Read A Seditious Affair for Free Online Page A

your side.” The brute sloshed out the Moselle as if it were gin. “I was saying that to a lad I know just a couple of days ago. He’s another one trying to make a circle square by thinking. Well, sometimes you can’t. You got to stand by your friends or your duty, right? Can’t do both, and you got to choose.”
    “That’s it precisely,” Dominic said. “And I don’t want to.”
    The brute looked at him. Then he put down his glass on the side table, reached out a powerful arm, and gripped Dominic’s shoulder, pulling him over, and Dominic let himself be pulled until he could rest against the brute’s shoulder, leaning into his strength, and feel his steady heart.
    “It ain’t much fun doing what’s right, sometimes.” The brute’s voice was quiet. “I’ve done it and paid for it and been sorry for my choices even when I couldn’t’ve chosen otherwise. Sometimes there’s no way that means you can look yourself in the face afterward. I know this much, Tory: You’re wrongheaded in your politics, but you’re a decent man. Whether you’ll make the right decisions, I don’t know, but I’d back you to try your best, and if your friends can’t see that, they’re fools.”
    Dominic had to take a moment before he could reply. His throat felt absurdly tight. “Thank you.” The brute’s arm tightened, and Dominic blurted, “I wish—”
    “What?”
    “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
    I wish you’d tell me your name.
    I wish I dared tell you mine.

Chapter 3
    Silas looked around the shop with some satisfaction, ignoring George Charkin’s grumbles. It felt like a good day.
    They’d put the heavy bookcase over the trapdoor to the cellar, where he kept the handpress. It was a nuisance to do, especially since they’d just have to move it all back in a couple of days when he finished the next Jack Cade pamphlet, but better sure than sorry. Wouldn’t want to risk the law, after all.
    The law. That made him think of the Tory last night, torn by his dilemma. Looking for the right thing to do when his body was still marked by Silas’s fingers and teeth and prick, when he’d just been on his knees, begging for permission to spend. There was something Silas planned to do again—keep him on the verge of firing his shot for an hour or more, make him plead and gasp for it. That was what the Tory needed, not the pain or the shame but the surrender. He had to give it all up, and he had to be forced to it.
    It was no surprise he was fretting about a duty. Silas would have wagered he was some kind of upstanding citizen in the rest of his life. A minister or a lawyer maybe, a man who put principle before everything and was brought low by a blackguard radical in his private hours.
    His precious, peculiar Tory.
    “You going to help me with this or what?” George’s skinny arms strained to lift a crate. Silas shook himself out of his reverie and hurried over. Work to do.
    He could have sworn that the Tory was going to ask his name, though. Had known he would, with a sense of leaping anticipation for something, he wasn’t sure what, and had been disappointed when the question hadn’t come. He’d already decided he’d give his name if asked. Maybe that was rash, but he wanted to hear the Tory say it. Would it sound vulgar in that educated gentleman’s voice? Would the Tory use it to beg him, Please, Silas, please . . . ?
    “Ow!” bellowed George. “You landed that right on my foot! Bloody wake up!”
    Silas mumbled an apology of sorts. Wake up indeed. It felt like a very long time till next Wednesday.
    An hour or so later, he was going through the ledger when he heard a noise outside. Tramping feet, a familiar stir in the crowd.
    “What’s going on?” he asked George, indicating the door.
    George went and peered out. “Couple of swells and a squad with ’em. Six men, two redcoats.”
    “Where are they going?”
    George paused, then said, voice a little strangled, “Looks like . . . no, but . . . God’s