The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] (9 page)

“I beg your pardon?”

With a rustle and flap the man at the Admiral’s side put down his newspaper, emerging from the white screen like a butterfly out of its chrysalis. Jasper. He had left off his clergyman’s garb, dressed now in a suit of garnet silk that clung about his arms and shoulders, shadows suggesting the curves of muscle. He had swapped that awful wig, too, and the plain, clubbed style of its replacement emphasised the hawk-like Spanish lines of his face.

Charles took a step backwards, cursing the fiery rush of blood he could feel thundering to his face.
A murderer, remember?
But his body listened to his reason not at all, prick stirring and straining uncomfortably against the pinch of his tucked shirt. The blush made his lips tingle and he swore he could still taste the kiss there. A wash of panic went over him. The Admiral would notice! Surely he was bruised all over, visibly, like his throat? Impossible for anyone to miss it!

“Mean that literally, young man.” Vane laboriously pushed a spare chair with his foot, moving it an inch. As it scraped on the floor, Jasper leapt to his feet and pulled it further.

“You must not strain yourself, sir.”

He gave Charles a little smile, sneaking it sideways beneath his long black lashes. Such a smile! Sweet and uncertain and wicked all at once. Charles’ lips twitched in answer, his back straightened and chest puffed out with joy before he caught himself doing it and scowled.

“I will not be treated as an invalid, Jasper. The thing swells by the day, caution will buy me little more than minutes.” “Forgive me…” Charles took the chair from Jasper’s hand, watching the welcoming smile fade. “I’m not following.”

“This thing.” Admiral Vane cautiously unwound his extravagant cravat, revealing a bulge of pulsing flesh about the size of a fist emerging from the side of his throat. His expression, as he watched the change in Charles’ face from shock to curiosity, reminded Charles suddenly of Jasper’s trademark cynical amusement. “Could pop any time, I’m told. Blood all over the shop. Dead in under a minute. Not a bad way to go.”

“I,” Charles leaned forward, watched the fragile balloon surge with each heartbeat, the skin pulled tight and red over it, thin as paper. “I had no idea.”

“Indeed. But if my son had been doing the job I asked him to do…”

Jasper ducked his head, reached for the teapot, and made a performance of pouring straw-coloured green tea into blue and white porcelain bowls. “Circumstances rendered it impossible, Father. Forgive me?”

“Always. Always, lad. Just wish you’d gone to sea. Could have done more for you. A word in a few ears, could have got you a good ship, made you Post. Captain Marin, hey?”

Charles sipped the tea, its watery, tannin taste and fragrant smell bracing. If not for his own problems, and the grotesque growth that the Admiral was now gently swaddling in gauze, he might have found the exchange amusing. Were all fathers alike? This blend of pride and disapproval? Did they all nag in place of praise?

He put his hand in his pocket and touched the torn edge of the paper. The letter’s blood and thunder vengeance roared on in ink there, but he felt now a little foolish to have been so convinced of its absolute truth. He brought the two pieces out, handed them to Vane, who juggled them between his teacup and a little kickshaw of puff pastry in his other hand, from which warm gooseberry sauce bubbled. It was not the dramatic reveal it would have been on stage, with the lights flaring up and the villain caught in the act.

“Ah yes,” Vane lowered the pastry to his plate and attempted to scrape syrup and icing sugar from the declaration of war. “It all seemed so important a half year ago. I had a fish pond dug, you know,” he gestured gingerly to the East. “Over there. Wanted it deep enough for porpoises—miss them. Miss the sea when I’m ashore. O’course, your father claims it’s drained his best acreage of wheat, halved his yield. What am I to do about that? Tell him to plant somewhere else then.”

Charles laughed, remembering his father pacing from end to end of the hall, declaiming this perfidy to the whole house, while servants and children hung over the banisters and grinned. “Yes, sir. I heard of that from the other side.”

“So he opens his fences, sends his deer herd into my rose garden, damn the man!” Vane’s purpling face fell, and his colour returned to a more neutral brown. He coughed and waved over the servant who stood rigid and blank-faced by the door. “Not spending my last hours drinking this slop! Bring us the Aguardiente.”

He fixed Charles’ gaze with his clear brown eyes. Jasper must have inherited the startling force of his personality from this parent, for the Admiral’s regard, sympathetic though it was, could have stopped a rhinoceros in its charge. “Don’t mean that, by the way. About being damned.”

“Thank you, sir. But that was when you wrote this?”

