The Bohemian (xii) pt. 1
Title: A Ruinous Season: The Bohemian
Pairing: OT5
Genre: Historical AU, Crossover
Setting: Regency England. Year 1814 during the Spring-Summer social Season.
Rating: R
A/N: An anonymous comment on kpopficwangst 3.0 mentioned wanting to see a KPop Regency AU story. I decided to write one with SHINee. In my defense, I did it for the lulz. My deepest gratitude to my superlative beta glynnis.
Previous
~~✺~~
From over the top of his Bible, Minho watched Jonghyun and Lady Fauconberg advance toward a set of French windows. His friend stamped along as though he was trying to plunge through the floor, and Lady Fauconberg was walking strangely as well -- gingerly, as though the parquet would vanish from beneath her at any moment. Jonghyun flung open the windows and gestured rudely at his wife to step out onto the balcony. Once she obliged him, he slammed the windows shut behind them with a great bang that caused several members of the ton to start and stare, and at least one lady somewhere in the crowded ballroom to utter a screech of alarm.
Shaking his head, Minho looked back to his Bible and decided it was highly probable that only one of them would emerge from the balcony with limbs intact and in proper working order. If he were the gambling sort -- of course he wasn’t! He only ever accompanied Taemin to the gaming hells in order to sit at His Grace’s side and occasionally interject some pertinent passage of the Good Book condemning the shameful wickedness of such a vice -- but if he were, he would stake the entirety of Audley End House against Jonghyun being the one to return unscathed, for Lady Fauconberg had worn an expression of deep and abiding displeasure.
The steely and forceful look in her eyes brought back to Minho the discomfiting memory of the day, not long after Jonghyun had traipsed off and left her disgraced, when Lady Fauconberg had sat across from him in the drawing room of his townhouse and asked of him a favor that had plagued his conscience ever since. It was highly untoward of him to share a secret with his friend’s wife, he knew that, and Minho was certain that if Jonghyun was apprised of it, he would regard it a grievous betrayal. But to tell Jonghyun would be to forsake his sworn promise to a lady, something Minho was uncertain he could do, for it would mean betraying his own honor and duty as a gentleman. He knew the limits of Jonghyun’s temper and how it fled as swiftly as it arose, but he did not know the extent of Lady Fauconberg’s capacity for wrath. He rather thought that it was a knowledge he was not eager to acquire, since he could still recall perfectly the fearsome gleam in her feline eyes as she said quietly, upon his inquiry why such an elaborate subterfuge was necessary, "I have my reasons, which are my concern alone. Please pay me the respect a gentleman would to a lady, Lord Mandeville, and do not impose upon me to explain."
She had appealed to his honor as a gentleman, the one thing he could not forfeit, and therefore she had secured his complicity. Remembering the look of confusion on Jonghyun’s face earlier, guilt gnawed at Minho, and he found he could not concentrate on the print before his eyes. If it had been a matter as simple as telling her of Jonghyun's address...but she had already known that. No, it had involved a great deal more -- his handwriting, his furtive visits to the village inn to check the private letter box he'd secured so that the letters wouldn't be delivered directly to Audley End for the servants to gossip over...even the wicked thrill he'd felt when riding back to his estate with a letter tucked into the breast of his tail coat right over his pounding heart or when he opened one of the envelopes with unsteady hands, carefully slipped out the letter, and redeposited it into a new envelope he'd already prepared. The first time had caused him so much distress, he'd spent an entire sleepless night on his hands and knees praying for forgiveness, but then it had gotten easier and before long, it had become part of the routine of his life -- a private little part that he had been impious enough to have secretly enjoyed even as he berated himself for it.
It had been so wrong, he knew that, and to say nothing was worse. He could only pray that his silence did not cost him too dearly.
“It seems that the more life changes, the more it remains the same,” Onew remarked, smiling.
Relieved to be interrupted from his troubled thoughts, Minho closed his Bible and regarded his friend curiously. Onew tipped his head in the direction of the French windows, and Minho smiled at him in understanding. Before he could agree, though, Key let out a snort of disgust. Minho followed Key’s scornful gaze to the opposite end of the room and saw that Taemin seemed deeply engaged in conversation with a lady whom Minho did not recognize.
“Who is that ghastly creature? And on what turnip cart did she arrive this evening?” Key demanded, glaring through his quizzing glass.
Minho inspected the subject of Key’s derision thoughtfully. She was not beautiful; her features were too strong for true delicacy and her eyes a touch too widely spaced and somber to inspire a gentleman’s ardor, if one were more inclined to merry sparkling eyes and frivolous gaiety. She was also unfashionably sun-browned, and the yellow shade of her gown was unflattering to her coloring. Nevertheless, Minho found he rather appreciated her air of gravity and sense -- it lent her a serenity very few ladies in the room possessed, so consumed were they with their own fanciful sensibilities.
Minho rolled his eyes and sighed. “That seems rather unlikely, since only ton was allowed past the front entrance. She must be the daughter of a peer.”
“Perhaps that is true. Certainly by the look of her, it is quite plain -- and I do mean plain -- such a mopsey could only be the issue of some provincial, under-the-hatches baron. She need not utter a word to fair announce that she has been sent here to snare a pigeon into a leg-shackle. Why, her bilious colored rag of a gown might as well be embroidered with ‘Smithfield bargain’ all across it.” Key sniffed loudly and made an exaggerated show of waving his fan in front of his nose as if to chase off the phantom odor of the ‘rag of a gown.' “I do not wish to hazard a guess as to what sort of toadying taradiddles she could be prattling to His Grace to gain his sympathy, but I am sure he could not possibly find it beguiling in the slightest!”
Onew had hunched up his shoulders and looked down into his glass of orgeat lemonade, his face going completely expressionless, at Key’s tactless remark concerning the title of baron. Minho’s mouth tightened in anger. He knew Onew would not rebuke Key, for Onew was unwilling to show that he was acutely aware of his own lowered status in comparison to theirs, but on such occasions when Key’s tongue was so cruelly cavalier, Minho could not hold his.
“I shall thank you to rest your supercilious mouth for a moment, Kouraille. That is, if you can manage it,” Minho said coolly, leveling a flat stare at Key.
