A Seditious Affair (Society of Gentlemen, #2)

by K.J. Charles

And Silas had remembered the Tory’s fingers skimming the ridged skin of his back where the scars of flogging would never quite fade. He hadn’t asked or commented, but he’d noticed the scars, and maybe even Silas’s twitch at the table of torture implements, and it had all gone away. Consideration, that was what it was, and something inside Silas had shifted, just a little bit, at that moment. That tiny piece of thoughtfulness from a gentleman who wanted to be fucked into the gutter, but who noticed how the man in the gutter felt.

I don’t want you to stop, Dominic had said. Even if I should say I do. And Richard had stared at him as he would at some monstrous thing and said, But I love you. How could I hurt you? How could you ask me to? Dominic had had broken bones that had hurt less. And one forgot the reality of pain once the bones healed. He had a superb memory, and he did not forget words.

Mouth meeting Dominic’s with reverent care, moving gently. Hand pulling and sliding. Kissing Dominic and bringing him off at once with the kind of careful lovemaking he’d never wanted, that Silas knew he’d never wanted and was forcing on a pinned, bound, and helpless man because Dominic could not resist or object. He could do nothing but let Silas make love to him, and it set him coming as hard as the most brutal, humiliating fuck ever had.

“It is as though a surgeon should inform a patient that in order to cure his ailment he is required to cut off his head.” “Ha! Precisely,” Absalom said. “Sidmouth is concerned with the success of the operation, and has no regard for what it will do to the body of the patient.”

Dominic waved a hand in greeting as Julius took the vacated chair. He was a very handsome man, if one liked cold good looks, with fair hair and light blue eyes, exquisite in dress and vicious of tongue. He and Dominic had clashed for years, mostly because Dominic’s sense of duty was offended by Julius’s relentless refusal to care about the world around him, but in part because Julius had had the good fortune to share a bed with Richard

once and the sheer unmitigated gall to walk away the next morning. In recent weeks, though, as Julius’s successful love affair and Dominic’s disastrous one had progressed, they seemed to have found a quite unexpected mutual liking. It was the first shoots of what felt like friendship, and Dominic was grateful for it.

“Richard and I have not been lovers for a long time—” Dominic began. “But you’ve been the loves of one another’s lives forever,” Julius put in, interrupting him.

“But—” Dominic groped for words. “It’s been years. You just said he was in love elsewhere.” “So he tells me, dear fellow, but you know, I think Richard is very well used to having your heart, if not the rest of you. You, or at least his youthful idea of you, have long been the ideal against which the rest of us are found wanting. And now his lost love is hopelessly smitten not just with any other man but with a bravo from the slums of Ludgate. One can see why he finds that trying.”

“He does not know Silas,” Dominic snapped. “A man may be a lowborn radical without meriting contempt. He has more intellectual curiosity, more fortitude and backbone, than you will find in the entirety of White’s and Boodle’s together, and more commitment to his fellow man in his little finger than you, for example, have in your entire body. He may be wrong, but he is wrong in the right way. Why are you looking at me like that?” “No reason at all. My urge to meet this fellow Silas is becoming overwhelming.”

“No,” Dominic said comprehensively. “He is not a spectacle at Astley’s for your entertainment.” “Indeed not. He’s Harry’s mentor, and your motivation to haul yourself out of Richard’s shadow at last. I may tell you that we have all become quite weary of that particular tragedy. I can’t abide melodrama.”

He met her quizzing look, shrugged again. “Like you say, he’s got pretty eyes.” “Have it your way.” Zoë tapped his hand. “But, Silas? I said eyelashes. I didn’t say a word about his eyes.”

Sometimes one must cleave to what one knows to be right in the teeth of all opposition. Sometimes it comes at an unbearable price. Sometimes one must even face the fact that one’s wishes may be wrong—” “We still talking about politics?” “It’s all the same,” Dominic said.

“We disagree without hatred, and fuck as we choose. If I were to give my idea of utopia…”

“I went to the Garden of Love. And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. “And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not, writ over the door; So I turn’d to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore.

“And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And—”

“And binding with briars, my joys & desires.”

If he could write like this, draw like this, think like this, he would probably believe he had been touched by God too. He turned a few more pages, needing to keep handling

this lovely, wild thing, to be sure he owned it.

…the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity.

“Thank you for this,” he said quietly. “For the books. For Blake. For the ways you have changed me.”

Dominic licked his lips. He wanted, truly wanted, to say no, and that awareness had his whole body shaking with arousal, poised at that exhilarating point between pleasure, pain, and fear. This was the torment and insanity, the enjoyment of angels, when he was helpless in Silas’s hands. “Frighten me,” Dominic whispered.

Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have loved you. Like Silas hadn’t. Like he didn’t dream of the Tory asleep and awake, like he hadn’t shamed himself with fantasies of lives together, like he hadn’t surrendered in his soul as much as Dom ever had on his knees. Like he didn’t want to give up everything he’d ever fought for, every scrap of it, for his dark-eyed beauty. He feared in his bones that he’d give in if Dom asked, and Dom knew it and didn’t ask. Silas loved him more for that, with a heart so poorly suited and so unaccustomed to love that he felt it might burst its

banks like one of London’s choked, fetid rivers. He had no idea what to do with what he felt.

Listen. If your Richard fellow still loves you—” “He doesn’t.” “He must. Talking about having me put on a ship and taken off to America or what have you? To keep you safe, when that’s not what you want? Sounds like love to me.”

Silas looked around the glorious, elegant comfort of the room. “Can I fuck you in here?” Dominic took his other hand, clasped them together. “Silas, my firebrand, you may fuck me wherever you choose.”

He’d loved Richard so overwhelmingly, for so long, before he’d known what his prick was for, let alone that what he wanted to do with it was wrong. His entire youth had revolved around big, comforting Richard, the marquess’s

younger son. Dominic remembered it all. His parents’ intense pride, never spoken aloud, that their clever third son had graced their old but undistinguished line by winning the Vanes’ patronage. The charmed circle Richard had always cast around his friends, so that Dominic had walked unscathed through the schoolboy brutality of Harrow. Their first tentative, bewildering embrace under an ancient oak on the grounds of Tarlton March, Richard’s family seat. Dominic had kissed the marquess’s son in the marquess’s lands, and even then, the sense of transgression had shivered through him with terrible pleasure. He remembered the first confused, sticky groping and spending, and the way they had laughed because it was too absurd and too perfect. The bad times, when Richard had needed someone to weep with. The first time Richard had fucked him.

He’d grown into manhood in the knowledge that he and Richard, against all the odds, were one. David and Jonathan, they’d called themselves, Achilles and Patroclus, and forgotten that neither of those stories had a happy ending. They’d had their own Garden of Eden, and sure enough the curse of knowledge had come upon them, with Dominic’s growing, sick awareness that what they had wasn’t enough. He had spent fifteen miserable years knowing himself to be the man who had despoiled paradise. Silas was not paradise regained or anything like it. He was rough, inarticulate, or far too articulate and always at the wrong times, a grimy self-taught art...

“I cannot defend the contradictions in my position. I see no way whatever to reconcile my duty and my personal obligations, and heaven knows how this will end. You are quite right about that, and I have no answer. And furthermore, I know damned well that I have more power than Silas in the world outside. He wouldn’t let me forget it, even if I was inclined to. So…I give him the truth. I don’t ask for his; I give him mine.” The shames, the fears, the desires. He stared into the fire. “I have made myself vulnerable to him, I have put my soul in his hands, and he has cherished it. I wish you’d see that, Richard. I wish you understood.”

And, what was even more wearing, the thief had to be someone Martha knew. Someone of the area who’d be well aware she’d lost her son and who took the money anyway. Just as the informer who’d peached on his seditious writings had to be someone he trusted. It was always someone you knew. It was hard to keep up the fight for the freedom of your fellow man when your fellow man was a bastard.

It was hard to keep up the fight for the freedom of your fellow man when your fellow man was a bastard.

it shouldn’t be fucking charity that kept children from starving and the old folk from freezing, as if the country belonged to the rich by right and everyone else lived at their sufferance and by their whim.

“The Vanes have extraordinary holdings of books. The Tarlton March library alone would break your heart, and Paul Vane, Harry’s uncle, was an obsessive bibliophile.” “The one who died in the house fire?” “Yes. Fortunately, the fire didn’t reach his library.” Silas found himself grinning for the first time in a while. “You’re all heart, Tory.”

None of it was right. None of it. Not Martha sobbing over the torn floorboard and the loss of her little bit of hope. Not the hunger up and down the street; the pinched, hollow faces; the blue lips and fingers, while men like Dominic had hot baths and fires in every room. Not Zoë straddling a naked man whose neck she’d just saved and still begging pardon for a few hard words. Not Dominic, who said he loved Silas but had another man’s hooks

in his soul, one to whom no filthy, ragged ruffian could compare. Not a devil’s bargain that called to the worst part of him, offering a life of warmth and books and Dom there smiling at him every Wednesday, forever, if only he’d turn his back on everything that had ever mattered and every principle he’d ever held. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

It was a week since Silas had walked away from him in anger. Dominic had wanted to run after him, to chase him down the street, to go to the bookshop the next day and say, You mistook me. Let me explain. Let me help. He couldn’t do any of those things, because he might as well cut his own throat as bring their relations to public notice, and he was aware of a slow-burning anger of his own because of this, one that he

suspected echoed Silas’s permanent state of simmering resentment. Silas had lent him, under strict promise of secrecy, an unpublished essay entitled “Offences Against One’s Self.” It was copied in Silas’s rough, determined hand, but he had sworn the text was by Jeremy Bentham, the lawyer-philosopher. It was without doubt the product of a highly educated and formidably intelligent mind, and it demolished the justification for anti-sodomy laws with forensic skill. Among many other points, the author argued that it was a human failing to condemn other people for their different preferences. From a man’s possessing a thorough aversion to a practice himself, the transition is but too natural to his wishing to see all others punished who give into it.

