John flipped a hand dismissively, though his chest had tightened at Percy’s words. He’d suppressed everything at the time and he didn’t want it back now, twenty years later. Any of it.
“Yes. Well …” He turned slightly; Percy was standing between him and the terrace with the French doors.
“So I thought that you might possibly be willing to do me a much less dangerous favor.”
“Think again,” John advised him briefly, and, stepping round his erstwhile lover, walked rapidly away.
He heard nothing behind him; no protest, no offers, no calling of his name. At the open French doors, he glanced involuntarily behind him.
Percy was standing by the hydrangea bush. Smiling at him.
46
By the Dawn’s Early Light
THE SUN WAS WELL above the horizon when William came ambling slowly down Oglethorpe Street toward his father’s house. He’d had a long, fascinating—and very enlightening—conversation with Christopher Preston, about the Crown’s treatment of prisoners, prisoner-help societies, prison hulks … and Ardsmuir Prison. In the fullness of time, he might need to have a talk with Lord John. But not just … this … minute.
He wasn’t drunk, but wasn’t yet quite sober, either. One of his pockets sagged heavily and jingled when he touched it. He had a vague memory of playing cards with Preston and some friends of his—at least this experience seemed to have ended better than the last time he’d got blind drunk, ended up penniless, and … met Jane again.
Jane.
He hadn’t meant to call her to mind, but there she was, vivid, drawn on the surface of his mind with a sharp-pointed quill. The first time he’d met her—and the second. The shine of her hair and the smell of her body, close in the dark.
He stopped and leaned heavily on the iron fence surrounding a neighbor’s front garden. The scent of flowers and new-turned soil was fresh as the morning air on his face, the breath of the distant river and its marshes soothing, with its sense of flowing water, soft black silt, and lurking alligators.
The unexpected thought of alligators made him laugh, and he rubbed a hand over his rasping whiskers, shook his head, and turned in to Papa’s gate. He sniffed the air expectantly, but he was early; he could smell smoke from the kitchen fire, but no bacon. Voices, though … He wandered round the side of the house, intending to see whether he might charm Moira the cook into giving him a bit of toasted bread or some cheese to ease the pangs of starvation ’til something more substantial was ready.
He found Moira in the kitchen garden, pulling onions. She was talking to Amaranthus, who had evidently been gathering as well; she carried a trug that held a large mound of grapes and a couple of pears from the small tree that grew near the cookhouse. With an eye for the fruit, he strode up and bade the women good morning. Amaranthus gave him an up-and-down glance, inhaled as though trying to judge his state of intoxication from his aroma, and with a faint shake of the head handed him a pear.
“Coffee?” he said hopefully to Moira.
“Well, I’ll not be saying there isn’t,” she said dubiously. “It’s left from yesterday, though, and strong enough to take the shine off your teeth.”
“Perfect,” he assured her, and bit into the pear, closing his eyes as the luscious juice flooded his mouth. He opened them to find Amaranthus, back turned to him, stooping to look at something on the ground among the radishes. She was wearing a thin wrapper over her shift, and the fabric stretched neatly over her very round bottom.
She stood up suddenly, turning round, and he at once bent toward the ground she’d been looking at, saying, “What is that?” though he personally saw nothing but dirt and a lot of radish tops.
“It’s a dung beetle,” she said, looking at him closely. “Very good for the soil. They roll up small balls of ordure and trundle them away.”
“What do they do with them? The, um, balls of ordure, I mean.”
“Eat them,” she said, with a slight shrug. “They bury the balls for safekeeping, and then eat them as need requires—or sometimes they breed inside the larger ones.”
“How … cozy. Have you had any breakfast?” William asked, raising one brow.
“No, it isn’t ready yet.”
“Neither have I,” he said, getting to his feet. “Though I’m not quite as hungry as I was before you told me that.” He glanced down at his waistcoat. “Have I any dung beetles in this noble assemblage?”