The Gilded Scarab (32 page)

“Exactly,” said Ned, when I got this out. “Exactly. And, of course, with you, Rafe. You know, I never went to school. Like all Convocation House heirs, I was tutored at home. I didn’t get to meet other boys of my class, to play cricket or pirates or African explorers. I didn’t have friends. I think I may have one now.”

Despite my misgivings—the Lancaster luck had really never run to successful… oh bother, what was I to call this passionate friendship that might grow to something so much more? Well, the Lancaster luck has never run to successful romantic whatchamacallits. But despite my doubts, I reached over the all-too-wide table. Ned mirrored the gesture, catching hold of my hand. “I hope so,” I said, and I meant it, most devoutly.

But dammit, I’d also been hoping for Margrethe’s. I’d been hoping for Margrethe’s
a lot
.

“So, if I have understood you correctly, Margrethe’s—and what it symbolizes—isn’t banned completely? Merely delayed?”

Ned smiled. “Most definitely not banned completely.”

“While you get to know me better? Is that it?” I gave that a moment before asking, as plaintively as I could do it, “Do you think it will take you very long? I’m really quite shallow, you know.”

Ned stared, then threw back his head and laughed. “All you want is to go back to Margrethe’s!”

“And doesn’t that prove my point? Seriously, Ned, I have no depths to plumb.”

Ned squeezed my hand before releasing it and turning back to his meal. “I think you do yourself a disservice.”

“No, really.” We looked at each other for a moment or two, smiling. So I decided to prove it. It involved a smirk, doing something with my eyebrows that gave me a headache later, and adopting a sultry tone worthy of the finest courtesan. “Why don’t you come and play archaeologists with me? I have some treasure I could show you.”

Ned laughed so much he choked on his frog’s leg. I couldn’t understand it.

Dammit, I was
serious
.

I
WENT
to bed alone that night, which was naturally a disappointment, but I was still a happy man.

Ned’s driver deposited me outside my door sometime after midnight. I slipped into the side passage, reset the alarms, and went upstairs. There was no slit of light underneath Hugh’s door as I passed it. He had evidently already retired for the night.

I had a lot to think about.

I don’t think anyone had ever considered me as commitment material before. I don’t count Daniel because he didn’t want the real me; he was snatching at the “me” he wanted me to be, something compliant he could treat as an adjunct of himself. With Daniel it had all been about possession and ownership, and he didn’t know me at all. With Ned, it appeared to be about friendship and affection and… and perhaps more. One day. Someday soon, I hoped.

I slid into my big empty four-poster and put out the lights, and I languished. I unashamedly pined.

Until then, my idea of an amour had been seeing a man for longer than a week. Love had been a little like a game of cricket; once you caught the batsman out, the game was over and it was time to start the next match. Again, I’m not counting my five weeks with Daniel. He was, most definitely, something of a sticky wicket. All bowled out now, of course. Whereas with Ned, I think I was the one who’d been clean bowled. Out for a duck too.

I turned over, thumped my pillows into submission, and tried very hard to stop thinking about it. Especially if cricket kept on intruding itself as a metaphor. Too tiresome.

You know, I hadn’t been in the least flattered by Daniel’s attentions. I was very flattered by Ned’s.

Scratch. Skitter.

Oh dear Lord. Here we go again. If it wasn’t tinnitus, it was a mouse with hobnail boots.

I leaned over the side of the bed and groped for my slippers. The little noises stopped. I lay propped up on one elbow, a slipper in the other hand, listening.

After I’d been still and quiet for a moment, it started up again. A little scurrying somewhere toward the fireplace. A scamper. The soft whirring noise that had reminded me of a cockchafer. I hefted the slipper in my hand and hurled it at the sound.

Something crashed over in the hearth. The whirring noise became a sharp whine for a moment as it seemed to come toward me, then died into silence.

