Chapter Ten #2
“Now, Hinton,” Sir Oliver said. “Pilcrow is new to Society: He doesn’t know the form yet. You don’t mean to be rude, do you? Of course not: You’re a gentleman. Well, a gentleman plays when invited, if he doesn’t care to make implications about his companions.”
“I don’t wish to imply anything!” Titus protested.
“So take up the bones.”
There were seven of them. They were all looking at him. He didn’t know what to do.
Titus picked up the dice.
He’d lost eighty pounds by the time he heard a yelp of pain behind him, followed by a rush of smooth, apologetic French-accented speech.
“My sincerest apologies, Monsieur Etheridge, my clumsiness of the most insupportable. Ah, Pilcrow, mon ami, you have forgot the hour. We must make our excuses. Allons-y.”
Titus had heard that phrase before, and took it to mean Let’s get out of here. “Yes, I must go,” he agreed, weak with relief. “Do excuse me.”
He began to rise as he spoke, and Sir Oliver took his forearm, pulling him down. “Just a moment. You’ll finish the game, as a courtesy to your fellows. That is what it means to be a gentleman, rather than dressing like one.”
His grip was hard, his words harder, and they came on breath that reeked of spirits. Titus couldn’t find a reply, but as he groped for words, Nico put his own hand on Sir Oliver’s wrist and leaned in between them.
“I think you have played enough with him.” Nico spoke very pleasantly. Nobody could call it threatening at all. “Quite enough. But if you care to play with me, Sir Oliver, I will give you a game you will not forget.”
Sir Oliver began a reply, and Nico’s hand flexed visibly: Titus saw the knuckles whiten. Sir Oliver gasped, his grip lessened abruptly, and Titus pulled his arm away.
He looked round to see Nico smiling in a way that looked purely dangerous. Sir Oliver was not smiling at all. Titus found he wasn’t breathing, and suddenly he couldn’t bear another second.
He stood abruptly, pushing his chair back without regard for anyone behind him. “I should prefer to leave. Good evening, gentlemen.”
Across the table, the unpleasant Mr. Hinton stood too with a menacing scrape of his chair. “Gentlemen pay their losses,” he said, voice hard. “We like money on the table.”
“You know where he lives. Send a note,” Nico returned uncompromisingly. He took Titus’s arm—Titus didn’t mind that at all—and steered him briskly away.
“Can we leave?” Titus asked as they walked, and heard his voice shake. “That is, do I have to make goodbyes?”
“No. Just stay with me.”
Nico shepherded him through the crowd, repelling all approaches with an unstoppable flurry of mixed languages, and did not break stride until Titus found himself gasping for breath in the cool night air.
“Merde alors,” Nico said, exhaling hard. “My deepest apologies, mon ami. I lost you and I could not find you.”
“But.” Titus felt breathless, almost tearful. “That was a Society rout. With invitations. I feel like I was robbed on the street!”
“You were. Etheridge is, what do you call it, the little bird that lures the prey to its doom. I beg you will never gamble with him again, or visit any hell in his company, no matter who invites you. And Wells is a putain de saloperie de cafard de merde,” Nico said, spitting consonants like bullets, “and a cheat too, and one day someone will break his hands. How much did they take off you?”
“Eighty pounds!” It was an unfathomable, life-ruining sum of money, almost Mr. Thorpe’s annual salary, tossed away on the roll of dice. The fact that he could easily afford such a sum did not make him feel better at all. “Do I have to pay them?”
“I regret yes, if you are to mix in the company of gentlemen.”
“If those are gentlemen, I don’t want to!”
“Consider it a lesson in the value of birth,” Nico said.
“Sir Oliver Wells can trace his ancestors back to the Normans, and I expect every one of them was a charogne like him.” Titus didn’t know what that word meant, but Nico’s tone spoke volumes.
“I am truly sorry. To have let them get their hooks into you—”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Titus said, though Nico’s words felt unsettling. He wasn’t sure why for a second and then he remembered Etheridge. The little Frenchy’s got his hooks in you already.
“Nor was it yours,” Nico said. “Those men make a habit of fleecing the young or inexperienced or uncertain. I suppose you found it impossible to get away?”
“Entirely. What ought I do if it happens again?” Titus demanded. “Should I have just got up and left? I should, shouldn’t I? You faced them down easily enough, and I just did whatever they told me—”
“No self-rebuke, mon ami. You have never encountered that type of man before, whereas I worked in a Paris gambling hell for two years. One learns the appropriate manner.”
“Sorry?” Titus said, jolted from his self-reproach. “You did what?”
Nico grinned up at him, teeth pale in the darkness. “I served as ma?tre d’ and portier together, welcoming guests in and throwing them out, at an establishment of no more than moderate repute. You saw me evict the Laxton, no?”
“But you’re a comte!”
“With a stomach that requires to be filled. I appeared on the stage, too, although that rarely fills stomachs.”
“You were an actor?”
“For a little while and with no great success. I have a suitable face, but no more than adequate talent.”