Key let his quizzing glass drop from his fingers, and it swung from its ribbon attached to his waistcoat. With a flick of his wrist, he snapped his fan closed and tapped Minho warningly on the shoulder with it. “And I do thank you, Strange, to carefully consider the manner in which you address someone who precedes you in both age and rank,” he murmured, his tone light but as cold as Minho’s had been.
Minho pushed the delicately carved fan and the incongruously large hand holding it away from him. “When your conduct merits the respect afforded by two months and sixteen days, I shall endeavor to alter mine accordingly. Until then --”
He was cut short by Onew, who hastily exclaimed, “Yes, yes, indeed, we are all growing older, are we not? Of course, time flies when one is amongst dear friends,” Onew finished with a pleading smile at Minho. Minho bristled at the dependence Onew always had on him to lapse into a diplomatic silence during quarrels with Key. Typically, it was Key himself who had, with a carefully cultivated lack of self-awareness as to his own hypocrisy so finely garbed it was in arrogance, touched on the issue of age. Key was older, and yet Minho was expected, by Onew and everyone else, to behave with the maturity Key refused to assume.
To Minho’s greater irritation, Onew persisted, his smile growing broader and more fixed. “Does it not seem as though the intervening three years never occurred, for Fauconberg is with us again and quite the same as he ever was?”
Minho gritted his teeth and bit back an impatient sigh. He saw Onew’s platitudes for what they were: a feeble, desperate attempt to deny that their circle had become strained to a state of instability in those three years.
“Yes, other than his hair, Fauconberg seems unchanged,” Minho replied as blandly as he could. Despite what Onew said, Minho had the feeling that the halcyon days were long past, never to be recaptured, and that the storm for their circle was just beginning.
As though to reinforce his suspicion, Key opened his inciting mouth and said airily, although Minho was not fooled by his affectation of good humor, “I trust that not even you, Strange, can find fault with me if I offer up a prayer of gratitude to your beloved God that He has been beneficent enough to send Fauconberg back to us still possessing a trace of moral fibre. To have a staunch, unvarying friend who has shown himself in the past to be bold and resolute when one is surrounded by gutless hectors with feet of clay is something to be thankful for indeed.”
“That is unfair, Kouraille,” Onew muttered, his face appearing stricken but his eyes vague, as though he had already retreated far within himself.
Minho could not keep his hands from clenching around the edges of his Bible, so tightly that the binding bit into his fingers. He was sure that Onew realized as well as he did the subject Key, in a fury, was rapidly approaching. That same wrenching feud, the longstanding grudge Key could not resist from revisiting again and again, as though he believed he could wear them down into acceding to his will or, failing that, tear them down for their refusal to do so. Minho could already predict the course of the conversation and all of their roles in it -- Key coldly enraged and full of recriminations and criticisms of him and Onew, Onew resigned to Key’s blame but firm in his dissent, and Minho himself as inwardly frustrated as Key outwardly was at Key’s defiance of the reality that argument on the matter was fruitless.
Onew looked down into his glass once more. “This is neither the time nor place to enter into this discussion again.”
“Discussion?” Key retorted with a shrill, brittle laugh. “When have either of you paid me the courtesy of even allowing a discussion on this matter? Kindly do not attempt to revise history; you are both against me, do not deny it.”
“Why should we bother to deny what you have already fixed in your mind to be the truth? If we deny it, you do not listen, so consumed are you with the irrational certainty that we are somehow persecuting you,” Minho countered.
Two spots of red appeared on Key’s high cheekbones. “How dare you have the temerity to speak to me thus, Strange. You must be half-witted to charge me with not listening, for it is you -- you and Guernsey -- who refuse to hear me.”
“I dare because you are being absurd,” Minho responded, feeling himself flush with affront too. “His Grace has made it beyond clear his stance on the issue, and yet you cannot respect that? How dare you?”
“You really are a cods-head if you believe he has the necessary distance to adjudge the true nature of the situation. I am appalled that you would fail to see how it’s impossible for him given he is the source. If we approached him again, endeavored to reason with him united in resolve --”
“No,” Minho declared, “I will not, Kouraille. What you suggest is offensive to everything I believe to be right.”
Key shook his head, and his eyes went wide in feigned surprise. “Oh, and that is the crux of it, is it, Strange? What you believe to be right, what you find offensive, it must necessarily be in respect to you and your highly attuned sense of virtue and honor. Sometimes I wonder if you possess a drop of caring at all for that dear boy across the room, I really do, for it seems as though I am quite alone in that regard.”
Minho would not take a step back in the face of Key’s furious gaze and sneering mouth; he would not give Key the satisfaction of seeing how much his last comment had wounded him. To openly call into question his caring for Taemin was too cruel a cut, even for Key. Worse, Key had implicitly included Onew -- their leader who stood subdued and too diffident to defend himself -- in his senseless denunciation.
He took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. “If we are speculating on personal motivation, Kouraille, then I must confess I wonder about yours as well. What you present as selfless caring on your part appears rather more controlling and manipulative from where I stand.”
Seemingly unaware of his own actions, Key gripped the fan he held between his palms so violently that Minho saw it shake and heard it beginning to crack.
“Then perhaps it is in your own best interest to stand further away from me, dear boy,” Key suggested.
They regarded each other in silence, neither willing to stand down. Finally, Onew spoke again, this time in a low harsh whisper. It was a disturbing tone that Onew rarely used, except when provoked too far, which was often the result of confrontations over this recurring dispute.
“That is quite enough; we are in a public setting. Not another word, I will not have it.”
“I see,” Key said quietly, staring down at the damaged fan in his hands, resentment lacing his every word, “and I am the one being unfair.”
“Enough, Kouraille,” Onew admonished.
“Yes, I have borne quite enough,” Key replied, his eyes as hard and bitter as his voice. “I have held my tongue on this matter all evening until now out of deference to Fauconberg, but be assured that I will broach it with him and soon. I can depend on him to listen to me and truly hear me, as he always has when the two of you have denied me.”
Onew’s voice was still quiet, but Minho detected a slight unsteadiness in it. “If you must, but I do not think he will be in agreement with you.”