“No,” Vane laughed, a little wheezing sound, his shoulders hardly moving. “That was when I anchored my fleet at the end of your garden and encouraged my Captains to give all their men shore leave at once.” His eyes disappeared altogether into fleshy slits as he whispered a roar of laughter. “Nothing like a couple of thousand sailors on the lawn for a lively time. Riots and mayhem! Took us two weeks to hunt them all down again after. Never did find the last sixteen of ‘em.”

“’Course, your father was apoplectic! Thought he’d burst his spleen with rage. Limped across three miles of fields to wave his stick in my face.” Vane’s watering eyes emerged from their folds, suddenly chill. His jowls ceased trembling. “He said some things to me, regarding my birth, Jasper’s mother, that I could not tolerate. I challenged him. And he, the fucking coward, told me I wasn’t gentleman enough to fight with him. Refused me.”

The Admiral’s fingers tightened around his teacup until the porcelain gave a faint groaning crackle. Charles shifted forward to perch on the edge of his chair, concerned, and Jasper closed a hand around his father’s wrist, “Sir?”

Vane shook his mass of glorious horsehair curls and gave a tight smile. “Hm! Yes.
That’s
when I wrote that letter. Don’t know what I intended. Break out the long nines and bombard his house, maybe.” He raised a hand as if to touch the swelling on his neck, but did not complete the gesture. “Glad, in a way, this stopped me. He was a poor old man, hobbled with gout. Not much honour in defeating such a foe.”

The servant returned with a decanter of brandy and a silver bowl filled with marchpane in the shape of strawberries. Vane put down his teacup with excessive gentleness and gulped the brandy. “Besides, he was right. Who am I? Just a boot black’s son made good.” He moved his hand in Jasper’s grip until their fingers interlaced. “Should have married your mother, boy. Thought I was too good for her. Thought I could do better. Never did.”

A hardy autumnal wasp whined in irregular loops closer and closer to the sticky green spill of gooseberry syrup on Vane’s plate. Jasper swallowed, and in the moment’s profound silence bent his head over their linked hands.

A bastard
, thought Charles, allowing his gaze to rest on the crown of Jasper’s head. So the malicious whispers had been true, and Jasper was not the Admiral’s ward but his natural son. Just a bastard trying to pretend to be a gentleman. No wonder he assumed so many respectable guises and rang false in each one.

The admiral tapped his letter on the table with a prickly, high pitched rap. “So, death staring me in the face, suddenly none of it seems so very important. Felt sorry for the old curmudgeon. Called Jasper home from whatever it is he does in St. Giles', sent him over to bury the hatchet. Then Clitheroe goes and dies on me."

"I am sorry."
"No, we tried. Now I'm all ship shape, ready to go. Just a matter of waiting for my tide."
c
hAPteR nine

“I thought,” a peaty smelling wind with a hint of ice bent the grasses on the side of the river and hissed among the reeds. “When I found that letter I truly thought you’d killed him at your guardian’s request.”

Jasper walked down to the edge of the private quay, its weathered oak fading in the dim afternoon light into the pale silver of the water. The Admiral’s barge rocked against it with a comfortable thud, red sails furled. He skipped a stone that went bounding three, four, five-six-seven times over the surface, leaving a trail of widening rings. “When my mother sent me to him, he could as easily have sent me to a workhouse, sold me to a chimney sweep, as claim me for his own. That deserves as much loyalty as I have to give, but even I draw the line at murder.”

He wiped his hands. In the sombre light the deep red of his suit had an ecclesiastic air, a dull, dark richness that Charles associated with Italian basilicas. “You think very little of me,” Jasper said, “if you suppose me capable of such an act.”

“I want to think well of you,” the petulant whine that came into his voice when he said this dismayed Charles. “But the more I learn the less confidence I have.”

They had walked down to the riverside in silence, an unspoken understanding between them, knowing that Charles could not leave, not yet. Charles had been certain that all he waited for was an opportunity to speak in private. But now it had arrived and he wasn’t sure what to say.

“Don’t you find it cold?” Jasper pulled the light silk of his coat around himself just as a line of ragged clouds, sailing like the coal barges down the Thames, passed overhead. Rain drove chill into Charles’ face as Jasper strode up the slope from the water’s edge and paused by his side. Water soaked through his eyelashes, stinging his eyes, and as he closed them Jasper’s hand caught his chin, turned his face. Soft linen, impregnated with the musky, sensual smell of ambergris, brushed across his brow, pressed gently on his closed lids.

