But Alan Ross’s opinions were deeply considered and strongly held, grown like hardy weeds in the difficult soil of his upbringing. If he judged Jack wanting, then Jack would deserve it.
“The world is the world,” Jack agreed. “Most success happens through connections, no matter your station. There’s no magical law of inheritance that means someone pulls out a drawer in their desk, when they retire, and there’s a contract of employment naming the ideal man for the job, handily giving his full name and address.” Jack was hoping for another almost-laugh, but didn’t win one. “People talk. People do favours. That’s how it works.”
“I know,” said Alan bitterly. “Magical or not, people use one another.”
A rash, aching feeling crested in Jack. He found the words quid pro quo behind his teeth and imagined spitting them out onto the ground, to be trodden into the dirt and forgotten forever.
“And I’m a card to be played, you said. So tell me what else you want. Use me.”
Alan’s silence had a suspicious cast to it. But he looked up at Jack, and swallowed. Ruddy lamplight played with the shadows thrown by his curls onto his forehead.
“You’re writing me a blank cheque?”
“You’d tear it up and tell me to eat the pieces,” said Jack. “And I know you have more imagination than that.”
Perhaps Alan’s cheeks darkened with blood. Jack wanted to put a hand there, to check.
“Use you. All right,” Alan said hoarsely. “I will.”
13
The office of the Morning Post was a piece of music played by an orchestra. Or perhaps Alan needed to resist Spinet House’s influence and find himself some new metaphors. Either way—the office of a daily newspaper began slowly and then accelerated throughout the day, reaching its climax when the paper was put to bed in the evening and the steady racket of the printing presses, housed in wooden sheds in the dingy yard of the building, began.
Every story was an instrument: the political commentary, the notices and reviews of opera and theatre performances, the dispatches from foreign correspondents, the society pieces with their gossip dressed up in fusty speech. Each contributed to the sound of the whole.
It was midmorning and therefore relatively calm. That was the only way one could catch the Post’s editor for a leisurely conversation. Alan led Jack through a room crammed with typewriters on desks, only half of them in use at the moment, and towards Kenyon’s office.
The sound of many people typing was a comfort to Alan, no matter how frenzied the orchestra grew as deadline approached. He’d grown up in a loud family and a series of dismally thin-walled rooms. It took a lot more than a bellowing sub-editor, directing spittle into the red face of a journalist who’d skidded in too close to deadline with a story five inches too long, to put Alan off his work.
“Sir?” Alan rapped his knuckles on the door, and Randall Kenyon lifted his frown from reading to beckon him inside. “I’ve brought someone keen to meet you. Lord Hawthorn—”
“Yes, charmed,” drawled Jack. He was carrying a stick today, something Alan had only ever seen him do once on the Lyric, and seemed to actually be leaning on it. He exaggerated that effect as he strode into the office and extended a hand.
His cufflinks had diamonds in them. Alan tried to look humble and non-murderous as his lordship’s plummiest tones sailed forth.
“How d’you do. Kenyon? Wanted to meet you face-to-face, express my appreciation for the work you do. Read the Post religiously, of course. First one I pick up over breakfast.”
“Well. I—delighted, my lord, of course. Thank you. Thank you.”
Kenyon turned red above his moustache as he shook Jack’s hand. When he’d first taken over the Post the occasional whiff of reformist thought had floated weakly into his editorials, but under Lady Bathurst’s ownership of the paper he’d settled back into producing a solid Tory rag.
Unlike Lady Bathurst, he was easily cowed by titles. And unlike Lady Bathurst, he was not a personal friend of Lord Cheetham, and was therefore unaware that Jack’s politics were those of a class traitor.
Alan had primed Jack like a cannon and was now ruthlessly firing him at the man. This was the last chance he’d get, while he and Jack were still engaged in the same business and while Jack still had reason to express gratitude with favours. It wouldn’t last. Nothing did. Everything would change in a few days’ time if they found the knife at the Barrel.
“And very good of you to give Ross here a chance to shine. Offering opportunity to the deserving poor. Shows an eye for talent as well as the editorial eye, hey?”
Baron Hawthorn patted Alan patronisingly on the shoulder and launched into an expanded version of the story he’d come up with in Westminster, complete with vague gesturing at both stick and leg, hinting at dire wounds. Good old Sergeant Ross had saved his life in the Boer. Much lamented. Been pleased to connect with Ross’s only son back in England.
Alan couldn’t remember if he’d ever told Kenyon that his father had been an ice-cream seller, but it hardly mattered. Reality was being overwritten through sheer force of aristocratic authority. Kenyon—both an ardent voice for the kingdom’s military and an ex-Transvaal civil servant—gazed at Lord Hawthorn, Boer veteran, with increasing adoration. Alan swallowed a complex, wriggling mouthful of possessive feeling.
“—view it kindly if you’d help me keep an eye out for the lad’s prospects,” finished Jack insufferably. “I’m sure he’s acutely aware of the privilege, and all that, working here at the bastion of modern political thought.”
Alan managed to mutter something appropriate.
“Of … course,” said Kenyon weakly. “Talented lad. Asset to the newsroom. Always thought so.” His own sentences were falling into step with Jack’s.
Jack reminisced about the war a while longer, made an on-the-spot donation of fifty pounds to the paper’s ridiculous subscription fund to buy an airship for national defence, and trotted out the exact same arguments against the People’s Budget that Lord Cheetham had used.
Kenyon was practically floating half a foot above the ground by the time he ushered them back out of the office. Several pairs of eyes snapped down to notepaper or typewriter as they exited, and the melody of innocent typing followed them out into the corridor.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that was even better than I expected,” Alan breathed. “If he doesn’t give me a sub-editor post by the end of the year, I’ll eat my hat. Maybe even one of your hats. With all that stiff silk, it’d be harder to get down.”
“Nonsense. I have full confidence in your ability to swallow stiff things,” said Jack, in that appallingly cut-glass tone.
Alan choked on incredulous laughter. He told his prick, rather desperately, that this wasn’t the time.
“Besides,” Jack went on, before Alan could muster a caustic response, “when you then leverage the position for one at the Sphere, the man can hold me to blame.”
“I don’t think he’d blame you for slitting his throat even if you made eye contact the whole time,” said Alan. “No, he’ll moan at you about my fickle lack of gratitude, and you can agree that the lower classes these days lack all sense of loyalty to their masters.”