Subtle Blood

  Subtle Blood

  The Will Darling Adventures, Volume 3

  KJ Charles

  Published by KJC Books, 2021.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  The Will Darling Adventures

  About the Author

  Reader Notices

  This book is number 3 of a closely linked trilogy starting with Slippery Creatures. As such, it contains spoilers for the first two books.

  Please be aware, this book contains references to self-harm and emotional abuse within the family. A full list of content warnings is available at my website.

  Chapter One

  Will Darling was selling books.

  That was his job these days, and it brought him into contact with a pretty peculiar lot of people. Right now he was selling them to a specialist antiquarian book dealer off the Charing Cross Road, which was an experience all its own.

  He’d only been running Darling’s Used & Antiquarian since last October. As a novice in the misanthropic and surprisingly brutal world of old books, he’d found his colleagues in the trade very ready to share their opinions of his incompetence, so he was enjoying his current meeting a lot more than he probably should. It was quite entertaining to be underestimated when you had a secret weapon.

  Mr. Deansbrook, whose tiny paper-dump of a shop specialised in music, leafed through the list Will had handed him a second time, and pursed his mouth. “This is the Aveston collection.”

  “It is, yes.”

  “They’re selling off the Aveston music collection.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The Aveston collection,” Deansbrook repeated, in case they had misunderstood one another. “And you’re handling it? How the devil did you get that? Why didn’t they give it to me? Or Hughes, even? Good heavens, I could throw a brick from my doorway and hit half a dozen better men for the job! No offence,” he added rather too late.

  “None taken,” Will said cheerily. “Interested in anything, at all?”

  The list, as he well knew, comprised most of Deansbrook’s hopes, dreams, and sexual fantasies, since he shared the deceased Lord Aveston’s love of Elizabethan and Jacobean music. Will couldn’t tell a madrigal from a macaroon, but he hadn’t got the job for his bibliographic skills. In fact, he’d spent much of his time with the Avestons simply chatting to the new viscount, a pleasantly dim young man who was far more interested in swapping war stories and rattling on about cricket than in anything that might be classed as intellectual pursuits.

  That had been fun in itself. Will had enjoyed fossicking about the impressive library too, not to mention staying in a stately home where nobody was trying to kill him. That made a change. Mostly, though, he now had the opportunity to repay Deansbrook for a lot of jibes, and he planned to do that in full.

  Deansbrook went through the list, and made the sort of offer you might make to a man who didn’t know what he was about. Will returned a kindly smile and a figure five times higher. They spent some time exchanging professional observations, personal reflections, and abstract musing on the concept of honesty, and finally settled on three and a half times the initial offer, or ten pounds over Will’s private take-it-or-leave-it figure.

  Deansbrook mopped his brow with a grimy handkerchief, leaving a faint line of book-dust where the sweat had been. It was a hot June day and he didn’t believe in open windows. “Well, that’s settled. Are you going to tell me how you came to handle Aveston? I really would have thought they’d come to me.”

  “I had the inside track, I’m afraid,” Will said with an apologetic air that wasn’t convincing, or meant to be. “I’m working with a chap who knows the family.”

  “Hmph. I heard you’d taken on a partner, but I didn’t believe it. There can’t be the money in your place.”

  Will ignored the accurate disparagement of his business. “Oh, it’s an unofficial arrangement. To be honest, he’s more of a—” He cleared his throat and lowered his voice, because you didn’t have to be a book dealer long to learn which were the bad words. “Bibliophile.”

  Deansbrook sucked air through his teeth. “Sensible chap, though,” Will hastened to add. “Knows his stuff. Completed a very nice set of Fielding for me just the other day.”

  “Hmph,” Deansbrook repeated. “How did you come by this chap?”

  Will shrugged, smiled, and offered him the general list from the Aveston library to look through. That put an end to conversation for the moment, so he sat back and wondered what an answer might have sounded like.