“Then you are as much a fool as Strange, for Fauconberg has always been my ally. Do not think three years apart alters that. He and I understand each other; we are of like minds in ways you and Strange cannot possibly fathom,” Key said loftily.
If he is to agree with you, then you are indeed of like minds -- idiotic ones! Minho wished to say. He opened his mouth to do just that, but a commotion near the entrance to the ballroom made him turn.
A tall young gentleman with light brown hair, one thick lock precisely and purposefully arranged so that it fell over his forehead and obscured his right eye, had strode through the archway holding a glass of sherry in each hand. Minho frowned to recognize the man, who was laughing and loudly exchanging greetings with several of the other gentlemen in the room, as one whom he esteemed least in all of England -- the Earl of Ipres, one of Kouraille’s dearest friends. In Minho’s opinion, although the Earl of Ipres was as much of an irredeemable rakehell as Kouraille, at least Key was a straightforward dandy whereas Seunghyun Severn Ferrand-Toler was a ridiculous fop of the first order. And not just a fop, but a louche, debauched boor perpetually foxed and addled on laudanum.
Minho's contempt for Ferrand-Toler had been cemented that night last year when he had seen the man slip into His Grace’s bedchamber during the Commedia dell’arte ball Taemin held every Season at Cliveden. Anger inflamed him at the very memory of standing in the shadow of the doorway and watching in disgusted disbelief as Ferrand-Toler had rummaged through His Grace’s belongings and proceeded to pocket vials of laudanum and other medicines. He had confronted the man, who had not bothered to deny it and had instead laughed and claimed that His Grace could spare it and would likely not even find anything amiss. That cool, impudent disregard for Taemin’s generosity as their host had infuriated Minho. If it had not been for that, Minho would have let the matter rest upon Ferrand-Toler returning the vials to their proper place, but he could not bear anyone disrespecting His Grace, so he had confided in Guernsey. Then they had informed Taemin, who had received the news very calmly. But Ferrand-Toler had left the masque ball quite early, much to Kouraille’s dismay.
“Excellent,” Key declared. “Dear Toley is here and not a moment too soon. Perhaps he can save me from this dreadfully dull company.”
Minho took a deep breath to calm himself and tightened his hands around his Bible to keep himself from smacking Kouraille across the face with the Good Book. Key did not even deserve to have his cheek meet its hallowed cover if he preferred the company of a thief and a scoundrel such as Ferrand-Toler to his and Guernsey’s. Worse, it was the company Kouraille spoke of with such bare-faced contempt who protected him from knowing the vile truth of his dear ‘Toley,’ for His Grace had made Minho and Onew promise never to tell Key what had transpired, seeing rightly that the knowledge that one of his closest friends cared so little for Kouraille’s esteem that he would attempt to steal from Taemin -- whom Kouraille considered dearer than anything -- would be a nasty blow to their haughty friend. That Ferrand-Toler had the sheer audacity to attend tonight’s ball when he must’ve known that His Grace would be present was nothing less than an outrage in Minho’s eyes. Although he supposed it should not be a surprise, since the degenerate was similar to Kouraille in that he would rather lose his prized tailor to a premature demise than fail to put in an appearance at a ton ball. Undoubtedly, since they were such bosom bows, Minho surmised that Ferrand-Toler believed the same as Kouraille did: that no ball or rout could even be considered to have commenced until his arrival. Minho only hoped that His Grace did not cross paths with the lout tonight.
At the moment, he was of a mind to enlighten Kouraille as to his foolishness in favoring Ferrand-Toler -- and to think that Key disparaged his choice of friends by continually mocking Donghae d’Avranches, who was worth more than ten of a miscreant like Ipres -- but before he could, Onew squeezed his arm and shook his head in warning. Minho bit his lip and maintained his silence, seething as Key turned his back to them quite pointedly.
Glancing over his shoulder, Key sneered, “Gentlemen, you will pardon me if I take my leave to more diverting society.”
Minho returned Key’s glare but said nothing.
“Ah, I fear I have disappointed you, Kouraille,” Onew said with a taut, rueful smile.
Key’s eyes narrowed, and he whispered through teeth bared in a mockery of a smile, “Yes, and I fear it is a recurring circumstance. One so frequent of late as to likely become a permanent state of being.”
With that last damning charge, Key stormed off in the direction of his dear Toley. Furious, Minho watched his progress through the throng. But to Minho’s confusion, Ferrand-Toler ignored Kouraille, who was calling out his name, and was staring over at him and Onew. His gaze met Minho’s incensed one. The brazen smile on Ferrand-Toler’s face faded, and he regarded Minho gravely before giving him a slow nod of acknowledgment. Minho turned his face away. He did not wish to witness any overtures at civility from that villain. The Earl of Ipres was a despicable, godless reprobate through and through, and Minho would always believe so.
“Well, it does seem as though once more I have made a mull of everything with Kouraille,” Onew murmured to the floor, still smiling vaguely.
“Pay him no heed. He comports himself childishly,” Minho advised, rolling his eyes before looking at his Bible again. He was weary of Key’s tirades and wrongheaded grievances against them.
There was a long silence, which satisfied Minho that Guernsey agreed.
Then suddenly, Onew said quietly in a mild, conversational tone, “Do you think you are any different from him in that regard? Since you yourself pay heed to no one.”
Minho’s head snapped up, and he stared at Onew, his lips parting in shock.
“Guernsey, I --”
Onew held up a hand, and Minho fell silent. Then Onew took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment as though to steel himself, before he met Minho’s astonished gaze squarely. “Strange, please. I have extended to you my attentiveness on many an occasion, and now I beg of you to accord me the same courtesy. Plainly put, the discord between you and Kouraille has reached such openly intemperate proportions that it rapidly approaches a magnitude that strains my capacity for forbearance.”
Minho slammed his Bible shut, and his eyes narrowed in outrage. “How can you speak of it as though to impute that I am the instigator of the dissension? Why? Because I will not support Kouraille’s outrageously ill-conceived, high-handed quest to send Villiers to Paris and have him committed in that... that macabre tomb of a hospital, that grotesque pit seething with disease and morbidity, all in the name of saving his life? I cannot! The very notion is despicable and iniquitous. It goes against everything God has intended. Furthermore, you agreed with me that the misbegotten idea is to be neither further considered nor even countenanced.”
