A Seditious Affair (Society of Gentlemen, #2)

by K.J. Charles

What sort of man doesn’t fight for what he thinks right?” “Most of them.” Silas snorted. “Aye, true. That’s the problem.” “You lost your home and business,” Dominic said. “It is not selfishness or greed to rebuild your own life before you return to changing the world.” Return. He hadn’t even thought of return. Dominic gave Silas an affectionate, exasperated look. “Good heavens, you are the most absolute of men. There are points in between martyrdom to the cause and renouncing it altogether, you know. Declare yourself a holiday.” A holiday from principle, and Dom wasn’t even questioning that it would be a holiday. Silas could just stop for a while, regain his energy, think again. Take a breath. Surely he was entitled to take a breath?

And then nothing, Silas thought. Nothing, because of course it wouldn’t work. They were all mad, mad with desperate, self-blinding hope in the way only the hopeless could be. Silas remembered that feeling from when he’d helped Euphemia Gordon start a riot. He’d had to believe they could fight and win, refusing to face the obvious truth they couldn’t, because the alternative had been giving in to a despair so all-consuming that it would leave him empty forever. So he’d fought, and been gaoled and flogged for it. The consequences of this would be much, much worse.

“We’ve to do whatever Lord Richard says.” Will spread his hands. “And Lord Richard’s first order is to do what Mr. Frey says. But what Mr. Frey says would piss Lord Richard right off. And if you can tell me how to untangle that, I’d be grateful.”

There really were no chains like the ones in your head.

Dom was thrashing now, fighting it so hard you could almost believe he was tied to the bed by anything but his own will, and the sense of power was dreamlike. Silas could take something that Dominic hated and make him need and want and plead for it. His Tory, every inch of him, belonging to Silas. He wanted to dig the comb in, to break the skin and leave a mark that wouldn’t fade. Mine. Mine.

Dominic flopped back on the bolster. “A comb. A comb and a couple of cravats, and I think you may have turned my bollocks inside out.” “Aye, well, use what you’ve to hand, I say.” Dominic smiled faintly.

Thinking led to palming, and heated murmurs, and kisses, and eventually them lying together, prick to prick and mouth to mouth. Gentle stuff, and long drawn out, since neither of them was young anymore, and this mutual pleasuring wasn’t what set Dominic’s blood alight. But it was still pleasure, because of the wonder in Silas’s mongrel eyes and because Dominic knew damned well what Silas wanted. He wanted loving. He gave Dominic such brutal fucking, and he wanted love with the hunger of a long-starved man.

“Fear doesn’t make one a coward. Lack of fear can suggest one’s an idiot.”

“That’s not what the people wanted.” “What people want is freedom to live their lives, and good rulers to make that possible in an orderly state. Your cries for unbridled liberty are cries for chaos. What sort of society arises from murder and upheaval?” “I don’t call for murder,” Silas said. “What I want is to see people rule themselves, not be ruled, and for that they need teaching, and they need a voice. And if men, and women too, don’t want to rule themselves, well, let them say that. Let them who want chains stay in them, but they should have the choice. And you know why your lot won’t give us that choice, why you’d rather take away all those ancient British liberties you’re so strong on than listen to the people?” He jabbed a finger at Dominic’s shoulder. “Because you know damn well you’d find that even the men who want masters want different masters. Better ones. Ones that don’t just leave people to starve—” “One minute you want liberty; the next you demand that the government take charge of the bread on every man’s plate.”

“Enough! Or too much.” It was a line of Blake’s, and now the smile reached Silas’s eyes. “I am generally delighted to wrangle with you, but not tonight. There are other things I want to discuss, and—ah, tempers are too high. You radicals have pushed too hard, and my government has pushed too hard back, or perhaps it is the other way around, but I don’t like where any of it is going.” “I’ll agree with that.” “Then let us not bring it in here. We always said each would keep to his own principles—my duties, your ideals. We don’t ask each other to change them. And when I suggest you ignore your radical friends and lay down your arms, it’s because…” He traced a finger over the side of Silas’s face, the lines around his eyes. “Because I care about you, my beloved brute, and you’re so tired.”

He’d had a week of seeing Dom every day. A better week than he’d ever had in his life, in comfort and warmth, with Dominic Frey, who loved him. He probably ought to face the gallows in contentment knowing he’d had that week. In fact, the thought of it just made him want to hit someone, because if there was anything worse than having nothing, it was having everything and then seeing it snatched away.

Norreys’s breath hissed out in the darkness. “Very well. Now listen to me. You are going to cooperate with us, fully and without argument. If you are tried for conspiracy to murder and treason, let alone convicted, you will damn Harry for good, and if you do that, you gutter-blood werewolf, I shall kill you myself if I have to mount the scaffold and fight the executioner for the privilege, do you understand?” Silas understood that very well, and it was a relief in this quagmire to know that someone competent and determined had an eye on Harry. “I hear you. Cooperate in what?”

You’ve hagridden Dom for fifteen fucking years, and I won’t have you giving him another dose of what’s wrong with him. It’s not his doing I’m mixed up in this, and you, friend, you aren’t making me into a stick to beat him with because you don’t like his ways. I’ll do whatever’s needed, I’ll let you ship me out the country if that’s best for him and Harry, but I won’t stand here and listen to you talk like that about a better man than any of you. I’ll not take a fucking thing from you, if it comes with that attached. So you”—he jabbed an aggressive finger—“you keep a civil tongue in your head, or I’ll go back to Bow Street right now and stand my trial. You needn’t fear for your lordship’s secrets,” he added unpleasantly. “I don’t inform.”

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.

And the aristocracy dared to claim superiority to his sort. Silas had never met such a pack of barefaced liars in his life.

“I am myself alone.”

And yet the phrase sticks in my throat, as insults do when they have the added insult of being true.”

“He told me he would rather hang than allow me to use him against you,” Richard said. “And I believed him. Your werewolf is…devoted.” “Perhaps you could not call him that,” Dominic suggested, without much hope. When Julius bestowed a nickname, it stuck.

It does seem unfair that one should have to rethink one’s beliefs at the advanced age of thirty-seven.” “On the other hand, ‘The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.’ ” Dominic grinned at Richard’s expression. “Blake.” “I should be extremely grateful if you would stop quoting that lunatic at me. Dom, I don’t know what you want, and when I find out, I dare say I won’t understand. So I will say just this, with my hand and heart on it: While you wish me to offer shelter to your werewolf, and whatever your relations with him may be, I will do so without question, no matter how much he snarls at confinement.” “He’s been making himself pleasant then,” Dominic said with resignation. “Quite. In heaven’s name, go and cheer him up,” Richard said. “Or put him out of his misery; either will do. You won’t be disturbed.”