Chapter 16

Being shot had turned out to be profoundly unexciting. Belle might even have gone so far as to say it was tedious. It was inconvenient, and made one very weak, and it had clearly ruined both her dress and her pelisse. Moreover, and in spite of Rufus’s best attempts to keep her braced, every sway and jolt of the carriage seemed to rattle through her, deep enough to reach her soul. The pain itself was troubling less for its intensity—though, when stirred up, it had moments of great intensity—than from the sense of anxiety it brought with it. The body had its own ways of knowing when something was very wrong, and this felt like nausea in her skin, a tangle of hot and cold and both and neither radiating from her arm and shoulder. Perhaps she should have followed Valentine’s example and fainted. But she hated the idea of his being in the right about anything . And, besides, Rufus was looking so worried she didn’t quite have the heart.

Instead, she tried to focus on their new companion. Now that he had removed his tricorne and mask, he was a rather ordinary young man. To be frank, he had seemed somewhat ordinary even with them. He was only an inch or so taller than Belle, slender and nervy, like a deer one twig-snap from flight. His face was an expressive mishmash: wide mouth, narrow chin, button nose, slightly rounded cheeks, long-lashed hazel eyes into which his hair—a profusion of tight curls—was perpetually falling. After a moment, he drew a pair of glasses from the folds of his cloak and put them on.

Shifting on the carriage seat, Belle tried to find a more comfortable position and abruptly realised there wasn’t one. That, in fact, no movement whatsoever was probably her best bet for neither screaming nor passing out. “I don’t think,” she said, mostly to keep her mind occupied, “that we’ve been properly introduced yet?”

“I don’t think we have,” agreed Rufus. “Miss Arabella Tarleton, this is the pissjester who shot you. Pissjester, this is Miss Arabella Tarleton.”

“Um,” said the pissjester, unhappily.

“I, meanwhile, am Sir Horley Comewithers.”

“But call him Rufus,” added Belle. “It suits him so much better, don’t you think?”

The pissjester squirmed. “If I call him Rufus, will he stop calling me pissjester ?”

“‘But’”—Rufus mimicked Belle’s tone—“‘it suits him so much better .’”

“I think he must be concerned about me or something,” Belle told the pissjester, wondering if that was true, and what it meant if it was. Rufus probably did not actually want her to die, but it would simplify his life a lot if she did. “He’s not usually this rude. What’s your name?”

“Gilead,” offered the pissjester, after a moment. “Gilead Postlethwaite.”

A shiver of mirth travelled through Rufus’s body. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer pissjester ?”

The former pissjester drew himself up primly. “Gil is fine, thank you.”

“Any connection to Postlethwaite’s Rare Books?” asked Rufus, momentarily diverted from his hostility.

If Belle hadn’t been convinced moving her mouth would end up hurting her shoulder, she would have smiled. While she knew Rufus had been making considerable efforts with her the past few days (his discomfort with long-distance travel aside) it was in moments like these that she felt closest to him. When she believed she knew him or might come to do so. There were shades of her London friend, yes, his quick mind, and his curiosity, the sharp tongue that had always delighted her, but they existed alongside the parts of himself he had long been hiding—his fears, and pains, and uncertainties. Despite his insistence that there was nothing of himself in the men, or the man, he had pretended to be, Belle thought the truth was likely more nuanced. He was not the exquisite accessory he had been in London, but nor was he the irredeemable ruin he claimed. He was both, and neither, and all the spaces between. She only hoped he would be able to believe it one day.

“Um,” Gil was saying, a blush standing high on his cheeks, “yes. Please don’t tell anyone.”

One of Rufus’s eyebrows lifted into a mocking arch. “That you’re a bookseller?”

“No. That I”—the ex-highwayman gestured hopelessly at himself—“this. Any of this.”

“Does rare books mean porn ?” asked Belle.

Gil’s blush over-spilled his cheeks, splashed over his brow, and rushed down his jaw. “Heavens, no.”

