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The carriage ride out of London was long, and strange. Silas had never spent so long in a carriage, had never gone so far as the outskirts of the city. Watching the close-crammed buildings thin out and then dissolve into bare countryside was unmooring, like he’d imagine watching land disappear from the deck of a ship might be.
Cyprian was already waiting when the carriage stopped and Silas stepped out of it, legs stiff and numb. This was the back of Lord Richard’s country house, clearly, but it was still impressive; maybe more so than the front, because here he could see the barns and stables and outbuildings, the bustle of people doing all the countless tasks needed to keep the house’s magnificence running smoothly. “Mr. Mason,” Cyprian said, in his cool, matter-of-fact way. “Welcome to Arrandene.”
Silas didn’t know what to say to that, so he only grunted. Cyprian ignored that, in favor and whisking him through what seemed to be the kitchen door, and sure enough led into a large room, with a cavernous hearth at one wall and a long table down the center. There were people here, too, all of them busy, though not busy enough to keep them from going silent and watching as Silas walked through the room.
Cyprian led him into another room, this one with a desk and shelves of ledgers around its walls. Cyprian said, as he closed the door behind them, “This is Mr. Schooler’s office, the butler. You should have little reason to be here, except to receive your wages.” He trailed a finger briskly over the ledgers’ spines, looking for something. “For that, I think a guinea a week will serve nicely. I can show you how we keep the account of—“
“No.” It felt good to be angry again, Silas thought distantly; especially at someone other than himself.
Cyprian looked up, a look on his face that said plainly that he was not used to being interrupted. “Pardon?”
“I said no,” Silas growled. “I’ll do it, I’ll work in this house and I’ll organize his lordship’s books and stay out from underfoot, but I won’t be bought. I’ve still got at least some pride.”
Cyprian looked vaguely bemused, as though he found Silas mysterious but not particularly important. “No one is trying to buy you, Mr. Mason,” he said.
“Oh, aye? Then what’s this nonsense about a guinea a week?”
The expression on the valet’s face now held something worse than disinterest; something near to pity. “Believe me,” he said, “with it you will be far from the best-paid servant in this household. This is not a palaver, much less something so coarse as a bribe. It is a salary, and I would recommend accepting it.”
Silas felt wrong-footed, the source of his anger abruptly dissipated, and Cyprian making him feel like some ruffian just off the street. Well, he wasn’t: up until last week he’d been independent, his own master, maybe not respectable but a solid working man. He wasn’t ignorant. And it wasn’t so ridiculous, either, thinking Lord Richard was trying to pay him off; he was that sort, Silas thought, paying for his problems to go away rather than trying to solve them like a man.
Something in Cyprian’s gaze softened, just a bit. “Let me show you how we keep the accounts.”
“I know what a ledger looks like.”
Cyprian didn’t dignify that with an answer. “Most of us have little use for pin money, so you won’t be paid in coin each week unless you request it,” he went on. “Instead your account will be kept here—“ tapping the spine of one of the fat leather books “—and you may draw on your earnings at any time. Now, your room.” He looked Silas up and down, taking in the small bundle he had tucked under his arm. A spare shirt, wrapped round the books Dom had brought him when he was laid up at Jon and Will’s. “Anything else? Luggage?”
Silas scoffed a little, so it wouldn’t hurt so much to say. “No.”
“Hm. Well, follow me.”
Cyprian led him up some kind of back stairway, narrow and steep and dimly lit. Couldn’t have your servants going up the regular staircase, evidently. They walked up one flight, and then a second; by the third flight Silas was breathing hard, and was about to make a comment when the stairs ended abruptly, and Cyprian led him out into a narrow hall.
This looked more like a real place, none of the fancy wallpaper and crystal chandeliers that the London house had had, and that this one likely did too. Still, though, the bare floorboards didn’t creak, and it wasn’t too cold, either.
“This is the men’s floor,” Cyprian said. He gestured to a door at the end of the hall. “That’s the women’s. Stay out of it, if you know what’s good for you.”
Silas snorted; little chance that would be a problem. “Aye.”
Then, “This is yours,” Cyprian said, pushing open a door about halfway down the hall.
Silas followed him inside, finding he was almost hesitant to do so. It was a good-sized room, he saw, with a bed already made up and a table and chair, a washstand in the corner. It was bigger than the room Cyprian had shown him to in the London house, which he’d hardly been able to take in in his haze of numbness and regret. The ceiling here slanted down sharply, and part of one of the walls was brick, warm to the touch: a chimney. There was a window.
Silas stood in the middle of it, looked around. His chest ached dully. Warm and dry, thick quilts on the bed and fresh air and sunlight, slanting through the windowpanes and printing diamonds on the bedspread. The nicest place he’d ever lived in his life, and all he’d had to do to get it was sell out his principles for a guinea a week, for a man who’d probably never want to see him again.
