mean confessing the full precariousness of his future, and that needed to wait until after Will’s play. There were tears in his eyes, and he hoped Will couldn’t tell in the dark. He didn’t know if it was the early hour or the lack of air to his brain or just the fact that Will had rested his chin on Martin’s shoulder, but he wanted to fill the quiet with things better left unsaid. “I’ve loved you since you came home on leave the summer I was seventeen.”
Will stayed motionless, then pressed a kiss to Martin’s neck. “I didn’t know.”
“You weren’t meant to. Obviously, Will,” he said, striving for archness and failing miserably.
“And when did you realize that I loved you?”
Martin raised his eyebrows, not having expected that question, but knowing the answer anyway. “When you woke up early and made tea for me that morning after we first went to bed together. You looked troublingly fond and I thought to myself, well this is going to be a proper disaster.”
He turned his head to kiss Will, soft and slow, with one hand cupping his jaw, trying to convince himself that his opinion had changed since that day. But he couldn’t lie to himself. Will deserved a full life, a real life, more than what he’d have in an isolated cottage in the country. He turned and pressed an absent kiss to the birds that were inked on Will’s shoulder, a reminder that he couldn’t keep Will to himself.
Chapter Twenty
“At least let me send for the physician,” Aunt Bermondsey whispered as Martin stifled another cough.
“We’ll talk during the interval,” he answered, and then returned his attention to the stage. He had read the play and seen the dress rehearsal, but still he was riveted by the spectacle of the cast arrayed on stage, the chandelier lit with hundreds of candles, the audience equally glittering in their opening night finery.
“This is going well, yes?” he whispered during a scene break.
“Yes, darling,” his aunt answered, patting his knee as she had done the previous fifteen times he asked. “Your friend ought to be proud.”
It was odd to be sitting high up in the theater and to know that Will was behind the curtain. He wondered if Will could spot him among the hundreds of almost identically dressed men in the theater’s upper levels. Regardless, they were meeting backstage after the play; Will had shown Martin where to go and whom to speak to and told him what to say.
When the curtain dropped for the interval, Martin rose to his feet to greet the theatergoers who stopped by his aunt’s box. But after a few minutes upright, he began to feel unsteady. He gripped the back of a chair. “I beg your pardon,” he told a matron whose name he had already forgotten. “I’m afraid—my health—a minor complaint.” He sat, despite it being gauche for a man to sit while a lady remained standing, because he thought he might faint if he spent another moment on his feet.
When the box cleared and the audience hushed in anticipation of the play resuming, his aunt leaned over. “If I send for the apothecary, he can be waiting at Bermondsey House when we return.”
Martin shook his head. “I already have willow bark and camphor. There isn’t anything else to do except rest and wait and—” he took a deep breath, or as deep a breath as his lungs would presently allow “—get out of London.”
“When will you leave? I could take you myself—”
“No,” Martin said, appalled by the idea of his aunt attempting to play nursemaid. “With all due respect, Aunt, I would rather handle this on my own.” He wanted to prove to himself that he could. “I’ll send you word as soon as I’m home.”
“At least take my carriage. It’ll be far more comfortable than the stagecoach.”
“All right,” he conceded. He still couldn’t quite believe that his aunt wasn’t trying to prevent him from leaving, and he wasn’t sure he’d be convinced until he had left London far behind him.
The play resumed, and Martin spent the next hour so entranced that he hardly noticed his mounting discomfort. But as soon as the curtain fell, he became intensely aware of the pounding in his head, the quickness of his pulse. He told himself that this was no worse than that cold he had a few months earlier, and which had disappeared after a few days. His lungs were bad; it stood to reason that minor