  I met him last winter when he hired a thug to smash up my shop, in order to fool me into trusting him. He was working for a shadowy Whitehall bureau then, and he lied to me non-stop, except when he didn’t; he betrayed me over and over, and spent a week trying to save my neck. We took on a criminal gang together, twice, and I’ve never worked with anyone better or worse, sometimes in the same day. And we fuck. My God, how we fuck.

  Three months ago he lost his job and fiancée together, and since then he’s gone from being a secret agent to an amateur book dealer while he works out what he’s going to do with his life. Only, I don’t know what I’m doing with my own life, so the ground’s not exactly steady under anyone’s feet. And he’s a lord, did I mention that? His father’s got a title, a stately home, and a steam yacht, and my ma took washing in to make ends meet. I don’t know what we’re doing in the same postcode, let alone the same bed.

  But he’s good with books and that’s what matters. Right, Mr. Deansbrook?

  They finished dickering over prices, and Will left with the satisfying consciousness that he’d not only carried off the job well, but thoroughly annoyed his colleague in the process. He headed back along the Charing Cross Road towards May’s Buildings just as St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ bells chimed five. Perfect timing to get in, tidy up, and wash before he went to Kim’s place.

  They pretty much always stayed in these days. A few months ago, Kim had killed man-about-town Johnnie Cheveley in what he’d be the first to call an unnecessarily dramatic manner. He’d been commended for it at the inquest, since Cheveley had already shot Will once and been about to finish the job, but that didn’t cut much ice with the posh set. Kim hadn’t been popular before, but after the second time he’d been called a murderer in a restaurant, he’d decided to keep out of sight for a while. Apart from anything else, Will was liable to beat the daylights out of the next person who said it.

  Anyway, Kim’s place was as good as anywhere in London. It was clean, luxurious, beautifully appointed, with art on the walls and expensive electric lights. His man, Peacock, was an excellent cook; there was a cocktail bar as good as a night-club’s, not that Will much cared for cocktails; and the bed was right there. Or the sofa, or the floor come to that, because fucking couldn’t solve your problems but it didn’t half take your mind off them for a while.

  That was another difference between them. Kim lived in luxury; Will counted himself damn lucky to have a be
droom above a bookshop. He’d previously have said ‘a shabby bookshop’, but that had been before Kim.

  He’d come to help after the business in spring had left Will with a broken knuckle and a bullet in his arm. He’d copped far worse in the war, but he’d been younger then. Kim had volunteered to do the heavy lifting while he healed, and worked his arse off ever since: quietly, relentlessly, obsessively. Will’s books were now arranged in a sensible manner, with just enough chaos that browsers could believe they might snap up a hidden treasure. The rare books were all kept in view of the desk, and Kim had identified a couple of ratty old tomes whose sale had covered the entire year’s rates. Books had migrated from the floor to the shelves, which meant a man could get a broom around the place, and the whole thing looked a lot less like a scholarly gnome’s den and more like a proper commercial enterprise. Will still reserved the right to close up whenever he felt like it, mind. He was a second-hand bookseller and there was a principle at stake.

  He felt a bit guilty about how much unpaid work Kim had put in, but he’d needed the distraction. He hadn’t been physically damaged as Will had but he’d taken a hell of a beating all the same, the kind that left scars you couldn’t see, and that also took time to heal. Bookshop work was a lot more productive than most of the other things the nervy sod had found to do with himself over the last few years, and it had given them a lot of time together, long stretches of working in silent harmony, bickering about trivia and practicalities, enjoying each other’s company. They’d needed that, and it had been good, really good.

  It would be ungracious of Will to moan about things. He had his own business and his own home, which was not to be sneezed at in these hard days. He had pals to drink and play football with. And he had Kim as partner, lover, friend. He’d be an idiot to complain life was uneventful: after five years in the trenches and two clashes with a criminal gang, he’d surely had enough excitement to be getting on with.

  All the same, Kim had a habit of quoting Shakespeare that Will found as contagious as it was irritating, and the phrase that kept circling his mind was, Farewell, Othello’s occupation’s gone.

