Though he would have attributed them just as readily to Baron Hawthorn, and he’d have been completely wrong about that. The fact kept trying to sidle to the front of his mind and wave for attention. He had to keep kicking it back.
After ten minutes, someone else in that ridiculous wig-and-robe combination rapped on the door, asking Lord Cheetham to come and discuss an upcoming vote. Ross closed his notebook and rose, assuming he’d be hustled out the door, but his lordship waved him impatiently back into his seat. “Stay here. No point you and Hawthorn playing a parlour game trying to find each other if you’re both roaming the halls.”
“Thank you for your time, my lord.”
“Hm. I’ll have a stern word with Lady Bathurst if you misquote me,” Cheetham said, but by now Alan had begun to feel out what sort of man this was. What had Manning said about Hawthorn? Mostly bark. Cheetham was gruff and brusque, and yes, indignant as the next aristocrat at the idea that someone might remove the smallest stone from his vast monument of power, but one sensed that the fuse of his temper was longer than his impatient manner would suggest.
Alone in the office, Alan flipped to a new page and began an outline for the article. But the novelty of where he was, on top of the fact that Lord Hawthorn was claiming to be a fucking Liberal, drummed in his mind. His focus fell apart.
The window was small and didn’t look out over the Thames, to Alan’s disappointment, though it did provide a new angle on the pale spires of Westminster Abbey. He paced back and forth, resisted the urge to go digging in the solid wooden filing cabinets—he wasn’t that sort of journalist, and to his deep annoyance he found himself wanting to live up to Cheetham’s gesture of trust—and realised quickly that he was in search of magic.
Cheetham hadn’t been told Alan was unbusheled. The topic of magic had not come up during an interview on the People’s Budget. But the Earl of Cheetham was, one assumed, as magical as his son. More so. Alan had only the haziest idea of what had happened to Hawthorn—had been a magician, and now wasn’t? Through choice? Through accident? Something relating to his sister, for which a char of a secret-bind had been laid on his tongue?
Horror spidered between Alan’s shoulder blades as he remembered seeing the bind flare to life. The most disturbing thing had been the sudden and brutal crack in the infuriatingly unflappable Lord Hawthorn’s composure.
Lord Hawthorn. Fighting for the People’s Budget. Alan kept coming back to it, tripping over it: an inexplicable gap in the floorboards of the universe.
Usually it took until mid-afternoon for Alan to feel this abrasive with swallowing his feelings. Despite the Morning Post’s interests, his lowly status there meant that he interacted with mercifully few titles. Now he was surrounded by them. And it had been his own bloody idea.
“When you complained about the lack of gold, I didn’t realise it was because you’d been hoping to steal it. Art’s a little harder to slip into your pockets.”
Alan turned from where he’d been gazing unseeing at a dull pastoral painting. He gave his sweetest and least sincere smile, the one that used to pluck pennies from the purses of soft-hearted women on the street and direct them onto his mother’s spread-out shawl.
“I’ll settle for the inkstand, that looks worth a few pounds.”
Hawthorn’s mouth didn’t twitch. He’d found that composure again in his brief period out of Alan’s sight. Alan waited to be ordered peremptorily out of the office, and readied himself to make some kind of provocative demand to see the rest of Westminster Palace. He didn’t want to see it. But a fight might at least purge the miasma of aristocracy from his lungs.
Like Cheetham, Hawthorn didn’t hurry Alan anywhere. He closed the door to the office and, rather bewilderingly, did some pacing and gazing of his own. It wasn’t the kind of room a man of Hawthorn’s size could pace comfortably. His stride ate the rug in two gulps. Alan found himself nearly perched on the edge of the desk to give him space.
Fuck it. There was only one weak spot he was sure of.
“So that’s what your pa’s like,” he said. “What about your ma? Polly, was it? Why don’t you visit her more often?”
Hawthorn gave him a look that blazed right through that composure and went for Alan next, like flames leaping from house to house, greedily searching for fuel to consume and hurt. It was even better than Alan had expected.
“My family are magicians. I am not. This fact is equally as distasteful to them as the reminder is to me.”
Alan touched the inkstand. It did look expensive. His fingers left smudged prints against the gold. “Do they know anything about this Last Contract business?”
“No.” Then, reluctantly: “Not so far as I know.”
It had been telling, that instant denial. There was a faith in it. Who was to say that Hawthorn’s parents weren’t involved with the wrong side of this magical conspiracy, given they all knew that his cousin George was likely the ringleader?
A new spider of fear tried to attack Alan’s shoulders. He distracted himself with the next unwise question, managing to make it come out in the same tone of journalistic inquiry.
“Do they know you fuck men?”
Hawthorn took a single step forward. It was a motion in the realm of crowding Alan further back against the desk, and it sent another jerk of hot sensation through him.
He should be more careful with this. He’d been so careful, for so many years. He looked up into Hawthorn’s blue, implacable eyes and felt like hurling stones at the sun.
“Are you trying to blackmail me, Master Cesare?” said Hawthorn. “On what grounds?”
“Reading material.”
“I don’t believe I’ve admitted to even a passing familiarity with whatever filth you peddle.”
Alan’s fine-tuned nerves told him that there was no real threat in this conversation. They were tossing a grenade back and forth, each of them pretending that it was primed to explode, but it wasn’t.
“Then I suppose it’d be hypocritical trying to explain how I knew, wouldn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
“On the ship? I was defending the right of the literate working man to his little pleasures. And I said something about the man who cleans a lord’s windows, and you said”—Alan altered his voice—“that he could thereby experience being fucked by the aristocracy in more ways than one.”
A pause.
“You’ve a good memory,” said Hawthorn.
And that particular sentence, delivered in that deadly drawl, certainly hadn’t played itself over and over in Alan’s mind ever since. No. He shrugged. “I was forced to memorise chunks of Scripture and poetry at school. Weren’t you? Suppose half of yours was in Latin too.”
Hawthorn didn’t take the bait. “Hm. I do remember saying that. You’d made me think of … I can’t recall the name.”
“Bootblacks and Groundskeepers.” No power could have stopped Alan’s unwise tongue from filling that in. “There’s a story in that one about the man employed to clean all the windows of a huge country manor. He looks through the study window and sees the master of the house bringing himself off, and…”