Snowed In: Kit and Harry

Chapter 1 Late Spring, Fairleigh Hall, Yorkshire, 1802 “Hullo! Are you lost, or are you honestly looking for Fairleigh Hall? Which you might be, we are expecting someone, and we hardly ever expect anyone, so it’d be a rather impressive coincidence if you decided to drop by at the same time as someone else, wouldn’t it?” Kit Thompson, knee-deep in snow and cranky about it, regarded this improbable enthusiasm from the front steps of the sprawling ancestral manor in question. The enthusiasm, in the form of a young man with distressingly broad shoulders and hair made of wayward sunshine, waved at him from the white-heaped lane and then hopped over a gate and ran his way. Kit gazed at all that sunshine as it bounced through the snow. Thought, well, he doesn’t look like a cold-hearted magical murderer. Of course most murderers looked exactly like anyone else, right up until the moment, as it were. Years of London streets had taught him that; more than half a decade as a constable in Bow Street’s Preternatural Division had reinforced the lesson. His empathy fluttered and stirred, unhappy and tired, searching for a connection. It, like the rest of him, did not enjoy the ice and the isolation. The world had gotten colder and colder as he’d traveled north from London. Unseasonably so. Ominous. Bad enough that the coach had had trouble getting through, and according to the driver this had been a good day. He ran a hand through his own hair, batting at mist that hadn’t yet learned how to be either snow or rain. The young man who had waved did not call out to comment on the informality, the weather, or the tailoring of Kit’s clothing, which happened to be fashionable, but only barely. Kit had needed to be able to move in Society circles, and outward portrayals did matter. But he’d been grumpy about the necessity. He’d never been part of Society. He’d never be a gentleman, not in the way of birth or breeding. Arguably not in appearance, either; not unattractive, or he thought not, but generally unnerving. Intense. Overly blunt. Black hair that held enough of a wave to hint at a symbolic lack of taming. Eyes the kind of dark brown that was also nearly black, which had made more than one person nervous on more than one occasion: all that unreadable scrutiny brought to bear directly on them. He wasn’t particularly tall—around average, in comparison to most men—and in the sort of good shape that came from running around back alleys and climbing drainpipes and generally being good at both concealment and flexibility. He’d never bothered with any false heels or colorful corseted waistcoats; he did not give a damn about pretenses. His sister tended to shake her head sorrowfully and then laugh at him for this stance, but then Anne had to keep up with the latest trends; her shop welcomed flurries of ladies in and out in whirls of muslin and lace and ribbons and fur trimmings. She was doing well, these days. They both were. To a certain extent. That extent relied in large part—or it had initially—on Kit’s usefulness. His magical gifts, his skill at detection and intuition, his profession. He’d hauled them up from their murky family past and into respectability. He lived comfortably. He ensured that Anne and her daughter did, too. He rented a townhouse in the sort of neighborhood that suggested the right impression: professional without pretension. That had been partly practical and partly because he couldn’t afford more; the Preternatural Division constables were paid decently, in large part thanks to Sam Rookwood’s ceaseless advocacy as Chief Magistrate, but nowhere near the income of the titled upper class. Kit might take a few private commissions, might be rewarded; he might eventually even be wealthy, given the size of the recent royal bonus. But he would not ever be a gentleman. The air bit down like magic. Like fangs on a bone. Scraping along his senses. Everyone knew, and would not forget, about their background. About their mother and the plushness of that courtesan’s bed—not a common w***e, no, but only a different name for the profession, sniffed the gossips. They murmured direly about Kit’s family tree, and his dressmaker sister and her daughter and her lack of any visible husband. That family tree had a lot of tangles. Most of them unofficial and illegitimate. Equally undiscussed, at least in polite company. Technically Kit probably only half-counted as polite. Working for hire, even if he did that work in ballrooms and at country house parties. And even that had been a step up from the general Thompson state of existence. That was at least in part a lie. At least these days. At least given certain marks of favor, and his own reputation. He did not like thinking about his reputation. He glared at the slab of stone pretending to be a sky. He glared at mounds of snow and the departed coach he’d taken up here and the mud settling onto his boots and his bag. He glared at, by implication, all of Yorkshire. And its damned magical crimes. He watched while the approaching young man, in rapid succession, hopped over a puddle, narrowly avoided another puddle, accidentally put a boot squarely into a third, waved apologetically in Kit’s direction, and for good measure laughed at himself. Too much energy. Too many