Chapter Nine

Content warnings can be found here

Edward sat on the bed, tapping his boot with his riding crop. The sharp sound of it, the buzz of sensation through the leather, evoked a hundred nights, and most of them with Dickie. Wearing proper evening wear in God knew how long brought it all back, too. 

He stared into the fire as it collapsed in upon itself, his feelings a mess. 

Dickie. The last time they’d been on anything like good terms had been when they’d parted in Oxford amid... well, not quite tears. Edward had remembered the bite of Dickie’s birch too well to sob in front of him, but they had pressed hands, and promised, and commiserated, and for once there had been no cruelty between them. Normally their kisses were like sloe thorns, festering under skin, each endearment a barb designed to rip up skin. But that final night, it had been a stillness, a One more drink, old chap? A, No, I really mustn’t. The way it had felt that night, they could have spent the rest of their lives together. 

Except, of course, they had only felt that way because the world had come down between them like a knife.

"My godfather says he can find me a place," Dickie had said. "At a friend’s bank at first, and then... 

It won’t be quite… well."

Even thinking about it had made Teddy take a deep breath. He had whispered, “Good luck, old man. I’ll see you in Town, of course.”

A little over a year later, he had done so - but by then the damage had been done. All-powerful Dickie, the glorious, vicious bastard whom Teddy had worshipped, had allowed all the grandeur to be shaken out of him. The Richard Thornton whom Teddy met a year later no longer commanded any room simply by walking into it, no longer silenced lesser mortals with the slightest pursing of those chiseled lips. 

So, desperate and reckless, Edward had pushed and provoked, hoping to bring a little of that coiled steel back into Dickie’s face, to wake the old tyrant and make him harsh and sublime again. But Dickie had merely left off cringing at the coattails of fatuous old men for just long enough to tell an old school pal that he was not welcome, that Mr Thornton no longer had time for such distractions.

One night, years before that, before they had even left school, Dickie had held him close and twisted Teddy’s ear until it felt as though it would come clean off his head, hissing, "Whose are you, Valance? Who owns you?"

"You. Only you." Teddy had said it, had cried it out, sobbed it, meant it with all his heart that night, and every night that followed it.  But if your master could be licked into servitude, what did that mean for you? 

So, yes, Edward had made something of a fool of himself over it. His old school fellows had, in the main, understood. A few others had needed to be settled with discharge of powder and a small ball of lead, but he’d ridden most of it out with his head held high. 

Or, he would have done if he’d been able to win Dickie back to him.

Oh, there had been a handful of furtive, hateful encounters when they had happened to be in the same place, and he’d dragged the old Dickie out of hiding, but the morning after it had just been more rejection, more scorn. Eventually, there had been the threat that if Teddy made another scene and jeopardised Mr Thornton’s career, then Dickie - in his cheap suit, with his clerk’s manner - would shoot him.

For months, Teddy had longed that he would be as good as his word, that Dickie would turn up one day and make all the hurting stop with a nice, loud bang. Instead, Edward’s father had packed him off to the continent to persuade him to stop acting like such a damned simpleton and somewhere along the line - amidst all the soft, eager bodies, the duels, the escapades, the sauce and the devil’s picture books - it had stopped mattering quite so much. Then, he had come back to England, and almost fallen over Peaches.

If Edward were besotted with her, it was a different mammal entirely to what Dickie Thornton conjured in his chest. She was sharp as a razor, hard as the ground when you were thrown to it, and yet she could be soft, too, tender, forgiving. 

Edward knew nothing about her beyond what she chose to tell.

He did not even know her Christian name.

His whip moved faster, more angrily. 

Not that he could expect her to trust him, to tell him anything. Of course, he couldn’t ask that. They all took the scars they needed to survive, and he suspected hers would make his seem the most trifling of scratches. She had given up everything for him, and now she would stare into his eyes, asking some desperate, unspecified price. 

He would have wed her, if only she would have had him.

But she had not. And now, at last, it was time to decide between them.
With sounds of laughter and curses still coming from the dressing room as she tried to find her way into her livery, Edward rummaged among ‘the proper accoutrements of a gentleman’ until he found a sheet of paper, a pen, some ink, Writing as swiftly as he could, in his flounciest, most aggravating hand, he scrawled a handful of lines before swirling out his signature and printing, “ninth Earl of Forthenby” beneath that. He smiled, a little grim.

It looked well.

Edward folded it upon itself, and addressed it to Mr Richard Thornton and the best guess he could make at Dickie’s place of work. There was sealing wax amongst the useful bits as well, but no seal. He supposed it would not be quite the thing without that, so put the folded paper upon the dresser and turned, just in time to see Peaches emerge. 

She looked predictably breathtaking.

“That periwig is ridiculous,” he said. “I think it’s too big.”

“Feels like a bird’s nest as well,” she said, scratching it, and eventually taking it off. “Tell Hedge you told me it looked a right dog’s dinner?”

“Simply wouldn’t do, old man,” he drawled, the way he knew she sometimes liked to hear it. Then he laughed, “Don’t worry, I can handle Hedge. Now, over here, lad. Let’s have a look at you.”

She executed a bow, although for the first time it wasn’t as though she were putting the whole institution of it to death. A marked improvement, there.

She was in the Forthenby colours, amber and charcoal grey, and they flattered her dark eyes, her brown skin. Her shirt was white, fastened high by a stock wrapped as well as only Peaches could wrap it. She wore a waistcoat but no jacket, and her hose were tight, very tight, her feet covered by silver buckled shoes, with a square heel that emphasised the lean, long strength of her. For the last day, she had looked boyish, pleasingly ambiguous in a scruffy, stagey way. Now she looked as true and breakable as a sweet-mouthed idiot fresh up from school. She’d taken so much trouble over it, was holding her lips firm, as though ready to hear his disparagement, to disavow her own weaknesses.

“Does it meet with your approval, my Lord?”

He beckoned.

With slow, careful steps, Peaches stepped closer to the bed where he lounged. Her stride was halfway between a town lad’s swagger and servant’s respectful tread, as though she had seen it done often enough but struggled to copy it. Her thighs were hard and firm under the tight fabric of her britches, her shoulders slim for a man’s, her throat long and dark. Her eyes sparkled in the firelight.

Edward made a gesture in the air with his hand, and felt a warm glow in his loins as, without questioning him, she rotated upon the spot.

When high, pert arse came within reach, he slashed the riding crop across it, and heard her hiss of breath, her cry swallowed in to proper, respectful silence. Edward adjusted himself in his own britches.

“Oh,” he said, with a passable go at anger. “Oh, damn it all. No. It simply won’t do, Peach.”

“My Lord?”

“You’ve spent an unconscionable time adorning yourself, and frankly, the result is such that… well, dash it Peach.” He managed to keep an element of disappointment to his voice. “There’s nothing for it but for you to take those britches off again and to bend over the bed so I can give you a seeing to.”