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“How in god’s name did I let you talk me into this?” Staring at himself in a dusty mirror, Rupert attempts to adjust the plumes on the world’s most absurd hat in such a way that means they won’t fall into his face. The damned things tickle abominably. No wonder they’d gone out of fashion sometime in the eighteenth century.
“Not sure. I think you were drunk.” Bas manages to look as if he’d been born to his matching hat, the lucky bastard.
“Sounds likely enough.” Fiddling with the rosary at his belt, Rupert frowns. “Remind me again why I have to be the priest and you get to be the only one anyone can actually recall the name of?”
“Because, my friend, d’Artagnan is the dashing, boyish one, and Aramis, despite his priestly bent, is a lover and libertine at heart, exactly like yourself. Athos, on the other hand, is a brooding man of intellect obsessed with his wife - clearly Declan - and Porthos is a jolly chap who lives for food, fights, and fun, which suits Freddie well enough. Don’t tell me you don’t remember the story.”
“Never read it.” If he’s to be honest, Rupert can’t recall the last time he read a book that wasn’t either about horses or written by Lizzie. At least her books do the reader the courtesy of having naughty bits.
Bas rolls his eyes. “They made a movie of it too, a decade or so back. It’s only one of the most famous stories in literature. You are a true philistine, aren’t you?”
Rupert sighs, pulling the wretched hat off and tossing it into a dim corner of the tiny dressing room, one of a warren of similar spaces nestled in the back of Cotchester’s community theatre. “I’m Minister for Sport, not the arts. What god awful production did we nick these from, anyhow?”
“Oh, I borrowed them from Corinium,” Bas says. “With the help of a very charming wardrobe assistant who was most eager to please.”
“More concerned with getting into your pants than she is with potentially losing her job, hmm? Well done, you.” Suddenly the velvet tabard and leather pants don’t feel quite so uncomfortable as they had a moment ago; knowing they’d been stolen right from under Tony’s nose and smuggled across the green gave the whole endeavor a certain piquancy.
“Well,” Bas admits, staring at himself in the mirror as he adjusts the rakish angle on his hat once more, “I may have promised we’d take her on at Venturer should she get caught.”
“Bas,” Rupert groans. “We haven’t got the budget to make promises to every one-night fuck of yours, not the way you get around.”
Bas just snorts. “You’re one to talk. Don’t be cross with me, I got you a present in the bargain. Well, of sorts.”
He feels his eyebrows lift along with the corner of his mouth, almost without permission. Christ, Bas may be an inveterate rascal, but there’s a reason he was old Lord Pop-Pop’s favorite son; a reason he’s been one of Rupert’s closest mates for nearly as long as he can recall. There’s no one on earth quite as charming as Bas, when he puts his mind to it. “You know me. I love a good gift, do tell.”
“You’ll have to wait and see–ah,” Bas says, as the door across the corridor opens, Taggie’s tentative voice calling out, “Mummy?”
“Perfect timing,” Bas murmurs, moving to the doorway, Rupert hesitating only the briefest moment before following. “How’s our gorgeous Queen Anne?”
“Oh, hello,” Taggie says, catching sight of them, ducking her head a bit, though not enough to hide the delicious pink crawling up her cheeks. And no wonder, with the dress she’s wearing, a confection of white silk and cascading lace, seemingly every inch of it covered in jewels. Or perhaps ‘attempting to wear’ is a more apt phrase, the whole glorious contraption half hanging off her body, held up by her hands, cupped protectively over her chest. “I can’t get this done up on my own. Mummy said she’d help, but–”
“Our Milady de Winter is having her own private fitting with Declan down the hall, I think,” Bas says, winking. Thank the lord for him, because Rupert couldn’t possibly think of a thing to say just now, staring at Taggie, standing there glowing under the lights like the angel he’s so fond of naming her. Like some kind of pure, perfect goddess dressed in shades of innocence; exactly the kind of creature he’d leave smeared with filthy fingerprints if he so much as dared touch her.
He really has got it bad, hasn’t he?
“Best not to disturb them,” Bas continues, oblivious to his friend’s inner torment. “Luckily, you’ve no shortage of deft hands ready and willing to provide you with gentlemanly assistance right here.”
Bas pauses, shifting his weight to the other side of the doorframe as if to get out of the way, both his eyes and Taggie’s on Rupert, and he’s such a wretched fool that it’s all he can do to stand there staring at her, because if he moves–if he moves, he’s too afraid it’ll be to grab her in his arms, slam the door in Bas’s face, and take her right there on the floor. And Taggie deserves better than that. Better than him.
“Um,” Taggie says into the silence, shifting, the wide skirts rustling around her. “It’s all right, I’ll manage.”
