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Then, Benjamin was alone, with only a light, twirling snowfall for company.
* * *
The sun was heavy in the sky by the time he reached the middle of town. He strolled along the Thames, delighted that the snow from the night before had not settled. The sun beat down upon him and London, refracting off the surface of the river, glittering as much as the chandeliers at the ball the night prior. He breathed in deeply, taking in the loaded Thames air; it smelled a little like algae and smoke.
A steam packet made its way past South Bank, sending small white wisps into the air above it. He could scarce believe the boat was real—that any of this was real, having spent so much of his life moving between hovels in Peckham. He was a Five Fields man now, not that it meant that much more. Not that it changed the company he kept.
“I’m tellin’ you, Fletch—she was beggin’ for my whirlies by the end of the night,” his ever-eloquent friend Lamb announced, a little too vibrantly, as they passed the Embankment gardens. “Devil be the shitsack that stole her from me. Twice my size, he was. Didn’t stand a chance.” Lamb kicked a nearby pebble, sending it cascading down the road and into an oncoming carriage.
“I’m sure he was,” Benjamin agreed through a laugh, trying his best to keep his head low. He knew it had been a mistake to allow Lamb to tag along—when was it not?—but his friend had been climbing the walls in boredom that morning.
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.