“Mr. Mason?” Cyprian said. Silas looked over at him. “I said, is there anything else you need?”
“No,” Silas said. “No.”
“Then I’ll leave you to it.” Cyprian glanced wryly at Silas’s bundle, which he was still clutching under his arm. “Servants’ dinner is at four o’clock. Listen for the clock downstairs, if you don’t have a watch. I can introduce you to everyone then.”
“Right,” Silas said.
Cyprian slid silently out of the room, in that catlike way of his, and shut the door behind him. Silas stayed where he was for another couple of minutes, just looking, trying to think. Servants’ dinner. Jesus, that’s what he was now, wasn’t it: a servant, to be fed and watered whenever it suited the master’s schedule. Stuck up here, out of sight; given a few nice things to keep him loyal, keep him complacent.
When he moved, finally, his bones felt heavy. He set his meagre little bundle down, took off his coat. There was a pegboard on the wall behind the door, he saw, so he hung up the coat. Unwrapped the books from their shirt, hung the shirt up, too. Set the books in a neat pile on the table.
He didn’t have a pen, he thought, or ink, or anything to write on but the books’ endpapers. He wondered, if he asked, if he’d be allowed: if it would be thought he couldn’t be trusted or, if he was given them, if Cyprian would come sneaking in here to check he wasn’t writing sedition under Lord Richard’s roof. He looked at the door: no lock. Another price to pay, he thought bitterly.
His face felt hot; his eyes prickled. Stupid: he’d known what he was doing. It had come down to it, the gallows ahead of him and naught else to do, and he’d taken any chance at life he was offered. Well, this was the life he’d chosen, right here in front of him. No ink or paper, no self-sufficiency, no pride. Just another little piece in the machinery of being Lord Richard Vane, another one of the lives broken down to nothing more than fucking service in his name. He’d chosen it, so he could live it. He had to, now.
He went to the window and looked out. Trees and fields, brown now and dull in the February afternoon gloom. No one in sight, nothing like the constant stream of humanity that was London. It was eerie. He couldn’t even hear anyone else, the walls of the house thick and no one upstairs anyhow in the middle of the day. He felt, maybe for the first time in his life, entirely alone.
*
If he didn’t like the feeling, he discovered shortly that he liked even less being surrounded by Lord Richard’s staff. He went to dinner when he heard the clock strike, because he couldn’t think of any true reason not to, and because he hadn’t eaten since that morning. The kitchen Cyprian had taken him through earlier was now full to bursting, the long table ringed with people wearing either demure servantly black or Lord Richard’s green, strangely alike-looking at first but, when he looked closer, made up of all ages, from a couple of boys who couldn’t be more than seven or eight up to a woman hunched and wrinkled who must’ve been eighty if she was a day. Most of them were talking, not riotously but in a constant babble. Silas didn’t see Cyprian; he hoped everyone’s distraction would let him sneak in in peace.
It was a fool’s hope, as he discovered almost immediately. He’d scouted a chair at the end of the table, but the minute he tried to sit in it a boy who looked to be fourteen or fifteen said, “No, that’s Jenny’s chair, you can’t sit there.”
“Right,” Silas said roughly, “well, if you could tell me where there ain’t someone supposed to sit, then.”
He hadn’t thought he’d said it with any particular snappishness, but the boy drew back from him, expression closing off. “You’re the new bookman, right?” he said, sounding suddenly doubtful.
“Aye.”
“Er, I think Mr. Cyprian said--down there?” he suggested, pointing toward the other end of the table.
“Right,” Silas said. Farther into the room, farther into the crowd of all of them.
Cyprian appeared then, in the doorway to another room off the kitchen. “Ah, Mr. Mason,” he said, “you’ve made it.” He didn’t say it loudly, but the room had quieted down once he appeared and it felt as though he were shouting, Silas uncomfortably aware of how many more people were looking at him now.
Cyprian came to stand beside Silas, and gestured more specifically than the boy had to an empty chair. “Between Mr. Fanshawe and Mr. Gould, there.”
“Right,” Silas said again, feeling humiliated and helpless and choked with it all. He turned away from Cyprian without looking at him, went to the chair and sat as he’d been told to, like a trained dog.
Cyprian didn’t sit with them, but went back into the other room. There must be a separate dining room for the upper crust of servants; even service in houses like this couldn’t be equal. Everything in a hierarchy, everything in its proper bloody place.
“You’re the new bookman, then?” one of the men sitting next to him asked.
“Aye,” Silas said shortly. How everyone in this damned house knew who he was already, he had no idea.
“George Gould,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m keeper of the silver.” Silas had no idea what that meant, but he reluctantly took the man’s hand. “You’re. . .Mason, I think, right?” Gould added, after a pause.
“Aye,” Silas said.
Gould looked expectant. “You have a first name too, don’t you?”
