Chapter 17
Thomas arrived in London very late that evening, having ridden some forty or fifty miles as though pursued by the devil himself.
George was neither at the lodgings he kept on Half Moon Street nor at the townhouse.
Brimstone was near to dropping from exhaustion, so Thomas saw him stabled and, on the hope rather than the likelihood of finding his brother, set out for the Army & Navy Club in Pall Mall.
The hour was beyond merely unsociable by the time Thomas stepped between the Corinthian columns and richly decorated arches of George’s club.
The interior was as lavish and ornate as the exterior, and Thomas, travel-stained and dishevelled as he was, was not well received.
He waited in the echoing hallway, at the foot of the sweeping stone staircase, until George, at last, came sauntering down it.
He was with a couple of rakish-looking young men Thomas vaguely recalled from his brother’s regiment.
“Thom!” cried George, with an expansive gesture. He was clearly the worse for drink. “Tell me you bring good news. Is the marquess dead?”
Thomas had barely slept. He had ridden all day. He had prepared a speech. Prepared it a hundred times, a thousand, with every mile that fell to Brimstone’s hooves. And then he had abandoned it, for what could he say, what use were words, when all he had were questions?
Why? What happened to you? Who are you?
And now even they were lost in the scalding rush of pain, fury, love, and loss.
Was this careless, brittle stranger really all that remained of his brother George?
The boy who had broken his arm trying to rescue the stable cat from a tree.
And had broken the other one, taking a fence too hard and too fast on a horse too big for him.
It was one thing to grieve the dead, but the living too?
Thomas stepped smartly across the entrance hall, his footfalls echoing upon the marble, opened his mouth to speak, and, instead, found himself delivering a straight left to his brother’s face.
Thomas had boxed for Cambridge in his youth, and though he had not practised in years, his skills had not entirely atrophied.
There was a horrific crunch of cartilage.
George staggered back, cursing incoherently through a rush of blood, his hands coming up to shield his nose.
There was a ripple of shock and outrage through the attendants. Somebody dropped a tray of drinks. George’s friends just gaped.
“What the deuce?” snarled George. “Are you deranged?”
Thomas was, if anything, even more appalled. He had fallen, instinctively, into a guard position, and now he dropped his hands. “I . . . I’m so sorry. I don’t know . . . why I . . . I’m so sorry.”
George glared at him through blood-smeared fingers.
Then, still clutching his face, he ducked low and charged, tackling Thomas about the waist. Thomas might have boxed, but he was unprepared and undefended and the army had taught George efficiency and brutality.
The two of them crashed heavily to the floor, Thomas underneath.
The impact, coupled with his brother’s weight, knocked the breath from his body.
For a moment, he was too dazed to react.
George straddled his chest, bracing himself on an elbow.
Thomas flung up a hand to protect himself, but it was too late.
His brother brought back his arm and slammed his fist into Thomas’s face, once, twice, three times.
A dull rust-coloured pain billowed through Thomas’s head, his vision blurring bloody, then black.
Struggling under George, he managed to get his arm between them, just enough to ward off the worst of the blows.
“George,” he gasped. “Enough. Please.”
But Thomas knew of old that it would do little good.
His brother, in the grip of any strong emotion, was not easily restrained or subdued.
He showed absolutely no sign of having heard Thomas or even that he still recognised who he was.
Thomas could have been any assailant, from any battlefield.
There was no time to think, and George was lost to reason.
Thomas caught his brother’s other arm by the elbow and twisted up with his hips, flinging George to one side.
Through the smudges of pain that muted all his senses, Thomas could hear, albeit distantly, a commotion. Voices. Running feet.
He staggered upright, only to have George rush him again.
In desperation, Thomas swung a right hook, caught his brother ineffectually against the side of the head, and went down under him again.
George shifted his weight forward this time and, when Thomas tried to shove him away, pinned him to the floor with one arm across his throat and one knee upon his upper arm.
George pressed down hard, Thomas struggled hopelessly and choked for breath, his head full of lights and splinters, and then George’s friends were dragging him away.
Thomas drew in a mouthful of air, and it burned his throat like liquor.
The commotion was louder now. It was all around him.
He tried to stand, but the effort made him instantly dizzy.