They both stared at him.

He wilted. “Well, maybe a small amount of porn.”

They kept staring.

“A medium to moderate amount of porn.” He gave a kind of full-body twitch, as though he would have physically bolted had he not been stuck in a closed carriage. “It’s not my fault. Etching seems to make humanity absolutely rampant, especially in Italy. And don’t get me started on the books of hours.”

“Please,” murmured Rufus, “get started on the books of hours.”

Gil dropped his voice to an awestruck whisper. “The illustrations those monks were drawing in the margins. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

“You are in danger of over-selling this.”

“Knights,” said Gil quickly, “in deadly combat with snails. Murderous rabbits performing deeds of extraordinary violence. Nuns plucking severed members from trees. A naked woman astride a flying phallus. A bird with the head of a man in its anus. A stag with the head of Jesus suspended between its antlers.”

“Well”—Rufus seemed to be considering the matter—“at least Jesus wasn’t up its anus.”

“I’m sure,” returned Gil, in rather hollow accents, “somewhere, in some book, he is.”

The carriage rolled over a rut in the road that felt like a mountain, and Belle ground her teeth together lest she cry out. Or worse, whimper. Valentine had whimpered a lot , despite later maintaining he had borne his travails with dukely stoicism. Through sheer stubbornness, she was able to mostly control her vocalisations. The trembling, however, was another matter. It had started as little shivers running like ants across her body. Then begun to burrow deep until it was as though her very bones were trying to knock together.

“R-rufus,” she asked, “is it especially cold in the carriage?”

He put his free hand against her brow—which, despite the chill, somehow felt repulsively clammy. All he said, however, was “Yes.” And, to Gil, “Give her that damn cloak, will you?”

Gil immediately pulled it off and tucked it round her. It might have helped a little, but it was hard to tell when she was prey to so many conflicting sensations.

“Sorry,” she whispered, “t-to take your damn cloak.”

“Not at all,” he returned. “It shouldn’t have been necessary to ask.”

She tried to gather her thoughts, which seemed to want to roll away from her in all directions. “Did you say you were a bookseller? Or did I imagine it?”

“No, no,” he reassured her. “I am a bookseller.”

“Then”—her thoughts continued rolling—“why are you dressed as a highwayman?”

Somehow, Gil was still blushing. “It’s embarrassing.”

“You may consider the explanation penance for having shot me.”

“I also fear you may find it sordid or unsuitable. You see it concerns, um, the affairs of gentlemen.”

He was so hopelessly teaseable that Belle could not help herself. She widened her eyes in faux naiveté. “Political matters? Business correspondence? That kind of thing?”

“No.” He made a mortified little sound. “Affairs between gentlemen. Affairs of the heart and ... and other ... areas .”

“Gentlemen?” gasped Belle. “With other gentlemen.”

Gil looked about ready to fling himself from the moving vehicle. “Oh my God. I have spoken the unspeakable. Named the unnameable. I have sullied your maidenly innocence with my depravity.”

It was Rufus in the end who took pity on him. “She’s fucking with you. She knows full well what you mean. As do I, for I share your inclinations.”

“You do? But”—Gil’s gazed flicked rapidly from Belle to Rufus and back again—“I thought ... are you not ...?”

“We’re eloping,” Belle explained.

“Even though he . . . ?”

She remembered, just in time, not to shrug. “I do not need his physical passion.” Carefully turning her gaze up to Rufus, she added, “I like your company very much, though.”

His smile was soft and effortless. “And I yours, dear heart.” A pause, his eyes glinting in the gloom of the carriage. “About eighty-seven percent of the time.”

“That is a good percentage,” she declared. “Any more, and our life together would be dull. Any less and it would be frustrating.”

Gil was still looking confused. “But if you are not corporeally compatible, will you both not miss the ... um ... carnal opportunities offered by the single state?”

“I don’t see why marriage to each other,” said Belle, “prevents either of us from enjoying whatever opportunities, carnal or otherwise, come our way.”

