Percy’s hand went to his hip, in an almost longing reach for a weapon that wasn’t there. Since returning to England, he had yearned for a chance to fence. Ordinarily, he sparred with those of his peers who were similarly interested in the pastime, but that was presently out of the question. Sometimes he even visited a fencing studio—low sorts of places, but needs must—but it seemed that during his absence, something of a fashion for fencing had sprung up among the more daring sons of the aristocracy. And so Percy had spent the weeks since his return eyeing his weapons, occasionally taking them out to sharpen or polish, but with no prospect of putting them to good use.
It had been his mother who insisted that he learn to fence, on the theory that Percy, who had been so small as to be nearly delicate, needed to develop some talent at intimidation. He was the last of the Percys; his mother had hoped for more, but she got a thin, pale, invisible, charmless child and made the most of him. And for that, Percy was grateful.
Nobody would have considered the late Duchess of Clare to be a doting mother, but she had detected in her son the early signs of a fatal weakness and done her best to teach him to conquer this failing. She had seen that he was eager to please, generous of mind, and disinclined to cause pain. In a person born into ordinary circumstances, a person who need concern himself with nothing more than his acres and his family, these qualities might even merit praise. For the future Duke of Clare, they would get him trampled on, stolen from, and possibly killed. His very gentleness would make him putty in the hands of the wrong person.
She taught him that because he was the heir to an uncommon degree of wealth, power, and pedigree, people would try to use him. She taught him to trust nobody but herself and people who he paid enough to need him.
She taught him that there was no such thing as peace and that any struggle or skirmish would involve the Duke of Clare; for a man in his position there was no such thing as neutrality. She taught him to look for the seeds of unrest, and it wasn’t until much later that he realized she never told him what to do once he found those seeds—whether to stomp on the tender shoots or to water them.
Percy was to be aware of the hidden currents of power and strife that flowed beneath the surface of ordinary life, and he was to channel them for his own preservation. For preservation had been the duchess’s goal, and all her lessons had been for the purpose of teaching her only child self-defense against a world that she believed would eat him alive.
Percy insisted that he didn’t need to use a weapon in order to survive in this frightening world his mother described; he said that surely a sharp tongue and a title were all he needed, citing the duchess herself as all the precedent he required to support his argument. But she had prevailed, and a fencing tutor had duly been imported from France.
That had been ten years ago, and since then Percy had grown tall enough that he hardly needed a sword to intimidate. But now he thought he understood his mother’s motivation—she had probably been trying to improve Percy’s confidence more than his ability to physically defend himself. After all, life as the heir to the Clare dukedom and loyal son of his father’s principal enemy hardly required much in the way of physical combat. It did, however, require quite a bit of brazenness.
And it required even more, now that he knew he wasn’t the heir at all. It would be a great deal easier if he could simply go after his father and his hirelings with a sword.
Percy watched the prizefight with increasing interest, the delicate clash of swords soothing him in the way he supposed a hot cup of tea might work on someone with more reasonable sensibilities. He had witnessed prizefights as a child and abroad as a young man. The combatants were usually ruffians of a very low order who attempted to hack one another to pieces with badly honed weapons and no pretense to any skill whatsoever. And at first glance these swordsmen were little better than vagabonds: one of them had a long gash bisecting an eyebrow, and he didn’t think the two men had more than a dozen teeth between them.
But just as he was about to decide that this spectacle wasn’t worth his time, the fight ended and the loser left the platform to a chorus of jeers. Another man climbed up, there was some exchange of words that Percy couldn’t hear, and the next thing he knew both men held swords. They bowed to one another and began sparring, with rather more clatter and elaborate footwork than strictly necessary, but Percy had to concede that they knew what they were doing. They both wore close-fitting garments and had their hair shorn close to the scalp. This, he supposed, gave their opponents fewer places to grab should the fight devolve into outright fisticuffs. His lip curled in distaste.
One of the men executed turns and flourishes to the wild enthusiasm of the crowd. Coins appeared from purses and pockets rather faster and more often than they had during the previous match. Percy wasn’t certain how the fighters were paid, whether their only incentive was the final prize awarded to the last man left standing at the culmination of the day’s battles, or whether they received a share of the amount wagered on the fight’s outcome. They fought like a small fortune was at stake, and Percy had a hard time prying his eyes away.
As he watched, he realized that the uncertain feeling in the pit of his stomach was jealousy—he wished he were on the platform, holding a sword. He missed the feeling of a hilt in his hand, a blade obeying his commands. Of course he couldn’t join in a public prizefight; the Marquess of Holland simply didn’t—
Except that soon enough, he wouldn’t have any standing to lose. And he could earn some coin, a prospect that he found rather thrilling in its novelty as well as probably a good idea for someone whose fortunes were, at best, uncertain. The idea of earning money through the one skill he possessed surely should not feel quite so daring, but Percy’s heart raced at the thought.
He let his feet carry him the short distance to Webb’s coffeehouse. When he opened the door, he was surprised to find that the overwhelming smell of tobacco and coffee was almost welcoming. He slid into a seat at the long table. Webb was nowhere to be seen, but Betty poured him a coffee. Her eyes slid right over him, and he realized that she didn’t recognize him in drab clothes.
Half the table was involved in a debate about taxes, a topic Percy found about as thrilling as a dose of laudanum. Instead of joining the conversation, he sipped his coffee and found that he could tell this pot had been brewed by Betty, not Webb, because it tasted like proper coffee rather than what Webb achieved by tossing in a chaotic array of herbs and spices. He glanced around the room, noting that the bookshelves were as distressingly disorganized as usual and that a spider was weaving a cobweb across the entrance to the staircase. Strands of silk caught the light, shimmering prettily through the smoke, and Percy regretted that it would be destroyed as soon as Webb knocked his stubborn head into it.
As if Percy had summoned him, Webb stomped into the room, not from upstairs but rather from the door that led outside to an alley. He banged his walking stick into the floor in an apparent attempt to get everyone’s attention. The stick didn’t even make that loud a noise, but the room quickly hushed.
“All right, you lot. Somebody’s been scribbling Tory nonsense on the privy walls.” Every eye in the room was on Webb, as if he were a magnet. He wasn’t even raising his voice above his usual scratchy growl. “You want to write Tory slogans, you do at it the coffeehouse across the way with the rest of the Tory scum.” As Webb spoke, he looked at his audience, and his gaze caught on Percy, and Percy knew he had been recognized. “Here, we serve Whigs and radicals.”