“Oh good God,” Titus said, and sat down abruptly, just about managing to hit the chair.
Nico came over and squatted down in front of him, a gentle hand on his knee. “You cannot appeal to reason or kindness with that type. All he thinks of is how wronged he is. Well, now his wrongs include a violent man threatening to kill him, and I expect that will occupy his thoughts to the exclusion of all else.”
Titus took that in. “I suppose—but what if he makes a complaint against you? Or if he stews on it and makes a complaint against me anyway?”
“The first is my problem. The second—well, if he still moves against you, nothing would have stopped him. But what was your alternative? Take him back as your lover? Let him move in here? Hand him money, and see how often and how greedily he came back for more?”
“No. No, I couldn’t. Oh God. You were really just actingthen? You’re very good because I was terrified. Why were you doing an English accent?”
“What?”
“Your accent. You didn’t sound French at all.”
Christ Jesus, had he dropped it? Nico couldn’t even remember: he must have been angrier than he knew. He gave his airiest shrug. “I often put it on in the gaming hell: All Paris knows the English are dangerous brutes. And it unnerved him. Change the voice, change the stance, be fierce, be calm, always change. The audience is unsettled; they are kept on their toes, as you say, and they believe more easily for it.”
“Oh. Goodness. But if you can do an English accent so well, and English speech too, why don’t you always—”
“We digress,” Nico said firmly. “You need a glass of wine to settle your nerves. What a remarkably unpleasant man.”
“You have no idea,” Titus said. “Or perhaps you do, I don’t know. Have you ever seen leather prepared?”
“I avoid tanneries.”
“No, well, they are foul, but I meant after the hide is soaked. The leather-worker uses a long blade and he scrapes at the inside of the hide to cut away whatever’s left of the flesh or fat. Scrapes and scrapes, till the skin is so thin and flexible it will bend to whatever he wants. That was me, by the end. He scraped at me till I was hollow and pliable and doing whatever he wanted—”
“No, he did not. You gave him his congé, no?”
“I told him we would not be together anymore. It was ghastly. He shouted, and he cried, and he told me all the ways in which I was wrong and bad and worthless. And then he raised my rent. And then he wrote and I ignored his letters—”
“You told him no and you stuck to that no,” Nico said. “It shows admirable decision.”
“If I had that, I shouldn’t have let him behave as he did for so long.”
“Nonsense. At first you liked him, yes? You wanted him to be happy, and to repair matters when you feared you had offended him. If he took advantage of your goodwill, that is not your fault.”
“I don’t even know what he wanted, except for both of us to be as miserable as he could manage. He made everything into an affront, as though he enjoyed being outraged and upset.” Titus’s mouth turned down in a spasm of unhappiness. “I don’t understand why.”
“Nor I, and I do not care to,” Nico said. “I have met many people of that wretched type, and they may make one another unhappy a long way from me. Congratulate yourself that you dug him out of your life. It is hard to do with that sort.”
“Well, I didn’t, given he came back to blackmail me!”
Nico squeezed his knee. “If you tell these people to go away a hundred times, they come back a hundred and one. Generally, it only ends when they find a new victim. Or if you offer to murder them. That speeds matters up considerably.”
Titus attempted a laugh. “I don’t think I could do that.”
“But of a certainty you could! Not with a knife, perhaps, but with the poison. Think. You ask the good Thorpe to bring you both wine. You drink. Then you inform him that the wine was adulterated with some vileness of colour. What was it called, the yellow arsenic?”
“Orpiment, but—”
“You tell him he has drunk orpiment—for best effect, you would put some yellow colour in the wine first—and rehearse the terrible death that awaits him. The cramping guts, the froth at the mouth, the failing sight. You tell him stage by stage until he can taste the poison in his mouth and he is weeping for mercy—”
“Yes, but would he not point out I had drunk it too?” Titus objected, to Nico’s immense satisfaction. “And I’m sure one would taste orpiment, even in wine.”
“But he doesn’t know that. And naturally you drank it, because you possess the antidote.”
“There isn’t an—”
“Quiet. You possess the antidote, which you propose to take now while you leave him to die. He begs for mercy. You offer him a dose of the antidote in exchange for his written admission he is a lying slanderer. Et voilà, done.”