“I suppose I had just taken it for granted that it should. Although”—and here Gil’s expression grew rueful—“I am clearly the last person to claim insight into either carnality or opportunity.”

Even with the distraction of conversation, Belle’s head was beginning to swim. While there had initially been something almost reassuring about the pressure of Rufus’s hands upon her, they had increasingly become the source of an ache, both itchy and numbing at once. She stirred fractiously beneath him, but he only steadied her and asked their companion, “Surely you didn’t think holding up passersby was the ideal way to meet a partner?”

Gil made an impatient sound. “Of course not. I was holding up someone by pre-arrangement.”

“Someone wanted you to rob them?” asked Belle.

“Not rob them. Menace them. Seduce them.”

This was apparently too much for Rufus, who cut in with “This seems needlessly byzantine, my friend. Could you not have simply gone to the docks or a discreet establishment in Moorfields like the rest of us?”

“I have tried, my friend . I have encountered many a soldier, sailor, or candlestick maker willing to make use of me. But my preferences lie elsewhere.”

“In menacing?”

Belle did not blame Rufus for his scepticism. But she thought he need not have poured all of it into his voice.

“Yes,” returned Gil, clearly stung. “Is it so hard to believe?”

“Completely.”

Gil drooped a little.

“Nonsense,” said Belle. “I believe you could be very menacing.”

Gil drooped more. “Now I just feel patronised.”

“Maybe you could say um less?” suggested Rufus.

“Oh, you have feedback too?”

“A few notes.”

“Wonderful. A performance review is just what my evening needs.”

Rufus raised a brow. “I could shoot you, if you like?”

“Do let it go,” said Belle, wishing she sounded, and for that matter felt, stronger. “He’s sorry, and I’m going to be fine.”

His hand pressed down painfully. “Of course, my dear. Absolutely fine.”

Then:

“Belle? Belle?”

Her name tolled distantly. Like a bell, she thought with an internal giggle.

“Belle.”

The darkness behind her eyelids was as soft as goose down. She was floating in it quite contentedly. At least until Rufus slapped her. She gazed up at him, betrayed. “What was that for?”

“Gil is about to continue his story”—his attention flicked sharply across the carriage— “aren’t you?”

“Um ... am I? I mean. Yes. Yes, I am.”

“And you don’t want to sleep through it, do you, dearest?”

“Maybe I could hear it later? I’m ...” It was strange. She could have yawned, but even the effort of that felt beyond her just then. She just wanted to close her eyes again and be borne sweetly away. “Tired.”

His lip curled. “How very feeble of you. I would have expected something like this from Valentine but not from—”

“I’m awake,” she yelled. “I’m awake.”

“Glad to hear it. Now, Gil, if you would be so good as to continue mortifying yourself for our entertainment?”

By way of answer, the bookseller took refuge in grumbling. “I don’t know what more to tell you.”

“At this juncture”—there was an odd tight note in Rufus’s voice—“anything. Tell us how you came to mistake us for your pre-arranged menacing? Or, for that matter, how one goes about pre-arranging a menacing in the first place.”

“Classifieds.”

“Do they allow you to advertise for that kind of thing in the newspaper?”

“Not in so many words. But there are ways of indicating that one may be searching for particular kinds of friends. And I fell into correspondence with another such gentleman.” Gil gave a wistful sigh. “It was a very pleasant correspondence.”

Another gently enquiring noise from Rufus. “Oh?”

“We spoke as frankly as was advisable—but still more frankly than I have ever spoken to anyone—of our desires and our difficulties in fulfilling them.”

The world, temporarily confined as it was to a carriage with two other people in it, kept slipping away from Belle. She was doing her best to concentrate, so as not to seem impolite, or worse, an overly indulged milksop like Valentine, but voices ebbed and flowed around her, the speakers themselves smudging into shadows. She found she was glad, after all, of Rufus’s hand. It was still uncomfortable. Yet it felt tethering too. She roused with an effort. “Your correspondent had a wish to be menaced, then?”

