Clem was tidying up his study, an act of order in defiance of fog, when he heard the commotion in the hall. Polly’s voice raised in shock and horror, Elsie as high-pitched counterpoint, and a light tenor voice, coming in gasping sobs, that was almost, but not quite, unrecognisable.
“Rowley!” Clem bolted out of the room and stopped in horror as he saw his lover, spectacles askew, with one lens cracked, sodden, face patched red and white. “What— Are you all right? Did you fall?”
“Attacked,” Rowley said hoarsely, and his knees buckled. Clem leapt forward to catch him.
“Are you hurt? Injured? You’re freezing. Polly, we need a footbath in my study. Er, to save you the stairs. And Mr. Green. The stairs, I mean.”
“I’ll do a footbath if you sit him down with a blanket,” Polly said briskly. “I’ll put the kettle on. You’ll feel better for a cup of tea, won’t you, Mr. Green? Dear me, if it’s not one thing in this house, it’s another.”
That was inarguable. Clem left her to it and steered Rowley into the study, where he got the wet greatcoat off him, pushed him into his usual chair by the fire, threw on a plentiful heaping of coals, then went to fetch a blanket. Rowley was shivering violently by the time he came back.
“Dear God, you’re frozen stiff. What happened?”
“Spim.”
“What? How?”
“He, uh, he sent a message to meet in the gardens, from you. He had a knife. He took my, my, my spectacles.” Rowley put a trembling hand to his eyes. “He took them off my face and threw them away and I couldn’t see. He was right behind me and I couldn’t see.”
“Oh Rowley.” Clem dropped to his haunches, pulling Rowley into a hug. “Oh sweetheart, sweetheart.”
“I had to look for them on the ground, in the fog. I couldn’t find them. It took—I don’t know. It felt like hours, but I had to find them, I wouldn’t have seen him, waiting—”
His shoulders were heaving. Clem bit his lip. “Do you have another pair?”
“Upstairs. But I couldn’t get back, not without them.”
“I understand.” He did, all too well. Rowley’s nightmares, come to life. “Will you be all right if I go and fetch them?”
Rowley nodded. “Top drawer of the dresser.”
Clem took the stairs three at a time, ignoring Mr. Rillington’s querulous mumbles, and came back down like a sedate dowager, because he could all too easily imagine tripping, falling, and landing on Rowley’s only spare pair. He held them out, and was sure he saw a tiny relaxation when Rowley took off the broken pair and put them on.
“Thank you,” Rowley said. “That, uh, that’s better. God, I hate when I can’t see. He s-said he was going to cut my fingers off. Wanted the page. I told him we’d sent it to your brother. What did you do with it?”
“Kept it.” Clem gave him another squeeze and released him with reluctance, knowing Polly was all too likely to come in. “After what Mark said, and what you said…I kept thinking that you were right, he’d burn it and take a trip abroad and leave us with Spim. What a thing to think of my own brother, but I did. So I told him that I’d keep the page very safe until he’d met his obligations, and you were right because he hasn’t done anything yet, has he, and now this. Oh, Rowley.”
“We have to get rid of it. Now.” Rowley’s filthy hands were twisted together so hard it looked painful, but that wasn’t enough to stop the shaking. “He said, if I lied to him—if he finds out—”
“I’ll send it now if it’ll make you feel better,” Clem said as reassuringly as he could.
“No, wait. You can’t go to the pillar box.” Rowley sat up. “What if he’s out there? Spim?”
“You don’t think—”
“I don’t know. All I know is, he had a knife in my back not so long ago. What if he’s waiting for you?”
“Why would he be?” Still, it was dark outside now, or darker, and the night seemed very full of shadows. Not to mention fog, and Clem had no desire to go groping for a postbox in the murk. He’d got lost on his own street before now. “Look, surely even if he was there, he wouldn’t be interested in everyone from the house, would he? I’ll ask someone to post it, and then it’ll be out of the house. Will that help?”
Rowley nodded, so Clem scrawled a note for Edmund, addressed the envelope in careful print so it couldn’t go astray, found a stamp, and went to the lodgers’ parlour. Mr. Power had come in early and was sitting with last Saturday’s Illustrated London News. “Good evening,” Clem said. “I wondered if you’d do something for me.”
Mr. Power winked. “Long as it’s no trouble to me.”
“I need this posted. I can’t leave Mr. Green after this afternoon—you heard he was attacked?—and I can’t send Elsie out alone on a night like this. Would you mind?”
Mr. Power put the paper down. “You’re asking me to run errands? Go out in this fog to save the skivvy trouble? Now look here, Mr. Talleyfer—”
“You don’t have to,” Clem said. “Just as I don’t have to stay up at night to let you in late, or overlook it when you have a nip of rum in your bedroom, or make sure I don’t mention to Millie Blanchard in Clerkenwell that you flirt with Emma Howes at the butcher’s. I do those things because I like this to be a friendly house where we help each other, and now I need help. So would you drop this into the pillar box at the end of the street for me, Mr. Power?”
