crawling with bugs and worms. While he
waited for the tub to fill, he paced the room, trying to outrun the feeling of
unease and mild nausea that kept creeping up behind him like a shadow. It was
with a great sigh of relief that he sank into the water at last, leaning all the way
back against the rim and tipping his face up to the ceiling. He shut his eyes.
He saw fine white linen and tasted bitter male seed on his tongue. Pressing
his forehead to the bed, he reached back with cold, shaking hands and parted his
cheeks.
“That’s the way,” a smooth, darkly sensual voice praised him, as if he were a
very good dog. “Yes. Open yourself for me, Michael, and let me see my prize.”
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Michael’s eyes were open and he was scrambling desperately to get out of
the tub even before he realized what he was doing—he fell twice, choked on a
strangled sound, then landed in a heap on the rug beside the bath. Wet, bruised
and shaking, he curled into a ball and stared at the dirt caked against the clawed
feet of the tub until the terror faded.
He climbed back into the tub, but he did not relax. He took vicious hold of
the cake of soap and scrubbed himself vigorously from head to toe with it,
rubbing and scrubbing until his skin throbbed with heat. As the water drained,
he toweled himself off with the same angry determination. After storming
upstairs to dress, he tucked his hair into a queue, stuffed it under a cap, and
reached for his spectacles and his purse.
It was raining and cold, technically morning but still so early the sun hadn’t
even begun to peek through the clouds, so Michael hunched into his coat and
kept himself under eaves as much as he could as he made his way down the back
streets and out onto the main roads. For almost an hour he simply wandered
aimlessly, shivering and drenched now to the bone. Eventually he saw the call
sign of a pub he knew well enough to enter, and after ordering a plate of
breakfast, a pot of tea and a paper, he tucked himself into a corner by the fire,
and before his order even arrived, he fell asleep.
The barkeep had been kind enough to serve him again with hot food once
he’d woken, and Michael ate gratefully and sipped his freshened tea. He was still
slightly damp from his walk in the rain, but he was mostly dried out now, which
he supposed was something.
There were still shadows in his head. They were just ghosts now, dull images
that made him uneasy: soundless, tasteless, colorless old dreams. But they upset
Michael as much now as they had when he’d been dreaming, because he’d
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thought he was rid of them. He’d been fine. What had happened? What had
made them come back?
How could he make them go away again?
When a figure slid into the booth across from him, he startled, then averted
his eyes and focused intently on his plate as he saw who it was.
“Why the devil didn’t you come and get me?” Rodger asked, sounding
weary and frazzled. “Been looking for you for an hour.”
Michael pushed a lump of potato into a puddle of runny egg. “You needn’t
have.”
“What, you want me to leave you alone?” When Michael didn’t answer,
Rodger sighed and reached for Michael’s tea. After draining it, he picked up the
pot to pour the cup full again. “Do you want to head back or stay out for a
while?”
“Out.” Michael pushed his plate away and tried to give Rodger a hard look,
but he was afraid he appeared mostly dull. “You treat me like your virgin cousin
you don’t dare let out of your sight. I was only taking a walk and having
something to eat.”
“You ain’t my cousin, and you sure as hell ain’t a virgin.” Rodger speared
the potato and snagged the crust of Michael’s toast as he rose. “Come on. I’ll take
you over to that shop you like in Cheapside.”
Friar’s Bookshop. Michael’s spirits rose in delight before sinking in guilt. “I
can’t. I haven’t earned in a month.”
“You brought in eight hundred pounds,” Rodger reminded him.
Michael felt the dark that had never fully left him close over his head, and he
shrank back into his shadows.
Rodger grabbed his hand. “Come on, love,” he urged in a quiet whisper.
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“I don’t want to keep having the nightmares. I don’t know why they’ve come
back.” He huddled into himself. “Maybe I shouldn’t see him again. Except we’ve
taken his money.”
“We’ll give it back,” Rodger promised.
Michael tried to bite his tongue, but it was no use. “Except I think I
want
to see him again,” he whispered.
“Come.” Rodger tugged Michael to his feet and led him through the maze of
tables toward the door. “I’ve a yen to see you smile, ducks, so I’m taking you to
go play with your books.”
Memory caught up with Michael—he saw Albert stepping forward in the
dim light of the bedroom, and he saw Daventry smile his wicked smile in the
shadows.
Shaking his head to clear out them both, he pulled free of Rodger and
reached for coin to pay his bill and extra for the barkeep’s trouble.
“I just want to go home,” he said.
Rodger nodded and rested his hand briefly on Michael’s shoulder before he
turned and headed for the door. Anxious and confused, Michael lifted his heavy
feet one after the other and followed Rodger out into the morning London fog.
Wes nearly sent a message to Dove Street with his regrets several times. He
had been unable to eat breakfast and shook like a leaf until he’d doctored his tea
with laudanum, enough to put most men to sleep. Even then the thought of
riding a short distance in a carriage made him reach for the chamber pot. Clearly
any kind of outing with Vallant would be impossible.
But though he drafted two missives to excuse himself, he tossed both into the
fire. After choking down some toast and peppermint-leaf tea, he loaded his pill
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pouch, ordered his carriage brought around, and headed for Dove Street. At the
very least he could deliver his regrets in person.
Upon his arrival, Wes smiled and tipped his hat at the gardener tending to
the boxes outside the bawdy house. Often he would stop and inspect the man’s
work, offering tips and praise, but today he was too fixated on collapsing into a
settee in the drawing room. By the time he passed through the doorway and
handed his coat and hat to Barrows’s man, he was shaking.
When he started down the hall, Barrows himself appeared from a doorway
and stopped him with a grim look, jerking his head to indicate the room behind
him. “Michael’s curled up in my office, asleep at last. He’s had nightmares the
past few nights, and they’re starting to wear on him.” Barrows grimaced. “I’d
send you on your way, but he’ll be furious when he wakes if I do. So your
choices are to wait him out here with a copy of the
Times
, or I send a lad over to fetch you when he comes around.”
Wes knew there was no way he could make a trip back and again. He
nodded toward an open armchair near the fire. “H-h-here.”
“Done and done.” Barrows held the door open wide for him. “I’ll send a gel
’round with tea and nibbles. Let her know if you need anything else.”
With that Barrows headed down the hallway. Wes watched him for a
moment before slipping inside, heading for the chair he’d seen from the
doorway. As he came fully into the room he caught sight of the figure on the
sofa, and he stopped, stricken.
Michael was curled up in the corner, lying on his side with his back to the
cushions, all but his eyes covered by a knitted afghan someone had tucked all
around his sleeping form. His long blond hair tumbled across the pillow, over
the blanket and into his face. He looked like a child sleeping.
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All around the sofa were books, at least twenty of them, ranging from the
very ragged to pristine, and the shelves behind the sofa were full of them as well,
most stacked haphazardly. They were books of all sorts, ranging from novels to
serials to nonfiction. To Wes’s surprise, one stack contained nothing but books on
botany, one of them a volume to which Wes had contributed.
A young man entered, bearing a tray unsteadily. When he saw Wes, he
smiled and blushed, trying to bow and not drop his tray, barely succeeding at
both.
“Your tea, milord.” The boy looked around anxiously. “Where should I put
it, sir?”
Wes nodded at the floor before the chair. “Th-thank you.” He opened the
volume he had picked up and thumbed through the pages.
The boy lingered. “You a reader like our Michael? He’s famous for it, you
know. Them’s all his books, but he has more in his room. Acres of them.” His
cheeks went crimson. “He’s teaching me to read. Says I’m natural with letters.
And Mr. Barrows will get me a good job once I learn them all.”