“But your face is very suitable,” Titus said earnestly, before he could consider the words, and felt his cheeks flame. “That is, I’m sure you were marvellous. Er, professionally.”
“I am a better portier,” Nico said. “Short, but to the point. Mon ami, I know that type of man, and how one deals with them. You do not and you need not feel ashamed of that. They saw you were uncertain, and they used it against you.”
“Yes,” Titus said. “Everyone is doing that.”
He could hear the bleakness in his own voice, and it silenced Nico, though only for a moment. He was not an easily silenced man. “Is it only that experience? Is there something else wrong?”
“Everything else. The house is still being besieged.” Beggars tugged at his coat-tails when he came down the steps, and the higher sort of mendicants called five times a day.
“I’m taking up these awful invitations to awful events in the hope I’ll make friends, which I will not because nobody is interested in anything except my eight thousand a year.
Of course I was rooked by those men: I was invited to be rooked.
The only reason anyone at all speaks to me is in the hope of transferring money from my pockets to theirs.
And I know that makes me sound like Miss Whitecross, but I can see exactly why she became so bitter. Why am I doing this?”
“Doing—?”
“Going to parties I don’t want to attend with people I don’t like.
I know why,” he went on before Nico could speak.
“I’m doing it because it’s what’s done. I’m doing it because everyone else thinks it’s marvellous, or at least they say they do.
Maybe absolutely nobody enjoys any of it, and they’re all just pretending to like standing around making pointless chatter, and everyone would be relieved to stay home. ”
“That would explain a great deal.”
Titus sighed. “I daresay other people love it, really. I know I don’t enjoy company as everyone else does. But since I’m not everyone else, why do I have to behave like them?”
“You do not,” Nico said. “Nobody is making you do it but yourself. And you have enough money to do as you please. Unless you are seeking a good marriage, or a seat in Parliament or some such?”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Then what are other people’s opinions to you?”
Titus wasn’t sure how to answer that. The fact was, there were frameworks to life.
Rich people mingled with rich people, everyone aspired to rise in their social class, oldest brothers inherited everything, and there was one acceptable shape for a love affair to take, namely a man, a woman, and a wedding.
The frameworks were clearly marked out to tell you what was right, in case any or all of it felt horribly wrong.
“If I didn’t go to parties,” he said slowly, “who would be the loser?”
“If you wish to claim a place in Society, only you. If you don’t, nobody at all is the loser except that jean-foutre Wells, and he can—” Nico finished that sentence with a string of French that probably included a reflexive verb.
Titus breathed out, long and hard. “Yes. Quite. It’s just—when there is a done thing, it is very hard to say, I will not do it. Especially when one doesn’t know what else to do.”
Nico shrugged, as befitted an aristocrat who had worked in a gaming hell. “I find it very easy to refuse demands, but I had not your upbringing.”
“No. No, indeed. My brother replied to me.”
Nico took the non sequitur without a blink. “Augustus?”
“He said he had always done his duty to the family. He said Vespasian was sadly ill-conditioned, and Hadrian regrettably womanish, but at least Claudius and I had fulfilled our roles, and he looked forward to my further support. He gave instructions for me to come down and visit immediately. He would like me to bring him a porcelain dinner service, and some bolts of silk for his wife.”
“Quelle enflure.”
“Does that mean something rude?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Titus said. “I’m so tired of this. It’s starting to make me believe that everyone around me is hiding greed behind a mask, like some sort of ghastly nightmare where you’re hunted by monsters that look like people. Did I tell you, Miss Whitecross called the money a curse?”
“Would that she had cursed me with it and saved us both the trouble,” Nico said rather drily.
Titus felt a guilty pang. To have complained so much about his situation, to a man in difficulties, was unforgivably selfish. “Yes, of course. I realise I am very fortunate—”
“No, no, no. Titus.” Nico’s hand closed on his wrist, warm and firm and shocking, pulling him to a stop in the dark street.
“That was a stupid remark on my part; please forget it. You are distressed, and you have every right to be. We will go home, and you will sleep, and we will speak tomorrow, hmm?”
Titus’s nerves were quivering like violin strings. It was the aftermath of that horrible, frightening encounter, he knew, and of blurting out more than he’d meant to say, and it was Nico, so close, warm hand strong on his skin.
Are you here for my money too? The words trembled on his tongue, after Etheridge’s implications, but that was stupid.
He knew very well that Nico had turned up with his eye on Miss Whitecross’s fortune.
If he didn’t want to trust people, it was the height of stupidity to be pouring out his misery and fears to this of all men.
Except that Nico had actually helped. He’d listened, and sympathised, and stepped in, and he might be hiding greed behind a mask, but it was an exceptionally beautiful one.
If Titus were to express a desire for himself, he knew exactly what it would be. God knew he had caught himself sketching little pictures of Nico too often, whenever he had pen and paper and five minutes to daydream; he’d thrown several bills and letters guiltily into the fire, afraid of discovery.
But if charming, confident Nico wanted a useless, inept fool who couldn’t stand up for himself, he would have mentioned it by now.
“Yes,” he said. “Home.”