Mr. Power gave him a very narrow look. “Mr. Talleyfer, it’d be a pleasure.”
By then Polly had the footbath ready. The next half hour was all about Rowley: getting his wet things off and hung up for the mud to dry; swathing him in Clem’s dressing gown and getting his feet into the footbath; pouring tea with sugar into him whether he liked it or not. He gave Polly an account of assault in the fog by an unknown rampsman, and she marched into the kitchen, whence the smells of baking soon rose.
“She’s making preserved-ginger biscuits,” Clem said, with awe. “Goodness, Rowley, she’s only made those for me half a dozen times. She must like you.”
Rowley offered an effort at a smile. His colour was improving, at least.
The ginger biscuits were not long in coming, and Clem was pleased to see their restorative effect. He wasn’t sure what Polly put into them, and nor was anyone else; there were women up and down Wilderness Row formally Not Speaking to her because she refused to give out the recipe. Clem didn’t have a sweet tooth in general but could happily have eaten a plateful at a sitting, and they had much the effect on the system that a stiff drink had on people in books. Rowley nibbled an edge listlessly, sat up, took a second one, and let his hunched shoulders relax a little for the first time since he’d come back.
Clem smiled at him. “They are good, aren’t they? But you do have to have something terrible happen to you first, because she doesn’t like to waste the ginger.”
“God forfend,” Rowley said. “What are we going to do?”
Clem scratched his beard. “The police?”
“He said not to.” Rowley grimaced. “Well, he would. Clem, I should have thought, should we warn your brother?”
“I did, in the note. I don’t know when he’ll get it but we’ll never find a messenger boy willing to go to Haymarket tonight, so it’s the best I can do short of setting off on foot.”
“No.”
“I’m not going to. I’m staying with you. I’m going to secure the house, and stay up all night with the poker to hand if I have to, and tomorrow I’m going to tell Edmund to deal with Spim or I’ll tell the police everything, and Uncle Desmond too, and none of it will be a secret any more. And I’m going to ask Mark and Nathaniel for advice, because they’re the most capable people I know, and after that…I don’t know what else we can do.”
“I’ve got money,” Rowley said. “The insurance will pay, they said, and I’ve put a bit aside. I don’t have to keep the lease next door. If we wanted to go somewhere else, we could. Manchester or Birmingham or somewhere, where you could keep lodgings and I could set up again.”
“Do we have to?” Clem asked. “If we don’t have the page any more, surely Spim will leave us alone?”
“I don’t know,” Rowley said. “Maybe. When people once got in my father’s way, they found it very hard to get out of it again, and Spim’s that kind of man, it seems.”
“I see. Ugh. I don’t want to. I’ve been here eight years.” It had taken so much work to be settled, to have everything running smoothly, to have his friends and connections and people who understood. Friends at the Jack who shared his likings; friends at the Royal Sovereign who shared the half of his origins unknown to him; the people at the Working Man’s Institute who came to lectures on poetry; the rug seller and his family who were teaching him a few words of Hindi; his lodgers, even, ill-tempered or unreliable as some of them were. The idea of leaving it all behind was sickening. “If we have to, if you’re in danger…”
“I don’t like it either. I like things as they are, or were, too. But if you’re going to force trouble on your brother, even if it’s his own damn trouble, he might not take it well.”
Clem hadn’t thought of that. Of course Edmund would be deeply displeased, and with Lugtrout dead, he had no need for a lodging house any more. Change yawned ahead, dark and inevitable and frightening. “Yes, of course. Ugh.”
“But we can do as we please,” Rowley said. “We’ve enough money, we’ve occupations. If we bring Polly with us she could sell the recipe for these biscuits to Huntley and Palmers, and we’ll all live like kings off the proceeds.”
“She’d murder you in your bed if you even mention it,” Clem said, and at Rowley’s look wished he hadn’t. “Sorry. It was a joke.”
“I know. I, uh…God, Clem. I thought he was going to kill me. I couldn’t see, and I thought he was going to kill me, and I was so glad I’d met you first. I kept thinking how much I didn’t want it to be over, and how you’d feel if I didn’t come back or when they found me—it wouldn’t be till the fog lifted—”
“Oh, love.” Clem leaned forward to take his hand, gripping it hard. “Stop. You’re safe.”
“Just don’t send me any urgent messages any time soon,” Rowley said, voice a little tremulous. “God, I should have known. I’m a fool. The message was for Mr. Green the stuffer, and you’ve never called me that. He knew so much else, though. That you’re Edmund’s brother, about the page. How much could Lugtrout have told him? How much can he possibly know?”
“Sssh.” Clem squeezed his hand. “Stop. As long as he knows we don’t have anything he wants. And we’ll talk to Mark tomorrow, we’ll go away if we have to, we’ll be fine. You’re safe. Have the last biscuit.”