From a man’s possessing a thorough aversion to a practice himself, the transition is but too natural to his wishing to see al...

It was sheer perversity, Dominic thought irritably, as he headed up the stairs. Silas ranted about the rich who didn’t give to the poor, yet he’d be consumed with outrage if Dominic tried to give him money today.

“Funny thing, I never feel weaker than when I’m with you. But after, I can keep going another week, because there’s you at the end of it.”

Dominic breathed the words in, making them part of himself. Their tone, the feel of Silas’s fingers, their tightening grip. He etched it all in his memory, to be taken out and examined reverently when he was alone. There were a number of things he wanted to beg for and just one he’d get. “Please, Silas. Come to bed.”

“Richard will do anything for his friends,” Dominic said. “In my case, that includes offering a means by which my lover might remain safe in a time of such danger that I feel, frankly, sick with apprehension. Silas, if I begged you—” “Don’t.” Silas’s voice was thick. “I can’t—not if you do that. Don’t.” Dominic folded a hand, dug his nails into his palm. “You have no idea how much I want to. I want to make you give up your principles almost as much as I should like to give up mine. I’m afraid for you every day. I want you to be safe. I want you warm and fed. I want a thousand things for you that you won’t take from me.” “I can’t.” “I know. You can’t accept a damned thing except for the trivial matters of my heart, my soul, and my moral certainty. You’ve helped yourself to those quite freely.”

“And your arse,” Silas said. “I don’t mind taking that either. I got to stand on a level with you, Dom, or I’m nothing.” Dominic inhaled deeply, striving for control. “Heaven preserve me from a man of principle.” “Ah, you love it. Politics, pricks, and principle, that’s what you like most.”

Perhaps Silas was injured. Dominic placed no faith in the reports that he had “looked well enough, considering.” At some ungodly hour, with him blackened by smoke, who could be accurate? And how much did the people of Paternoster Row even care, those for whom he’d fought so long, for whom he’d gone hungry, yet who had let him disappear into London destitute. It was a perfect practical example of why the democratic idea was a utopian folly, and Dominic wished to heaven that it had been himself rather than Silas proved wrong.

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.”

“I can’t take a loan from you.” Dominic’s breath hissed. “Let me approach this another way. What can I do? What can I ask, what can I offer, what is it that you’re hoping I say? Tell me, Silas, because I don’t know. Don’t refuse me because I’m rich. Take my help because I am your friend.” “Your lover,” Silas pointed out. “Which is different.” “My love,” Dominic said. “Which is different still. I love you. I am entirely convinced that you love me despite your refusal to admit a damned thing. You are the one person with whom I find talking and fucking and companionship to be an equal and mutual joy. I never thought it possible to understand and be understood as we do. And it is hard enough to know that my friends regard this, or me, with

You are the one person with whom I find talking and fucking and companionship to be an equal and mutual joy.

amusement or contempt; it is hard enough for us all to live in the shadow of the gallows; and I am damned if I will let you roll additional boulders in our path with your accursed independence that I have no desire at all to infringe. I don’t want to put you under obligation. Why the devil would I? I want you to accept my help because you’re my lover, and lovers do that!” Silas opened his mouth, closed it again. “You’d freeze in the streets before coming to my door,” Dominic said, more moderately. “And I’d like to believe that was because you don’t want to endanger me, but it’s not, is it? You won’t take from me because you can’t see past our different standings. And a year ago I respected that, but, Silas, you have everything of me that matters, and you cannot leave me with nothing but coin while I watch you struggle and starve.” “Easy to say,” Silas began, managing to control his tongue. “But you ought to know—you got to understand— How the hell can I stand equal to you—” “Because you are my equal.”

Silas took a deep breath, staring ahead. “That’s it. That’s what it is.” “What is?” “It’s not that you’re a gentleman. It’s you. It’s how you listen to me, and how you think about what I say, and how you look when you read Blake, like you’re seeing angels yourself, and imperial Tokay because you wanted me to taste it when you still had a bloody great black eye I gave you. That’s what I can’t see past, or over. I can’t see a sodding thing but you.”

Dominic grabbed Silas’s shoulder, pushing him down onto his back. “Damn you. Say it, Silas. Say it.” “Fuckster,” Silas said. “I love you, and you know it.”