Christ, this was excruciating. “Silas.”
The man bobbed his head. “I’ve got a cousin--” he started, but Silas was saved from the rest of the sentence and hopefully the conversation by the arrival of the food, brought out by a woman who must be the cook and a small army of cook’s assistants, young girls and some that looked like they might crumple under the weight of the dishes they held. No one seemed to find that ridiculous, when there was a table full of men and plenty of women, too, who could’ve handled them easier.
And the food was--it was nothing like Silas had thought it was going to be, scraps from Lord Richard’s table. There were great dishes of meat, chicken and ham and more, four kinds of boiled vegetables that he could see and sauces and jellies and baskets of rolls. Everything was steaming-hot, and the table was studded, in a last flurry of activity by the serving-girls, with great rounds of butter and salt cellars full to the brim. All to feed--what, a couple dozen people? You could’ve fed half of Ludgate with this and it would’ve been the best meal most of them had had all winter. Silas couldn’t do anything but stare at it all.
But no one else seemed to think it was anything out of the ordinary, no holiday or occasion he’d forgotten. They simply dug in, passing dishes back and forth. At least the girls didn’t have to serve them, he thought darkly; they had sat down too and were eating as heartily as anyone.
The man on his other side--it must have been Fanshawe--nudged him. “Goose?” he asked, holding the platter out to Silas.
Silas took some, because something in him wouldn’t let him turn down food when it was offered. He took ham and carrots and turnips, too, and bread with butter, until his plate was full, and then ate it all, automaton-like. It would’ve been sheer stupidity to refuse, but that didn’t mean he had to, could make himself, enjoy it.
It was good, though. He hated the fact that it was; hated the fact that he noticed. Everything cooked right and well-seasoned and good to begin with, too, nothing trying to be disguised with overcooking or a little sauce. Someone had poured him ale and he drank all of that, too, crisp and good. The room felt too small; he felt exhausted, hollow even with his stomach full. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d been in a Bow Street cell only the day before, hungry and cold, terrified he was going to swing. He couldn’t match up the edges of that with this, here, now: he couldn’t understand the turn his life had taken.
Conversation swelled up around him again slowly, as bellies began to fill, but he couldn’t focus on it. He finished every crumb from his plate but didn’t take more, the way he saw some doing, an odd and meaningless compromise he made with himself. He had a feeling he’d be making a lot more of them in the coming days, weeks--Christ, maybe years. The hollow feeling got worse, expanding into a kind of helpless anger. He had no idea how long it would be, how much longer he’d have to spend in this world. Worse, he had no say in it.
“Mr. Mason,” someone said, emphatically, like they’d said it before.
Silas jerked his head up. “What?” he snapped.
The woman who’d said his name looked taken aback, and several other people around them frowned at Silas. He didn’t care; he had no interest in what these people thought of him, or their inane chatter.
“Well--nothing,” the woman said uncertainly. “I only wondered how you were liking Arrandene so far.”
He was supposed to compliment, he was sure, the beautiful house and the wonderful food and Lord Richard’s bloody generosity. “It’s fine,” he said shortly.
“Oh, all right then,” the woman said, ruffled.
Silas looked back at his plate. He was shamed by the hurt on her face and annoyed by that shame; why these people couldn’t just leave him alone, he didn’t know. How they couldn’t see what felt so painfully evident in him, the loss of lover and livelihood and life’s work in one blow, he didn’t understand; he felt as though he had limbs missing.
No one else tried to speak to him after that. If they were sending him an angry or curious or any other kind of look he didn’t know it; he kept his eyes on his plate, and felt the good, plentiful food weighing in his stomach like stone.
*
He was in a room full of books, and two people were seated before the fire, deep in conversation. He took a step forward and they looked round at him: it was Dominic and Lord Richard, and Dom’s expression was flat and cold; “What are you doing here?” he asked, and Lord Richand called for a servant--
He stepped backwards, away from them, and then he was in the room at Millay’s, his and Dom’s old room. Except Dom was already there, and someone else, too, with him on the bed, fucking him, making Dom keen. Silas said Dom’s name, but he didn’t seem to notice; he said it again, louder, but it was no use: Dom couldn’t hear him, and sudden panic seized his stomach--
Then he was at his shop, and Harry was there. Silas grabbed his arm, said, “What are you doing? They’re looking for you,” and Harry looked at him like he was mad, said, “No, they’re looking for you.” There was a crashing sound, then, and flames started licking up the bookshelves, and Silas thought, no, not the books--
He woke with a start. Something was wrong, he thought dizzily, he needed to do something, and he’d already swung his legs over the edge of the bed before sense returned. The books were already gone; Dom was already gone. There was nothing he could do.