For a moment, Rupert could swear Bas looks disappointed in him before he turns to Taggie, that charming smile back in place. “No, no, don’t be silly, I’ll help. I promise not to touch a thing I shouldn’t, and Rupert here will keep me honest, won’t you?”
“Always.” His voice comes out strangled, a strange, hoarse croak of a thing, as he watches Bas cross the narrow hallway, watches Taggie turn and present him with her back, with the lacing running up, half undone, caging her creamy skin.
Bas coughs a little as he begins, a sound somewhere between a hiccup and a laugh. “Been a long time since I had to lace a girl up,” he says, and launches into an improbable tale of corset-wearing showgirls in Monte Carlo that Rupert doesn’t take in a word of. No, he’s too consumed with trying to resist the urge to yank his friend off the only woman Rupert’s ever wanted badly enough to fight for her and punch him square in the face.
Taggie peers over her shoulder, looking down at Bas’s progress, laughing at something he’s said, her gorgeous mouth stretched wide. Until she looks up, and meets Rupert’s eyes, all the joy falling off her face, her expression turned–what? Upset? It ought to be, with the way he’s staring at her, as if trying to burn a hole straight through her. She ought to be furious with him, ought to tell him where he can get off, leering at her like some disgusting lecher twice her age.
Instead she just looks so full of longing it makes some dangerously weak part of his heart crack, and he turns away before he snaps.
“There,” Bas says a bare moment later, sounding proud as a peacock. “Beautiful job, if I do say so myself. Give us a twirl, darling?”
Rupert looks and immediately wishes he hadn’t; the tight lacing pushes Taggie’s breasts up, giving her a delectable little swell of cleavage, all of it a lovely shade of pink at the moment, her blush still staining her skin as the two of them stare at her like a piece of meat.
“Fits like a dream,” Bas says. “What do you say, Rupert? Would you go down on your knees for our magnificent queen?”
“I’d happily die for the privilege." Somehow, he manages to make the truth sound glib, a feat he’s both proud of and grateful for. Taggie just stares at him with that damned look on her face, like he’s her whole world, and if Bas wasn’t there, his eyes darting back and forth between them–
“Tag, wow! Don’t you look a sight,” Freddie says on his way down the hall, the same costume that looks dashing and elegant on Bas and Rupert somehow rumpled on him, a bit off-kilter. “Once my Sharon gets a peek at you, she’ll talk about nothing else for a whole week but what a princess you are.”
Taggie smiles and laughs at Freddie’s sweet, honest, fatherly flattery, so very different from what Rupert’s just directed at her that a wave of shame and disgust washes over him, twin unfamiliar feelings that need to be drowned in a finger or three of whiskey as quickly as possible. Grabbing both his ridiculous hat and Bas’s arm, Rupert hares off in the opposite direction.
“Are you mad?” Bas hisses, reclaiming his arm, though without any true rancor. “Did you not see the opportunity I laid at your feet? That girl was all but gift-wrapped for you! You’re not actually a priest, man.”
“Taggie is not an opportunity,” Rupert grits out between clenched teeth. “Or a gift, certainly not one you have any right to give.”
Bas frowns. “Is this about that ridiculous promise you made Declan? Taggie’s a big girl, Rupe. Let her make her own choices–and unless I’ve utterly lost my touch with women, which we both know isn’t the case, I’d say she was dying to get your hands on her. She practically wilted when I got near. It was almost insulting.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Rupert mutters, running a hand through his hair and turning away from his friend. “She’s better off without me. All I manage to do is ruin everything I touch.”
For a moment, the look on Bas’s face is intent, serious, an expression typically reserved for hunts and polo matches. Serious enough that Rupert feels a wild impulse to ask the kind of questions men like them don’t admit to having, much less wanting answered: do you think I’m broken? or maybe just, what’s wrong with me? or the disgusting, stripped-bare thing at the heart of it all, the almost pathetically childish, am I truly unloveable?
But he doesn’t, his mouth remaining a stubborn, thinned line, and Bas grins and throws his arm around Rupert’s shoulders, the moment dissipating just like the thin fiction that either one of them might ever feel anything real. “That sort of rot is dangerously close to self-pity. What’s say we get changed and head across to Bar Sinister, drink away all these newly acquired qualms and scruples?” he offers, and that sort of temptation? That, Rupert will allow Bas to lead him into with pleasure.
“She’s absolutely longing to dance with you,” Bas says, after the third time they’ve caught Taggie staring in their direction, her glance averted with bitten lips and downcast eyes.
Knocking back another flute of champagne, Rupert narrows his eyes, staring out over the crowd of Venturer employees, supporters, and prospective backers currently crowding his house, all in costume. “She’s not. Taggie doesn’t like to dance.”