More rain hit his back, slid down beneath his collar, carrying a gluey paste of wig powder with it, but on his dried face and all down the front of him the heat of Jasper’s tall, sturdy form beat like a minor sun. “Don’t,” he shut his eyes again to avoid seeing the tender, intent look on the man’s face. “Don’t. I can’t. Not without answers.”

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” Jasper gave another of his fund of small, humourless laughs. “But we had, perhaps, better go inside. Thank you, by the way.”

The downpour turned the path into a river of milk, loosened the side curls of Charles’ wig. He could feel them sagging with every step. “For what?”

“For not telling my father I had been defrocked.”

“I’m not sure I was aware of it myself.” Charles kicked at the stones, feeling bruised about the heart. “I find I know nothing reliable of you at all, except that you are the Admiral’s natural child—a fact that does not fill me with confidence.”

“And one for which I feel I cannot be fairly blamed.”

A styal completed the ruination of Charles’ powder-blue breeches, leaving smuts of lichen and moss on his knees. He came down with a splash that spattered his ankles, trickled inside his shoes. Lifting his foot, he shook it angrily. “It’s all of a parcel with your current behaviour. You lied to me.”

Though the rain was easing off as they trudged up the hill, crested the rise and looked down on the crisp golden sandstone of the Admiral’s modern residence, the wind had picked up again. Charles’ coat clung, sodden at the back, and at the blast of icy air, he shivered, teeth chattering. Jasper struggled out of his own coat, swung it—warmer and bigger than his own—about Charles’ shoulders, and at that moment he felt he hated the man so bitterly he could scarcely draw breath. “How hard would it have been to just not make the claim at all, if it was false?”

“Let me,” they had reached the bowling lawn that stretched before an empty dance floor. Walking over the great, rectangular yellowing marks where sails had lain out to dry, Jasper opened the iron and glass door, ushered him in. "Let me tell you everything. From the start. After that, you may decide what to do with me. I will abide it, whatever your decision."

"I suppose."

A few hollered commands brought servants with armfuls of towels and clothes. A footman with a gold hoop earring in his ear and a cutlass scar along his jaw thrust into Charles' hands a quilted robe. "Throw your suit out the door and I'll 'ave it dried in the kitchen in a trice. Oy! Badger, look lively now an' set a fire in Mr. Jasper's study. You won't mind changing in there, will you, sir, on account of it'll just be one fire to lay instead of two."

He took Charles' flabbergasted look as confirmation, and rolled off with an apelike gait. Jasper smiled a smile of deep amusement. "As you see, decorum is left at the door in this house."

Jasper's study seemed to radiate warmth. Charles trailed his fingers along yards of tawny brown leather volumes, their gold stamped titles gleaming against title-plates of crimson. The walls—what could be seen of them beneath the bookshelves— were papered with gold silk. Two chairs by the fire steeped in its leaping lemon light, their plump upholstery a mismatched green and blue.

"Refugees," Jasper smiled, seeing his reaction, "from other rooms. I normally sit at the desk."

It was jammed against the wall beneath the window, cluttered with quills and sand bottles, a sextant and an orrery clock under a glass dome. Sheets of paper rolled into every alcove, and towers of stacked books stood dog-eared with bookmarks. To the right of the desk a crucifix hung on the wall, the crown of thorns gilded and the blood red as poppies. Above the desk the window showed bleak and grey. The rain had returned and drummed down on the path outside with a steady, soothing hiss.

Its sound made Charles shiver once more. He drew closer to the fireplace, peeling his two layers of sodden coats off to let its warmth reach his skin. At the rattle of the curtains closing, he felt a shift, as though the room had been taken out of the world, made into a refuge, somewhere outside time. He swallowed and fumbled with his waistcoat buttons, the buttons of his breeches.

Behind him came the rustle of Jasper doing the same, and he bit his lip as he fought the urge to turn around and watch.
Answers first.
But his body didn’t listen, his prick stirred and his skin awoke in anticipation of being touched. Without turning round to look he could not tell if Jasper was watching him. It made taking his shirt off an act of risky surrender, the drag of its damp warmth over his shoulders once more delightful. Even the air, as he stood momentarily quite naked, brushed over him like feathers. He trembled with the mute, unworthy hope that Jasper would forget his promise, and press his naked chest to Charles’ sensitized back. The nape of his neck cried out to be kissed.