tried very hard not to think of Will and carnal matters at the same time. He tried not to think of carnal matters, full stop, but that was another predicament entirely.
But now that he had the idea in his mind, it was hard to dislodge. He knew Will liked women, but that didn’t mean he only liked women. Martin was fairly sure he himself liked women as much as he liked men, which was to say not particularly much. He supposed he was capable of being attracted to anybody, as long as they were Will Sedgwick. That was a problem he had long since become accustomed to: he knew how he felt about Will, and he knew there was nothing for it, and that was that.
But if there was a possibility—if Will might be interested in the same thing—
He nipped that line of thought in the bud. Will was interested in nothing of the sort. Will had looked at his mouth exactly one time, and Martin had no experience whatsoever with what men looked like when they wanted to be kissed, so it didn’t matter what he thought he had seen.
And even if Will had been open to the idea of a kiss, that was probably because he had noticed Martin’s attraction—and really, the spiders in the rafters had surely noticed by now—and responded out of whatever madness made him want to agree to anything Martin wanted.
Besides, if Martin acted on that sort of base impulse, he really would put paid to Will’s future. Getting him sent to the navy had been bad enough. Being unable to help him after he returned had been even worse. To cut him off from the sort of proper loving partnership that he deserved would be the ultimate disaster. Because Martin knew Will, knew him down to the bone, and he knew that if they got together, however briefly, Will would stay by Martin’s side forever. He was appallingly loyal and had no common sense whatsoever, especially where Martin was concerned.
During the years they had known one another, Martin had done nothing but take. It was the most unequal friendship ever known to man. And he was determined not to take another thing.
Once Martin collected himself, he went to Mrs. Tanner’s house, which he knew was situated on the other side of a small wood, and which he recognized by virtue of seeing all the barnyard animals Will had described to him over the past months—a goat, a pig, various species of fowl. The cottage itself was ramshackle in a way that even the gamekeeper’s cottage had not yet achieved. There seemed hardly to be a perpendicular pair of lines in the entire structure; everything bent and sagged in an alarming manner.
When he knocked on the door it was answered by Mrs. Tanner, her brow furrowed in consternation at the sight of Martin on her doorstep. “Something wrong?” she asked, not bothering to address him by a name she had surely guessed was false.
“No, no, but Mr. Sedgwick is a bit under the weather. I wanted to let you know that he won’t be around until tomorrow, in case you were expecting him. But if you need an extra set of hands, I might be able to be of use.” He couldn’t quite imagine what he could do, but Mrs. Tanner brought them supper almost nightly in exchange for Will’s help, and Martin felt that making the offer was the minimum required of him. And, if he were being honest with himself, he wanted Mrs. Tanner to stop looking at him with barely banked alarm, as if Martin were about to start ravishing young women and hosting orgies.
She gave him a long, skeptical look, almost a glare, as if she thought he were mocking her. Then she seemed to come to some kind of decision. “You can gather the eggs.”
“Gladly,” Martin said, trying to look like he gathered eggs every day of his life, like he was an expert in all matters egg-related. He turned in the direction of what appeared the area of the garden where a motley assortment of fowl congregated. They didn’t seem to have any kind of system for where they laid their eggs, and he wasn’t certain if this was typical of birds or merely of a piece with the disorder of the entire property. Soon enough, however, he spotted a small blue egg halfway beneath a rosemary bush. He bent down, picked it up, and held it gently