Farquar was lazy and afraid of many things, chiefly change and thinking. As change and thinking were famously Kirke’s favorite things, Kirke scared him witless.
And what Dominic wanted to do was pass a law that would in essence deprive Farquar of his favorite cheap labor.
People were forever quoting his damned Freedom Speech at him. He’d given it a decade ago.
“It warms my heart that you’ve paid enough attention to my speeches to rank them, Farquar.”
He sensed what was coming, and realized it was precisely the raw, red meat his feral mood craved.
“Doesn’t look as though your lot will ever get the votes.” Farquar shook his head with mock sympathy. “Your lot” meant the Whigs. “Don’t you feel like the chap from Greek myth who pushes a rock up the hill over and over and never gets anywhere? Shishyfuss?”
The name exited Farquar’s mouth on a fine,brandy-scented spray, a droplet of which landed on Dominic’s cheek.
He stared at Farquar long enough for Farquar’s amused smile to fade.
Then he delicately, slowly, and pointedly wiped his cheek with the tip of his forefinger.
“You must feel like Sisyphus every time you attempt to utter a word comprising more than two syllables, Farquar.” He said this on a sympathetic hush.
The ensuing rustle of chuckles from the men around them turned Farquar’s face a blotchy maroon.
“You’ll get there eventually, old boy,” Dominic added, with hatefully tender encouragement. “If there’s anything you know I know, it’s that I never, ever give up.”
They stared at each other.
All of that would madden Farquar, particularly “old boy.” Kirke, a baron of absolutely no pedigree, common as dirt, had been raised to the peerage by the king for years of exceptional public service. Farquar, a viscount, was the result of centuries of aristocrats with empty heads and bloated coffers mating with each other until the empathy was bred right out of them.
“Reminded me of that madman who roams Covent Garden shouting out lines fromHamlet. Blathers on and on,” Farquar pressed on. “No one pays much attention to him, either.” His gloating little smile was back. “Because he’s mad, you see,” he explained to the rest of the men. “Only a madman would do the same thing over and over with no result.”
Pointing out that Farquar had clearly paid attention to his speech today was too easy. “I’ll wagerfive pounds you can’t say the word ‘soliloquy’ right now,” he said, taking pains to sound bored.
More laughter and calls for “Try it, Farkie! I could use a fiver!” And “Go easy on him, Kirke! We all know ‘s’s’ are hard!”
Farquar said nothing. With his mouth, anyway. His eyes shot poison darts.
Dominic sighed and shifted his weight to his other leg. “You know, I am aware you have a point, Farkie.” So conciliatory was his tone that Farquar’s demeanor relaxed by about three notches. “I do have a tendency to go on. At least I’m in relatively distinguished company when it comes to that. After all, no one was inclined to indulge the king about his divorce. And no one listened to Joseph Utley.”
There were more good-natured chuckles. “If wives were that easy to get rid of, we’d all swap them out twice a year,” someone mumbled.
“Who the devil is Joseph Utley?” Pangborne was smiling.
“The nine-year-old boy who died of an infection after he was whipped bloody by the foreman of Farquar’s cotton mill for working too slowly.”
Kirke said it almost conversationally.
Oh, how he loved precarious, loaded, dense silences. The delicious, shocked, abrupt stillness of men who had, for one moment, collectively stopped breathing. He could toy with them to his own ends. Lighten them, if he chose. Turn them into teetering monoliths that threatened to crash down upon them. Tighten the screws on the awkwardness.
He’d become an expert at disrupting complacency. It was the only thing that worked to chip away at the layers and layers of it.
His secret weapon was that he was perfectlycomfortable with discomfort, his and theirs. Being common as dirt meant he knew how to, and was willing to, fight like a snarling dog in the street—both metaphorically, and quite literally—for those who didn’t have a voice. But he’d learned thousands of better tactics since his more hotheaded years. Including a nearly impeccable sense of timing.
Those who crossed him often came away with the impression that he was—to quote the mistress who had hurled a lit lamp at him a day ago and nearly burned his house down—“a cold, ruthless bastard.” But those who had come to know him—inasmuch as he allowed himself to be known—understood it was seldom personal. Much the way glaciers inexorably gouged out valleys and sculpted mountains over epochs, Kirke was uniquely designed—by dint of the sheer bloody-mindedness bred into him by brutal poverty, his Welsh parents, and living with his six semi-feral brothers and sisters—to reshape the English political landscape in favor of justice. He was an absolutely unstoppable force.
The so-called common people knew it. It was why he’d been elected again and again, and why they’d largely stood by him, even as the gossip pages did their best to undermine him and formidable forces were often arrayed against him.
A decade. That’s how long he’d worked with like-minded others (many of whom had worked much longer than that) before they had finally passed the first laws abolishing the slave trade in 1810.
A decade. A grain of sand in the hourglass of time.