“That’s yours. I’ve had two already.”
“And you can have the third one,” Clem said. “That’s how much I love you, Rowley Green.”
“Greater love hath no man than he share the last ginger biscuit.” Rowley took it, broke it in half, and offered one part to Clem. “I love you too, but I’m only human.”
Rowley started yawning not long after. He looked drained, and Clem told him firmly to lie down in the bedroom.
“That’s your bed.”
“You’re staying with me,” Clem said. “I’m not having you lying awake listening for footsteps in the dark on your own. Go and lie down. I’ll tell anyone who asks that I’m sleeping on the settee, with the poker.”
“Sounds like fun,” Rowley said, but let himself be moved bedward. Clem didn’t join him. It was only half past eight and he had the usual evening tasks that wouldn’t wait for any amount of criminals. Polly had gone home early, groping in the fog, and all the other lodgers were safely in, so he went to lock the doors and windows. Goodness knew if it was necessary, or if it would do any good against the shadow that brooded over the house, but there was no point leaving more to chance than he had to.
So he bolted the front door, and was both startled and alarmed to hear a peremptory knock just after the chime of nine.
“Who can that be?” he demanded of Cat, who was winding around his ankles because of course he hadn’t put the blasted animal out. “Oh, curse it. You can go out the front—”
Unless it was Spim. The thought stopped him in his tracks.
Surely not. Murderers didn’t knock, did they? Or perhaps they did; perhaps you opened the door unaware and that was how they came. He had no chain, no peephole—
A second knock, urgent.
Either it was a murderer who shouldn’t come in, or it was someone who needed to. Hell’s teeth. Clem undid the bolts, opened the door a crack so he could squint through, and gaped at what he saw. “Edmund?”
“For God’s sake, let me in!” The Earl of Moreton shoved at the door as Clem stepped back. He was fog-damp, face pinched with cold.
“But are you all right? How did you get here?” Clem asked blankly.
“What? My carriage, of course.”
“But you’re all wet.”
“I had to walk from…” Edmund flapped his hand to indicate the street. “Do you intend to keep me standing in this hallway all evening? No, I want a private conversation with you,” he added as Clem indicated the general parlour. “Your study.”
“The parlour’s empty—”
“Your study,” Edmund repeated through his teeth.
“Uh.” Clem couldn’t find a way to say Mr. Green is currently in my bed that didn’t seem to advertise criminal relations. He should have announced it airily—he was attacked, the stairs were too much, I’m staying up—but he didn’t, and having failed to say it at once, the admission seemed as though it would be even more incriminating.
Edmund threw the study door open and strode in. Wincing, Clem followed, with Cat weaving around his ankles in an ingratiating way, and hung up the hat Edmund thrust at him. After all, Edmund would not intrude into his bedroom. Surely Rowley would stay quiet. Please God he wouldn’t snore.
“Very well,” he said, trying to get a grip on the situation as Edmund hung up his own greatcoat. “Why are you here?”
“For heaven’s sake,” Edmund said. “Are you not intending to offer me a cup of tea? Where are your manners? Where are your servants?”
“My housekeeper went home. The fog.” Elsie had gone to bed, since she started her duties at five, and Clem had no intention of getting her up for this. “I’ll make tea. Why don’t you sit down by the fire?”
“What about your lodgers? I don’t want to be interrupted.”
He looked rather odd, Clem thought, tense and set-faced. “We won’t be,” he said reassuringly. “They’re all upstairs, nobody will disturb us.”
“Well. Get on with the tea, then.”
“You could say please.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Clem hadn’t meant to say it. He wasn’t sure if it was the argument with Rowley, which had brought so many things to the fore, or the day’s terrors; the thought of Emmeline Godfrey’s wedding night, which had nagged him at intervals since he’d spoken to Mark; or simply the knowledge that Rowley was lying in his bed listening to his brother talk to him like this. Perhaps it was all of them, but he had, he realised, had his fill.
“I said, you could say please. You’re in my house—”
“My house. My money, off which you have lived—”
“I’ve worked,” Clem said. “Have I ever been late with the rent, or the accounts? I’m your brother, I’m Father’s son as much as you are, I’m tired of being grateful for crumbs from your table, and I d-don’t see why you can’t simply ask for a cup of tea instead of turning it into an insult.”
The lines of tension around Edmund’s eyes and mouth were more prominent than usual, unless that was the low gaslight. “I see you have decided no longer even to pretend respect to the head of the family.”
“I don’t f-feel a great deal of respect for you at the moment,” Clem said. “I’ve thought about this. I think you owe me quite a lot, Edmund.” An explanation for his deceit, an effort to rid them of the monster he’d brought down on them, a modicum of courtesy, for once. An apology. “Do you want this tea or not?”
“Yes,” Edmund growled. “Make it.”
Clem went to fill the kettle from the kitchen pump, his nerves fizzing and twitching. His hands were trembling like Rowley’s had, and for far less reason, he scolded himself.