“Doesn’t she?” Bas shrugs. “I’ve danced with her at least three times. Seemed quite amenable to me.”
“Bas, you know I love you,” Rupert says lightly, just the barest hint of steel lining his tone, “but stop.”
“I’m merely trying to understand why you–a man who could, and frequently does, have any woman he wants–are so bloody determined to refuse yourself this one when she’s all but worn a flashing neon sign that says ‘take me, Rupert’ above her head.”
“You know I promised Declan I wouldn’t touch her,” Rupert mutters.
“Ah, yes. Promises, which you take so very much to heart. No, you and I both know what the real issue is here.”
“Enlighten me,” Rupert says, in the exact tone he uses in dull meetings and interviews going off the rails, the one that warns, do the exact opposite of what I just said or I will annihilate you.
Bas, being Bas, blithely ignores it. “You’re a coward. You think Taggie’s too good for you–which she is, let’s be clear on that–and that you might have to do the horrific and difficult work of being a better man if you wanted something real.” Rupert says nothing, finding his empty glass suddenly fascinating. “Am I wrong?” Bas prods.
“You’re a hypocrite, is what you are.” A detestable thing, taking refuge in whataboutisms to avoid the uncomfortable question, but after all, he is a politician now. “You’d rip your own heart out and stomp on it rather than let anyone try to make you a better man.”
“Guilty as charged.”
Across the room, Taggie catches his eye again over the shoulder of her chattering sister, and Rupert turns away, seeking out a full glass.
Beside him, Bas sighs, then eyes him with a gleam Rupert remembers all too well from their school days; the kind that promises trouble. “All right then. If we’ve determined you’re not willing to be the better man, then why should I? Wish me luck,” he says, clapping Rupert on the shoulder and handing him an empty flute before walking straight over to Taggie.
“Your Highness,” he hears Bas say to her, bowing over Taggie’s hand with a flourish that makes Caitlin giggle and clap her hands with glee. “Dance with me?” he says, and then they’re lost to the crowd, caught only in glimpses; Taggie’s hand on Bas’s shoulder, his hand cupping her neck, his mouth practically against her ear as he speaks to her over the pulsing music.
And no matter how much Rupert knows he deserves this, every moment of it, no matter how he tries to tell himself they’re both adults who can do as they please, he’d be lying if he didn’t admit it feels exactly like watching another rider beat him while jumping on his favorite horse, the betrayal of it exactly as absurd and unfair and all the sharper for knowing that.
In the next moment, the song ends, but Bas doesn’t relinquish his hold on Taggie; no, instead he leads her away, out of the crowd, Rupert trailing them from a distance, rounding the corner just in time to see the glint of Taggie’s skirt disappearing up the stairs.
Upstairs. To where the bedrooms are. Which Bas knows perfectly well, having spent half his childhood pelting through the halls of Penscombe with Rupert.
Rupert knows perfectly well the sorts of things Bas does when he runs off with a woman at a party; hell, half the time Rupert’s been right there alongside him, sharing in the fun.
But it’s never filled him with incandescent rage before, an anger that’s all the more bitter for the hurt just beneath it, salting the wound. Bas has always been a little too careless, a bit too free from principles to be what anyone would term a good man, but he’s always been a good friend to Rupert, his loyalty beyond doubt. And now, this?
Hands trembling with suppressed emotion, Rupert lets himself out into the back gardens, fumbling through the dark before he acts on his worst impulses, charging up the stairs to commit murder in his own home, or worse yet, ratting the pair of them out to Declan and letting him do it instead. Instead he leans against the old stone of his home, resting his head on his arm and sucking in lungfuls of cool air which do nothing to calm him.
Stumbling back a few steps, he stares up at the lit windows of the first floor, wondering which room Bas had chosen for his dalliance, torturing himself by imagining how far he’s gotten, how long it would take him to unlace that dress he’s already had experience with. Not long; Bas has always worked quickly.
Pacing the lawn, he runs a hand through his hair, letting the offensive hat fall to the ground, unheeded. Maybe he will tell Declan. At his side, the dull rapier bumps against his leg with every stride, another small irritation fraying at the last threads of his self-control. Hell, maybe he’ll do Bas one worse and tell Maud, though letting her know another prospective lover has chosen her daughter over her seems a little too cruel, even in his present mood.
“You’re going to wear a path in the dirt if you keep that up,” Bas’s voice says, and Rupert whirls to find his friend lounging beside the doorway, relaxed and self-satisfied.
“Stay away from me, Bas,” he says, his hand drifting to the hilt of that ridiculous sword. “You don’t want to be near me right now.” So what if he hasn’t fenced since Harrow, and that only on the stage?
