“Maybe not,” said Ross. “But you sure as hell have more options when it comes to what you can do about it, when you’ve power and wealth enough to want for nothing.”
Jack gave a fair enough tilt of his head and reached out to ring for the next course. He didn’t think Ross had given him any of that speech as part of the quid pro quo. It had been a challenge; it had been, Jack suspected, the first time Ross had been allowed to speak his full mind in front of an aristocrat without fear of reprisal or unemployment. The very fact that Jack was safe to push—that, bizarrely, lay heavy as gifted gold in his hands.
So over the next course he gave Ross some of his own biography in return. He could only talk around Elsie’s death, forming her shape in a blank space on the page. And he didn’t mention magic. It was second nature in this place. Jack’s Mayfair staff were unmagical apart from Makepeace, who kept secrets as superbly as he kept the downstairs in order.
But Jack told Ross about his own schooling at Oxford, and then—an awkward leap across the blank space of Elsie—serving for a while as an officer of the Royal Army, in the Boer.
“And back in England, as I’m sure you know from Miss Debenham, I went about gaining a reputation as a disreputable old-fashioned rake.”
“Only a reputation?” said Ross. He hadn’t interrupted, or spoken much at all. Those interviewer’s instincts, no doubt. The source was talking; let them weave their own rope.
Jack let his mouth curl. He was feeling mellow and daring. He let the pause hang between them and grow hot.
“More bark than bite,” he said softly. “But still enough bite to be getting on with.”
* * *
When dinner was done, Jack showed Ross the upstairs library. Such as it was.
“It’s not really a library,” he warned. “Certainly not by Edwin’s standards.”
“It’s not a room full of books?”
“It’s a study.”
Ross rolled his eyes. His hostility had all but vanished with the meal, but it was creeping back now as he climbed the stairs and trailed his hand across the green silk damask on the walls, as if daring Jack to scold him for besmirching its beauty with his working-class fingers.
He was going to be disappointed there. Jack needed the company of very few people to be content, and enjoyed the stillness of solitude. Even more so after the weeks spent in Spinet House. And yet, letting the turbulence of Alan Ross step into the heart and hearth of his existence had been—exciting.
Perturbator, Jack thought. It was like Violet’s tuning fork, struck against his wrist. He thrummed with something patient and large.
In the study he lit the lamps and closed the door to keep in the warmth, turned around the chair at his desk to sit in, and waved an inviting hand at the single wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Ross might enjoy judging a man by his book collection as much as Edwin did.
“A library,” said Ross, with finality. “I know one when I see one. You—” He stopped.
Jack smiled to himself.
Sure enough, Ross fixed on the half shelf of thin purple pamphlets and crossed to them as if drawn by a beacon.
“You keep them on display?”
“Most people won’t recognise them from the spines,” said Jack. “And I don’t use this room for entertaining.”
Ross turned. His gaze was dizzyingly dark. “Do you want my thanks for inviting me in?” He swept a bow. “An honour, my lord.”
“The honour’s mine,” said some of tonight’s wine, out of Jack’s mouth. “I should ask you to sign them.”
Ross straightened at once. Now he raised a hand, half-protective, to touch the booklets, and his shoulders took on a familiar angle. Edwin was like this about some of his invented spells. The artist both wanting and not wanting to be perceived.
“They’re only filth.”
“I didn’t peg you as modest.”
Ross’s mouth twitched. He touched the books again.
“Tell me about them,” Jack said. The atmosphere of the study found those notes of command in his throat and roughened his voice with them. “Tell me about the Roman.”
Ross didn’t look wary this time. He leaned back against the shelf containing the work of his own mind. “I told you I started at eighteen. We needed the money so Caro could give notice. The place she was in—she didn’t have Bella’s problem, but the housekeeper was a bully and the lady of the house even worse. It got us by until she married and became Dick’s mouth to feed.” A mirthless smile. And so. The arithmetic of living on that exhausting edge of survival.
“Why write about men with men?” Jack asked bluntly. “If it was all about the money, I’d have thought you’d choose the larger audience.”
To his surprise, the smile became a real one. “I tried that first. Tried to get my hands on what was popular and copy the style. It was rubbish. I hated it. And then one day I threw a tantrum and wrote what I wanted, and the printer got it into the hands of an esteemed collector.” Ross pronounced the words mockingly. “No idea who. But he paid in advance for a few more. Word got around after that.”
Not a large audience, but an appreciative one. And willing to pay handsomely. Jack couldn’t remember who amongst his limited list of like-minded acquaintances had dropped the first recommendation into his ear. The memory of reading it crawled luxuriously down his nerves as he watched Alanzo Cesare Rossi, the Roman, slide a purple booklet from the shelf and crack it open.
“He liked the classical bent of the first one,” said Ross. Pages fell beneath his thumb with a rhythmic whisper. “The anonymous sponsor. More of that, he said. Masters and slaves. Rent boys and gladiators.”
Jack’s body was heavy where he sat, his limbs full of more blood than usual. The first few Roman books had shared that setting—thus the nom de plume, he’d assumed—but quickly spread to cover other time periods. Other fantasies. All with that dark, sparkling heart of things taken and claimed.
“You said you wrote what you wanted.”
He hadn’t managed to inflect it as a question; nor entirely as a statement. There was a long pause. Ross wasn’t smiling any longer.
“Don’t dance around,” said Ross. “You don’t give a toss for manners when it suits you not to. Don’t change on my account. You want to know why. So. Ask.”
“Why is this what you write?”
Ross nodded, a surprisingly patronising motion from someone a foot shorter and seven years younger than Jack. Someone whose life Jack could have easily bought—had bought, he thought with a trickle of heat, remembering the cufflinks and watch he’d pressed into Ross’s hands.
“Because this,” said Ross, lifting the book, “is safe.”
“I’ll remind you of that if you’re ever arrested for obscenity.”
“Safer than the alternative. Or perhaps you think I’d come to no harm at all, risk nothing, if I were to go in search of rough-handed soldiers and cruel dukes and tell them that what I really fancied was being tied up and fucked and pretending that I didn’t want it.”