“And how can you be so blind? In order to support your highly questionable rationale, you parrot back Villiers’s denials word for word as though they are your own convictions. Simply because I have reached the same conclusion as you is not some sort of holy affirmation that my reasoning follows yours, for indeed I wonder, I worry, whether reason has any presence in your life anymore.”
Onew rubbed his forehead distractedly, oblivious as to how this action disarrayed the front fringe of his hair. Minho was rattled into speechlessness by Onew’s words; he could only stare, stunned, at his friend.
With a heavy sigh, Onew spoke again. “I have decided not to pursue the matter further with Villiers because he was so adamantly opposed to it when it was originally raised to him.”
Oh, indeed? Minho wondered angrily. ‘Adamantly opposed’ was an interesting interpretation of the reaction of their youngest. Taemin had flown into such a frenzy of rage that it had seemed to verge dangerously close to madness in its sheer violent ferocity. Minho felt sickened with distress to even recall that night last spring.
On the outside, that evening had been exceedingly mild and balmy, still warm from the sunlight that had beaten down on Town all the day. The windows of Taemin’s study had been open to the velvety darkness of the night, its sweet air, and the scattered shots of light from fireflies flitting in their mating dance. But inside, a tempest had been gathering. Taemin had sat behind the heavy, intricately carved cherrywood desk with its marble top, his hands placidly folded as he listened in utter silence while Key explained the conditions of the Hôpital Necker and the qualifications of its staff and supervising physician, René Laennec -- the foremost authority in the field of phthisiatry and the leading scholar currently studying the advancement of treatment for the affliction. Key had been corresponding with Laennec for months, unbeknownst to both Minho and Onew, and had already made every necessary arrangement for Taemin's care.
It had been a deadly silence, the unearthly hush of nature right before a savage, torrential rainstorm...but Minho had not realized that at the time. He had merely stood by and watched in an agony of indecision, unsure of what to do or say as Onew had interjected to add his own smiling assurances to Key’s bright and wheedling ones that Taemin would be accorded the utmost deference and freedom possible as a convalescent at Necker -- that he would be treated as its premier patient. Onew’s smile had frozen and Key’s eyes had narrowed into slits of disbelief when Taemin had slowly risen from his chair and said, smiling a strange, frightening smile that bordered on obscene in its utter lack of warmth or humor, You would have me studied, poked, and prodded like some base, common animal?
It had only been in that very moment that Minho had realized the gravity of their error and the power and fury of the youngest of their circle. For with that fierce, unnatural smile still on his face, without uttering another word, Taemin had picked up his chair and hurled it at them. If they hadn’t flung themselves to the floor, it would have smashed into them, but instead the chair had crashed into the wall behind them, splintering with a loud crack that had sounded to Minho’s horrified, bewildered ears like approaching thunder.
Key had lifted his head to cry out for Taemin to remain calm, to simply discuss it with them, only to receive a gash through his right eyebrow from the silver letter opener Taemin had launched at him with unerring aim. Had Key not whipped his head aside at the last moment, the letter opener would have surely gouged out his eye. Onew had had just an instant in which to fling out his hand and push down Key’s head, slamming his forehead to the carpeted floor, before a cut-glass paperweight sailed past, nearly slicing through the tendons of Onew’s wrist but for a hair’s breadth.
After that, they had stayed huddled on the floor with their arms covering their heads as books, framed paintings, and all manner of valuable objets d’art rained down around them in a fusillade of untamed wrath. By the time the servants had ventured to the door, terrorized by the explosion of noise, Taemin had managed to break three windows, tear down all the draperies, and kick over the immensely heavy desk from sheer strength of will and rage. When the servants, led by the butler Sherringham, had rushed in, Taemin was in the midst of pushing the massive, nearly floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcase down on his friends’ crouched, trembling forms. Minho had been unable to do anything but lie there cowering, his arms crossed over his bowed head, and listen numbly to Key moaning, He’s gone mad, he’s gone mad, he’s gone mad, as Onew begged Key in a choked whisper that sounded near a ragged sob to keep silent.
The servants had arrived just in time to grab the bookcase, halting its descent, and heave it back against the wall -- it took three men to move what Taemin, enraged, had moved by himself. After attempts to calm Taemin failed, the manservants had had to bodily restrain their lord and master while the young Duke of Annandale writhed and thrashed in their grasp, wild-eyed, literally spitting at his shaking friends, who were staggered with horror in the face of his heretofore unseen manic temper.
Taemin had then proceeded to scream such a flood of vileness, a seemingly never-ending torrent of profanity of such a breadth of vocabulary and depth of descriptive depravity that it had momentarily stolen Minho’s breath away with sheer appalled wonder at exactly how and where Taemin had learned it all. Judging by the stupefied expressions on Key’s and Onew’s faces, it had been obvious they were wondering the same; they appeared shocked beyond belief at the unremitting deluge of foul and abusive vulgarity spewing from Taemin’s soft mouth. As Minho had stared at Taemin’s flushed, spitting, shouting visage, he had questioned whether he knew his friend as well as he’d thought...or even if he truly knew Taemin at all, for that livid, half-mad creature with the face fairer than Gabriel’s did not resemble one whit the impeccably mannered, deeply courteous, and infinitely gentle boy Minho had known and been so fond of for near on a decade.
When it had appeared clear that Taemin’s vituperations towards his friends would not abate, the servants had been forced to gag him -- Roley had shrieked with pain when Taemin sank his teeth into the valet’s hand -- and administer a soporific.
They had watched, petrified into silence, while the soporific finally took effect and Taemin went limp in the servants’ hold, his last indecent remark towards his friends fading into a gurgle and his glassy eyes falling closed so that his long lashes lay like molted feathers above the curves of his cheekbones. Minho did not know how long they would have stood there, aghast and unmoving, had it not been for the servants hurrying them out with as much courtesy as fear of their lord would allow. They had not argued with Taemin’s servants, for they had seemed unable to recover the power of speech.
Once outside Taemin’s townhouse, they had turned away from each other without meeting one another’s eyes and gotten in their separate carriages to take their leave as though they were all criminals implicated in the same capital offense.
