Page 27 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

Wallace was nowhere in sight. A few minutes earlier, Solomon had sent him off to bed, where he himself would soon be bound. He prayed Wallace wouldn’t unexpectedly reappear.

“Of course he’s here,” Vaughan said. “Where else would he be? He knows you’ll take him under your wing.”

He was his usual charming self, his voice light, his smile inviting Solomon to share the joke. Solomon felt like he was being tugged in two directions.

Vaughan stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Please, Solomon. We had an argument—you know how it is. I am most anxious to make it up to him. Let me only see him, and all will be well.”

“What sort of an argument?”

“I’ve always hoped you considered me a friend, Solomon. Won’t you help me on this? Haven’t you ever had a little falling out with a lover of your own?”

Solomon bit the inside of his cheek, hesitating. Vaughan was a sound man and a good friend, or so Solomon had always thought. But he couldn’t forget the strained note in Wallace’s voice, saying, I need to make a clean break from him.

“I’m leaving town for a few weeks this morning,” Vaughan said. “I must see him before I go.”

“Listen, the Canterbury stage is leaving in fifteen minutes. I can’t dawdle here with you.” He held up his hands, palm out, in a gesture of innocence. “I’m sorry. If I see him, I’ll tell him you were here. He’ll know where to find you, I expect?”

Overhead, the yard clock struck the half hour. Vaughan glanced up at it, his expression sour.

“I must go.” He reached out to clap a hand on Solomon’s shoulder. “I count on you, my friend.”

When they both rose that afternoon, Solomon drew Wallace aside into an empty stall and told him about seeing Vaughan. “He said he was going away for a few weeks.”

“Oh, thank God.”

Solomon studied him warily. “I don’t know what you fell out over, but won’t you give him a chance to speak to you? I hate to see the two of you at odds like this.”

“We didn’t fall out. We didn’t have an argument, or whatever it is he says. I can’t even imagine myself daring to argue with him.”

Solomon blinked. That seemed such a strange thing to say.

Wallace slumped back against the wall, his hands in his pockets. “I wish I’d left him long ago.”

Solomon felt like he was groping his way across a pitch-dark room with no idea of where he was. “Well… why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose… I mean, who else would ever put up with me?”

Solomon stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. Let’s just get to work.”

During the following weeks, Wallace was a pale and silent version of his former self.

Solomon managed to arrange things so that he and Wallace had the same night off, hoping to draw him out of himself, but he refused to come out.

That was for the best, as it turned out, for Hugo Vaughan was at the alehouse Solomon went to.

“I was hoping you’d be here,” Vaughan said, neatly cornering him. “I just returned to London this evening, and I’m longing to see Wallace, of course. Won’t you convey him a message from me? Tell him I’ll be waiting for him tomorrow at nine by St Saviour’s.”

Solomon hesitated.

“Come, Solomon,” Vaughan said gently. “Don’t insult us both by persisting in this foolish charade that you don’t know where he is.”

“He don’t want to see you.”

Vaughan’s mouth softened in a fond smile. “He always has been an emotional sort of fellow—always living on his nerves. He needs someone to take care of him. You understand that, don’t you, Solomon?”

Perhaps there was truth in that, though Solomon had never thought about it in those terms.

“So you’ll pass on my message?” Vaughan insisted. “We need you, Solomon. Wallace and I both. And I know you never let a friend down.”

Solomon bit his lip. He could pass on the message, at least. Wallace had the right to make up his own mind, surely.

“Well—” he began. But something about Vaughan’s words bothered him.

He studied Vaughan’s smiling face. “You know exactly what to say to get through to me, don’t you? You’re playing me like a fiddle!”

Anger flashed, very briefly, in Vaughan’s eyes, and then he was smiling again. “Solomon, my dear boy, do be serious. You can’t hide him from me for ever.”

There was an intensity in him that was closer to the surface now. It prickled uncomfortably at Solomon’s skin.

“He don’t want to see you. Can’t you just leave it at that? I mean—this happens all the time. People are lovers until they en’t.”

“It doesn’t happen to me, Solomon.”

Solomon took a step back, disturbed by the look in his eyes. “Listen, I’ll see you around, Hugo.”

And he almost ran out of the alehouse.

“Vaughan is back in town,” Solomon told Wallace.

They were in the kitchens.

“Oh,” Wallace said in a small voice. He put his hand to his mouth. “I’m sorry, I—” He turned and ran from the room.

After a few minutes’ search, Solomon found him retching into the bushes behind the inn. Alarmed, Solomon put a cautious hand on his back.

