He found Percy Wainwright with Olivia, a sempstress, the sempstress's assistant, and Olivia's maid, all in a state of hilarity over the fitting of Percy's suit, which did not appear to be going well.
His first sight, in fact, was of Percy's bum, clad in linen drawers and exposed to view as Percy bent to touch his toes, indicating a tendency of the so-far sleeveless and skirtless coat to pull across the back.
"You see?" Percy was saying. The women, seeing Grey in the doorway, burst into laughter.
"Well, yes, I do," Grey said, endeavoring not to laugh himself, but failing, as Percy shot upright and whirled round, wide-eyed. Grey bowed, hand on heart. "Your servant, sir."
"I fear you take me at a disadvantage, sir," Percy said with mock dignity, whipping a pair of half-finished cream silk breeches off the settee and wrapping his loins in them.
If we were alone, I certainly would, Grey thought, and allowed some hint of this to show in his smile. Percy caught the hint; a higher color rose in his cheeks, already flushed. He held Grey's eyes for a fraction of a second, his own alight with speculation--and acceptance--before joining in the general laughter.
"Johnny! How quick you've been! I didn't think you'd come 'til teatime." Olivia waddled forward and went a-tiptoe, straining over her bulge to kiss his cheek. "Here, you try this coat. Perhaps it will fit you better."
He felt his own face grow warm at the notion of publicly disrobing--even partially--in the presence of Percy Wainwright, but the latter was grinning at his discomfiture, and he allowed himself to be stripped of his uniform coat and waistcoat, though he did retain his shirt and breeches. Catching, as he did so, a brief glimpse of Percy, bare-legged and clad only in drawers, as the latter wrapped himself in Grey's banyan, Olivia having evidently stolen this garment from his room.
Grey turned his back hastily, thrusting an arm randomly through what he hoped was the proper hole of the coat the sempstress held for him. The fabric was a heavy silk velvet of a midnight blue, and it was still warm from Percy's body. He bit the inside of his cheek, and tasted blood.
The sempstress, herself flushed and laughing, but still attentive to business, was circling him with a bit of chalk and a calculating eye, making him raise and lower his arms, move to and fro. Breaking out in a dew of sweat, he bent over at her order, remembering too late that he'd worn the stained doeskin breeches for riding.
Further outbreaks of hilarity, this time at his expense, but he didn't mind. He had a momentary qualm when the sempstress knelt at his feet to pin a waist seam, but she merely flushed a little more and cast her eyes modestly down, her shy smile making it evident that she considered it a personal compliment; she was a handsome young woman, and likely had had such before.
Percy Wainwright knew where the compliment lay. He laughed with the girls, teasing and making comments, but his gaze kept returning to Grey, alive with interest. He had left off his wig, and at one point, he casually ran a hand through his short-clipped hair, as though to order the dark curls, and glanced at Grey.
Did you get it, then? his upraised eyebrow said.
Grey raised his own.
Percy grinned at him, but glanced away a moment too soon, and when he looked back now and then, Percy was always engaged in conversation with Olivia, a maid, or Tom--who had arrived belatedly and was experiencing loudly audible mortification over Grey's breeches.
What was this? he wondered. He was not mistaken in the attraction; he knew that for certain. And he had not had any indication during their previous conversations that Percy was either light-minded or flirtatious in the least. Perhaps it was only caution, he told himself--a reluctance, lest anyone notice what was going on between them.
When they had at last resumed their usual garments and the sempstress and her assistant departed with armloads of blue velvet, he made occasion to brush shoulders with Percy at the door of the drawing room.
"Melton tells me I am to have the honor to familiarize you with the ways of the regiment, your duties and the like. If you have time this afternoon...?" For the first time, he regretted staying in his mother's house. Though officers' quarters in the barracks would not have been much better. How far away were Percy's rooms?
"I should like that more than I can say," Percy replied. "But I am, alas, engaged." The regret in his voice seemed real, but Grey experienced it as a small blow, nonetheless.
"Perhaps tomorrow--" he began, but saw Percy grimace in apology.