Except that was probably the first time in his life he’d challenged his brother. The first rule of his entire life had always been unquestioning obedience to the earl. Any attempts at defiance had been punished by his father with beatings, his brother with rage or threats to his livelihood.
Well, he’d broken that rule, and he didn’t care, either. He’d do very well without Edmund’s support if he had to, and he wasn’t going to see Rowley suffer again.
He took a moment to calm himself in the peace of the kitchen. When he returned to the study, Edmund was standing irritably by the fire. Clem hung the kettle on its hook and went to get the tea things from their shelf, rehearsing the order in his head because no matter what he’d said, he didn’t want to fumble now. Cups, tea canister, milk jug—blast, he’d forgotten the milk. Edmund gave an ostentatious sigh as he went to fetch some from the scullery but offered no comment. Teapot, spoons— “Sugar,” he said aloud.
“For God’s sake! I have never known anyone make such a parade of a simple task.”
“Why don’t you just let me finish,” Clem said, as evenly as he could. “Since you’re the one who wants it.”
“What sort of bloody fool can’t make a simple cup of tea without this back-and-forth?” Edmund snarled.
“What sort of fool keeps doing the same thing when it doesn’t work?” Clem snapped back. “You’ve been barracking me since I was a child and you’ve never once noticed that it only makes me worse. Be quiet and let me make this—this sodding tea, or say what it is you came to say, or go away. I don’t care.”
Edmund’s mouth and fists tightened but he didn’t respond. He really must be desperate, Clem thought in a detached sort of way, and almost wanted to laugh.
He put the things out with a shaking hand, taking his time. “Right,” he said at last. “Will you sit down?”
Edmund took Rowley’s chair, which creaked under his weight. He looked wrong in it. Clem took his own seat opposite. The kettle was still heating, but he had no desire to wait for it to boil. “Well, go on. I dare say your coachman or groom or whoever drove you would like to go home.” There was a thought; the poor man must be miserable out there. “Shouldn’t he come in?”
“Stop wandering from the point. I want to speak of your note.”
“The one I wrote on Wednesday?”
“Wednesday? I only received it this morning.”
Edmund’s tone was as accusatory as though the post were Clem’s fault. “I expect that’s the fog. I’m amazed they’re delivering anything.”
“That is scarcely my concern. You said you would send me that page, Clement. You gave me your word, and you have broken it, you treacherous— This is your last chance. You will give me that page, now, and I shall burn it this very minute, on this very fire that I pay for, in this house that I pay for, do you hear me?”
“I can’t do that—” Clem began, and recoiled as, with a sudden leap from nowhere, Cat landed in his brother’s lap.
Edmund let out a hoarse yell of shock. “Christ! Get this thing off me!” He shoved at Cat, which anyone could have told him was the wrong thing to do, because Cat swiped viciously at the flailing hand. Edmund gave a shout of real pain as a line of blood sprang up on his skin. Clem grabbed Cat round his midriff and pulled; Cat anchored his claws in Edmund’s thighs and stretched like india-rubber to about twice his usual length rather than let go.
By the time Cat had been detached from what had obviously been expensive trousers and evicted from the house in disgrace—not that Clem could really blame him for resenting another man in Rowley’s chair—the kettle had boiled. Edmund was seething with rage as he inspected his damaged hand and clothing, but he nevertheless insisted, “Tea.”
Clem gave him an incredulous look, but it didn’t seem worth the argument with all the other things to argue about, so he filled the teapot to let the leaves steep.
“I will ask you once more,” Edmund said, voice shaking with anger. “Will you give me that page now?”
“Just a minute.” Clem didn’t want to tell him it was in the post without at least trying for some of the concessions he’d meant to demand. “I’d like to know what you’re going to do for me first, because you really do owe me something.” Edmund’s jaw went rigid, nostrils flaring with anger, but Clem was blasted well going to say this. “I don’t think you’ve ever counted the cost of this business, have you? All the damage to Mr. Green’s shop. Fire, and threats, and attacks and a murder on my doorstep, and all you’ve given me is an—an airy assurance that this murderer will somehow go away once you’ve burned the paper. It’s not good enough. I want more than empty promises, Edmund.”
Edmund’s lips curled in that contemptuous look of his. “Of course you do. Who could doubt it? After all your fine words—but this was only to be expected. Pour the tea.”
Rowley said that Clem was patient and tolerant, and certainly he felt that other people were a great deal too angry, but he was within a whisker of emptying the teapot over his brother’s lap now. “Why don’t we finish this conversation?”
“Pour the damned tea!”
Clem poured two cups, handed Edmund one. He didn’t think his hand was particularly unsteady, but he must have fumbled the saucer, or Edmund’s hand banged against it, because it upended in a spray of brown liquid. Clem leapt back; Edmund made a noise of rage. “You clumsy oaf! My trousers! Get me a cloth at once, a wet one. They will be ruined.”
