Since the years of their boyhood, Hal was the only one who had ever trusted Bart to make up his own mind. Where do you want to go? Hal would ask. We’ll go anywhere you like.
It became a game, to listen at doorways and gather clues from their elders. London seemed full of places with odd and wondrous names. Boodle’s. Jermyn Street. Hatchards. The Star and Garter.
And so would begin one of their adventures. Hal always knew where to find their quarry. He and Bart would slip out of Tallant House and run through the streets of London, their feet crunching on stone macadam or raising puffs of dust. Sometimes they wore no shoes, and every scratch, every cuff, every time someone shook a fist at the two dirty ragamuffins felt like a victory. They were in disguise. They were not young scions of the gentry; they were simply free.
“Do you remember how we used to knock on the windows of Boodle’s?” The question slipped out, unleashed by Bart’s reminiscing.
Bart wrapped the reins once more about his hands, as if taking hold of himself. His grays tossed their heads in protest but slowed to a walk. Pall Mall was two walls of brick and stone rising on either side of a clutter of foot traffic and carriages. Hard to believe that he and Hal had once run through here. No taller than the curricle wheels, they could easily have been crushed by a careless driver. But Hal had always let him choose where to go. It was wonderful, such trust.
Bart darted a look at his friend. Hal was sitting very straight on the padded curricle seat, squinting at some huge building. “Sorry, Bart. What was that you said?”
“Nothing.” Bart chucked and turned the horses onto St. James’s Street. This plan might not work. He hadn’t known where to go, so he went where they always used to go. Where, as boys, they’d thought all men went. A square formed by four bustling streets of clubs, grand houses, cigar stores, bookshops. It seemed the beating heart of the city once.
Hal seemed to wake up in his seat. “Boodle’s. Yes, you’re right.” He leaned forward, looking for the familiar brown-brick building, the dramatic white arch of its huge central window. Lit at night by a massive chandelier, its brightness was a beacon, drawing small boys to make mischief.
Hal laughed, a short, startled exhale that little resembled his old explosions of mirth. Before the war, no one could laugh like Hal. His laugh was hearty and deep; it made the world want to laugh with him.
It made Bart sad to hear Hal laugh now.
But Hal looked pleased. “How angry Jem used to get when we’d hang over the iron railing and rap on the window. Do you remember how I used to steal his malacca cane to do it?”
“Salt in the wound, Hal. Gad, he was proud of that thing. A swordstick, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.” Hal settled back against the padded seat. “He had it made when our father died and he became Tallant. Something about the title meaning ‘good with a sword.’ I believe it was granted in the long-lost past for heroism in battle.”
“I don’t remember your brother ever being much good with a sword. Probably because we were always stealing it from him.”
“Poor Jem. He always was a good brother, you know. He deserved better than such teasing from me. A man should be able to sit down with friends without being tormented.” Hal’s posture grew taut; Bart could tell from the way the seat shifted.
“They were just boys’ pranks, Hal. Nothing more.” Bart glanced at his friend, trying to read Hal’s expression. Either it was blank or Bart was out of practice.
“Oh, I know. Did you know that Wellington’s a member of Boodle’s?” Hal sounded strange, and the smile he gave Bart was strange too. Bart wanted to sigh as they drew past Boodle’s and turned onto Piccadilly.
Here was Hatchards, tall and gray, where they’d once bought horrifying novels, telling the bemused clerk they were for Bart’s sisters.
And next to it… “Fortnum’s,” Hal said. They had never run here, never had the slightest interest in a store where no pranks could be played, nothing bawdy bought. But the adult Hal had had much to do with Fortnum’s, which had fed the army for years.
It seemed there was nowhere Bart could drive that would allow them both to think nothing had changed.
And why should there be? Everything had changed. Bart was the one asking, Where do you want to go? And Hal didn’t trust Bart anymore. Bart could tell from the too-hearty cheer of his voice, nothing like real cheer at all.
When Bart was a boy, a youth, the Middlebrooks were everything he had wanted to be: friendly, confident, and clever. Bart never had succeeded in becoming what he wished. But this Hal in the curricle—he wasn’t that sort of man either anymore. He seemed but a portrait of his old self, baked brittle in an oven and cracked all over.
Which reminded Bart of something that might jolt Hal out of his reverie. “Hal, I can make the circuit back to Pall Mall. We could stop in at the British Institution and look at the new paintings.”
“The British Institution?” Hal was caught; he leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, excellent idea. Let’s go there. Though I thought you hated it?” He cut his eyes at Bart, his mouth curving.
Clever Hal. Bart had always hated the British Institution. He had hated every endless afternoon he’d ever spent in its quiet pinkish-walled rooms, waiting as Hal studied painting after painting and the promised “just one hour” inevitably turned into three or four.
Pink, to Bart, would always be the color of tedium.
But Hal wanted to go. He’d given an answer at last. And that must mean he trusted Bart, at least a little.
Maybe not everything had changed.
“We’ll go anywhere you like,” Bart said dutifully, diplomatically, and chucked his horses into a trot back toward Pall Mall.
***
Henry came back to Tallant House more tired than he had expected to be, and more hot and more… well, more glad.
The drive hadn’t started well. As they’d driven down Pall Mall the first time, Henry had noticed only two things. Cumberland House, a stretching Palladian mansion that seemed to loom up into the sky and stare at Henry as he passed by its seven bays of windows. Here squatted the Board of Ordnance, the army’s mapmakers, the ones who ensured that weapons and powder got to soldiers—or didn’t.
And the Guards’ Club, as inconspicuous as the other building was eye-catching. It was a narrow town house, quoined and pilastered in tasteful style, home to a new club that the other officers in the Foot Guards looked forward to joining someday. Henry had turned his back on it when he sold his commission, yet here it was, in his face.
But Bart, good man, had opened Henry’s eyes to the other buildings. Years, he had lived in this square of Town, and he’d run down these streets, and he’d loved London. Everything he’d loved about the city—its noise, its life, its vitality—was still here.
Visiting the British Institution had been painful yet sweet, like looking on the picture of a beloved dead relative. Henry knew he could never set up an easel within its galleries again, copying paintings with eager energy. He would never win the coveted prize awarded to the artist who could create a fitting companion to the Old Masters.
But he still had eyes in his head. He could look and wonder and admire. He could study color and scrutinize brushstrokes.
And he could still prod Bart through room after room and watch his old friend try to stifle jaw-cracking yawns.
Yes, he was glad he had gone out. And when the fastidious Sowerberry gave Henry a letter after helping him off with his dusty, too-warm coat, Henry was glad he’d come back. A letter from Caro today was the essential extra that made everything just as it should be. A letter would help him capture this skittish optimism and cage it within himself.