I sat up and passed my hand over the photon globe in the lamp on the bedside cabinet. The light brightened slowly, going from the faintness of an anemic glowworm to a brightness that chased away the shadows in the corners. My slipper sat in the hearth, entangled with the poker and tongs. Typical. I probably couldn’t have hit them if I’d tried.

I listened.

Nothing.

No scampering, no skittering, no sound of tiny feet on the edges of the room where the floorboards were exposed beyond the edges of the big Turkish rug. Nothing moving on the rug. Nothing moving anywhere. Shying a slipper at whatever it was seemed to have done the trick. Another look around, a grunt of annoyance that I’d apparently knocked my watch onto the floor when I’d reached for the light—luckily without damage as it landed on the rug—and I put out the light and made another try at getting off to sleep.

I was a little tired of my nocturnal visitor. I kept the other slipper handy, just in case, and decided that first thing next morning, I’d send Hugh in search of a cat.

Chapter 21

N
ED
’
S
PLANS
for the next few weeks involved a lot of time spent together. Now then! I could get right behind that. I could get used to it. Spending time with Ned was no hardship.

He came to the coffeehouse as usual, of course, every other day. Some days he came back again when the coffeehouse was closed, after he’d seen his sons to bed. He appeared to be an attentive and loving father, spending more time with the boys than I remember my father bestowing on me, but he came in the late evenings once or twice a week.

He came alone, except for the ubiquitous Hawkins, and spent a couple of hours with me while Hugh was at the Plough. I wasn’t completely at leisure, of course, but Ned swore he liked measuring green coffee beans into the hopper at the top of my small roaster and learning how to judge when the beans reached the stage I wanted: light roast, or cinnamon, or full, rich, dark roast. To be honest, he wasn’t terribly good at it, but I’ll give Ned this much—he perseveres. And I didn’t care much about whether I got perfect coffee out of it. It was two hours of Ned’s company.

Will claimed his nose was well and truly out of joint, but he laughed when he said it and slapped me on the shoulder, grinning. He was a good friend.

Ned and I dined together a couple of times a week. Sometimes I went to the house in Grosvenor Crescent, arriving after the evening ritual Ned had with his children and they were safely tucked up in their nursery. Sometimes we dined in the West End. I fretted over not inviting Ned back to the flat for a meal, but not even Hugh, bless him, could put on a dinner to rival Ned’s chef. Instead I found quiet, good quality restaurants, where we could dine more or less tête-à-tête. “More” defined as being able to look at Ned across a dining table and admire the way the soft lighting slanted across hair and cheekbones, and “less” being all too aware that Sam Hawkins was sitting two tables away, never took his eyes off us, and likely had one hand on his gun. I was getting used to having Hawkins never more than ten feet off, but I can’t say I was happy about it.

Hawkins cramped my style
considerably
.

Then again, Hawkins couldn’t see in the darkened auditorium at Covent Garden when we took the Somerses up on their offer of a night at the opera. Foolish, really, because Ned probably had his own permanent box there, but he was apparently happy to share the one Annabelle Somers was able to get. And, what’s more, share it with me and Will and Mrs. Somers’s unmarried sister. We allowed Will and his sister-in-law to sit at the front of the box, while we sat at the back and admired a relatively new opera,
La Bohème
. Mrs. Somers in the lead role was very impressive, and if I fulfilled one fantasy by holding Ned Winter’s hand through the exceedingly high top notes, no one knew but we two.

And although Hawkins was around after our evenings out, when Ned came back to the flat for a nightcap and another couple of hours talking, and sometimes sitting in companionable silence, smiling at each other, he at least kept to the kitchen with Hugh and gave us a little privacy.

Hawkins wasn’t so bad when he was invisible.

At the end of May, we went to Lords to watch Yorkshire annihilate Surrey. The Gallowglass was a cricket fanatic and a member of the MCC, of course. Ned turned up to collect me dressed in MCC colors and sporting a straw boater. The scarlet-and-gold striped jacket suited him, and the way he had the boater pushed back on his head made him look like a schoolboy. He was beautiful. I had a very great desire to kiss him.