Clem couldn’t see much damp on Edmund’s legs, and Cat’s damage could hardly be wiped away, but he went to the kitchen anyway, rehearsing a number of Rowley’s expletives under his breath. He’d do this, he told himself, give his brother the damned tea if it meant so much to him. All that mattered was to make him understand that Spim had to be stopped, and that Clem would see his brother brought as low as any earl had ever been before he’d see Rowley hurt.
When he returned with the cloth Edmund had righted the cups and poured himself more. He took the cloth from Clem and gave himself a perfunctory dab. “Very well. Sit.” He picked up his cup and saucer. “I shall take leave, first, to make a few observations on your demands and what you may expect of me.”
It sounded as though he was settling in for a speech. Clem resigned himself and took up his own cup—
“Don’t drink it, Clem,” Rowley said.
Clem jumped so much his tea slopped into the saucer. Edmund’s head whipped round. Rowley was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, which was in the wall behind Edmund’s chair. He was dressed in his muddy trousers and jacket, but barefoot, and his eyes were fixed on Edmund even as he said, “Clem? Put the cup down. Do it now.”
“What the devil—” Edmund began.
“I saw you put it in, your lordship,” Rowley said, voice very level. “What was the idea, a household accident? ‘He was so disorganised, he always made foolish mistakes,’ something like that?”
The blood drained visibly from Edmund’s face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The powder that you tipped into Clem’s cup once you’d got him out of the room,” Rowley said. “I’m talking about that. Was it a soluble form?”
Clem, very slowly, took up a spoon and stirred his tea. He felt the spoon scrape against something gritty at the bottom, like undissolved sugar, but he never took sugar. He put the cup on the table, and was distantly amazed at how little his hand shook.
“I see your game.” Edmund’s voice sounded thin. “It is a plot, to blacken my name, more extortion—”
“Clem,” Rowley said, steady and remote. “Tell your brother, specifically, what you were asking of him. All your demands.”
“I wanted him to deal with this murderer before he hurt anyone else,” Clem said. “As he promised. Why—”
“You thought he was asking for money, didn’t you, your lordship?” Rowley said. “You thought he was going to blackmail you, because you’ve never in thirty years taken the ten minutes to get acquainted with your own brother that would have told you how wrong you were. Clem would have been loyal to the end if you’d given him one damned thing worth being loyal to, and you didn’t know it. You came here to kill him, and you never even asked him what he meant.”
“He was blackmailing me!” Edmund said. There was an unfamiliar tremor in his voice, cutting through the bluster. “All along, working against me—”
“I was not,” Clem said. It was baffling, too baffling to be hurtful or frightening yet. “How could you think that?”
“I had your note, I was given your demands. You forced me to this. It’s your fault.”
“I sent you the page back this evening,” Clem said. “It’s in the postbox now. I don’t understand why you’re saying this. I just wanted you to do something about Spim.”
“No. No. You are confused again, Clement—”
Clem picked up Edmund’s teacup and threw it. It hit the wall with a satisfying smash and a shower of tea, making both the others duck. “You tried to kill me, Edmund! You put something in my tea! How dare you try to bamboozle me and blame me when the murderer you brought down on us attacked Rowley this very afternoon!”
“No, he didn’t,” Edmund said.
“Shut up!” Clem shouted. “Stop lying to me!”
“Who didn’t do what?” Rowley sounded impossibly calm. “Your lordship? Who didn’t attack me?”
“My man, of course.” Edmund was staring at Clem. His face was corpselike. “He came to Clement today, he received his extortionate demands—”
“Nobody came to me,” Clem said. “I’ve been in all day and we’ve had no visitors. There’s a fog.”
“He came to me,” Rowley said. “He came to demand the page from me because his lordship sent him, because he’s been working for you all along, hasn’t he? Lugtrout was blackmailing you and the price was rising. He was drinking too much, indiscreet, so you hired a man to get the page back, or get rid of it—you didn’t mind which, of course. He was working for you all along.”
Edmund’s mouth moved. He didn’t speak.
“Did you intend to have Lugtrout killed?” Rowley asked. “Or, no, I bet you said ‘dealt with’ or ‘silenced’ or ‘removed,’ didn’t you? I know about words like that; I use them myself. It doesn’t really matter if you say ‘disjecta’ or ‘guts’ in the end, though, it’s the same stuff. You wanted Lugtrout gone, and he’s gone. And as for me and Clem, well, we were just in your way.”
Clem pushed himself to his feet and edged round Edmund’s chair, leaving a wide berth, so he could stand by Rowley without taking his gaze from his brother’s face. It did not look healthy. Edmund had the eyes of a man who saw his demons closing in.