Gil’s curls bounced as he nodded. “A passionate wish, yes. I should have known it was too good to be true.”

“How so?”

“Your friend has the right of it, Miss Tarleton. Look at me. Who would possibly want to be menaced by”—a gesture of self-directed despair—“this?”

“Well,” Belle offered. “If you inclined my way, I would.”

Rufus snorted.

And she wished she was not so very ... hazy, because this was something she felt strongly about. “I am in earnest. If I were to allow someone to menace me, it would have to be someone like you, Gil. Someone kind and considerate and gentle at heart. It would be foolish, I think, when seeking a menacing to put your trust in a more callous character.”

“Why, Bellflower,” drawled Rufus. “The areas of your expertise.”

“I would not say I’m an expert,” she returned. “But I have enjoyed an occasional menacing. Have you not?”

“When I am being menaced, I have rarely enjoyed the experience.”

“Then you’ve been menaced wrong, hasn’t he, Gil?”

This brought fresh pink to the bookseller’s cheeks. “My own exposure to the subject has been strictly theoretical, I’m afraid. I had hoped to rectify that with my ... my epistolarian friend, but you can see how well that went.”

“He turned you down?” she asked.

“He didn’t turn up at all.” Pushing his glasses up onto his brow, Gil squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Anyone else would have drawn the obvious conclusion after two hours of waiting. Then I saw your coach approaching and ... I suppose I was more ardent than I was sensible.”

“It is always better,” said Belle, ardently, “to be ardent than sensible.”

Rufus clearly saw the matter otherwise. “The presence of two complete strangers, one of them a woman, did not discourage you?”

“I was a little thrown,” conceded Gil. “But my correspondent did describe himself as a flame-haired, cat-eyed gentleman. And you, sir, are a flame-haired, cat-eyed gentleman.”

“And my companion is chopped liver?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might want her to watch or something.”

Belle managed a woozy smile. “I applaud your spirit of adventure.”

Rufus just rolled his eyes. “I think you’re a fucking idiot.”

There was a tense little pause.

“Believe me”—Gil’s voice wobbled—“there is no reproach you can offer more damning than the ones I am heaping upon myself. I have acted beyond foolishly, I have endangered another person, I have brought shame upon the good name of Postlethwaite, and for nothing greater than the basest of desires to menace another gentleman. One who, in this case, probably didn’t even exist. He was more likely an elderly lady or university student, seeking entertainment at my expense. I mean”—he hid his face behind an upraised forearm—“who else would write so fulsomely of their own taut buttocks?”

“No.” God, Belle was tired, impossibly tired, but she did her best regardless. “You mustn’t talk like this. And Rufus is ... Rufus is jealous.”

Gil glanced up, startled. “Of what? Look at him. He could menace any gentleman he chooses.”

“Yes.” Rufus’s tone had gone silky with distaste. “What would I possibly be jealous of?”

“Because nobody has been a fucking idiot for you yet.”

“That’s . . . ,” began Rufus.

But it was no use. Even his outrage—which she loved to provoke, especially through the simple application of truth—wasn’t quite enough to hold her. Then again, she wasn’t sure what would have been. She was spinning away like flower petals upon a spring breeze, released from a body grown stiff and sodden in Rufus’s arms. It didn’t, in all honesty, seem a wholly positive outcome. In general, she thought, bodies were to be remained in, and for as long as possible.

She had tried that, though. She had tried very hard. As she had tried so very hard at so many things. Things that other people took for granted. Claimed were easy, natural, normal.

It was nice, in a way, to have something of her own that was easy.

“Belle, you need to stay with me.”

Why? she wondered. When he didn’t want her to begin with?

Falling asleep had never been Belle’s favourite. It was like looking into a well. Then plummeting into one.

This was not like that. It was up, nothing but up.

She scattered herself across the sky. And while it was dark, it was soft as velvet and full of the promise of stars.