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Miles declared a holiday after that. It seemed only reasonable.
They went for a walk. He needed to stretch his legs and clear his mind. Toby was not one of Nature’s ramblers, except verbally, but he strolled down the country lanes happily enough, and it was a beautiful day, with sun dappling through the trees and a light breeze. They walked and talked, some of it idly, some because there were things it helped to say.
“It was play,” Miles said. “Dice, mostly. There’s skill to cards, and to judging horseflesh but I like—liked—pure chance. Wagering on the roll of a dice, especially money I couldn’t afford to lose. It was... It gave me something I’ve only ever found in battle, and believe me, I know how idiotish that sounds.”
“N-no,” Toby said thoughtfully. “I’ve never liked gambling—my little brother could always beat me at cards—and you wouldn’t get me on a battlefield, but there’s something about taking a very stupid risk, isn’t there? Like standing on a high place, a bridge, and thinking, I wonder what would happen if I jumped. Not like that,” he added at Miles’s look. “Not wanting to jump. Just knowing one could.”
“Something like, perhaps.”
“Or like stealing,” Toby added. “Knowing you might get caught, and the consequences, and doing it anyway. Or even... My father drank most of the time, but what you could guarantee as if by holy writ was that, if we desperately needed him to be sober, if there was something he absolutely had to do and he knew it, that’s when we’d find him passed out under the table.”
“That’s the most like it. I knew every time it would be the worst thing to do, and that’s what made it irresistible. I was expelled from school at seventeen. Went to London, where of course I sought out the worst hells. I had a generous allowance—we were wealthy, believe it or not—but I squandered it all and more. And went to my father for help, and promised reform and failed, over and over. I couldn’t have chosen a path more calculated to hurt a man who couldn’t bear waste.”
“Maybe if he hadn’t been so peculiar about waste, you might have chosen a different path.”
“I’m not placing blame on anyone but myself. No excuses. I threw away my substance and ran up debts I couldn’t pay, and enlisted as a private soldier when I’d exhausted every other pathway except turning highwayman.”
Toby’s ears pricked almost visibly. “Oooh. You’d be a wonderful highwayman.”
“You’ve never so much as seen me on a horse.”
“No, but I can tell. You’ve got the presence for it. Brooding, you know, and you can be quite intimidating, which is very important. The trick is to make people believe you’re desperate. That you’d do anything if crossed, because you’ve nothing at all to lose.”
That was a slightly worrying level of knowledge about the qualifications for a good highway robber. “You haven’t—?”
“Me? No, of course not. I can sit on a horse but not ride one as such, and I couldn’t intimidate anyone if I tried. My brother and sister used to call me High Toby for a while, but that was only because I grew early.”
“I see it didn’t take. Well, I could certainly make people believe I had nothing left to lose. I know precisely how that feels.”
“But the Army helped?”
“In the end. I was still gambling after I enlisted, like a bloody fool. Disgraced myself, my name, my uniform. I—uh.” He stared ahead, knowing he was flushing, but if he’d learned anything over the years, it was not to shy away from the truth, however bad. “Have you ever sucked a man for money?”
“Of course,” Toby said, as though stating the obvious. “Needs must. Why? Oh. Oh, well. It’s really not the worst thing you could have done.”
“It felt like it. It was—I had lost at dice. It felt more degrading than I had thought possible.”
Toby shrugged. “You’re, or you were, an earl’s heir. I wasn’t brought up with expectations so I dare say it’s different.”
Toby hadn’t had expectations, or privilege, or wealth, where Miles had had all those things and thrown them away, and he couldn’t help but notice that only one of them was whining about it. “I’m sorry you had to do that. I brought my degradation entirely on myself, and I only knew one way to take my mind off that, which was—”
“More play?”
“Quite. I couldn’t see a way out. And then—well, I met someone. Lieutenant Williams. She took me in hand—”
“She?”
“Fanny to her friends, in private,” Miles said. “A damned good soldier, and a damned kind soul. She had a lot of words for me, none of them flattering but unquestionably what I needed to hear, and to cut a long story short, I stopped. It’s been four years.”
Four long painful years, resisting not just the clawing demons of his habit, but their allies too: the shame and remorse that he’d wanted to obliterate with dice or drink. Fanny, with her own demons to battle, had warned him about the latter, saying, Don’t exchange one curse for another. He was grateful for that too.
He’d fought his demons, and so far he was winning, but fighting the French had been a damn sight easier in many ways. At least they weren’t always with him. At least that sort of war ended.