“And then Clem found the page,” Rowley went on, voice still very level. “He promised to give it to you, and he would have, only he wanted you to make good on your promise to deal with the murderer first. And you sent the man who tortured and killed Lugtrout to your own brother to tell him to hand it over. Didn’t you? Only he didn’t even try. He put a knife to my back instead and I told him we’d sent the damn page to you, and then what? He went back and told you Clem was asking for money?”
“Five thousand.” Edmund’s voice was barely audible.
Rowley nodded. “He’s double-crossed you. You were paying him, but the money was going to run out when you got the page back, so he was trying for an extra handful. What was the idea, that you’d give it to him to pay Clem?”
“Tomorrow. We agreed— Tomorrow.”
“But you didn’t want to pay blackmail money to your brother, so you tipped some powder into a paper and came here to kill him instead. Because you trusted your killer before your brother.” Something ignited in Rowley’s face that Clem didn’t recognise, a blaze of anger, and something hard and remote along with it. “You stupid murdering sod.”
“I had to,” Edmund said. “You don’t understand.”
“We’re going to the police,” Clem said. “Right now. You can come with us and tell them where to find your murderer. Or don’t come and I’ll tell them about what you put in my cup. Your choice.”
Edmund’s face convulsed. “No. No, you can’t. They’ll prosecute me. He’ll kill me. And—and— What was this man doing in your bedroom?”
That was an unexpected punch in the gut. Clem had quite forgotten their precarious situation and he couldn’t find a fluent answer now. Rowley answered for him. “Sleeping off being attacked by your mate. Did I tell you to go fuck yourself yet?”
“You may deny it all you wish.” Edmund stood, voice stronger, seizing his advantage. “William Lugtrout made certain implications of the most sordid nature, which I rejected out of brotherly—”
“Out of what?”
“If I lodge a complaint with the police—”
“You can lodge one right up your arse,” Rowley said, his South London rasp very strong. “Go on, tell the peelers what your pisspot accomplice thought, in between explaining the powder in that cup of tea and your name on that page. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated. Had any good weddings recently, Mr. Much-Married Man?”
Edmund lunged sideways, pushing Clem violently out of the way, toward Rowley, so they collided. He half tripped over Rowley’s feet, and as they disentangled themselves, Edmund tugged at his greatcoat, drew something from the pocket, and turned. There was a gun in his hand.
“Shit,” Rowley said.
“Get against the wall. Get back. Don’t think I will not shoot. You have made me a desperate man and you may take the consequences if you provoke me.”
They both backed up to the wall. Edmund’s eyes were wild. Fifty years old, the stout and stately Earl of Moreton, with teeth on show and a pistol in his grip. He tipped the contents of Clem’s cup onto the fire, then threw the cup itself onto the coals. The flames around it hissed and leapt blue. “Very well,” he said again. “That never happened. Now, where is the page?”
“In the post,” Clem said. “I told you. I posted it to you today.”
Edmund looked at him, then he moved the gun, its barrel shaking badly in his unsteady hand, and aimed it between Rowley’s eyes. “You will get me the paper or I will shoot him.”
Clem looked at him, at Rowley, and stepped between them.
He heard Rowley’s gasp, and had just time to think, He tried to kill you already, he won’t care, that was stupid, but it didn’t matter. He knew precisely where he had to be in this room, and it was between Rowley and the gun.
“Get out of the way,” Edmund said. “Clement, get out of the way.”
“No.” Clem couldn’t tear his gaze from the round black mouth of the gun. “I won’t.”
“Don’t make me shoot you!”
“I’m not. You’re holding the gun.”
“There’s people in the house.” Rowley’s voice was utterly flat and unemotional behind him. “If you fire that thing, they’ll all come running. It’ll be over for you there and then.”
“But it’s over anyway,” Edmund said, with an odd little laugh. “Don’t you see? I wanted Lugtrout dealt with, but it’s got worse and worse. He promised he’d deal with Lugtrout, and then he asked for more, and more, but the page never came, and then you started blackmailing me—”
“I did not!”
“No, he didn’t,” Rowley said. “Clem, I need to talk to his lordship. Would you step aside? For me? Clem, my star, please.”
Clem did not want to, not at all, but if he couldn’t trust Rowley now, he could never trust again. He stepped sideways, letting his brother’s gun point at his lover’s head.
Rowley came forward, close to Edmund, looking up. “Your lordship? It’s not over.”
“Of course it is.” Edmund sounded almost dreamy. “I thought, if I only had the page back—but now he’s turned on me and it will never end, it will never—”
“No, look,” Rowley said. “For a start, you’re right about me and Clem. We’d do ten years for unnatural offences, no question, so you’ve got something on us, to keep us quiet, so that’s fine, isn’t it? We won’t be able to talk. You were clever there. And Clem’s already sent you the page, so you can burn it when it arrives, right? So all you have to do is deal with the new blackmail business and you’re home and dry. See?”
Clem wasn’t sure what Edmund saw then, if anything at all, but his brother’s expression sharpened a little. Rowley had his attention.