"My engagement is in--in Bath," he said quickly. "I shall not be back for two or three days. I should in fact have left this morning--I will be very late--save that I hoped to have a chance of seeing you before I left," he added softly. He looked directly at Grey as he said this, and Grey felt some easing of his disappointment, if not his baser urges.
Bath, my eye, he thought. But after all, the man was surely entitled to his privacy, if he did not wish to say what his engagement was. Percy owed him nothing--yet.
"Find me upon your return, then," he said. He clapped Percy briefly on the shoulder. "Safe journey." He turned, and without looking back, went out in search of some privacy of his own.
Chapter 10
Salle des Armes
He returned in the evening, to discover that the dowager countess had likewise come back from her excursion. He went to her boudoir to pay his respects, and found her cheerful, if a little pale from her journey, and with a few lines of worry round her eyes. These, he took to be the natural effects of her discovery of the extent of Olivia's ambitions as a wedding planner.
He did his best to distract her, therefore, with the story of the afternoon's fitting, nobly sacrificing his own dignity in order to include his stained breeches and Percy's drawers.
"Oh, dear, oh, dear--poor Tom!" The countess made small snorting noises. "He does take his position very seriously, God help the poor lad. I think you must be a very great trial to him."
"Yes, he was in hopes that Percy Wainwright might be a macaroni--you could quite see visions of embroidered waist coats and clocked silk stockings dance in his head--but I was obliged to dash his hopes, alas."
The countess smiled afresh at that, but her voice was serious.
"Do you like Percy Wainwright?"
"Yes," he answered, rather surprised that she would ask. "Yes, we get on quite well together. Common interests, and the like." He trusted that no hint of just how common those interests were showed on his face. He cleared his throat and added, "I like the general, too, Mother--very much."
"Oh, do you?" Her face softened. "I'm glad of that, John. He's a very fine man--and so kind." She pursed her lips then, though still with a look of amusement. "I am not sure your brother is quite as taken with him. But then, Hal is always so suspicious, poor boy. I really think sometimes that he trusts no one but you and his wife. Well, and Harry Quarry, to be sure."
The mention of his brother reminded Grey. In the flurry of his return from Helwater, the preparations for the wedding, and the regiment's new orders, he had momentarily forgotten. But surely Hal had had sufficient time to speak with her by now.
"Mother--did Hal mention to you the page from Father's journal that we discovered in his office?"
If he'd thought her slightly pale before, he'd been mistaken. He'd seen her pale with fatigue and white with fury. Now, though, the blood washed from her face in an instant, and the look of fear in her eyes was unmistakable.
"Did he?" he repeated, trying to sound casual. "I rather wondered whether perhaps you had had one, too. Delivered by post, perhaps?"
She looked up at him, her eyes quick and fierce.
"What makes you think that?"
"The way you spoke of James Fraser when I departed for Helwater," he told her frankly. "Something must have disturbed you quite suddenly, for you to take such note of the man; you have known of him for years. But since the only thing you do know of him is that he was once a prominent Jacobite...?" He paused delicately, but she said nothing. Her eyes were still blazing like a burning glass, but she was
n't looking at him any longer. Whatever she was looking at lay a good way beyond him.
"Yes," she said at last, her voice remote. She blinked once and looked at him, her gaze still sharp, but no longer burning. "Your father always said you were the cleverest of the boys." This wasn't said in a complimentary tone. "As for 'was once a prominent Jacobite'--there is no 'was' about it, John. Believe me, once a Papist, always a Papist."
He forbore pointing out that "Papist" and "Jacobite" were not invariably the same thing. When politics entered the room, principle often flew out the window. While most Papists had indeed supported the Stuart cause, there were not a few Protestants who had as well, either from personal opportunism or from a sincere conviction that James Stuart was the divinely appointed sovereign of Great Britain, his religion notwithstanding.
"So you did receive a page from that journal," he said, making it a statement, rather than a question. "May I see it?"
"I burnt it."
"What for?" He all but barked at her, and she blinked again, startled. She eyed him then, obviously choosing her words.