The only thing worse than temptation is having to resist it.

It was hard to concentrate on cricket. The Gallowglass owned a box in one of the two side towers of the Pavilion, giving him his own balcony with a well-appointed private room behind it. I had never watched a match from seats this good, from an oasis of comfort with an excellent view of the pitch and oh my Lord, was that a bottle of champagne in the icebox? Two bottles? What luxury!

“My father’s secretary is very efficient,” said Ned, inspecting a bottle and nodding. “Krug. Excellent. There should be canapés or something too.”

There were canapés. And sandwiches, raised pork pies with crusts so light they melted in the mouth, and desserts rich with custard and cream. There were bars of chocolate to guard against the remote possibility that we would feel a few hunger pangs after eating everything else. It was very impressive.

“Dear Lord,” I said, through a smoked salmon sandwich of such delicacy that my taste buds were swooning, “I want to marry your father’s secretary.”

And for a moment, I meant it. But then the game began in earnest, and I watched Ned as much as I watched the play on the pitch. A Ned who couldn’t seem to stop himself from leaping up and waving his arms around—in a refined sort of way, of course, since this was cricket, after all—whenever the play got exciting, or from sketching out tactical plays in the air with his hands, or muttering unheeded advice to the team captains. Then when Surrey unexpectedly managed to bowl out Yorkshire’s lead bat, we were both on our feet, clapping wildly. Ned hugged me, both arms thrown around me. He smelled of clean, lemony soap, and excitement, and perhaps a hint of something that might be mummy dust, and for a second, I allowed myself to revel in it.

He laughed when he let me go, and we grinned at each other. And suddenly we couldn’t look each other in the eye, and sat down again. My face felt hot. Ned coughed and stared at the pitch.

“Good game,” he said.

I smiled so widely my face started to hurt. My arms remembered holding Ned, what it felt like to encircle him and keep him close. Some sort of muscle memory, perhaps? I flexed my arms, but the feeling didn’t fade. I was warm and happy.

I bit into another sandwich. “Yes. Good game.”

I don’t believe either of us was talking about cricket.

N
ED
WAS
in the coffeehouse the day my invitation to the Stravaigor-Plumassier wedding arrived.

“I’m going too,” he observed when I did my patented Oh-my-Lord-an-invitation-from-the-Stravaigor reaction. “Only from our perspective it’s the Plumassier-Stravaigor wedding. My father can’t go since it’s my mother’s birthday that weekend and he’s taking her off on a jaunt to Paris very early the next day. So I’m delegated to do the pretty for our allies in his place.”

I was half glad he’d be there—I’d at least have someone there to talk to who wasn’t a Stravaigor out for the main chance—but there were disadvantages all the same. “Perhaps we should pretend not to know each other when we’re there.”

“Why on earth?”

“Because the instant the Stravaigor works out we’re friends, my stock with the House will go up like a firework. I will be so popular I will shine.”

“With the expectation that you’ll manipulate me to the House’s advantage? Of course.”

“They’re Stravaigors.” I settled into the chair opposite him. The House was in for a disappointment, there. I’d do nothing to risk my friendship with Ned, and certainly not on the House’s behalf. “To be treated with caution.”

“If you’ll forgive me for traducing your relatives, Rafe, they have the reputation for hustling and dealing and not always being entirely honest.” Ned looked apologetic, although I didn’t see why. He was only speaking the truth. “I think you may be some sort of genetic anomaly there.”

Which was the nicest compliment the man could make me, bless him. The sole conclusion I could draw from it was that he liked me.

“They really will try to take advantage of it,” I said, after thanking him prettily.

“Well, I don’t like pretense. Of course, some of it is necessary, but not this time. We have nothing to hide in knowing each other. We’ll have to weather the storm, that’s all.” He smiled at me and raised his coffee in a toast. “Here’s to friendship, Rafe. Something never to be denied. Especially ours.”