“And look, your lordship, look at this,” Rowley went on. “It might make some sense to you. I got this off your man, he dropped it in the fog when he went for me. You want to see this.”
He slipped his hand in his pocket. Edmund leaned forward, lowering the gun a little, and Rowley—
Clem had never seen him move so fast. His free hand smacked the gun barrel sideways as the other came up from his pocket with vicious force. Blood flew, and the gun dropped from Edmund’s hand as he screamed. Clem recoiled, shocked, as Rowley kicked the gun swiftly under a chair and stood poised, a reddened blade gleaming in his hand.
“ ’My tools is very handy,’ ” he said through his teeth. “And very sharp. I think I got a tendon there, what do you reckon?”
Edmund’s mouth worked. His face was fish-white and he clutched his right hand with his left. Blood was dripping through his fingers.
“All this hurting people,” Rowley said. “Well, do what comes naturally, I say. Why don’t you fuck off before I skin you out through the mouth?”
They stared at each other. The blade in Rowley’s hand was tiny, no more than an inch and a half long, but it glittered with sharpness in the firelight. Edmund backed away, very slowly at first, then turned and fled, fumbling at the door, slamming it behind him. Clem and Rowley watched the doorway, frozen, and the front door shut with a bang.
“Well,” Rowley said. He put the little knife carefully on the desk. “Well.”
“He went out without his greatcoat,” Clem said. “He’ll catch his death. Oh God.”
Rowley walked into his arms, and then they were gripping each other so tightly it hurt, Rowley’s fists wound into Clem’s coat, and Clem wasn’t sure which of them was shaking more. He couldn’t think, couldn’t understand the full awful scope of what had happened here, couldn’t begin to imagine what would happen now. All he could see was Rowley, clutching his vicious little blade, and facing down a half-mad desperate man with a gun, for him.
“I love you,” he said into Rowley’s hair. “I love you so much. How are you so…here?”
“Don’t let go,” Rowley said urgently into his shirt front. “Christ alive, Clem, Clem. Did you see the fire?”
“The fire?”
“It burned blue.” Rowley twisted his head back to look up without moving away. “He put that stuff on the fire and it burned blue, and there’s a lot of things burn blue, but one of them is arsenic. If I hadn’t been watching through the crack in the door—” His voice was ragged. “I wanted to kill him. I could have cut an artery just then and I knew it and I didn’t care. I wanted—” He ducked his head again, shoulders heaving. Clem pulled him close, not finding a word to say, stroking his hair, until Rowley’s shaking stopped.
“God.” He wiped at his eyes and looked up again. “Sorry. Your own brother put a gun to your head, and I just did—that—and I’m the one crying on you.”
“Well, but I’m all right,” Clem said. “I’m all right because you were here.”
“Oh Jesus. All I could think of when I thought that man was going to kill me was you. All I could think of when your brother held a gun on you was that—that it would be all right, because if he shot you he’d have to shoot me as well and then it wouldn’t matter so much, you see, because I wouldn’t have to live in a world without you. I lived there for so long and it was miserable, and I didn’t know how miserable it was till you, and…I didn’t actually mean it would have been all right if he shot you. That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know.” Clem bit his lip. “I’m sorry you had to do that. I should have listened to you before.”
“He’s your brother. You should have been able to trust him.”
“But I can’t,” Clem said. “I’ll go to Inspector Ellis first thing tomorrow, and I’ll tell him everything. Edmund’s going to have to take the consequences. There’s no other choice.”
“Uh. Clem?”
“What is it?”
“He’s not exactly in his right mind. And not even he can think he can talk you out of pressing charges. I think you need to be prepared for him to, uh, do the decent thing. By which I mean, put an end to it. Fall in the river. Accident on purpose.”
Clem took that in. “You think…Yes, I see. It wouldn’t be very like him, but none of this is very like him. Or, rather, it’s all like him, but I never knew what he was like.”
“He never knew you. Christ, who knows anyone?” Rowley buried his face in Clem’s front again. “Who knows what bloody awful things people are capable of when—when—”
“I know you,” Clem said. “I know that you don’t like arguing with me because you’re frightened of what you might do, not of what I might do. I know you’re worrying right now I’ll be afraid or disgusted, or start thinking you’re like your father as soon as I think about what you did. You idiot.” Rowley made a stifled noise. Clem tugged him tighter. “No, but honestly, Rowley. I love you, and I know you, and if you’re expecting me to be upset because you stabbed my brother, you can think again. You saved my life. My preserver.”
“You saved mine. Oh God,” Rowley said into his shoulder. “How are you all right?”
“Because of you.”
“No, but…He tried to kill you. Your brother.”
“I know. I don’t think I believe it yet, not really. Once it sinks in I’ll probably wake up screaming.” He tried to say it as a joke, knew it wasn’t. “Will you stay with me? Tonight, I mean.”
“I’ll stay as long as you want me,” Rowley said. “However long that is. There’s nowhere else in the world I want to be while you want me to be here.”