He dragged a heavy, swollen hand to his face, and it came away bloody.
His jaw, his cheek, his brow, all throbbed sullenly.
His knuckles and his mouth stung. His soul wept.
“Come on, old man, hup, there’s a good fellow.” One of George’s friends grasped his hand and yanked him upright, then caught him by the waist as he swayed.
The other one, as far as Thomas could tell through the blood and tears, seemed to be soothing the situation with money.
“Just a misunderstanding,” he was saying. “High spirits. We’re just leaving, aren’t we, chaps?”
Thomas opened his mouth to speak and spat blood onto the pristine marble at his feet. Someone stuffed a handkerchief into his hand, but his fingers refused to close, and he saw it fall, turning over and over like a white flag.
Time was acting strangely. He kept losing pieces of it. The next thing he knew, they were on the street. George looked ghastly in the oily gaslight, but he seemed otherwise unhurt.
“So that was jolly.” That was the man who supported him. “What next? Tenter Street for a whore?”
“Not tonight.” George. His voice still thick. “I need to see to my brother. And my nose.”
Laughter.
More words. Spinning around senselessly like May dancers. Thomas’s head fell back. He blinked at a sky without stars. Fogged like breath across a dirty glass.
Farewells.
A hackney cab, painfully jolting.
Time slipping away again and Thomas letting it.
“Here, drink this, you stupid fucker.”
George’s rooms smeared gradually into focus.
Bachelor lodgings, well furnished and surprisingly well kept, given the way George had always been careless with his things when he was younger.
Thomas gingerly took the glass from his brother’s outstretched hand and took a sip.
The whisky seared his still-bleeding lip and made his eyes water.
“I can’t believe you broke my nose.” George flung himself into a wingback chair and held a cloth to his face. He had made some effort to clean the blood, but he still looked a little monstrous. “Was there a reason, or did you just feel like it?”
Thomas tried to pull himself out of the sprawl into which he had fallen. “I don’t know.” He touched his mouth again and winced. “I only wished to speak to you.”
“What is it then?” asked George. He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his long legs, looking surprisingly at ease for a man who had just fought with his own brother in the entrance hall of the Army & Navy Club. “You’ve clearly got a bee in your bonnet about something.”
Now the moment had come, Thomas felt entirely inadequate to the task. Wrong though it was to go around punching your brother, it was sometimes by far the easiest course of action. “It’s about Mrs. Clark,” he tried, carefully.
“Who?”
Typical that George could idly come close to destroying a woman’s life and not have noticed. “The housekeeper, George.”
“Oh her. Uppity quim’s done a runner actually. I had to charge the marquess’s steward to find another one.”
“Yes, because you threatened her. She’s staying with me.”
“Is she now?” George’s eyebrows twitched tauntingly upwards. “Didn’t think you had it in you, old boy.”
“Not improperly.” Thomas’s head ached, inside as well as out. “Must you be a . . . an arse? Have you no sense of shame? No regrets? No morals at all?”
“Ever the prig, Thom.” There was a whisky decanter on the table at George’s elbow. He poured himself a liberal measure and knocked it back. His mouth twisted. “As it happens, no, I don’t. Why should I?”
“Because,” said Thomas patiently, “what you did was not only wrong but cruel.”
It seemed utter hypocrisy to speak to another man of moral ill, and Thomas heard the lack of conviction in his own words. That touch of self-righteousness his brother had always disparaged.
“You came all this way to read me a lecture?” drawled George. “Reminds me of the marquess when he had his health. I suppose I should be flattered.”
“I didn’t—”
“Spare me, old boy. She’s a whore, what does it matter?”
“She was under your protection, that is all that matters.” Thomas leaned forward. His brother was far drunker than he had initially realised. There was a hollow glitter to his eyes. “I can hardly believe you would do something like that. I sometimes think I don’t know who you are anymore.”
George mirrored Thomas’s pose mockingly, his empty glass hanging limply from one hand. “Then you had better take a good long look, oh my brother. Because this is who I am.”
“A man who would force himself upon a woman?”
“Why not?”
Thomas shook his head and immediately regretted it. Lightning cracked beneath his skin, new-forming bruises flaring hot. “I know you to be better than that.”