“Or what,” Bas scoffs, approaching in the dim light spilling from the house. “You’ll skewer me with a dull prop?”
“How could you do that?” He doesn’t intend for it to explode out of him like that, but it does, the words all but echoing off the house. “When you knew how I–you knew, Bas!”
“Knew what, exactly?” Bas raises an eyebrow, waiting, but something in Rupert’s throat closes on the words, even now. Pointless, anyhow.
“It hardly matters, does it?”
Bas rolls his eyes. “Use your head, man. Taggie and I were upstairs for less than ten minutes. Do me some bloody credit, please. I don’t work that fast. And you know I’ve about as much interest in sweet, virginal things like her as I do in sheep.”
Ten minutes? It had felt like an eternity to Rupert, an hour lost to his own private torment. Still, some of the haze in his mind clears. “What am I to believe you were doing, then? Simply seeing if you could? If she’d let you?”
“Oh, I tried that back on the dance floor,” Bas says, and has the audacity to laugh. “Do you know what she told me? ‘That’s really flattering, Bas, but, um, I think I’m actually in love with someone else’,” he quotes, affecting a breathy voice Rupert assumes is meant to be Taggie’s. “Which was more or less what I’d suspected she’d say, of course.”
Rupert blinks. “What? Why?”
“Because she’s in love with you, you idiot. That’s what I’ve spent the last ten minutes talking to her about, letting the poor dear cry it out on my shoulder. ‘He doesn’t want me, Bas,’ she said, ‘he thinks he’ll break me, but he won’t,’ and on and on. I’ve seen my share of women despondent over you, but never one quite so devastated as that.”
To that, he has no answer, his mind racing but dead blank, the way it went in the ring, nothing but the next jump ahead, and the next, and the next. “But I will break her,” he says, his voice flat, defeated. “You know I will. Because you know you would, and we’re alike in that way.”
“I would,” Bas agrees, as if it’s nothing, pulling a pack of cigarettes from somewhere beneath his costume and lighting one. “But you won’t. You actually care about her. Do you know how I knew that?”
“How?” Bas knows him better than just about anyone in the world, but he can’t know that. No one can, when Rupert can hardly hold onto the thought himself.
“Because of this party. You hated the whole idea of it, the need for it, the time and money we’d have to spend on it, the concept, everything. You wanted nothing to do with it. And yet, when it became clear it would go ahead with or without you, you insisted on holding it here at Penscombe. Why?”
Rupert shrugs, feeling a muscle tick along the side of his jaw. “The house is huge and it’s been years since I held a party here.”
“No,” Bas says, turning his head to the side, blowing out a stream of smoke into the blackness of the night. “Do you know why I think you did that? Because you knew if the party was held at either The Priory or Green Lawns, they’d make Taggie plan it, and cater it, and serve at it, and let her work herself into exhaustion for them, all while they hardly even noticed. But if you held it here, you could bring in whoever you wanted to work it, even though she’s by far the best in Rutshire. And that’s exactly what you did.”
Tipping his head back, Rupert stares up at the blanket of stars. Leave it to Bas to notice, and to put it all together. “Yes.”
“Look,” Bas says. “It’s all very honorable of you, this whole self-denial bit. But I can’t stand watching you two make yourselves miserable a moment longer, so please, if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”
Rupert laughs despite himself, a strangled sound. “As romantic propositions go, I’ve heard better.”
“How about this, then? When I told Tag what I just told you, her face positively glowed, and she kissed me–on the cheek, mind, don’t hit me–when I promised her I’d come out and talk you down from your noble-minded high horse. She’s waiting for you.” Jerking his chin up, Bas indicates the upper window Rupert knows to be his own bedroom, Taggie standing there framed by the curtains, looking for all the world as though she were holding her breath. “Don’t disappoint her, man. Not really behavior fitting of a musketeer and all that.”
Above them, Taggie touches the windowpane, her eyes locked with Rupert’s, and he breathes in, all the tightness in his chest vanishing at once.
“You’re a good friend, Bas,” he says, clapping him on the shoulder and heading for the door.
“All for one,” Bas says, executing a mocking bow, cigarette flourished in his hand like a sword, “and all the rest for me, or something along those lines. You’ve always been my greatest competition around here. It’ll be wonderful to have you off the market.”
“So you did this for purely selfish reasons, did you?” Rupert asks, walking backwards towards the door, unable to wait a moment longer.
“Why else?” Bas says, and winks, and flashes that damned grin, the one that promises nothing in the world could really be so bad, not if he was still around to make it lighter.
“Love you too, Bas,” Rupert calls, and heads for the stairs.