"Because," she said evenly, "I did not wish to keep it. Have you heard the expression, John, 'Let the dead bury the dead'? What's past is past, and I shan't cling to its remnants."
He struggled for a moment against the impulse to say something regrettable--but then his eye fell upon the miniature on her dressing table. It had stood there since the day Gerard Grey had given it to her, and it was years since John Grey had ceased to notice it. Noticing it now, he was taken aback to see just how much the portrait resembled the image he saw in his shaving mirror. His father had been darker in coloring, but otherwise...So much for his mother's chance of forgetting the past, then, even if she wanted to.
"Really, Mother," he said mildly, "you are the most atrocious liar. What are you afraid of?"
"What? What the devil do you mean by that?" she exclaimed indignantly. She didn't curse often, and he invariably found it amusing when she did, but he suppressed his smile.
"I mean," he said patiently, gesturing at the miniature, "that if you wish to convince the world that you have lost all thought for my father, you ought to remove that from sight. And when you tell people you have destroyed something," he added, nodding at her secretary, "you ought not to glance at the place where you've hidden it."
She opened her mouth, but found nothing to say, and closed it again. She looked at him, eyes narrowed.
"If you don't want that journal page," he said, "I do."
"No," she said at once.
"Does it contain something so dangerous, then? Have you shown it to Hal?" Despite himself, a tinge of anger was creeping into his words. "I'm no longer twelve, Mother."
She looked at him for a long moment, the oddest expression of regret flitting across her face.
"More's the pity," she said. Her shoulders sagged then, and she bowed her head and turned away, rubbing two fingers between her brows.
"I'll think about it, John," she said. "More, I can't promise you. Now leave me, do; I've a dreadful headache."
"Liar," he said again, but without heat. "I'll send your maid, shall I?"
"Please."
He went out, then, but at the door turned back and stuck his head through.
"Mother?"
"Yes?"
"If you wish to convince someone that you aren't afraid--look them in the eye. Good night."
Percy Wainwright, it transpired, had never so much as touched a sword, let alone used one with violent intent. In order to remedy this shocking lack, he agreed amiably enough, upon his return from Bath, to go with Grey and Melton to their usual weekly practice, for the purpose of basic instruction.
The salle des armes favored by the Greys was in Monmouth Street, a small, dingy building wedged between a pawnbroker's and a mercer's shop near St. Giles, and run by a small Sicilian gentleman whose skill with the blade was surpassed only by the individuality of his idiom.
"Gets you fat-fat," Signor Berculi said without preamble, rudely poking Hal in his very flat stomach. "No practice, two weeks! Some pidocchio do the business on you, stick a rapier up you fat arse."
Hal, quite accustomed to Signor Berculi, ignored this pleasantry and introduced Mr. Wainwright as a new addition to the family and to the regiment.
The Signor circled Percy, shaking his head and biting his finger in dismay. Percy looked mildly apprehensive, but the glance he shot Grey was filled with amusement.
"So old, so old!" Signor Berculi mourned, halting in front of Percy and prodding him critically in the upper arm. He waved a small, callused hand at Grey. "That one, sword in cradle. You? Pah!" He spat, shook himself violently, then crossed himself.
"Come," he said, resigned, and seized Percy by the sleeve. "You lunge. No stick you foot, all right?"
While Percy was rapidly stripped to his shirt and breeches, given a battered rapier with no point, and set to lunging, the Greys stripped for action.
"En garde." Hal fell naturally into his stance, knee bent, rapier forward, the side of his body turned toward Grey, left hand held gracefully up behind his head.
"J'ai regarde." Grey tapped his blade lightly against Hal's, and held it crossed. Signor Berculi, circling them with beady eyes narrowed for flaws in form, shouted, "Commencez!" and they began.
It was an exhibition of form to begin with, neither man seeking actual advantage but only an opening in which to try a coupe or passe avant, circling slowly as their muscles loosened.
Grey saw Percy's eyes upon them, interested, until Signor Berculi spotted his distraction and drove him back to his lunging with a bark.
