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Lamb laughed, but it was mirthless. He laughed the way a child would when trying to make light of a transgression. “No, I did. I did! I made it to ol’ Culford. I put in an order with one of his boys. Two pounds of gammon, three of pork. Even went to the markets, got some greens, some apples,” he slurred. “They’re in the hallway. Only, you see—“
“You had a shilling or two left over, and that’s why you smell of beer.” Benjamin shook his head. He leaned down, disarming Lamb of his pot and poker and setting them on the nearby tiled counter. “I’ve heard it all before, Tommy.” He looked over the work slab beside the pantry shelves, noting the chosen ingredients in order: a third a sack of flour, what remained of last week’s lard, the stalk of a vegetable he could not even attempt to identify, a tipple of sheep’s milk, and damn near ten pounds of potatoes. “What the deuce were you trying to make?”
Lamb lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Soup.”
“Soup,” Benjamin sighed in echo, “It’s always soup with you.” He looked back to Lamb, who was staring at his hands as though he couldn’t fathom where he had misplaced his tools. “Did you come home alone? Is the house empty?”
“It’s only me. It’s only ever me… but my ankle, Fletch. Oh, you know my sodding ankle from when those frog-eaters took us unawares under Wellington...”
“Right, on your feet—before I sling you over my shoulder.”
Benjamin came to a crouch and scooped Lamb up by the arm, wafting the equally offensive stenches of stale sweat and ale around the pantry and up to his nose. Up the stairs they went, Lamb more begrudgingly, each step groaning beneath their feet. Benjamin pressed open the first door on the landing, and Lamb toppled through.
A lifetime ago, the room had served as his nursery. The wallpaper of his childhood was all but worn away, though some of it had yet to be torn off. It was a stone blue, like the color of the English Channel, with an intricate, chandelier-like design printed atop it. The other fragments of his youth had been looted or sold—the rocking horse in the corner crafted by his father, the pewter figures his mother would line up on the windowsill. There must have been a book or two in there at one point, for Benjamin had remembrance of her reading to him, but those memories had been buried with her.
He closed the door with a click and waved Lamb into one of the beds, though ‘bed’ was perhaps too kind a word for a hard, sawn in half mattress on the floor. Turning away for just a moment, he heard a cry precede a crash as Lamb tripped over the laces of his boots and fell forward. He knocked over an old side table, coming to a heavy crumple beside it. The table toppled over, front first, and the force of the double fall knocked grout from the ceiling.
Lamb shook the injury off quickly and reached out for Benjamin’s hand from where he was slumped on the ground.
“And this is why,” Benjamin hauled him up with a grunt, “We don’t dance around the kitchen on crooked ankles.” He felt like a nagging nursemaid, not that he had any intention of belittling the man. He forced a smile to match his—the man never seemed tostopgrinning, even after a tumble. “Do you see, now, why I badger you so? Really, my intentions are good.”
“I’ve always seen, Fletch,” he acquiesced, rolling himself onto his bed. The quilt kicked up dust. “It’s only... it’s just...”
Benjamin shook his head. He walked over to the side table to lift it back up. The top drawer had fallen out, with it, all its contents: an empty linen sack, the knob of a door that was probably not of this house.. .and most curiously, a stack of letters tied together with string. He guessed first that they belonged to a passing veteran, as the house rarely wanted for squatters—the echo of some foreign tryst or some such thing. He slapped them atop the dresser and turned on his heel when Lamb let out a grunt.
“It’s been a year, Fletch,” he began, flicking clumsily through an old print ofThe Morning Herald,whichhe had nimbly acquired a week past. He pulled the paper close to his face, squinting. “It’s been a year, and I thought, well, a man has to celebrate a year like this.” He folded the paper and tapped in the corner where the date had been printed.
“The fourteenth of January, and now we are the twentieth…” Benjamin sobered, crossing his arms over his chest. “The day we set foot in Dover. I remember. You thought you’d reward yourself with a drink, is that it?”
“We’re alive, ain’t we? That’s cause enough for me, Fletch.” Lamb dropped his gaze, his smile cracking ever so slightly. “And it helps, with the black dreams and all that. The war is so far away now. You should give it a go again…” His eyes rolled to the back of his head.
“Lucky sod,” Benjamin grumbled. The war was not so far away for him. No, the war had come home with Benjamin Fletcher. He ate with it. He lay with it. There was no ceasefire, no reprieve, no grounds for repentance either, not even at the bottom of a glass—that, he knew first-hand—not with all the ill he had wrought just to survive. There was always something since his return to hound him, since before it, too. And it almost always had to do with money.
“What? What is it?” Lamb’s eyes were suddenly open, wide and wet, the whites circling his irises like clumps of coal on a bed of snow. “Tell me, Fletch, if I did a wrong thing. You have to tell me, or else—”
“It’s not that, Tommy,” Benjamin lied. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” he lied again.
Lamb sucked in a breath. “Is it Harper? Is he on your back again? I swear, next time I’ll send him away myself, I will.”
“What?” Benjamin’s blood turned to ice in his veins. “Why do you say that?” The words spilled from him with no grace, no temperance. “Has he been around? He hasn’t come knocking, has he? Lamb, you must tell me if—”
Lamb chuckled as if there was anything funny about a devil like Harper, and began flicking through the paper again. “Not that I know of. It’s just, you always get that look when he’s about, when he’s in London even, and I thought… don’t matter now.” He shook the hair from his eyes. “Must be something else, more trouble.”
“Trouble.” Benjamin let out a gentle scoff. “You could say that.” He came to sit beside Lamb on the mattress. There was a strange sense of filiality between the two men, like a brotherhood made of the sea and steel rather than blood. He didn’t resent Lamb for his weakness, but he understood in the way a brother might understand the unfair harping of a father. Only their father was memory and there was little he could do to shield his friends from its wickedness, save putting a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, no matter the cost.
“So,” Lamb garbled after a while, rolling up the edges of the paper, “What’s the name of trouble today?”
Benjamin fought a maudlin smile. “Trouble does the job—Lady Trouble—and you would not believe your eyes if you saw her.” He recalled Lady Charlotte at Hathaway & Bacon—his surprise, her fury, the way her eyes gleamed with mischief in the stead of her betrayal.
“And she’s the same lass you saw at your fancy do, then? Cor, I can just imagine her.” Lamb closed his eyes and grinned. Something within Benjamin pinched, and he elbowed the boy in the ribs. “All right, I’m only having a laugh. Tell me then—where did you see her?”
“Where else? The publishing house. She was with her brother, looking to do... well, honestly, I’m not certain what she was seeking there, but she was there all the same.”
“But she found you.” Lamb nodded. “Was she—“
“Oh, as full of fire as the last time I saw her? Aye, she was. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought I had planned the whole thing just to add salt to the wound.” His brow grew heavy in its furrow. He looked to the window, where a light drizzle of rain was tapping against the panes. “Perhaps it’s the other way round, and she is the one tailing me. Bored little princess trapped in her tower... better she give up that chase now if she’s hoping to ensnare me in a game.” A small side-smile curled at the corner of Lamb’s mouth, and Benjamin recoiled. “What have I said?”
“You said you couldn’t stand the woman when you saw her first, but I see right through you, I do. You can’t get enough of her.”