When Wallace finally straightened up, he wiped his mouth with a trembling hand. “Lord help me. My stomach has been in knots all week.”

“What happened, Wallace?

“Nothing. Nothing. You’re probably imagining all sorts of dire things. But the truth is—nothing. He just—got inside my head. That’s all. I think he’s broken me. I’m clay in his hands.”

“Here, come here.” Solomon got him sitting on one of the crates stacked up against the inn’s back wall, and fetched him water from the pump.

They sat in silence for a while. Solomon was thinking guiltily about all the little things he’d ignored: all the warning signs he’d missed, all the times he’d seen Vaughan put Wallace down.

“I’m sorry I came here bothering you,” Wallace said after a while. “I wasn’t even sure how you’d receive me. I seem to have drifted away from everyone I used to know. Hugo didn’t like me to, well… have other friends.”

“I’m glad you came here.”

“If Hugo comes looking for me, don’t let me leave with him?”

“I won’t even let him see you,” Solomon said firmly.

He knew how it would be if Vaughan got his claws back into Wallace again. Vaughan would know precisely what to say to get under his skin.

Solomon thought back to when they first met. The fellow feeling that had seemed to bind him and Vaughan, and the uncanny insight Vaughan had sometimes seemed to have. But perhaps he had only pumped Wallace for useful information about Solomon, and Solomon for useful information about Wallace.

“I can’t stay here at the Crown.”

“No,” Solomon agreed, fighting his first impulse to keep Wallace close by, where he could keep an eye on him. “What about the Wheatsheaf on the Kensington road? Robert Keller is head ostler there now—you remember that red-headed fellow as used to work here?”

But when Solomon walked out to Kensington two days later to see Wallace, he received a shock.

“Wallace Acton? He en’t here. Some gent came asking for him this morning, and he ran out the back and en’t come back. In debt or something, is he?”

“Something like that,” Solomon said.

He spent the next two hours searching, in vain, every inn and hostelry along the Kensington road. When he finally gave up and returned to the Crown, Wallace wasn’t there, but Vaughan was.

He smiled in greeting. “Morning, Solomon. Do you know where Wallace has got to, by any chance?”

Solomon was tired and angry, and he still hadn’t recovered from the shock of learning that Vaughan had gone so far as to track Wallace down out in Kensington.

“Christ, Hugo, can’t you just leave him the fuck alone?”

Vaughan’s eyes narrowed. Sourness came to the surface. “You want him for yourself, don’t you?” When Solomon only shook his head, Vaughan insisted, “You do. I know you’ve had him. He feels so good, doesn’t he? That big burly mass, lying over you, pounding into you.”

Solomon wanted to put his hands over his ears. “Stop it.”

“And so easily led. Why, you can make him do anything you want.”

Solomon wasn’t a fighting man, but he balled his fists now. “You shut your mouth, you bastard.”

Vaughan only smirked. “I know you, Solomon Dyer. You’re remarkably like me.

You wear a pleasant smile, but you know how to look out for yourself.

You could have a lot of use for a man like Wallace.

” His voice hardened. “Well, you can’t have him.

You’ll never have him again. He’s mine . I love him and he’s mine.”

“If you en’t out of here in the next twenty seconds, I’ll call a dozen ostlers to put you out.”

Vaughan’s smile was sharp. “I’ll find him. You can’t hide him from me.”

It was the following morning by the time Solomon finally heard from Wallace. One of the women from the pie shop in Fishmonger’s Alley came by to say that Wallace was there.

As soon as he could get away, Solomon went to see him. Wallace was sitting in a dark corner with a penny cup of tea. He looked like he had slept in his clothes and hadn’t eaten in a day or more. Solomon sat down opposite him.

Wallace raised his head. “He came looking for me at the Wheatsheaf. I ran out the back, like the coward I am.” He couldn’t meet Solomon’s eye. “You must think me a sorry excuse for a man.”

His words contained an echo, as though he were repeating something he’d heard said to him more than once.

Solomon’s stomach twisted. What had been going on under his nose, without him noticing?

How had he been so blind? He heard a voice from childhood in his head, a voice he’d thought he had learnt to ignore.

Carnal indulgence is a sin that will blind you to everything else.

Lead you to worldly disaster and spiritual ruin.

If he hadn’t been so busy getting his wick away with every man in London—

But he couldn’t wallow in his own guilt just now. He had to look out for Wallace.

“Don’t say that about yourself. It en’t true.”

Wallace rubbed at tired eyes. “I just can’t face the thought of seeing him again.”

“Then don’t see him again. There’s no reason you should.”