He dropped his head into his hands, and tried to breathe normally again, taking great large breaths. When Harry was little he used to have nightmares almost every night, unsubtle, childish things about being chased, being caught. Euphemia had never had much time for things like nightmares, and Alex was a heavy sleeper, so it was usually Silas who Harry would crawl in beside. Come now, lad, breathe, Silas would mutter to him. It’s not real.
Easy advice to give a six-year-old, Silas thought wryly; harder to take himself. He was no stranger to bad dreams, but there was something raw about this one, and it stuck in his chest. What are you doing here?
He missed Dom, so goddamn much. He could admit it, here, in the just-before-dawn light from the window. His window. He’d wished for anger, wished for something that could protect him, but it hadn’t come: only a horrible, numb grief that sat hollow in his chest. He missed him. Was he ever going to talk to him again? Touch him? He supposed he might see him, if only from around a corner or behind a half-closed door, when he came to see Lord Richard. The thought was so unbearable he dug his fingernails into his skin, looking for some other pain to distract himself from it.
When Harry had been plagued by his nightmares, Euphemia had been stern and Alex had fretted, and they had given him harried apologies every morning they found Harry curled by his side. In truth, though, Silas hadn’t minded much: it had been after he’d gone back to the Gordons, after Annie and the baby, before he’d got the shop up and running and moved out again on his own. He’d been angry at everything, then, and so sad he could hardly understand it, and Harry should’ve made everything worse, cheerful and healthy and always underfoot. He hadn’t, though: instead there was something soothing in his jabbering, good-natured aliveness. Proof that the world hadn’t stopped or withered for one man’s grief.
The world felt stopped, now. He was as good as dead in his own life: everyone he knew but Harry would assume that he’d been gaoled or had died or, worse, that he’d simply left, gotten tired of it all. Even in the distant future, when he’d served his time in this house and could go on with his own life again, he couldn’t go back. Too many questions, and even if he answered them with the web of lies that had been constructed around him he’d never be trusted again. His own people would never trust someone who’d worked for a lord, which he knew because he wouldn’t have, before. He’d spent twenty-five years building a life for himself that maybe wasn’t pretty, was cold and hungry and brutal, but he’d been proud of it, all the same.
He wasn’t proud, anymore. He didn’t know what he was. He laid back down, and stared at the shadowed ceiling, and tried to go back to sleep.
*
Arrandene’s library was beautiful; Silas could admit that. Shelves of books stretched to the ceiling, and not just any books, either, but bound in good leather with gilding along the edges. The first thing he did was just touch them, run his fingers along their spines. Just being around them put something right in his chest, made him feel a little more like a person again.
They were a mess, though; Lord Richard had been right about that. Double-stacked on the shelves and with unopened crates in the corner; evidently Harry’s dead uncle’s library had been dumped wholesale on Arrandene and left to moulder. He thought scathingly of rich lords and not bothering to take care of the lovely things that belonged to them, and buoyed himself on that bubble of anger through the first day, and the second.
On the third, he was sorting through a stack of treatises on astronomy bound in fine red calfskin when the door opened behind him, and Harry’s voice said, “Oh God, Silas.”
Silas hardly had a chance to turn around before he had an armful of Harry, who latched himself onto Silas like a limpet.
Slowly, Silas brought his arms round him. “Harry?”
“Yes. Oh my God, Silas, I was so scared.” Harry’s voice was muffled, his face buried in Silas’s shoulder, but he sounded tearful.
“Aye,” Silas said. “Aye. Well.”
After a long moment, Harry pulled back. “I’m so glad you’re all right. Are you all right?”
Silas cleared his throat. “Aye. Course I am.”
“I know you don’t want,” Harry gestured around them, “any of this.” He bit his lip. “But it’s not forever. And it’ll keep you safe.”
He didn’t want to be kept safe; but he couldn’t quite summon the will to say that to Harry, who was looking at him with so much goddamn hope. That was worse than anything: how tired he’d become, how resistance, natural to him as breathing, seemed suddenly so useless. “Sure.”
“And--” Harry gnawed at his lip a bit more, looking suddenly uncertain. “Um. Have you heard from Dominic at all?”
“No.” It hurt to say, which was stupid. “No.”
“Right. Well, I’m sure--”
“Don’t,” Silas snapped at him, sharper than he’d meant to. “Just--” He looked around them, trying to grasp at something that would keep them from talking any more about Dom. “I’ve got all this to do, so.”
Harry looked like he saw right through that, which was lowering. But, bless his endlessly cheerful heart, all he said was, “Actually, we’re here because Julius and Richard have things to talk about—“ Harry’s slightly guilty look indicated that one of those things was Silas himself— “but I wanted to talk with you, too. I have all this money now, and, well, I’d like to do something with my time, now that I don’t have to work. I was thinking--well, I was thinking that maybe I could start a school.”
“A school,” Silas repeated.
“Um, yes,” Harry said, withering a little. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?”
