The paper was the Morning Post. He couldn’t justify that, really, except that it arose from the same prickle of prurient interest that had made him burn to reread some of Ross’s erotic work in full knowledge of the author.
The elderly man sitting across from him from London to Wickford looked liable to remain asleep even if a full brass band marched through the carriage. Unlikely to crack an eye to pass judgement on Jack’s reading material. Jack found himself reading the newspaper anyway. Like Ross himself, the Post made him enjoyably angry—just in the other direction. He kept a mental list of political causes he would donate to out of petty spite because the Post frothed over them.
He had the compartment to himself after changing to the older, pokier car of the local line. It was a fine day, and the South was showing off its summer wardrobe: lush patchworks of grazing green and golden crops sailed past, the vivid pastoral colour all but giving off a harmonious hum that Spinet House would have envied. Morning sunshine warmed the side of Jack’s body through the train window and shone merrily onto the pages of the Roman booklet.
Those pages had never seen this much sunlight before. Bedside candlelight and furtive lamplight were the more usual illumination of—well.
“No more, please,” I gasped. My legs were loose jellies, too weak to hold me up, and what had been a delicious ache in my backside two rooms ago was now on the horizon of pain. “I can’t—and surely you are spent, after so long—”
“I find myself inspired,” my tormenter said, in that low growl that by now was a signal of exquisite anticipation to my nerves. I groaned in surrender; his strong hand gripped the back of my neck and pushed me down until my cheek was against the polished wood of that immense dining table. An audience of cold-eyed oil portraits stared down at us from the walls. “I will have you again at least twice before the sun sets, insolent thing, and you will writhe just as sweetly around my prick as you did the first time.”
It was impossible not to speculate.
Could a man write that and not reveal something of the channels down which his own desires ran? Yes, if he were a chameleon as skilled and shameless as the socialist who aped the ideology of the Post for a wage.
But the Roman had been consistent from the very beginning. It was why Jack had become an instant and avid collector. Always there was power on one side and little on the other. Always something was taken, some barrier stepped over or broken through. Only on the other side of the barrier would shame and protestation be stripped away so that the narrator’s helpless enjoyment could soak the text.
Jack closed the booklet firmly and, to punctuate, slapped it rather too hard against his own palm. Hm. There was at least one Roman collection about naughty schoolboys and strict masters, wasn’t there? And—
And this was a pointless line of thought.
Even with Jack’s favour discharged, Ross wasn’t about to vanish from his orbit entirely. Jack could only imagine how uncomfortable it would be, living in Spinet House while a magical knife-hunt was conducted by two men whom Jack had fucked. Fielding Robin’s protective glares around Edwin was quite bad enough.
And no matter how much spice a bit of antagonism might add to a fuck, Jack’s tastes didn’t run to people who didn’t actually want it. Ross’s provocation was mere prodding. It was only hope driven by furious lust that had Jack reading anything more into it.
He banished the booklet back into his jacket, reopened the Post to the Letters section, and diverted himself with some healthy rage instead.
The man he paid for a cart ride to the estate either didn’t recognise him or was doing an excellent job of pretending not to. Cheetham tenant farmland began at the edge of the town and stretched for a good two miles before they hit the road leading to the estate proper. Jack shaded his eyes and looked about. Were those his cornfields? His dairy herds? Hawthorn land was a large chunk of this; the ancient earldom had been created by merging a modest barony with the adjacent land, on which Cheetham Hall had been built.
Jack managed it, as he did most things, at a distance. For years he and his father had communicated about agriculture and rents and land management via stewards, as he imagined some married couples communicated via the household staff.
The Hall looked the same. High, pale grey stone frontage, dark roof and eaves, comfortable with age. The glass of the front windows was comparatively young: only sixteen years old. It had all been replaced at once, after it shattered.
A figure moved at one of those windows. Jack turned his face from the house and did not climb the stairs to the terrace and the imposing front doors. Instead, he walked around—around, around, he’d nearly forgotten the sheer size of the old pile—until he could follow the hedge of fragrant rosemary that bordered the kitchen garden. Dimly he heard voices in the kitchens. And above that, louder and louder as Jack turned away from the rosemary and walked across a patch of summer-lush lawn, was another sound like a thumb run ceaselessly over the tines of a comb.
And there, beneath a handful of trees, were the hives.
Jack stood for a time, looking at them. There were ritual words for blood-oath; there were words for all sorts of contracts. And there were words for this, awkward as it was.
“Hives and queens of Cheetham Hall. It’s been a long time,” he said. “I’m sorry for that. I’m … doing well.” How to expand on that? Healthy? He was. Secure, prosperous? Certainly. Exerting his wealth and his power in a manner that satisfied his conscience? Yes.
Happy?
No, but it probably said something that it was the last emotion he considered. Real happiness had been replaced, when it shattered, with things more complicated and opaque.
Bees danced busily in the air. A handful wove near Jack, investigating, but didn’t consider his dark jacket worth landing on.
Having neither wedding nor childbirth nor recent bereavement to report, Jack bowed once in the direction of the hives. The heels of his feet prickled in his shoes as he straightened. A sensation of cold ants climbed his legs and his vision went dim at the sides, dark clouds dotted with sparks, for a few over-loud heartbeats.
He breathed until it all settled, then went back to the front door of the Hall. The bees were one duty and this was another. The long-absent heir to Cheetham set his knuckles to the door and knocked, and did not enter without invitation.
Mr. Blake was too experienced a butler to exclaim in surprise, but a violent twitch of his brows suggested it was a narrow escape. Jack handed over his hat and jacket as Blake—now recovered enough to behave as though Jack sprang visits on his childhood home every other week—informed him that her ladyship had a guest, and they were taking tea in the conservatory.