Next
Pairing: OT5
Genre: Historical AU, Crossover
Setting: Regency England. Year 1814 during the Spring-Summer social Season.
Rating: R
A/N: An anonymous comment on kpopficwangst 3.0 mentioned wanting to see a KPop Regency AU story. I decided to write one with SHINee. In my defense, I did it for the lulz. My deepest gratitude to my superlative beta glynnis.
Previous
~~✺~~
From over the top of his Bible, Minho watched Jonghyun and Lady Fauconberg advance toward a set of French windows. His friend stamped along as though he was trying to plunge through the floor, and Lady Fauconberg was walking strangely as well -- gingerly, as though the parquet would vanish from beneath her at any moment. Jonghyun flung open the windows and gestured rudely at his wife to step out onto the balcony. Once she obliged him, he slammed the windows shut behind them with a great bang that caused several members of the ton to start and stare, and at least one lady somewhere in the crowded ballroom to utter a screech of alarm.
Shaking his head, Minho looked back to his Bible and decided it was highly probable that only one of them would emerge from the balcony with limbs intact and in proper working order. If he were the gambling sort -- of course he wasn’t! He only ever accompanied Taemin to the gaming hells in order to sit at His Grace’s side and occasionally interject some pertinent passage of the Good Book condemning the shameful wickedness of such a vice -- but if he were, he would stake the entirety of Audley End House against Jonghyun being the one to return unscathed, for Lady Fauconberg had worn an expression of deep and abiding displeasure.
The steely and forceful look in her eyes brought back to Minho the discomfiting memory of the day, not long after Jonghyun had traipsed off and left her disgraced, when Lady Fauconberg had sat across from him in the drawing room of his townhouse and asked of him a favor that had plagued his conscience ever since. It was highly untoward of him to share a secret with his friend’s wife, he knew that, and Minho was certain that if Jonghyun was apprised of it, he would regard it a grievous betrayal. But to tell Jonghyun would be to forsake his sworn promise to a lady, something Minho was uncertain he could do, for it would mean betraying his own honor and duty as a gentleman. He knew the limits of Jonghyun’s temper and how it fled as swiftly as it arose, but he did not know the extent of Lady Fauconberg’s capacity for wrath. He rather thought that it was a knowledge he was not eager to acquire, since he could still recall perfectly the fearsome gleam in her feline eyes as she said quietly, upon his inquiry why such an elaborate subterfuge was necessary, "I have my reasons, which are my concern alone. Please pay me the respect a gentleman would to a lady, Lord Mandeville, and do not impose upon me to explain."
She had appealed to his honor as a gentleman, the one thing he could not forfeit, and therefore she had secured his complicity. Remembering the look of confusion on Jonghyun’s face earlier, guilt gnawed at Minho, and he found he could not concentrate on the print before his eyes. If it had been a matter as simple as telling her of Jonghyun's address...but she had already known that. No, it had involved a great deal more -- his handwriting, his furtive visits to the village inn to check the private letter box he'd secured so that the letters wouldn't be delivered directly to Audley End for the servants to gossip over...even the wicked thrill he'd felt when riding back to his estate with a letter tucked into the breast of his tail coat right over his pounding heart or when he opened one of the envelopes with unsteady hands, carefully slipped out the letter, and redeposited it into a new envelope he'd already prepared. The first time had caused him so much distress, he'd spent an entire sleepless night on his hands and knees praying for forgiveness, but then it had gotten easier and before long, it had become part of the routine of his life -- a private little part that he had been impious enough to have secretly enjoyed even as he berated himself for it.
It had been so wrong, he knew that, and to say nothing was worse. He could only pray that his silence did not cost him too dearly.
“It seems that the more life changes, the more it remains the same,” Onew remarked, smiling.
Relieved to be interrupted from his troubled thoughts, Minho closed his Bible and regarded his friend curiously. Onew tipped his head in the direction of the French windows, and Minho smiled at him in understanding. Before he could agree, though, Key let out a snort of disgust. Minho followed Key’s scornful gaze to the opposite end of the room and saw that Taemin seemed deeply engaged in conversation with a lady whom Minho did not recognize.
“Who is that ghastly creature? And on what turnip cart did she arrive this evening?” Key demanded, glaring through his quizzing glass.
Minho inspected the subject of Key’s derision thoughtfully. She was not beautiful; her features were too strong for true delicacy and her eyes a touch too widely spaced and somber to inspire a gentleman’s ardor, if one were more inclined to merry sparkling eyes and frivolous gaiety. She was also unfashionably sun-browned, and the yellow shade of her gown was unflattering to her coloring. Nevertheless, Minho found he rather appreciated her air of gravity and sense -- it lent her a serenity very few ladies in the room possessed, so consumed were they with their own fanciful sensibilities.
Minho rolled his eyes and sighed. “That seems rather unlikely, since only ton was allowed past the front entrance. She must be the daughter of a peer.”
“Perhaps that is true. Certainly by the look of her, it is quite plain -- and I do mean plain -- such a mopsey could only be the issue of some provincial, under-the-hatches baron. She need not utter a word to fair announce that she has been sent here to snare a pigeon into a leg-shackle. Why, her bilious colored rag of a gown might as well be embroidered with ‘Smithfield bargain’ all across it.” Key sniffed loudly and made an exaggerated show of waving his fan in front of his nose as if to chase off the phantom odor of the ‘rag of a gown.' “I do not wish to hazard a guess as to what sort of toadying taradiddles she could be prattling to His Grace to gain his sympathy, but I am sure he could not possibly find it beguiling in the slightest!”
Onew had hunched up his shoulders and looked down into his glass of orgeat lemonade, his face going completely expressionless, at Key’s tactless remark concerning the title of baron. Minho’s mouth tightened in anger. He knew Onew would not rebuke Key, for Onew was unwilling to show that he was acutely aware of his own lowered status in comparison to theirs, but on such occasions when Key’s tongue was so cruelly cavalier, Minho could not hold his.
“I shall thank you to rest your supercilious mouth for a moment, Kouraille. That is, if you can manage it,” Minho said coolly, leveling a flat stare at Key.