Silas didn’t know what he thought. Harry had never been the studious type, and now that he was free of his grandfather and the law and had his fop beside him Silas assumed he’d be spending his days buying clothes and eating fancy dinners and whatever else gentlemen did to waste their time. Not come up with ideas to start schools.
“Dunno,” Silas said, truthfully enough. “What sort of school?”
“I was thinking something like a Sunday school,” Harry said, almost shyly. “Except for writing, too, and reading things besides the Bible, and sums, and history, and more, maybe. Like what my parents taught me, but for anyone, even children who have to work all week. And it would be free, obviously, and for whoever wanted to come. So. Yes.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, not in the theory of it, and Silas had railed often enough against the lesser sorts of religious education, meant to teach children to read a bit and fear God and not much else. “Aye?” he said. “And who’ll teach it, then?”
Harry shrugged a little. “I don’t know yet. I thought of asking around a bit—not in Ludgate,” he added, seeing Silas’s expression, “and I’d be quiet about it, but there must be plenty of people who need work and know enough at least to teach the younger ones. And it’ll be trusted more if it’s taught by people they know, I think.”
“Aye, well. That’s true enough,” Silas admitted, studying Harry’s face. He looked different, Silas thought: no longer stained with ink and grime, of course, his neckcloth fine white linen and his hair tousled so neatly it had to be a-purpose. But more than that, too, he looked happy, and purposeful. He looked like his father, in truth; Alex as Silas had first known him, when Silas had been only sixteen and stupid and had spent his time lurking warily round Euphemia like a stray dog looking for scraps. To both their credit, or in testament to both their foolishness, they had fed him instead of chasing him away, fed him books and ideas and pamphlets and bread, too, though they’d had little enough of it to spare. They had been good to him, for no reason at all: at sixteen he’d been mean and ragged and hard, living mostly on the street and by stealing what he could. Euphemia, he had always thought, in the rare moments he looked over his own history to try and make sense of it, had saved his life; not just in the bare practicality of the phrase—though she might’ve done that, too—but in a greater sense, too. She had saved him from callous purposelessness, had saved his life for good work and a cause.
Silas didn’t know if Harry would want to be told any of that, didn’t know truly what he thought of his parents: they hadn’t spoken much of them after Harry had come home from France, which Silas could admit was in large part his own fault. His own grief had shocked him in its enormity, and burying it far enough down so that he could work and write and stretch the food twice as far had taken all his time. By the time they had both recovered, more or less, it had seemed too late to talk about them. Silas didn’t know if it was too late now to tell Harry that they would’ve been proud of him; he didn’t know if Harry would care to know.
Harry had continued on, blithely unaware of Silas’s thoughts. “Julius thinks there are probably tutors out of work who could teach more advanced subjects, and when I told Richard about it he offered to put word out—Silas, don’t look at me like that.”
“Look at you like what?” Silas said gruffly.
“You scowl whenever I say Richard’s name. Haven’t you had to see each other at all?”
“No.” He suspected that Richard was avoiding him, which he was more than all right with. Silas hadn’t so much as glimpsed him since they had come to Arrandene, though his presence in the house was unmistakable, making everyone else orbit around him, wait on his every whim.
“Well,” Harry said, looking as though he’d caught that, and wanted to steer well clear of it, “I’d like your thoughts, if you’d like to give them. I’ll have more put together soon, I think, and I’m sure we’ll be back here at Arrandene plenty.” He smiled a little at Silas. “Please say you will.”
“Aye, all right,” Silas said, and felt a little lift in his chest when Harry beamed at him.
*
The servants’ table had mostly ignored him since that first dinner, which he was fine with. He didn’t need to chatter while he ate, and he didn’t care what any of them thought of him anyway, so. He was fine with it.
Sunday morning, though, the woman who sat across from him, who had tried to talk to him that first night, said, “There’s a group of us walks to church together, if you’d like to join.”
Silas just looked at her for a moment. The expression on his face probably wasn’t good, but he didn’t scoff and he managed to say only, “That’s all right.”
She looked slightly pained, but added, “There’s a few who go to the Methodists’ meeting, as well. Mrs. Brunnel--”
“No,” Silas said, cutting her off. He knew there were others watching them; he didn’t know why no one in this house could mind their own business. “I’m fine.”
The woman--Silas didn’t know her name, he realized with a bit of guilt--tilted her head slightly. “Lord Richard likes us to go to church, if we’re able.”
Nice for Lord Richard, Silas thought, with particular bitterness, to make up for holding his tongue. “I ain’t a churchgoing man.”
She gave him a long look. “You might want to think of fitting in here, Mr. Mason,” she said finally. “You seem as though you’ve had a hard life. This is a good place, a good chance. I would take it, if I were you.”
