Page 29 of Beguiled

“Ah, now he is an interesting one,” Murdo replied. “He’s fairly new to the King’s circle and does not occupy an especially high position yet, but he is a man who hears all. There is something about him men like to confide in. They want him to like them, I think. They give him information to curry favour with him.”

David thought of the man’s comely form and bright gaze, his sharp uniform and handsome moustache. He could see what Murdo meant. Even a man who did not share their proclivities would admire Sinclair, with his confident masculinity and dashing appearance. He was the sort of man both men and women would be drawn to.

“Tell me something he has heard, then,” David invited, a hint of challenge in his voice. “Something I could not know.”

“You assume he would confide in me?” The beginnings of a smile played at the corner of Murdo’s mouth.

“Some things, yes, or you couldn’t know how much he learns. Besides, you seemed friendly—and he must trust you if he handed you the errand the King gave him.”

“Getting you to the Peers’ Ball, you mean? Perhaps I asked Sinclair to give that errand to me.” Murdo smiled, but his face was unreadable. David wasn’t sure if he preferred this Murdo, ambiguous and unsettling, or the one from earlier with his tender, unguarded gaze. Both incited feelings in David that were uncomfortable.

“All right, then,” Murdo said, interrupting David’s thoughts. “Here’s something he told me. Have you heard about Lord Londonderry?”

“That he’s dead? Yes.”

The news of the Foreign Secretary’s demise had only just arrived in Scotland. The man had taken his own life around the same time the King had set sail for Scotland.

David paused, then added, “I also heard that it was suicide.”

Murdo inclined his head, acknowledging the accuracy of that statement. “He severed his own throat with a pocket knife.”

David shuddered. “Christ—”

“Oh, but there’s more—here’s what Sinclair told me.” He bent his head close to David’s ear and said, his voice very low, “Londonderry went to see the King just before the King left for Scotland. He was raving. Told the King he was a fugitive of justice, that he’d been accused of the same crimes as the Bishop of Clogher. He was kissing the King’s hand and begging his forgiveness one minute, then ranting like a madman the next.”

David swallowed against the sudden nausea in his throat. The arrest last month of the Bishop of Clogher when he was caught in a compromising position with a grenadier guardsman in a public house had been the biggest scandal in years. All the more so when the bishop broke bail and disappeared. It had caught the public imagination, and it seemed to David that whenever the case came up, people spoke as though the crime of buggery was responsible for all the world’s ills. As though the actions of two men in a private room could somehow leak out of windows and wall-cracks and infect everyone else with wickedness.

But then, was it so surprising people thought that way? It was what David had been brought up to believe, after all. And hehadbelieved it. He’d been convinced that his fascination with the act, his desire for other men, was a sign of a weak and sinful nature. Something to be suppressed at all costs.

Had that changed? Hadhechanged?

It used to be, when he heard people sneering aboutsodsandbuggers, his chief reaction was shame. Self-loathing. But more recently—like when the scandal of the bishop came out—he’d found himself growing angry when he heard such comments. Angry that people seemed to think they had a right to know what others did behind closed doors. Angry that they wanted to rip people apart for it, even blamed the state of the nation upon it. That they assumed the men who did these acts were mad with a depraved sort of lust.

That they presumed to know how a man in that positionfelt—

“Are you quite all right?”

David started and found Murdo regarding him with a concerned expression.

“Yes—I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just such a horrible business. Londonderry, I mean.”

Murdo frowned. “I oughtn’t to have blurted it out like that. I forget sometimes that you’re not like the people I usually circulate amongst.”

Aristocrats, he meant. Aristocrats and politicians. People with power and influence.

“Wouldn’t your friends have found it as shocking as I did?”

“I don’t consider those people friends, and no, they’d have thought it a delicious bit of gossip.”

“Oh.” David wondered what Murdo inferred from that. That David was hopelessly naïve, perhaps?

“Look, do you want the rest of that ale?”

The unexpected change of subject set David back on his heels.

“Ah—not especially, no.”

“Shall we leave, then?” Murdo sent David a sidelong look. “I’d like to see your rooms, if that would be all right.”