“Funf.”
It was a ridiculous schoolboy joke, one that he’d heard cracked a dozen times at Eton as they’d learned to count in German. It was also the last thing in the world he’d expected to hear from Daniel at this moment, and Curtis doubled over with laughter, not so much at the absurd pun as at the ease with which he’d been caught. Against him, Daniel was shaking with amusement too, and Curtis held him and laughed till tears ran down his face, in a way he hadn’t done since Jacobsdal, in this little safe place outside the world.
Chapter Thirteen
They sat in silence for a few moments after the laughing fit had passed, sharing the whisky. Daniel took a swig from the hip flask and passed it over. “Ought you sleep?”
“I’ll watch. You sleep.”
“I slept all day. I’ll wake you in the event of trouble. Are we anticipating any?”
“I don’t see why we should be. Sir Maurice told me to expect reinforcements early in the morning. I’ll go back in, I suppose, and try to keep things looking normal.”
“Good. The trick will be to stop them destroying the evidence when they realise they’ve been rumbled. Vaizey will want to know who’s been up to what, and for that, he’ll want the files.”
“About that,” Curtis said reluctantly.
“Ye-es. I’ve failed to remove any photographs of us to date, of course. That needs to be done. I don’t think going in tonight—”
“Out of the question.”
“Then we shall just have to deal with it tomorrow. Leave that to me, if you would.” Daniel hesitated. “Look, the worst that will happen is that the Armstrongs will get those photographs into the hands of Vaizey, or his men and thence to him. Whatever he might think, he won’t allow them, or word of them, to go further. He’s good at keeping matters quiet.”
“I don’t much want him to have them, though.” That was understating things. Sir Maurice was possessed of a cold, ferocious temper and a force of personality that would probably still reduce Curtis to a stammering schoolboy when he was fifty. More than that, he and Sir Henry were Curtis’s family, the closest thing he had to parents. They could not be allowed to know of this. He could not believe that he was doing anything wrong in lying here with Daniel, not when it felt so simple and so comfortable, but he had no intention whatsoever of trying to make his uncles understand that, and to disappoint them was not thinkable.
“Obviously not,” Daniel said. “And I’ll try to avoid it. But if it comes to that, let me handle him. If I tell him the situation was forced on you—”
“No,” said Curtis, with emphasis.
“Then I’ll claim we were posing. Or something. Just let me deal with it, hmm?”
“I’m not having you shoulder the blame for this.”
“I don’t propose to shoulder it, I propose to shift it firmly onto the Armstrongs where it belongs. I bow to your experience in matters of physical violence, my dear Viking. I do wish you’d leave the low cunning to me.”
“Your what?” demanded Curtis.
Daniel rolled sideways so that he could run a hand over Curtis’s chest, slipping a finger between buttons into the coarse hair. “Viking,” he said. “Huge, muscular, rampant—”
“Oh my God, don’t start that again.”
Daniel’s eyes were dark stars, their gaze darting up from under lazily hooded eyelids. “A great, powerful brute of a man, bent on rape and pillage—”
“Good heavens!” Curtis exclaimed, half-laughing, rather shocked. “One wouldn’t believe you’re a poet.” He paused. “You are, aren’t you? That is, you did write those poems? It’s not part of your pretence?”
“Of course I bloody did.” A distinct note of the East End rang in the vowels of that offended response. “Who’d you think wrote them, Gladstone?”
Curtis grinned down at him, absurdly charmed by that tiny chink in his armour. “I didn’t think anyone else could have written them. They’re just like you.” Daniel cocked a wary, questioning eyebrow. “Incomprehensible,” Curtis told him, “and far too clever for their own good, and hiding all sorts of things, and—rather beautiful.”