“Well, you ain’t me,” Silas snapped; so piss off, he added in his head, but God knew if he said that they’d probably throw him bodily from the house. It didn’t seem like such a bad outcome, come to that. He stood up jerkily, feeling as though he couldn’t breathe right.
He left the table, all of them staring at him. The only place he could go was his room in the attic, so he went there, paced around it like it was a cage. He’d been in a cage, had spent his time in gaol--had spent the night just days ago in a cell, come to that--and he knew it was no comparison. Here he had his own space, a window and light streaming through it, good food and as much of it as he could eat. He had wages, more than he could’ve imagined, and a job surrounded by books. He had people around him with kind faces, who said things like you look as though you’ve had a hard life. He knew he couldn’t complain, knew that he should be finding something useful to do, but he’d never felt more useless in his life.
He wouldn’t have gone back to gaol if you paid him ten times what Lord Richard did. But in gaol he’d been angry, had been furious and on fire with it. He’d organized petitions of his fellow prisoners for better conditions, had smuggled out letters to the radicals’ wives who came to visit the lot of them who’d been sentenced. He’d done things, even as he’d been starved and frozen and locked away.
Now, full-bellied and warm and free, he wasn’t anything. Tongue cut, teeth pulled. Angry to no purpose and alien to the people he should’ve fit in with. And the one man who would’ve made it close to worth it hated him for what their relationship had turned him into.
Aye, well, Silas thought. Same here, Dom.
He stayed in the room for near an hour, until he was sure they’d have all cleared out of the kitchen. Then he took his coat, and some coins from his week’s wage that he’d asked Cyprian for the day before, and walked out of the cursed house.
He wished he was doing something so bold as leaving for good, but even knowing he would be coming back couldn’t stop the slight easing of the tension in him, that he had the freedom to leave if he wished. And if it was his day off, of course, he thought darkly; no choosing your own schedule in Lord Richard’s house, it was Sunday for everyone, or half Sunday if you were particularly necessary. Just long enough to get your head stuffed with rot in church about being meek and suffering and getting your reward in the next world, so as not to make too much of a fuss over your hardships in this one.
He walked in the opposite direction as the church, toward a little town the carriage had gone through on the way here. Less than a week ago; Silas could hardly countenance it. It felt like an age, his life in London already dim and far away.
He had hoped, maybe, that the town would have something of London in it, a grouping together of people and buildings and streets that would be something more than the empty brown nothingness that surrounded Arrandene. But it wasn’t: Arrandene, in fact, was bigger than the town, its cluster of stables and dairies and smokehouses and outbuildings more impressive than the scant collection of low stone buildings in front of him. It felt like a disappointment, but he didn’t know why; it wasn’t as though he’d truly expected anything.
There was a pub and a blacksmith and a butcher and not much else. No bookshop. Silas chose the pub; there was plenty left in the day, and it would’ve felt like defeat, more like defeat, to turn back and return to Arrandene now.
The woman behind the bar eyed him suspiciously. He was a stranger, which they must not have seen many of, and if his clothes marked him now as a respectable servant he knew the rest of him didn’t match. An odd thing, he was now, not this and not that.
He walked to the bar, knew enough to set down coin before asking for anything. A pub was a pub, and this woman looked like a dozen he knew--he’d known--in Ludgate, sharp and hard and worn to the bone. “A pint,” he said. “Ale, strong beer, whatever you’ve got.”
She didn’t look any more welcoming, but she drew him the pint and took what it cost. There weren’t many others in the place, a few old men in the corner and a group murmuring among itself by the hearth. He started towards an empty table, but the prospect of being alone with his thoughts and nothing to distract from them stopped him, made him turn back.
“You got anything to read?” he asked. “A newspaper?”
She looked, if anything, more suspicious. “Might have,” she said finally, the first words he’d heard her speak. She put her cloth down and disappeared for a moment, coming back with a bedraggled-looking news sheet.
“Aye, thanks,” Silas said. Its ink had run in parts and it looked as though it had been destined for use as food-wrapping, but it was only a week old and a London paper, too. At Arrandene, he’d discovered, there was only the Morning Post, full of its Tory claptrap, which made it down to the servants’ hall after a few days and was passed around in parts. Dom would’ve probably told him to ignore it, not to read about the world outside Lord Richard’s comfortable house, not worry himself about things he couldn’t do anything about now and probably never could’ve changed anyway. But he couldn’t, couldn’t bear to turn his back entirely, and what the hell did Dom know, after all.
And he wasn’t thinking about Dom, anyway. He sat himself in a corner with his ale and the paper, and began methodically making his way through each.
He was a few pages and half the pint in when someone cleared their throat in front of him, and said, “Afternoon, then.”
Silas looked up. A man stood there, in a coat going to threads and with a rough-shaved face. He looked to be Silas’s age, which probably meant he was at least a decade younger: the poorer you were, in Silas’s experience, the faster you got old. “Aye,” he said, warily.