“She told me I had to face myself if I was to change,” he said. “Especially, that I had to make amends to those I had wronged. Well, that was my father. I came back to do it, and he was dead. A sudden congestion of the heart. I was too late.” And God, the urge to find a hell then and lose himself in the rattle of the bones, the dark thrill of chance and loss and Fate.
“But you did make the amends,” Toby said urgently. “He knew what you’d achieved. He forgave you.”
“So it seems. He knew I’d done better, he was proud, he wanted me to come home. That means everything.”
He’d keep that precious letter forever. He also had no intention of asking what Toby had been doing to find it. He’d been up to something nefarious, and he’d known full well Miles would realise it and brought him the letter anyway without even pausing to muster up a plausible excuse. Miles wanted to kiss him all over again for that.
“What about your father?” he asked. “Would you ever go back? Reconcile?”
“God, no. He caught me with an ostler from the local inn and I really thought he might kill me, so I very much doubt he’d consider making amends even if he stopped drinking, which he won’t. By the time I left he wasn’t so much a man as a lot of cheap gin in a man-shaped bag. I’m amazed he could smoke a pipe without catching fire.”
“Christ, you’ve a turn of phrase.”
Toby shrugged. “I don’t ever want to see him again. But my brother and sister... I hope they’re all right. I’m sure they are. Marnie, my little sister, was a very determined girl, and Rob will have looked after her, or more likely the other way around. They’ll have gone away somewhere safe.”
He didn’t sound quite sure enough. “Have you tried to find them?”
Toby grimaced. “I thought I’d come back for them as soon as I had the money to do it. But I never did. I’ve been trying to keep my own head above water for seven years, and mostly failing. I will look for them one day, though. When I can.”
Miles caught his hand and squeezed it. “I’m sure you will.”
They talked, they walked. They ate together, Miles telling Mrs. Whitworth it was absurd to provide separate meals. It was the first time he’d eaten with another person since his return to the Hall, and it felt like being let out of gaol. The entire house felt better in fact. Not good: it was still a reminder of his father’s loneliness and obsession, and Miles’s own spoiled future. But it no longer felt like a deliberate cruelty, and that was something.
They ate, and then Miles caught Toby’s hand, and took him up to the bed-chamber. Taking their time because they could, stripped bare; kissing fast and slow; making love in a bed rather than fucking in an alley or playing the fool on furniture. Just warmth and pleasure, skin and flesh, the slow delights of mutual surrender and satisfied desire.
And then, in the morning, Miles went to see Mr. Greenford, the lawyer from the letter.
***
IT WAS AN HOUR’S RIDE back from the market town. At least his father had left him one decent horse. Cincinnatus was a strong beast, well trained, and costing Miles money he didn’t have while he ate his head off in the stables.
Money he probably didn’t have. Didn’t have yet. Might never have. Or, just possibly, might.
He’d set off from Mr. Greenford’s house with his head in a whirl which an hour’s jog-trot had done nothing to calm. The first twenty minutes or so had been spent in dizzying excitement, then reality had crashed upon him, then the realisation that he needed help, and the person he had to help him was...
Well. It was Toby, who had found him the letter, who listened with such quick sympathy, who had been curled against him this morning and woken with a sleepy smile that squeezed Miles’s chest all over again in the memory. Toby, who’d been going through his father’s pockets when he found the letter. Toby, who’d stolen his damn watch in the first place.
Some might say Miles would be a bloody fool to trust a proven thief with information about a gigantic sum of money and, he had to admit, ‘some’ probably meant almost everyone on earth. On the other hand, Miles couldn’t be trusted with a pack of cards. He had never stolen, needless to say, because he was a gentleman. He’d just ruined himself, fled the country to avoid paying his debts of honour, run up more and paid them on his knees.
Needs must, Toby would say. There was probably an entire school of philosophy summed up in those words, always delivered with a little shrug and a smile.
Doubtless he would be a fool to trust Toby with this. But the alternative was to tell him his services were no longer required—after yesterday, after that glorious day of closeness and caring—send him away, and go back to ransacking his father’s ruin alone. For money.
Fanny had once said, Before you do it, think what you’ll feel like after you do it. Miles didn’t have to imagine how he’d feel going through the house alone; he already knew. Instead he considered sending Toby away without explanation, what the look on his face might be—
He might well be a fool. He still couldn’t do it. So he’d just have to tell him everything instead.