muscles. Annoying, that. The ball of sunshine had to be some sort of estate manager or overseer for the Fairleigh lands. Awfully young for it, perhaps early twenties—which would put him five to ten years younger than Kit himself—but heedlessly confident. Clothing expensive but clearly made for walking fields or surveying drainage. Mud and slush on those boots and also on rolled-up sleeves. Nothing aristocratically pale or useless; nothing rakish and reckless and callous. A splash of mud had reached one cheekbone. It sat there and bisected golden freckles proudly, an adornment. The young man had freckles. This was unfair. “Hullo again,” announced the owner of the freckles, coming to a stop. He was taller and larger than Kit, plainly much nicer, and had apparently not noticed that his shirt had turned near-transparent from either exertion or general omnipresent damp weather. Kit tried not to appreciate this too much. “Would you like directions? Or are you in fact here from Bow Street, and you’ve been waiting for me, and if you are and you’ve been standing here long I’m really very sorry.” “You have mud on your cheek,” Kit said, and then only did not put a hand over his own mouth because he had some self-control left, dammit. A stray snowflake had waltzed in to land atop the young man’s hair. It shimmered white on gold. “Do I?” One big hand investigated. “I do. I suppose it likes being there. Oh, drat, I can’t properly shake your hand now, can I? Oh, sorry again, I’m doing this all wrong. Did I mention we don’t get visitors much? Would you like tea?” “Tea,” Kit echoed, bemused by this onslaught of friendliness. He stretched out a wisp of intangible power, cautiously. He ran into honeyed sweetness and the taste of ginger biscuits and the slow lazy throb of a summer afternoon, lake water and radiance; he caught breath amid Midwinter presents and peppermint creams and a brush of springtime like the fur of a baby rabbit against his hand. The universe glowed: honest as an open rose, nothing held back. He did not trust it. Nothing was that real; no one was that forthright. Secrets, he thought. Secrets, and what better way to hide them than behind supposedly transparent cheerfulness? “Tea,” the young man echoed right back, turning Kit’s parroting into a shared joke somehow, not mocking but affectionate, “and there might even be biscuits.” He paused, widened eyes conspiratorially, and threw in, “Which might even be chocolate.” Those eyes were brilliant blue, Kit noticed. Bits of ocean sparkling with good humor. Gold glinting from waves. He got irritated with himself for noticing. More snow skittered in, chased by wind. Eddies twirled; flakes pirouetted and piled up. More on the way. Gnawing cold. And Kit caught himself thinking, nonsensically and for no reason at all, that those freckles should be warm. Little sunny scraps of treasure-dust. Bits of light. He said, “If you’re promising chocolate I suppose I’ll come in,” and watched the young man beam as if this answer were the key to every happy ending. Exactly what had been hoped for. A gift under a Midwinter holly-bough. He cleared his throat. Thanked every god he could think of that his talents lay in reception, picking up and reading emotion, rather than projecting. “Is the Earl at home? I’m meant to be meeting with him. As requested.” Of course the Earl of Fairleigh would be home. The Earl of Fairleigh never left home. The request for assistance had come via a desperate-sounding letter requesting aid in the matter of relentless and likely magical estate-smothering blizzards, and Sam had sighed and thrown it Kit’s way with a parting, “as Chief Magistrate I’m bloody well sending you on a bloody vacation, go to the country, get out of London, get some rest, it’s likely some locals with weather talents playing pranks in any case, you can handle that in your sleep.” Kit, lingering in his superior’s doorway, had explained in vain that he did not need a vacation, that the country was a suspicious and abstract concept that lacked proper coffee-houses and late-night take-away pie shops, and that Alice Lake or Peter Lyon, both of whom were brand-new junior constables, could use the practice of a trip to the wilds of Yorkshire. Sam had threatened to magically set Kit’s hair on fire, and hadn’t even been smiling when he’d said it. Kit, being fond of his hair, had given in. “Oh,” his young man said, now getting snowed on and undisturbed by this fact, “yes, Ned will be in his study, but you’ll be meeting with us both anyway—oh, I should’ve said, I’m Harry Arden, er, Henry actually, after our father, but no one calls me that, it’s Harry, please, sorry, come in!” Harry Arden. Henry Arden. Viscount Sommersby. The Earl’s younger brother. And Kit’s best suspect in the matter of someone trying to sabotage Fairleigh Park’s income and Edward Arden’s health, which according to rumor had never been strong. If anything happened to Edward—a slip on an iced-over lane, a chill, the simple toll of the stress as fields and trees froze beyond their normal capacity to survive—then Henry Arden would inherit it all. Henry Arden had treasure-dust freckles and felt like summer amid snow. And asked visitors to call him Harry. Kit found himself, for one of the very rare occasions in his life, entirely speechless.