Key let his quizzing glass drop from his fingers, and it swung from its ribbon attached to his waistcoat. With a flick of his wrist, he snapped his fan closed and tapped Minho warningly on the shoulder with it. “And I do thank you, Strange, to carefully consider the manner in which you address someone who precedes you in both age and rank,” he murmured, his tone light but as cold as Minho’s had been.
Minho pushed the delicately carved fan and the incongruously large hand holding it away from him. “When your conduct merits the respect afforded by two months and sixteen days, I shall endeavor to alter mine accordingly. Until then --”
He was cut short by Onew, who hastily exclaimed, “Yes, yes, indeed, we are all growing older, are we not? Of course, time flies when one is amongst dear friends,” Onew finished with a pleading smile at Minho. Minho bristled at the dependence Onew always had on him to lapse into a diplomatic silence during quarrels with Key. Typically, it was Key himself who had, with a carefully cultivated lack of self-awareness as to his own hypocrisy so finely garbed it was in arrogance, touched on the issue of age. Key was older, and yet Minho was expected, by Onew and everyone else, to behave with the maturity Key refused to assume.
To Minho’s greater irritation, Onew persisted, his smile growing broader and more fixed. “Does it not seem as though the intervening three years never occurred, for Fauconberg is with us again and quite the same as he ever was?”
Minho gritted his teeth and bit back an impatient sigh. He saw Onew’s platitudes for what they were: a feeble, desperate attempt to deny that their circle had become strained to a state of instability in those three years.
“Yes, other than his hair, Fauconberg seems unchanged,” Minho replied as blandly as he could. Despite what Onew said, Minho had the feeling that the halcyon days were long past, never to be recaptured, and that the storm for their circle was just beginning.
As though to reinforce his suspicion, Key opened his inciting mouth and said airily, although Minho was not fooled by his affectation of good humor, “I trust that not even you, Strange, can find fault with me if I offer up a prayer of gratitude to your beloved God that He has been beneficent enough to send Fauconberg back to us still possessing a trace of moral fibre. To have a staunch, unvarying friend who has shown himself in the past to be bold and resolute when one is surrounded by gutless hectors with feet of clay is something to be thankful for indeed.”
“That is unfair, Kouraille,” Onew muttered, his face appearing stricken but his eyes vague, as though he had already retreated far within himself.
Minho could not keep his hands from clenching around the edges of his Bible, so tightly that the binding bit into his fingers. He was sure that Onew realized as well as he did the subject Key, in a fury, was rapidly approaching. That same wrenching feud, the longstanding grudge Key could not resist from revisiting again and again, as though he believed he could wear them down into acceding to his will or, failing that, tear them down for their refusal to do so. Minho could already predict the course of the conversation and all of their roles in it -- Key coldly enraged and full of recriminations and criticisms of him and Onew, Onew resigned to Key’s blame but firm in his dissent, and Minho himself as inwardly frustrated as Key outwardly was at Key’s defiance of the reality that argument on the matter was fruitless.
Onew looked down into his glass once more. “This is neither the time nor place to enter into this discussion again.”
“Discussion?” Key retorted with a shrill, brittle laugh. “When have either of you paid me the courtesy of even allowing a discussion on this matter? Kindly do not attempt to revise history; you are both against me, do not deny it.”
“Why should we bother to deny what you have already fixed in your mind to be the truth? If we deny it, you do not listen, so consumed are you with the irrational certainty that we are somehow persecuting you,” Minho countered.
Two spots of red appeared on Key’s high cheekbones. “How dare you have the temerity to speak to me thus, Strange. You must be half-witted to charge me with not listening, for it is you -- you and Guernsey -- who refuse to hear me.”
“I dare because you are being absurd,” Minho responded, feeling himself flush with affront too. “His Grace has made it beyond clear his stance on the issue, and yet you cannot respect that? How dare you?”
“You really are a cods-head if you believe he has the necessary distance to adjudge the true nature of the situation. I am appalled that you would fail to see how it’s impossible for him given he is the source. If we approached him again, endeavored to reason with him united in resolve --”
“No,” Minho declared, “I will not, Kouraille. What you suggest is offensive to everything I believe to be right.”
Key shook his head, and his eyes went wide in feigned surprise. “Oh, and that is the crux of it, is it, Strange? What you believe to be right, what you find offensive, it must necessarily be in respect to you and your highly attuned sense of virtue and honor. Sometimes I wonder if you possess a drop of caring at all for that dear boy across the room, I really do, for it seems as though I am quite alone in that regard.”
Minho would not take a step back in the face of Key’s furious gaze and sneering mouth; he would not give Key the satisfaction of seeing how much his last comment had wounded him. To openly call into question his caring for Taemin was too cruel a cut, even for Key. Worse, Key had implicitly included Onew -- their leader who stood subdued and too diffident to defend himself -- in his senseless denunciation.
He took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. “If we are speculating on personal motivation, Kouraille, then I must confess I wonder about yours as well. What you present as selfless caring on your part appears rather more controlling and manipulative from where I stand.”
Seemingly unaware of his own actions, Key gripped the fan he held between his palms so violently that Minho saw it shake and heard it beginning to crack.
“Then perhaps it is in your own best interest to stand further away from me, dear boy,” Key suggested.
They regarded each other in silence, neither willing to stand down. Finally, Onew spoke again, this time in a low harsh whisper. It was a disturbing tone that Onew rarely used, except when provoked too far, which was often the result of confrontations over this recurring dispute.
“That is quite enough; we are in a public setting. Not another word, I will not have it.”
“I see,” Key said quietly, staring down at the damaged fan in his hands, resentment lacing his every word, “and I am the one being unfair.”
“Enough, Kouraille,” Onew admonished.
“Yes, I have borne quite enough,” Key replied, his eyes as hard and bitter as his voice. “I have held my tongue on this matter all evening until now out of deference to Fauconberg, but be assured that I will broach it with him and soon. I can depend on him to listen to me and truly hear me, as he always has when the two of you have denied me.”
Onew’s voice was still quiet, but Minho detected a slight unsteadiness in it. “If you must, but I do not think he will be in agreement with you.”