He breathed deep, intoxicated by the smell of sweat, old and fresh, the metal tang of the swords, and the rub of the hilt on the heel of his hand. He loved to fight with the rapier; it was so light, he was barely conscious of it as anything more than an extension of his body.
He and his brother were evenly matched physically, being of a height, with Hal having a few pounds the advantage in weight, and Grey perhaps an inch more in reach. Despite this evident equality--and the fact that Hal was a fine swordsman--Grey knew himself to be better.
He seldom demonstrated that knowledge in their practice bouts, knowing equally well that Hal hated to lose and would be in bad temper if he did. Now, though, he found himself pressing, ever so slightly, and realized with a glance at Percy and a small tingling of his flesh that he meant to win today, no matter what the consequence.
"Have you any further news of the conspirators?" Grey asked, as much in order to distract his brother as from curiosity.
Hal met his thrust with a strong riposte, beat, and went for a thrust in quarte, which failed.
"They go to trial this week," he said briefly.
"I have"--a beat, beat back, feint in prime, and he touched Hal's shoulder, barely, and smiled--"have not seen mention of it in the papers."
"You will." Grunting, Hal lunged, and he barely turned aside in time.
"They"--Hal was beginning to breathe hard by now, and the words emerged in brief bursts--"decided to--do as I said--they would."
"To suppress the political aspects of the case?" Grey was still breathing easily. "Say 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.'"
"She sells--sea shells--by the frigging seashore! Damn your eyes!" A fusillade of beats and a vicious thrust that missed his chest so narrowly that Grey felt the blade glide along his shirtfront.
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Peter Piper picked a peck of pippled pickers, Peter P--" Laughing--and beginning to gasp himself--he left off, and fought.
Beat, beat, feint, a half skip back as Hal's point lunged past his face, another, Hal was leaning too far forward--no, he'd caught himself, jumped back in the nick of time as Grey's blade came up. A lunge in tierce, in tierce again without let, and dust flew up from the stamp of his foot on the boards.
Hal had caught what he was about; he could feel Hal's thoughts as though they were inside his own head, feel the edge of astonis
hed annoyance change, anger rising, then the jerk as Hal caught himself, forced himself to restraint, to something colder and more cautious.
Grey himself had no such restraint. He was happily off his head, drunk with the lust of fighting. His body felt like oiled rope, tensile and slippery, and he was taking dangerous chances, completely confident that he could elude Hal's point, regardless. He saw an opening, dropped into a flattened lunge with a yell, and his buttoned point struck Hal's thigh and skidded across the fabric of his breeches.
"Jesus!" said Hal, and swung at his head.
He ducked, laughing, and popped up like a jack-in-the-box, grabbing the point of his rapier so the blade bowed between his hands, then let go and snapped it off Hal's, making the metal ring and the sword jump in Hal's hand.
He heard Berculi swear in Italian, but had no attention to spare. Hal was fighting back in earnest now, beating at his blade fit to break them both. He skipped in at once, his arm running up Hal's and taking him by surprise, so they ended in embrace, sword arms linked and blades entangled, bodies pressed together.
He grinned at Hal, baring his teeth, and saw the spark leap in his brother's eye. He was faster, though, and the first to jerk loose, leaving Hal for an instant off balance. He dropped by instinct into a perfect Passata-sotto, and his button pressed against Hal's throat.
"Touche," he said softly.
Hal's hands fell away, his rapier dangling, and he stood for a moment, chest heaving for breath, before he nodded.
"Je me rends," he said gruffly. I yield.
Grey took away his point and bowed to his brother, but his eyes were on Percy. Percy had left off his lunging altogether in order to watch, and stood against the wall, eyes wide in shock and what Grey hoped was admiration.
Signor Berculi had snatched off his wig and was kneading it with excitement.
"You!" he said, brandishing the object in Grey's face. "Never you do that! Is no proper that what you do! You insano! But good," he added, standing back a little and surveying Grey from head to toe as though he had never seen him before. He nodded, pursing his lips judiciously. "Very good."