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Lamb was quite a few years younger than him, but they had met the same way he had met all his other brothers. They had been placed in the same unit under Captain Harper in Toulouse and saved each other’s lives more times than he could count. He had sworn his life to these men, not that it colored them with any decency.
“Where was you anyway?” Lamb asked, blowing a tuft of blonde hair out of his eyes. There was a smudge of dirt on his cheek that Benjamin ignored. “Drinkin’ it up allla-di-dawith your fancy new friend, was you?”
“You know I was, Tommy. I’ve no need to be opaque about it,” he replied with a huff, dragging Lamb by the scruff out the way of an oncoming rider.
“Opa-que?” the man repeated. “Is that one of them words your friends use? Did you read it in one of them poems you like so much?”
“And what if I did?” he retorted, trying not to lose his patience. Lamb had always been a few apples short of an orchard. “You don’t scoff at the poems when they put food on your plate and beer in your tankard.”
“Oh, you know I’m only having a laugh with you, Fletch. You know I ain’t meanin’ no harm.” He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his raggedy jacket. “So, whas’it like? Up there with the lords? See any of your mam’s old friends?”
Benjamin’s chest tightened at the mention of his mother. “I might have,” he replied, thinking back on the Duke of Gamston. “But nothing came of it. If they saw anything of mymamin me, they didn’t say it.” Gamston had been so close Benjamin could smell him, and it had been too much to bear. He was old now, still leering and haughty in his ways, still trailing around that blasted cane like a scepter. He shook the memory away. With any luck, he would never have to suffer the man’s presence again. “I’ll tell you what, though, Lamb—give me a month, and I’ll have the lot of them in the palm of my hand.”
“And what’ll you do then, Fletcher? What’llwedo?”
Benjamin hopped atop a stone fence, looking out across the empty street. “We’ll be kings.”
“Yeah!” Lamb shouted, pumping his fist in the air. “We’ll be kings! And we’ll drink like kings!”
Benjamin hopped down, slinging a hand around his friend’s shoulder—not too tightly, so as not to soil his beige tweed jacket. “And we’ll eat like kings!”
“And we’ll shag like kings!”
“And we’ll show them who rules London,” he bit out. He pulled Lamb in close, shaking him silly. “Who rules London?” he demanded.
“The kings!”
“And who is the king of kings?”
“Benjamin fuckin’ Fletcher, that’s who!”
“BenjaminfuckingFletcher,” Benjamin repeated with a grin, his nostrils flared.
He was BenjaminfuckingFletcher, son of a dismissed lady’s maid and her sea-faring lover. He was BenjaminfuckingFletcher, who had spent his whole life picking up after people who didn’t give him the time of day, who didn’t see him as anything more than a disposable cog in their machine. He was BenjaminfuckingFletcher, who had given his youth, his body, and what could have been his life to a country that couldn’t think of less of him—and BenjaminfuckingFletcher was sick of it.
He had let himself be whisked away last night by the majesty of the proceedings, by their clapping, their flirting, their garments, their drinks, by Pollock’s amicability, by Lady Singberry’s praise. They had not known BenjaminfuckingFletcher. They still did not care. They had lauded Mr. Charles F. Huxley, so Mr. Charles F. Huxley he would be.
He stilled. Notallof them had, of course. Not Lady Charlotte, with her beauty, her fire. She had seen right through his mask. She knew he was no gentleman—there was nothing genteel about him. She didn’t know everything, of course—not yet, but he could have sworn she was quite intrigued by what she had found. Irate… but curious.
And here he was, on his way to deliver another blow. Surely, his misery outweighed hers.
It had to.
He dropped his hand from Lamb’s back once they reached the end of the street. “Right,” he began, “You better head back now. There’s no place for you further in, not when one of them might see us.” He looked around and pulled a small leather pouch from his coat pocket. It pealed with the sound of sovereigns. “This is the last of it,” he said, tending the purse to Lamb, “At least for today it is. Don’t piss it away before I get back.”
Lamb’s eyes widened as if suddenly ravenous, wild. He snatched the pouch from Benjamin’s hands like a greedy little gremlin, shaking it as if to weigh its contents. “Ah, but this’ll do just swell,” he hummed.
“I mean it,” Benjamin warned, his voice dropping to a low grumble. “You don’t take it to Miss Everman. You don’t take it to The Rose and Crown. You put an order in with the butcher on Keenan Street, and then you go home.” He placed a firm hand on Lamb’s shoulder, squeezing just a bit too tightly. Still, the man did not lift his eyes from the purse. “Do I make myself clear, Lamb?”
Lamb nodded, but Benjamin knew it was a lost cause. He hoped without fruit that his fellow veterans might change their ways, but they were men of charity and pleasure now. He let go, and Lamb scuttled off without another word, sprinting down the road like a hound with a pheasant.
Benjamin turned back, swallowing down his worry. There were more important things at hand.
After all, he was only a few minutes from Piccadilly.
CHAPTERSEVEN
The hem of Charlotte’s mink-lined pelisse was dragging behind her as she walked along Piccadilly Street. She could see the placard from where they were at the very edge of Green Park, like a beacon taunting her—calling to her. Back and forth it swung, taking the publishing house’s name with it: ‘Hathaway & Bacon’. Beneath it was another sign, equally hanging from an iron frame, reading “St Mary’s Printers,” offspring of the publishing offices which had been invaluable in her cover story.