“Then you are as much a fool as Strange, for Fauconberg has always been my ally. Do not think three years apart alters that. He and I understand each other; we are of like minds in ways you and Strange cannot possibly fathom,” Key said loftily.
If he is to agree with you, then you are indeed of like minds -- idiotic ones! Minho wished to say. He opened his mouth to do just that, but a commotion near the entrance to the ballroom made him turn.
A tall young gentleman with light brown hair, one thick lock precisely and purposefully arranged so that it fell over his forehead and obscured his right eye, had strode through the archway holding a glass of sherry in each hand. Minho frowned to recognize the man, who was laughing and loudly exchanging greetings with several of the other gentlemen in the room, as one whom he esteemed least in all of England -- the Earl of Ipres, one of Kouraille’s dearest friends. In Minho’s opinion, although the Earl of Ipres was as much of an irredeemable rakehell as Kouraille, at least Key was a straightforward dandy whereas Seunghyun Severn Ferrand-Toler was a ridiculous fop of the first order. And not just a fop, but a louche, debauched boor perpetually foxed and addled on laudanum.
Minho's contempt for Ferrand-Toler had been cemented that night last year when he had seen the man slip into His Grace’s bedchamber during the Commedia dell’arte ball Taemin held every Season at Cliveden. Anger inflamed him at the very memory of standing in the shadow of the doorway and watching in disgusted disbelief as Ferrand-Toler had rummaged through His Grace’s belongings and proceeded to pocket vials of laudanum and other medicines. He had confronted the man, who had not bothered to deny it and had instead laughed and claimed that His Grace could spare it and would likely not even find anything amiss. That cool, impudent disregard for Taemin’s generosity as their host had infuriated Minho. If it had not been for that, Minho would have let the matter rest upon Ferrand-Toler returning the vials to their proper place, but he could not bear anyone disrespecting His Grace, so he had confided in Guernsey. Then they had informed Taemin, who had received the news very calmly. But Ferrand-Toler had left the masque ball quite early, much to Kouraille’s dismay.
“Excellent,” Key declared. “Dear Toley is here and not a moment too soon. Perhaps he can save me from this dreadfully dull company.”
Minho took a deep breath to calm himself and tightened his hands around his Bible to keep himself from smacking Kouraille across the face with the Good Book. Key did not even deserve to have his cheek meet its hallowed cover if he preferred the company of a thief and a scoundrel such as Ferrand-Toler to his and Guernsey’s. Worse, it was the company Kouraille spoke of with such bare-faced contempt who protected him from knowing the vile truth of his dear ‘Toley,’ for His Grace had made Minho and Onew promise never to tell Key what had transpired, seeing rightly that the knowledge that one of his closest friends cared so little for Kouraille’s esteem that he would attempt to steal from Taemin -- whom Kouraille considered dearer than anything -- would be a nasty blow to their haughty friend. That Ferrand-Toler had the sheer audacity to attend tonight’s ball when he must’ve known that His Grace would be present was nothing less than an outrage in Minho’s eyes. Although he supposed it should not be a surprise, since the degenerate was similar to Kouraille in that he would rather lose his prized tailor to a premature demise than fail to put in an appearance at a ton ball. Undoubtedly, since they were such bosom bows, Minho surmised that Ferrand-Toler believed the same as Kouraille did: that no ball or rout could even be considered to have commenced until his arrival. Minho only hoped that His Grace did not cross paths with the lout tonight.
At the moment, he was of a mind to enlighten Kouraille as to his foolishness in favoring Ferrand-Toler -- and to think that Key disparaged his choice of friends by continually mocking Donghae d’Avranches, who was worth more than ten of a miscreant like Ipres -- but before he could, Onew squeezed his arm and shook his head in warning. Minho bit his lip and maintained his silence, seething as Key turned his back to them quite pointedly.
Glancing over his shoulder, Key sneered, “Gentlemen, you will pardon me if I take my leave to more diverting society.”
Minho returned Key’s glare but said nothing.
“Ah, I fear I have disappointed you, Kouraille,” Onew said with a taut, rueful smile.
Key’s eyes narrowed, and he whispered through teeth bared in a mockery of a smile, “Yes, and I fear it is a recurring circumstance. One so frequent of late as to likely become a permanent state of being.”
With that last damning charge, Key stormed off in the direction of his dear Toley. Furious, Minho watched his progress through the throng. But to Minho’s confusion, Ferrand-Toler ignored Kouraille, who was calling out his name, and was staring over at him and Onew. His gaze met Minho’s incensed one. The brazen smile on Ferrand-Toler’s face faded, and he regarded Minho gravely before giving him a slow nod of acknowledgment. Minho turned his face away. He did not wish to witness any overtures at civility from that villain. The Earl of Ipres was a despicable, godless reprobate through and through, and Minho would always believe so.
“Well, it does seem as though once more I have made a mull of everything with Kouraille,” Onew murmured to the floor, still smiling vaguely.
“Pay him no heed. He comports himself childishly,” Minho advised, rolling his eyes before looking at his Bible again. He was weary of Key’s tirades and wrongheaded grievances against them.
There was a long silence, which satisfied Minho that Guernsey agreed.
Then suddenly, Onew said quietly in a mild, conversational tone, “Do you think you are any different from him in that regard? Since you yourself pay heed to no one.”
Minho’s head snapped up, and he stared at Onew, his lips parting in shock.
“Guernsey, I --”
Onew held up a hand, and Minho fell silent. Then Onew took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment as though to steel himself, before he met Minho’s astonished gaze squarely. “Strange, please. I have extended to you my attentiveness on many an occasion, and now I beg of you to accord me the same courtesy. Plainly put, the discord between you and Kouraille has reached such openly intemperate proportions that it rapidly approaches a magnitude that strains my capacity for forbearance.”
Minho slammed his Bible shut, and his eyes narrowed in outrage. “How can you speak of it as though to impute that I am the instigator of the dissension? Why? Because I will not support Kouraille’s outrageously ill-conceived, high-handed quest to send Villiers to Paris and have him committed in that... that macabre tomb of a hospital, that grotesque pit seething with disease and morbidity, all in the name of saving his life? I cannot! The very notion is despicable and iniquitous. It goes against everything God has intended. Furthermore, you agreed with me that the misbegotten idea is to be neither further considered nor even countenanced.”