The man gestured at the newspaper. “My friends and I, we’ll buy your next drink if you’d read that out to us.” He nodded back towards the group of men clustered around the fire, who were all watching the exchange. “We like to know the goings-on, see, but there aren’t many who come from London in the winter, and none of us can read much, and you seem to be getting through that right quick.”
In fact Silas had been savoring it a bit, reading it slower than he might. He didn’t altogether like the idea that they’d been watching him, but he had plenty of experience reading out pamphlets and news sheets to any number of the radical groups he’d been a part of over the years, at least half the members of which usually could hardly read their own names. He didn’t like to do it, exactly, but he knew how not to speed through and not to mumble. And it was a free drink, and something to do, so he said, “Aye, all right.”
The man looked a little surprised, but genuinely pleased. “All right then,” he said, and put out his hand. “Caleb Brown.”
Silas took it. “Silas Mason.”
He introduced Silas to the rest of the men, a half dozen of them, each one worn-looking and grim-faced. There were a few laborers and a blacksmith and a tailor; Brown himself was a cobbler. They were the kind of men Silas knew and understood, though without the radical fervor, the light in the eye, however manic, that he was used to in these sorts of groups.
But then again they weren’t much of a group at all, just a collection of men looking to drown their troubles and forget the week ahead. It made Silas want to give them a good shake, frankly, but he supposed he was grateful--grateful; just the thought of the word stuck in his craw--that at least he wouldn’t have Cyprian breathing down his neck about newfound radical connections.
He folded the paper back to the beginning, and started reading out the articles he’d already read for himself. It was largely a dull task, but the men did seem interested, and after a few minutes the older men in the corner and even the wary woman behind the bar seemed to be listening. It was a third-rate news-sheet and the writing was clunky and dull; Silas got half-way to thinking how he could write something better given a half-hour and a pencil stub before remembering that, of course, he couldn’t.
But it gave the news and it wasn’t filled with Tory hysterics and he only had to read about the Six Acts a couple of times, with a paranoid lurch in his gut. There was nothing about Thistlewood and the rest of the Spenceans, and Silas didn’t know whether to be bitter or thankful, didn’t know if he was glad they weren’t being used to condemn the working man or sick with how easily they were forgotten.
Brown was as good as his word, and refilled Silas’s cup the moment he’d drained it. It wasn’t a particularly substantial paper, and even reading it out it probably wouldn’t have taken any more than an hour, but the men occasionally stopped him to make a comment or to ask for an explanation of something. It was clear they really hadn’t heard much from London over the winter, for all that they were only a few hours from it by coach. Silas tried to explain what he could without saying anything that could get back to Cyprian, back to Lord Richard, and get him booted out. He hated it, hated leashing his tongue, hated not saying what he thought or the whole truth. It felt as though something had been cut from him, an aching wound in his chest where something had been taken out.
But he read and he talked and he drank the ale they bought him, and it wasn’t bad. It made him feel useful, truly useful, in a way he hadn’t felt since he’d written his last pamphlet before everything. That was something.
When at last they’d exhausted the paper and the talk and their cups, Brown caught up with Silas as he made to go. “If you’d come back next week, same bargain,” he said. “We’ll find you something to read us, if you’re willing.”
Silas paused, and then nodded. He could’ve told him he’d do it for free, and he would’ve, but he knew it wasn’t so much about the ale as it was about their dignity: if there was some kind of exchange then it wasn’t charity. Silas understood that well enough.
Brown clapped him on the shoulder. “Next Sunday, then.”
“Aye,” Silas agreed, and felt a little lighter as he walked out into the dusk.
*
That night he dreamt about Dom. Dom in Silas’s room at Arrandene, lying naked on the bed. Sunlight was coming through the thick window-glass, printing wavering diamond shapes on his skin, and Silas stepped closer, to see. The dark lines looked like a cage over him, and that twisted something in Silas’s gut.
But when he got closer he saw that the crisscrossing lines weren’t shadows at all, but words, printed in dense dark strips over Dominic’s skin. He tried to read them, but couldn’t: his eyes couldn’t focus, and he was distracted because Dom was saying something. A prayer. Silas almost recognized it; he closed his eyes to listen closer.
When he opened his eyes again Dom was gone, and the white sheets were smeared with ink. Silas rubbed his thumb over one of the marks, trying to wipe it out. It only smeared more, and the more Silas tried to rub it away, the farther the ink spread, until the sheets were black and wet. He looked at his hand, stained, and thought, exhausted, that he had tried his best. He’d been trying his best.
*
He woke up more tired than he’d gone to bed. If he was a better man, he thought, he’d wish to stop dreaming about him, about Dom, wish instead for dreamlessness and rest. But he didn’t know what he wished. Too much, and all of it impossible. He was used to wishing for impossible things, but he’d lost the knack of it somehow; he’d forgotten the method.
