A Seditious Affair by Charles K.J

Author:Charles, K.J. [Charles, K.J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group - Loveswept
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The House passed the Six Acts in the last days of 1819, sending out the old year on a roar of popular anger and discontent. Dominic was glad he’d seen Silas the night before. He didn’t want to see his lover’s fear.

Fourteen years’ transportation on a second conviction for seditious libel. That was law now. A law intended to make people afraid, and it had worked, because Dominic was terrified.

Silas would be fearful and angry but not silent. Of course he would not be silent. He would find a way to write, somehow, of that Dominic was sure. Because Silas had true courage, which looked into the face of consequence, and was afraid, and fought on.

If Dominic had had that courage, he might not have spent quite so long in a limbo of unconfronted misery.

He had written to Richard at Arrandene. The letter had probably ruined his friend’s Christmas; it had certainly shadowed his own. He had told Richard in plain words that to move against Silas would be to end a lifetime’s friendship and informed him that they would speak on Richard’s return to London. Richard had made an appointment with him, his note a single curt line, and now it was time.

Dominic waited in the private room at Quex’s, where two men might safely shout at each other on unlawful topics, feeling sick.

He’d loved Richard so overwhelmingly, for so long, before he’d known what his prick was for, let alone that what he wanted to do with it was wrong. His entire youth had revolved around big, comforting Richard, the marquess’s younger son. Dominic remembered it all. His parents’ intense pride, never spoken aloud, that their clever third son had graced their old but undistinguished line by winning the Vanes’ patronage. The charmed circle Richard had always cast around his friends, so that Dominic had walked unscathed through the schoolboy brutality of Harrow. Their first tentative, bewildering embrace under an ancient oak on the grounds of Tarlton March, Richard’s family seat. Dominic had kissed the marquess’s son in the marquess’s lands, and even then, the sense of transgression had shivered through him with terrible pleasure. He remembered the first confused, sticky groping and spending, and the way they had laughed because it was too absurd and too perfect. The bad times, when Richard had needed someone to weep with. The first time Richard had fucked him.

He’d grown into manhood in the knowledge that he and Richard, against all the odds, were one. David and Jonathan, they’d called themselves, Achilles and Patroclus, and forgotten that neither of those stories had a happy ending. They’d had their own Garden of Eden, and sure enough the curse of knowledge had come upon them, with Dominic’s growing, sick awareness that what they had wasn’t enough.

He had spent fifteen miserable years knowing himself to be the man who had despoiled paradise.

Silas was not paradise regained or anything like it. He was rough, inarticulate, or far too articulate and always at the wrong

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