“And how can you be so blind? In order to support your highly questionable rationale, you parrot back Villiers’s denials word for word as though they are your own convictions. Simply because I have reached the same conclusion as you is not some sort of holy affirmation that my reasoning follows yours, for indeed I wonder, I worry, whether reason has any presence in your life anymore.”
Onew rubbed his forehead distractedly, oblivious as to how this action disarrayed the front fringe of his hair. Minho was rattled into speechlessness by Onew’s words; he could only stare, stunned, at his friend.
With a heavy sigh, Onew spoke again. “I have decided not to pursue the matter further with Villiers because he was so adamantly opposed to it when it was originally raised to him.”
Oh, indeed? Minho wondered angrily. ‘Adamantly opposed’ was an interesting interpretation of the reaction of their youngest. Taemin had flown into such a frenzy of rage that it had seemed to verge dangerously close to madness in its sheer violent ferocity. Minho felt sickened with distress to even recall that night last spring.
On the outside, that evening had been exceedingly mild and balmy, still warm from the sunlight that had beaten down on Town all the day. The windows of Taemin’s study had been open to the velvety darkness of the night, its sweet air, and the scattered shots of light from fireflies flitting in their mating dance. But inside, a tempest had been gathering. Taemin had sat behind the heavy, intricately carved cherrywood desk with its marble top, his hands placidly folded as he listened in utter silence while Key explained the conditions of the Hôpital Necker and the qualifications of its staff and supervising physician, René Laennec -- the foremost authority in the field of phthisiatry and the leading scholar currently studying the advancement of treatment for the affliction. Key had been corresponding with Laennec for months, unbeknownst to both Minho and Onew, and had already made every necessary arrangement for Taemin's care.
It had been a deadly silence, the unearthly hush of nature right before a savage, torrential rainstorm...but Minho had not realized that at the time. He had merely stood by and watched in an agony of indecision, unsure of what to do or say as Onew had interjected to add his own smiling assurances to Key’s bright and wheedling ones that Taemin would be accorded the utmost deference and freedom possible as a convalescent at Necker -- that he would be treated as its premier patient. Onew’s smile had frozen and Key’s eyes had narrowed into slits of disbelief when Taemin had slowly risen from his chair and said, smiling a strange, frightening smile that bordered on obscene in its utter lack of warmth or humor, You would have me studied, poked, and prodded like some base, common animal?
It had only been in that very moment that Minho had realized the gravity of their error and the power and fury of the youngest of their circle. For with that fierce, unnatural smile still on his face, without uttering another word, Taemin had picked up his chair and hurled it at them. If they hadn’t flung themselves to the floor, it would have smashed into them, but instead the chair had crashed into the wall behind them, splintering with a loud crack that had sounded to Minho’s horrified, bewildered ears like approaching thunder.
Key had lifted his head to cry out for Taemin to remain calm, to simply discuss it with them, only to receive a gash through his right eyebrow from the silver letter opener Taemin had launched at him with unerring aim. Had Key not whipped his head aside at the last moment, the letter opener would have surely gouged out his eye. Onew had had just an instant in which to fling out his hand and push down Key’s head, slamming his forehead to the carpeted floor, before a cut-glass paperweight sailed past, nearly slicing through the tendons of Onew’s wrist but for a hair’s breadth.
After that, they had stayed huddled on the floor with their arms covering their heads as books, framed paintings, and all manner of valuable objets d’art rained down around them in a fusillade of untamed wrath. By the time the servants had ventured to the door, terrorized by the explosion of noise, Taemin had managed to break three windows, tear down all the draperies, and kick over the immensely heavy desk from sheer strength of will and rage. When the servants, led by the butler Sherringham, had rushed in, Taemin was in the midst of pushing the massive, nearly floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcase down on his friends’ crouched, trembling forms. Minho had been unable to do anything but lie there cowering, his arms crossed over his bowed head, and listen numbly to Key moaning, He’s gone mad, he’s gone mad, he’s gone mad, as Onew begged Key in a choked whisper that sounded near a ragged sob to keep silent.
The servants had arrived just in time to grab the bookcase, halting its descent, and heave it back against the wall -- it took three men to move what Taemin, enraged, had moved by himself. After attempts to calm Taemin failed, the manservants had had to bodily restrain their lord and master while the young Duke of Annandale writhed and thrashed in their grasp, wild-eyed, literally spitting at his shaking friends, who were staggered with horror in the face of his heretofore unseen manic temper.
Taemin had then proceeded to scream such a flood of vileness, a seemingly never-ending torrent of profanity of such a breadth of vocabulary and depth of descriptive depravity that it had momentarily stolen Minho’s breath away with sheer appalled wonder at exactly how and where Taemin had learned it all. Judging by the stupefied expressions on Key’s and Onew’s faces, it had been obvious they were wondering the same; they appeared shocked beyond belief at the unremitting deluge of foul and abusive vulgarity spewing from Taemin’s soft mouth. As Minho had stared at Taemin’s flushed, spitting, shouting visage, he had questioned whether he knew his friend as well as he’d thought...or even if he truly knew Taemin at all, for that livid, half-mad creature with the face fairer than Gabriel’s did not resemble one whit the impeccably mannered, deeply courteous, and infinitely gentle boy Minho had known and been so fond of for near on a decade.
When it had appeared clear that Taemin’s vituperations towards his friends would not abate, the servants had been forced to gag him -- Roley had shrieked with pain when Taemin sank his teeth into the valet’s hand -- and administer a soporific.
They had watched, petrified into silence, while the soporific finally took effect and Taemin went limp in the servants’ hold, his last indecent remark towards his friends fading into a gurgle and his glassy eyes falling closed so that his long lashes lay like molted feathers above the curves of his cheekbones. Minho did not know how long they would have stood there, aghast and unmoving, had it not been for the servants hurrying them out with as much courtesy as fear of their lord would allow. They had not argued with Taemin’s servants, for they had seemed unable to recover the power of speech.
Once outside Taemin’s townhouse, they had turned away from each other without meeting one another’s eyes and gotten in their separate carriages to take their leave as though they were all criminals implicated in the same capital offense.
Next