*
“I see you’re taking to the work.” Cyprian nodded to the stacks of books that surrounded the desk, Silas seated in the middle of it. “I thought you might.”
Silas grunted, to keep himself from saying something ruder. He didn’t know yet what he truly thought of Cyprian, who was very quick and very clever and very much Lord Richard’s man. Silas didn’t know yet who he was as his own person, and was discomforted by that, didn’t like the mask he was being shown and couldn’t see yet what was underneath it.
Besides which it was Cyprian, he knew, who was responsible for him being here. For saving his neck by putting it under Lord Richard’s yoke. Silas found himself pitifully grateful to and clawingly resentful of him at once, and he didn’t care for either feeling.
Cyprian drew a finger along the spine of a book Silas had set aside on the desk. “You might consider taking to the company, as well,” he said, in his off-hand manner. “You’ll be here for a while now, Mr. Mason, and Lord Richard doesn’t care for a disordered household.”
“Oh, well,” Silas couldn’t help but scoff, “if it displeases his lordship—“
“Besides,” Cyprian went on, as though Silas hadn’t said a thing; Silas felt the resentment burn bright, “I thought these would be your people. Handworking proof that the lower classes are capable of more than criminality and vice. That seems as though it would make an excellent pamphlet.”
The corner of Cyprian’s mouth was drawn up, an almost-smile that exposed a remarkably canine tooth. Silas didn’t know his temper, didn’t know if he was laughing at Silas or himself or the servants or nothing at all, but he didn’t like it, any way.
“I ain’t writing propaganda for Lord Richard,” he said shortly, instead of bothering to try and untangle it all.
“Indeed,” Cyprian said, his gravity returning and only a slight glint in his eye. “I apologize for the implication. What I mean to say, Mr. Mason, is only this: that you are not the only one here who has made the leap from gutter to serving-hall, and, however difficult the transition, I think you will find this a good place to have landed.” Cyprian drummed his fingers once on the desk in front of him. “And, that you may not have lost so much as you think.”
Something in Silas’s chest seemed to give way slightly, as though his bones had been swapped for splintering wood. “Don’t talk to me about what I’ve lost,” he growled, but it felt breathless and painful. Maybe Cyprian had been saved by the largesse of some lord; maybe he saw his life as a climb upward, reaching his peak as the hand and arm of Lord Richard fucking Vane. That wasn’t Silas’s life; that wasn’t his story.
He’d known his own story, understood it, until last week; until, if he was honest with himself, a year and a half ago, when he’d walked into that room at Millay’s blind to how the man inside it would upend the story he thought he understood about himself. He had forgotten about the previous night’s dream until that moment, but he thought of it now: the sheet stained with ink, Silas unable to shape or govern it.
Cyprian only nodded, unperturbed. “As you wish,” he said. “Well, good evening to you, Mr. Mason. Don’t fall asleep on the books.”
Silas watched him leave, the door to the book room clicking ever so softly shut behind him. He was relieved to be alone again, he thought, but he wished—he didn’t know. He didn’t know what he wished anymore, what he could wish for in this damned stifling house, crammed with belongings and people, and nothing however small that he could call his own.
When he’d been a younger man he’d once wished to someday have his words bound up in a book like those on Lord Richard’s shelves: he hadn’t thought of it in years, but being around all these lovely books the past few days had reminded him. Even when he’d wished for it it had been a foolish, private wish, never so much as thought of around anyone else. He’d never written anything worthy enough to get thick rag paper or goat leather covers, much less vellum or gilt edges, not then and not since. Every word he’d ever published he’d printed himself, set the type and printed the pages and sewn up the bindings of each pamphlet. He’d strained his eyes writing and pricked his thumbs sewing and blacked his hands with ink, and the solidity of the work had gotten him through, through his anger and weariness and hunger and occasional, sinking doubt.
At first he’d kept a copy of everything he’d written; later he only kept what he might find use for later, or what he was particularly proud of. It had all gone up in the fire. He was under no illusions that his writings existed anywhere else, knew they were read and reread, if they were lucky, before being destined to wrap food or light fires or simply be tossed in the street. He hadn’t thought he’d minded. Now, his own copies gone and no prospect of writing anything new, he found that his childish wish for a volume full of his words, well-bound and kept safe, had a strange, aching appeal.
It was only foolishness: words were no use stuck up on a shelf, preserved and prettified and never read. He’d have his way, read and thought over and talked about, any day. Any day at all.
There was nothing for it, anyway. That life was done with, sure as the life he’d had with Dom, precarious as it had been, was done with. There was nothing for it, and it wasn’t helped by thinking over it, either. Cyprian was probably right, though Silas would never admit it to him. He needed only to go forward, not think of what he’d lost.
No matter, he thought roughly; no matter. He bent his head over the ledger again, and went back to work.