“That might be a very long time,” Clem said. “If you leave it up to me, it might not be far from always.”
“Well, you know me.” Rowley looked up at him with the faintest shadow of a smile. “I like to wait.”
Clem didn’t wake up screaming, but that was as much as could be said for the night. They lay in bed together, entwined for comfort and the illusion of safety, but neither could sleep. Rowley’s mind would not stop running through the horrors of the day—the attack, the growing, nauseating awareness of something terribly wrong as Edmund shouted at Clem, the tension as he’d dressed in silence to be ready for something, and the stealthy movements of a man tipping powder into his lover’s drink.
Fucking Edmund Taillefer. He’d better have killed himself, or Rowley intended to make him wish he had.
If he could. If Edmund didn’t somehow use his power and influence to find a way out of this, if he didn’t somehow use what he knew of Clem and Rowley against them, if he didn’t reconcile with his henchman Spim…So Rowley lay awake and fretting next to Clem’s warm silence, until the reaction set in a couple of hours later. Rowley heard a stifled gasp, and a sob, and he wrapped his arms around his love, helpless to do anything but hold him and whisper useless words as Clem confronted his brother’s hatred alone in the night.
But at least he was alone with Rowley. At least Rowley could hold him and tell him he was safe, and wonderful, and beloved. It was all they had against the darkness, and maybe it was enough.
They were both miserably tired the next morning, waking to the reality of shards of china on the floor and in the fireplace, and a gun under the chair. Neither wanted breakfast; both ate in silence as the other lodgers chatted, fuelling themselves for the inevitability of the trip to the police station. At least the fog was lifting.
“For now,” Mr. Rillington said over his kipper. “It’ll be back soon, and thicker. Mark my words.”
There was a rap on the door and Elsie came in, bobbing. “Mr. Talleyfer? Visitor for you in the parlour.”
Clem looked startled. “Visitor? Is it the police?”
“Should it be?” asked Mr. Power, with a comical lift of the brows.
“It’s a Mr. Taillefer,” Elsie said, with a slightly confused look. “Mr. Timothy Taillefer. He says he’s got bad news.”
Clem insisted Rowley should come with him, and introduced him to his cousin Tim. He was a very pleasant-looking fellow of Clem’s age, fair-haired and blue-eyed, but Rowley could see a resemblance in the cousins’ expressions and demeanour that hinted at their relationship, and the warm greeting they exchanged said everything about their friendship.
“Rowley knows all about Edmund’s business,” Clem said, after introducing him. “More than you do, Tim, I suspect. So, did he kill himself then?”
Tim looked a little startled at that blunt question. “He did, yes, if you mean Edmund. I’m afraid he shot himself last night. How did you know?”
“He didn’t fall in the river?”
“N-no. Were you expecting him to?”
“We weren’t expecting him to shoot himself,” Rowley said. “Are you sure about that?”
“I saw the body,” Tim said mildly. “It wasn’t pretty.”
“No, but…” Rowley glanced at Clem. “The thing is, I sort of stabbed him in the wrist last night—”
“Oh, that was you, was it? The police are wondering. Er, why?”
“And I’d swear I cut a tendon,” Rowley finished in a hurry. “I don’t see how he’d use that hand. Or did he use his left?”
“The gun was in his right hand,” Tim said. “Going back to why you stabbed him…”
They told him the story, all except the personal parts. Tim listened to the whole thing mostly in silence, with a few incredulous exclamations, and at the end drew a deep breath. “Well. He had good reason to end it, then. What a damned thing. What a terrible mess to have made. And poor Peter, too.”
“What can we do about that?”
“Nothing,” Tim said firmly. “For one, you still need to give this story to the police. It makes no difference that Edmund’s dead. Your lodger fellow’s dead too and Rowley here could have been killed, let alone you, Clem. The treacherous old buzzard. Er, whether you tell the police that part is up to you, of course. But in any case I don’t propose to play into a blackmailer’s hands by lying for Peter’s sake when the fact is he’s got no right to inherit.”
Clem made a face. “I know. But I’m sorry for him.”
“I’m sorry for the father he had,” Tim said. “Edmund was a rotten husband, and a rotten father to do this to his son, and, since we’re on the subject, an utterly rotten brother too. Not to speak ill of the dead and all that, but the way he treated you was a disgrace. Not that Phineas will be any better when it comes to his turn, but at least he doesn’t go round assassinating his relatives like an Ottoman sultan. Honestly, what a thing to do. Edmund must have been quite mad. Thank God you saw what he was up to, Rowley. I say, it really is a stroke of luck that you lodge here.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Rowley said, as neutrally as he could.
“Yes.” Clem shot Rowley a smile. Just a normal, unexceptional smile, nothing to get excited about, but the curve of his lips and the warmth in his eyes promised a world just for the two of them, and did quite extraordinary things to Rowley’s heart. “You know, I think so too.”