He could, he supposed, head back downstairs and make a fuss. That was probably what they wanted him to do, whoevertheywere. Wynn or Jessamine, he supposed—but no, that wasn’t right, he’d heard them both in the drawing room as he’d passed. Bram couldn’t move that fast. Elise wouldn’t wear a cassock unless monasteries were hiring couturiers. Hawley didn’t need to play ghost when he had a perfectly satisfactory game of blackmailer going on.
Gideon? Would Gideon really dress up in a cassock to scare him? Did he want Zeb to leave that badly, enough to do something so childish and unkind?
Zeb didn’t want to think about that. He took stock of his position, summarised it as utterly miserable, and went to bed.
Seven
He got up early again the next morning, tempting though it was to hide in bed for the rest of the fortnight. “Face the day,” he told himself sourly. It was what Gideon had used to tell him as he got out of bed on time in the morning, brisk and ready for work. Zeb had not been so inclined then, and didn’t want to now.
But here he was, and his desire to be outside just about outweighed his desire to stay in bed staring at the ceiling and feeling miserable, so he headed out for another turn around the grounds. He felt rather too aware of the twelve-foot boundary wall as he walked, even though he mostly couldn’t see it. If he was going to stay, he’d need to get out onto the moor and take advantage of the beautiful scenery and miles of land unpopulated by Wyckhams.
Hewasgoing to stay; he’d made a promise so he had to take the consequences. But he hadn’t promised to allow himself to be made a fool of by people capering around in costumes. He’dconsidered his situation thoroughly as he lay in bed last night, cold and angry and listening for noises that might be footsteps, and the conclusion he had reached was,Sod this for a game of tin soldiers.
He stomped around the follies, marched through the wood past Wayland’s Smithy, and was coming up to the stone circle in a bad mood he couldn’t shake when he saw a man approaching from the other direction. Tall, lean, looking as ill-tempered as Zeb felt: who else could it possibly be.
“Hey,” he snapped. “I want a word with you.”
“Mr. Zebedee?” Gideon said, with cold disdain.
His damn fool name on Gideon’s lips, and Zeb’s resentment and misery and anger boiled over with the abruptness of a pot of milk on the stove. “Fuck you.”
Gideon’s head went back. “Excuse me?”
“You heard. I don’t know what I have done to merit this treatment,” Zeb said. “Well, I do, but for Christ’s sake, I didn’t do it on purpose. I’m sorry I got you sacked; I got myself sacked too, so it’s not as though the whole thing was a spree for me. I’m sorry I wasn’t who you wanted me to be a year ago, I’m extremely sorry my presence here upsets you now, and I’m sure we’d both prefer it if I was anywhere else, but I’m not. And with all that said, I am sick to the back teeth of your insults and accusations and spite. I don’t deserve it, I’m not going to put up with it any more, and, frankly, I thought better of you than childish practical jokes!”
Gideon had looked like he was ready to fire back, but at that last his brows went up. “What do you mean, jokes?”
Zeb glowered up at him. “Capering around in a sheet to frighten people is pretty low stuff, and if you had readThe Monasteryyou might grasp quite how poor the taste of this whole farrago is.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You, dressed up in a robe, prancing round the corridor last night when I went to bed!”
“I did no such thing. Robe?”
“Robe, hood, faceless monk of the kind you and Wynn and Jessamine have been making sinister allusions to. It’s embarrassing. You really can’t need a job that badly.”
“I need this job extremely badly,” Gideon bit out. “But my duties do not involve dressing up as the family ghost to scare you, and I didn’t.”
“Well, if it wasn’t you, who was it?”
“How should I know? When was this?”
“Just after ten.”
“I was playing billiards with your brother and Colonel Dash from quarter to ten until past the half hour,” Gideon said. “I had an eye on the clock, as anyone would in those circumstances. I didn’t leave the room for the duration of the game. Ask your brother.”
Bram had many poor qualities—most of them, really—but he wouldn’t collude on a practical joke, if only because of his inflated sense of personal dignity. If Gideon had been playing billiards with Bram, he hadn’t been upstairs making a mock of Zeb, and Zeb felt a knot in his chest relax with a sudden lurchthat made him realise just how tight it had been.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Well—sorry. I thought I heard everyone else downstairs. Sorry.”
“Everyone elsewasdownstairs. The only people missing were you and Hawley.”
“I don’t suppose it was him: he’d hardly need to bother playing ghosts in the circumstances. You should probably know he’s blackmailing me about being queer.”
“What?” Gideon yelped.
Zeb should probably have led up to that a bit more, he realised. “He’s threatening to tell Wynn my sordid secrets if I don’t step out of the running for the inheritance, and since he won’t believe I’m notinthe running, this is going to get nasty. I don’t think he knows that you were the person I got sacked from Cubitt’s with—in fact, I’m sure he doesn’t, or he’d have taunted you about it. But I felt I should warn you.”
