There came another thump and two more thuds, as if something had tried to knock.
Wren dashed to the door. “Butcher?”
The latch rattled in his hand as three more knocks pounded against the wood.
“Hold on,” Wren told him—imagining a hundred disasters that must have befallen Shrike if he could not speak or ring a bell or open an unlocked door under his own power—and flung the door wide.
Felix Knoll slumped against the door-frame. His top hat had rolled away towards the staircase, leaving his blond curls rumpled. The left sleeve of his coat had slipped halfway down to his elbow, and his cravat hung untied in a way that created a whole new kind of knot. The stench of gin seeped into the office along with him.
Wren stared at him for a long and silent moment before he mustered the will to reply, “Good Lord.”
This roused Felix enough to lift his head and blink—his eyelids not quite moving in tandem—at Wren. “Where’s Grigsby?”
“Upstairs and asleep.” Wren bit off the words, his already-strained nerves robbing him of patience.
Felix absorbed his information with a furrowed brow.
“Why are you here?” Wren asked.
“Went out with friends,” said Felix. “Lost ‘em.”
Wren strongly suspected Felix’s friends had lost him on purpose. “And so you come to Mr Grigsby to sober you up.”
“He’s a very sober man,” Felix slurred.
Wren had to concur with that logic. And while he very much wanted to slam the door in Felix’s face, he knew in his heart that Mr Grigsby, if he were here, would have welcomed the boy no matter his state of intoxication. Certainly with more concern for his well-being than Wren felt.
Against his better judgment, Wren held out his hand to Felix. “Come along, then. You’ll be more comfortable sitting down than against the wall.”
“On the contrary,” Felix retorted, though he took Wren’s arm and stumbled inside, “against a wall can prove very comfortable—in certain company.”
Wren shot him a sharp glance at that, but the far-off expression on Felix’s face bespoke wistful thoughts of all the unfortunate women Felix had known, rather than an attempt to ingratiate himself to Wren.
Felix slumped in Mr Grigsby’s armchair while Wren broke off a strong portion of tea leaves into the copper kettle over the fire. Coffee would’ve been better, but Mr Grigsby found the stuff a touch too much for his old bones—his words, not Wren’s. Wren had taken his coffee at night with the Restive Quills. They would hardly lend him a cup of it now.
The whistle of the kettle interrupted Wren’s bitter musings. He poured the tea into two cups—chipped for himself and whole for Felix—and waited until ribbons of steam no longer rose from the tea-cups before handing Felix’s over. Felix, in the midst of a mumbled rendition of a filthy song, accepted it with minimal sloshing. He even drank a few sips, though he pulled a spectacular face. Wren hid his bitter smile behind his own tea-cup.
The clock on the mantle chimed half-past eleven.
“Where are you staying in town?” Wren asked.
Felix, ever unhelpful, shrugged.
Wren suppressed any expression of his exasperation. The solstice duel lay barely an hour off. There were far more important things at stake than a single drunk toff. Yet Wren could hardly explain the true stakes to anyone. Especially not Felix. No matter whether or not he was too far gone to remember it in the morning.
“Mr Knoll,” Wren began after some contemplation. “I’m afraid I cannot stay with you tonight. I have an urgent appointment this evening. However, if you’d like, you may make use of my rooms until you feel more yourself. Mr Grigsby will no doubt be very happy to see you when he wakes tomorrow morning.”
Mercifully enough, Felix was drunk enough not to question an urgent appointment so late in the evening, yet not so drunk as not to understand the bulk of Wren’s proposition. His brows knotted together as he slowly bobbed his head along with Wren’s words. After Wren finished, it took him another moment to reply, “I follow you, Lofthouse.”
“Splendid,” Wren lied.
With that, he had only to scoop Felix out of the chair and haul him upstairs. Easier said than done, that, particularly for a man of Wren’s stature, but he managed, no thanks to Felix’s clumsy stumbling. As he leaned Felix against the wall at the top of the stair and unlocked the door to his garret, Wren tried not to think of the risk he undertook in allowing the prodigal son to sleep off his sins in his own bedroom. He consoled himself with the knowledge that his worst artistic ventures were tucked safely away under the loose floorboard beneath his bed; there was no reason Felix would bother looking under there for something he didn’t know existed in the first place.
Besides, there was more at stake than Wren’s literary sins. Shrike’s very life, for one. The fate of the seasons, for another. Wren didn’t think England could survive another year without a summer.
“All right, then?” Wren asked after he’d half-laid, half-dropped Felix onto his own mattress.
Felix blinked blearily around at his unfamiliar surroundings. “…All right.”
