Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHEN NOTHSHIRE FINALLY got home, Champeraigne was there, waiting for him, having eaten him out of his entire store of candied orange peels. Nothshire had procured them at a shop in London, and now he was going to have to make a trip back. He had only eaten a few of them.
“No one knew where you were,” said Champeraigne, his French accent thick as he sat on a lounge in Nothshire’s sitting room. “I asked everyone, and they were all entirely clueless. Which means you’re acting secretively, and I think that is worrisome for everyone, Benedict.”
“You’re here because you want more money from us,” said Nothshire.
“I’m here because I have a little job for the four of you,” said Champeraigne.
“Job?” said Nothshire. “We don’t work for you, comte. We are not yours to command.”
“Are you not, though?” said Champeraigne. He’d once had quite a lot of land in France, but then the Revolution had happened. He’d fled, taking as much of his jewels as he could carry, but leaving behind his house and his lands and all his servants. He’d saved his neck, of course, from the guillotine, but he was angry that he’d lost so much. He was greedy for more, convinced that he deserved to have all of his wealth restored to him since it had been stolen from him.
Nothshire had to admit that maybe they did work for Champeraigne. Hitherto, however, the comte hadn’t dictated what they did, just how much they should pay him for his silence. Unless they called his bluff, though, he could always ask for more. They could easily become his puppets.
“What is it you want us to do?” said Nothshire.
“I’ve a bit of a… discussion I’d like to have with someone,” said Champeraigne. “This someone has rather rudely declined to speak to me, however. I have tried asking very nicely and cajoling him, and I have failed. The time has come to compel him to speak to me, I think. Between the four of you, especially with Rutchester in the mix, I’m sure, you could convince him to give me an audience.”
“Give you an audience,” echoed Nothshire. He doubted this was really about a conversation. “Who are we talking about?”
“The Earl of Penbrake,” said Champergaine.
Nothshire furrowed his brow. “What do you wish to talk to him about?”
“Oh, that’s all very convoluted,” said Champeraigne. “It’s not important why. It’s important that you say yes.”
“And if I don’t say yes?”
“It’ll be all over town in weeks that you four killed your fathers. Shot them down like dogs. In front of the dogs, in fact. Those poor, traumatized hunting dogs must have never quite recovered from it all.”
“Maybe enough is enough,” said Nothshire. “Maybe I just let you tell everyone. Maybe I doubt anyone cares. Maybe I don’t know if anyone will believe you. Maybe—”
“You will run that by the others before you make that decision for them, won’t you? I know what Rutchester did to the bodies. What you let him do. You all watched.”
Nothshire couldn’t look at him. Yes, it was all quite a tale, he supposed. He could try to explain that they hadn’t been dead from the gunshots, and that Rutchester had said he was just going to go and end it for them, as a mercy, and then Rutchester had gotten… well, whatever had happened, the hunting accident story they’d planned on had become impossible to sell after Rutchester had gotten hold of the bodies. They ended up saying the late dukes must have been mauled by a bear or wolves or something, not that there were bears or wolves in the woods of the northern parts of Britain, but what else could it be blamed upon? Something, then, some creature must have done it, they said. What else but a creature could have done it?
It was really amazing they’d gotten away with it, he supposed.
Champeraigne was getting up. “You have two days to decide whether you’d like to help me with my Penbrake problem. After that, I begin spreading the tale of your patricide, hmm?” He pushed himself up on the ornate cane that he used. He was not incredibly old and decrepit, but he walked stooped over, his thin body bent and his nose hooked like the beak of a bird of prey. On the top of his head, his hair was thinning. “Thank you for the candied orange peels, Your Grace.”
“You’re so very welcome, monsieur le comte, ” he muttered.
“OH, I KNOW what this is about,” said Arthford. It was precisely three hours later. They were all gathered at Dunrose’s place, because Dunrose had been hitting the laudanum too hard to leave and go anywhere else.
