He cleared his throat. “I am neither stinking, nor do I resemble a puppy in the slightest. Who appointed you my father?”
“No one, but alas, you haven’t many options when it comes to friends who hold you in great esteem and are also free to look after your sorry arse. Riverdale is involved in some manner of contretemps over a woman, Brandon and Camden are happily in love, and Christ knows what Whitby is about these days. Sniffing the skirts of cookery school owners, apparently. I heard something concerning him begging her to marry him or similar rot.”
“Good for them. I’m busy, as you can see.” He held up the volume for his friend’s examination. “You have leave to carry on with whatever it is you were doing before you ventured here. I will just return to my poetry.”
“Whatever it is I was doing,” King repeated, tsking. “You say this as if I haven’t dozens of important tasks to keep me occupied. Tasks that don’t involve spending my time calling on a friend who has turned into a stinking drunkard over the past month.”
“You have important tasks? What are they? Buying a new waistcoat? Haranguing some poor chap over the cut of his trousers?”
King’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being an arse, Richford.”
“Iaman arse.”
Sweet God, he was worse than an arse. He was the devil incarnate. It didn’t matter if what he had done had been for Rhiannon’s sake. Her stricken face would haunt him until the day he finally met his grim reward.
“An arse who appears to have been wearing the same shirt for at least the last two days. I’m reasonably certain I spy the remnants of more than one meal marring it, and you smell likean animal suited to the barn rather than a duke to the manor house born.”
Nettled, Aubrey glanced down at his shirt, sure he was about to prove his friend wrong. However, there were stains. Several of them, in fact, indeterminate spatters that could have indeed been from more than one meal. He might have known if he could recall precisely what and when he had last eaten, but as it happened, he couldn’t. He brushed at the stains, but it wasn’t any use. They were quite set in.
“It’s only one stain,” he lied before performing a discreet sniff of the air. “And I don’t smell like an animal better suited to the barn, curse you. That’s a scurrilous accusation. How do you know it’s not the salmon bones you’re smelling instead of my person?”
“Bloody hell. There aremorebones than just the one?”
Aubrey peered down at the myriad objects scattered over the surface of his writing desk. “There could be a fucking chicken roaming around in here for all I’d know.”
King shuddered. “Ye gods, man. I’ve never seen you like this. First, haven’t you any damned chambermaids? Who is meant to be cleaning this filth?”
“Of course I have chambermaids.”
“Then they ought to be sacked and replaced,” King groused.
“But I don’t allow them in here,” Aubrey explained.
“Then they ought to enter when you are elsewhere,” his friend said as if he were explaining a simple fact to a small child.
Aubrey wanted more gin. Where was the damned bottle? For some bloody reason, he was thinking about the scent of jasmine now and how Rhiannon’s hair had glistened, unfurled on his pillow in the lamplight and the way she had spoken with such fervent certainty of Eos and Tithonus and their ill-fated match.
“Did you hear me?” King wanted to know.
“Of course I heard you, but I am ignoring you.” He scattered a pile of books in the corner of his desk, sending one tumbling to the floor.
“You need to allow the chambermaids to clean up, or you’ll have rats in here soon,” King said with great disgust.
“I am thirty years old, King. I am aware of the inner workings of the domestics. But the trouble is that I don’t want to leave my study. I am comfortable here, you see. Mrs. Brumley tried, believe me, and on no fewer than four separate occasions, to have one of the maids come in and tidy up my mess, but they annoy me and then I begin to bellow, and it all goes to hell. I’ve sent three of them away in tears.”
“And the fourth?”
“I don’t recall. Perhaps I made all four weep. Hmm. It would certainly be fitting if I had.” Aubrey shuffled through some correspondence, then tipped over an inkwell. “Fuck. That is going to quite ruin the rosewood unless someone mops it up. Have you seen my gin?”
“Oh, you mean this little thing?” King held up his bottle.
“Yes, that.” Aubrey reached for it across the desk, sending a stack of plates to the floor in the process. “Give it to me, curse you.”
“It’s half past ten in the morning, Richford.”
“Then why the Christ are you at my house? Shouldn’t you be sleeping off the aftereffects of one of your potions?”
King tossed the gin bottle across the room, where it landed in the hearth with a dramatic crash. “I should be, yes. But presently, I’m concerning myself with a drunken fool who is apparently sleeping and living in his own rubbish.”
