Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade Read Online Free PDF Page B

brother’s obvious agitation. Over all of it, though, was the image of the page he had held so briefly in his hands.
    He forced all other thought from his mind, concentrating on remembering, committing the words he had read to memory. He still felt the shock of Hal’s throwing the paper into the fire, and could not bear the thought that those words of his father’s, pedestrian as they might be, should be lost to him. The duke’s journals were no secret, and yet he had read them secretly, abstracting one at a time and smuggling each volume to his room, returning them to their shelf, careful that no one should see.
    He could not have said why it seemed important to keep this postmortem relationship with his father private. Only that it had been.
    He had more or less succeeded in fixing at least the substance of the vanished page in memory, when Hal finally hunched his shoulders and spoke abruptly.
    “There has been talk. Regarding conspiracies.”
    “When is there not? Which particular conspiracy concerns you?”
    “Not me, so much.” Hal settled his hat more firmly, bending his head into the wind. “And it has not yet blown up into open scandal, but it almost certainly will—and soon.”
    “I don’t doubt it,” Grey observed caustically. “There hasn’t been a decent scandal since Christmas. Who does this one involve?”
    “A sodomite conspiracy to undermine the government by assassination of selected ministers.”
    Grey felt a tightening of the belly, but replied casually. It was not the first time he had heard of such a notion; sodomitical associations and conspiracies were a standby of street criers and Fleet Street hacks whenever news became too slow.
    “And why does this concern you?”
    Hal fixed his eyes on the slimy cobbles.
    “Us. It is a thing that was said. Of—of Father.” The word struck Grey in the pit of the stomach, like a pebble from a sling. He was not sure he had ever heard Hal use the word “Father” any time in the last fifteen years.
    “That he was a sodomite?” Grey said, incredulous. Hal drew a deep breath, but seemed to relax a bit.
    “No. Not in so many words. Nor was it—thank God—a popular rumor. Only random accusations at the time of his death, made by members of the Society—such accusations were common, thrown at almost every man of any visibility connected with the South Sea Bubble. The scandal was blamed on ‘companies of sodomites’—though God knows it was blamed on every other group, interest, or person anyone could think of, as well. But the Society was prominent at the time, and sodomitical conspiracies were their particular obsession.”
    “The Society?” Grey said blankly. “Which Society is this?”
    “I forgot. You would not have been old enough to hear much at the time—”
    “Damned little, in Aberdeen.” Grey made no attempt to keep an edge of bitterness from his voice, and his brother glanced sharply at him.
    “Which is precisely why you were sent there,” Hal said, his voice level. “In any case, it is the Society for the Reformation of Manners to which I refer; you
have
heard of them?”
    “I have, yes.” Angry and unsettled, Grey was making no effort to hide his feelings, and let distaste and contempt show in his voice. “Prigs and puritans, who will not acknowledge their own base urges, but find delight—and release, no doubt—in accusations of corruption, in blackening the characters of innocent men. They are—”
    Hal put a restraining hand on his arm again—no more than a touch, this time—to keep him from speaking further, as two chairmen went by at the trot, their heads wreathed in white smoke from their panting breath.
    The cold and twilight kept many folk indoors, but there were those whose livelihoods compelled them to the streets, and as they approached St. James Street, there began to be more of them. A balladeer, chestnut sellers, apple-women crying the virtues of their wizened fruit. Grey saw his brother scrutinize