Even now, Dunrose was lying sideways on a couch, one hand dangling to drag his knuckles against the floor. They were in Dunrose’s upstairs sitting room. Arthford and Nothshire were seated in chairs that flanked Dunrose. Rutchester was prowling behind Dunrose’s couch.
“What’s it about?” said Nothshire. “I think it might be time to get out, I must say. This is a worrisome step up for Champeraigne. It’s one thing to demand more and more money, and to leave us in a place where we must raise the funds ourselves in various ways. It’s another entirely for him to start telling us to go and collect people, kidnap them, and bring them to him.”
“Penbrake did something to Seraphine,” said Arthford. “It wasn’t recent, but Seraphine told me about it some time ago, and she must have decided to share it with Champeraigne.”
“Wait,” said Rutchester, stopping his pacing. “We’re going to collect a rival for him, one of his mistress’s other bedfellows?”
“No, you know it’s not like that,” said Arthford. “Seraphine does as she pleases and it’s a requirement of all of her ‘bedfellows’ if you want to call us that, that we don’t interfere with the others. She decides, not the men, not even Champeraigne.”
“But he’s the main one, isn’t he?” said Nothshire.
“No,” said Arthford, sighing.
“The Marchioness de Fateux is most often seen on his arm,” said Nothshire. “Everyone thinks of her as his.”
“But she’s not,” said Arthford.
“Look, you have some thing with this woman,” said Nothshire.
“I’m in love with her,” said Arthford. “Something none of the rest of you can possibly understand.”
“You can’t be in love with some woman who’s fucking at least ten other men all the time,” countered Nothshire.
“Can’t you?” said Rutchester. “I’m not sure how that makes any difference, really.”
“Well, she doesn’t love you,” said Nothshire.
Arthford sighed again. “She has instructed me not to interfere with Penbrake. But I have to say, I don’t like him. So I don’t mind if we do it. I don’t know what Champeraigne has planned, but it’s likely a duel or something similar.”
“Champeraigne can’t duel,” said Nothshire.
“He’d name someone as a substitute, likely,” said Arthford. “Maybe he’d let me do it. Of course, I think he hates it that I’m with Seraphine. I don’t think he likes sharing her. She says that she dislikes that about him, but I don’t think she’s being honest about that either.”
“I have never understood what you see in this woman,” muttered Nothshire.
“No,” said Arthford, “but that’s because you have no interest in women at all.” He gestured up at Rutchester. “And neither do you.” He glanced at Dunrose. “And Dunrose would understand, but his first love is opium.” He shrugged. “You’ll all have to take my word for it, I suppose, but when it comes to the woman you love, you’re not in your right mind. I’ll do it if even the other three of you won’t, I think. But it would be easier for me if you’d help, because Seraphine would be more likely to forgive me, I think, if I was working with the group of you instead of on my own.”
“We don’t have a choice,” said Rutchester. “We have to do it.”
“We don’t, though,” said Nothshire. “We are dukes, and we can likely get by with having done what we did to our fathers.”
“Easy for you to say,” said Rutchester. “All you did was pull a trigger.”
Arthford glanced up at him. “No worries, Rutchester, no one’s going to tell anyone anything about you.” He turned to Nothshire. “It’s one thing for you. Your father didn’t do the sorts of things that other people’s fathers did.”
Nothshire bowed his head.
“You always said,” spoke up Dunrose, his voice dreamy, “that we had to be together on this. We had to be four acting as one. Are we four or one, boys?”
“One,” said Arthford immediately.
“One,” said Rutchester.
They all looked at him.
“One,” he said, with a nod.
“WHAT DID PENbrAKE do?” said Nothshire to Arthford. They were outside Dunrose’s place, waiting for their respective carriages.
“Ah, yes,” said Arthford. “Well, bad enough for your code to kick in, I think.”
“He forced himself on her?”
“He drugged her,” said Arthford, “likely with laudanum. Had his way with her while she was asleep.”
Nothshire thought about this. “Well, had she agreed to it beforehand?”
“What? To having him fuck her while she was sleeping?”
“Just to the fucking, I suppose. I don’t know, but is that the same thing, if you’ve already indicated it’s all right for the person to fuck you?”
“No,” said Arthford. “She said it was the most horrifying thing she ever experienced. She didn’t understand why she was so exhausted and overly drunk, because she’d been drugged. She fought sleep and then woke up with her body all tender in the wrong places and—“
“Oh,” said Nothshire with a curt nod. “Monstrous, then.”
“Indeed,” said Arthford.
It was quiet.
“If you could marry her, the Marchioness de Fateux, would you?”
“What? Seraphine? No, she wouldn’t let me marry her,” said Arthford.
“But say she would. Would you?”
“What kind of question is this? You’re simply going to torture me about her,” said Arthford.
“I torture you? You are always saying wretched things to me .”
“Well, whichever of us gets there first with the mocking silences the other, I suppose.”
Nothshire sighed. Where was his carriage? He peered down the street. It was growing dark now. He was quite tired. He’d spent too many days moving, and now they were going to all have to go on some chase of Penbrake. What he really wanted was an entire day in bed. “I think I wish to marry the Viscountess of Balley.”
“What?”
Nothshire glanced at him. “Well, if you’re going to poke fun, do it and get it over with.”
“You swore we did not kill that woman’s husband because you wanted her. Good God, you’re King David and Bathsheba, aren’t you?”
“No.” He glared at him. “That’s not why I did it. Exactly. He was a bad man. She was unhappy.”
“I thought you just got her some brat to raise on her own. That’s what Rutchester said you were up to when I couldn’t find you after Champeraigne was asking after you. You know, it annoys me that he insists on speaking only to you. He sends servants to us to ask about your whereabouts, yes, but why not just come to one of us and tell us that he wishes us to go after Penbrake? You are not the leader, you know that?”
“I do,” said Nothshire, because he wasn’t. Maybe he sort of was. Sort of. “Anyway, everything went wrong with the infant orphan. The mother didn’t want to give up the child, so we ended up spiriting her off to her sister’s house, and then the viscountess gave her some valuable necklace, and then she and I had to stay overnight at an inn, and she drank too much port and she came up with some mad scheme to—” He broke off. “Do you think we could be married? Or would it be irresponsible to attach oneself to a woman when Champeraigne controls us?”
“Mad scheme to what?”
“No, I’m not getting into that.”
“You tupped her, didn’t you?”
Oh, look, there was his carriage. He started towards it as it pulled up the curb. “We shall set off in the morning, then, yes? To find Penbrake?”
Arthford caught him by the arm. “No, you don’t. You don’t run off. You did. You lifted those skirts. What sort of woman tempts a man like you to do such a thing?”
He shook him off. “She’s a widow. It’s not strictly all that wrong. Anyway, I didn’t.”
Arthford scoffed.
“Am I mad, though? To marry now? I’m not even thirty. You wouldn’t marry, not even this woman you say you love.”
Arthford lifted a shoulder. “She’s not that way, Benedict.”
“And this doesn’t bother you?” He lowered his voice. “I think I just want to marry the viscountess because I don’t want anyone else to have her, really. And the idea of her with a child, one that’s not mine, it’s…”
“So, you wish to marry her to possess her, then?”
He looked up at the darkening sky overhead. “Damnation. Don’t I sound just like him?”
“You’d never hurt her. It’s different.”
“If we’re to have people we treat like toys, at least we play nicely with them, you mean?” said Nothshire.
“Well, it’s something,” said Arthford.
“She doesn’t want to marry me,” said Nothshire, opening the door to the carriage. “If I were truly all that different than my father, that’d matter to me. But I don’t think it does.” He tried to pull the door closed.
Arthford stopped him. “You won’t, Benedict. You won’t force yourself on her. You’re not like that.”
“I was this close, though, Simon,” he said, holding up his fingers. “This close.” He shook his head. “What good is a man’s code if he meets the qualifications he thinks justify death? I’m as bad as any of the men I kill.”
“Maybe we all are,” said Arthford quietly. He shrugged. Then he shut the door to the carriage.
Nothshire banged a fist into the ceiling. The carriage took off.