  He wasn’t going to think about that now. Kim did enough thinking for two, and they couldn’t both sit around being contemplative or they’d end up as monks. And he wanted to enjoy the evening properly, since Kim had been off scouting out another old house’s library for sale down in Sussex and they hadn’t seen each other for a few days. So Will had a quick wash, put on a clean shirt, failed to do something about his hair, and headed out to catch the tram to Holborn.

  Kim lived in a swanky set of mansion flats, and had given Will a key to the back stairs, rather than have the porters know all their comings and goings. It was probably fair: he was a tradesman, he might as well use the tradesman’s entrance. As it were, he thought to himself with a grin, and let himself in and up to Kim’s kitchen, where a bald man in a sombre black suit and a white apron was at the stove.

  “Good evening, Mr. Darling,” he intoned.

  “Evening, Mr. Peacock,” Will said cheerfully, because Peacock’s gloom always gave him the wild urge to embark on a song and dance routine. “How are you?”

  “Tolerable, thank you. Lord Arthur is in the sitting-room.”

  Which was to say Sod off, I’m busy. Will took himself into the main room, where Kim was at the cocktail things.

  “Starting early?”

  Kim turned, a smile lighting his dark eyes. “Hello there. How did it go with Deansbrook?”

  “Coughed up in full. Got a tenner over the number you put on it. He wasn’t very pleased.”

  “Excellent. Aveston will be delighted. He needs the money.”

  So did Will, and he was on a percentage. He gave Kim a highly coloured account of negotiations as they sipped sidecars, and Kim capped that with some comic stories of his scouting efforts in Sussex, which rather underplayed that he’d made some excellent finds.

  “And I got something else, by the way,” he added, as Will admired his loot. “A bit...let’s say, out of the ordinary. Not for sale.”

  “What is it?”

  “Poetry. In the vein of the Decadents, though it goes a bit far even for them, and by that I mean half of it is raving mad. Well, the title is White Stains, implying exactly what you might think.”

  That didn’t sound like Kim’s usual reading matter. “Why’d you pick that up?”

  “Because amid the filth, there is some quite exquisite beauty. Listen to this.” He opened a slim volume.

  “‘Lie close; no pity, but a little love.

  Kiss me but once and all my pain is paid.

  Hurt me or soothe, stretch out one limb above

  Like a strong man who would constrain a maid.

  Touch me; I shudder and my lips turn back

  Over my shoulder if so be that thus

  My mouth may find thy mouth—’”

  Will took the book off him and read the lines again, and then the next verse, which sent his eyebrows up sharply. “This is by a bloke, right? To a bloke? While they’re at it?”

  “Exactly so.”

  He read it again, slower, to take the words in. “Blimey. Private printing?”

  “A hundred copies, in Amsterdam. Most of them were seized and destroyed by Customs recently. Try this.” Kim found the page.

  “‘To feel him clamber on me, laid

  Prone on the couch of lust and shame,

  To feel him force me like a maid

  And his great sword within me flame—’”

  “Blimey.”

  “The refrain is ‘A strong man’s love is my delight’,” Kim said. “As one who shares that point of view, I can safely say he knows what he’s talking about.”

  Will’s experience of poems about buggery was limited to limericks in the trenches and on lavatory walls. He’d never seen anything about two blokes together written with artistic aspirations, and he wasn’t sure how to think about this level of—he searched his mind for a word, and came up with respect. “Let’s have another look?”

  “Be warned, that was the high point. It’s mostly appalling.”

  Will flipped through the book, came across a poem called ‘With Dog and Dame, an October Idyll’, read two stanzas, and said, “What the bloody hell is this?”

  “Is that the dog one or the corpse one?”

  “The what?”

  Kim grinned. “The author has a truly childish urge to shock. Hardly surprising when one considers who he is.”

  He was obviously waiting to be asked. “Go on, amaze me.”

  “Aleister Crowley.”

  Will dropped the book as though it were on fire. “You’re joking. That lunatic Satanist traitor?”

  “He’s without doubt religiously eccentric, or eccentrically religious, but I have it on good authority he was a double agent. One of ours, I mean.” Kim picked it up again and flipped through the pages. “And while this is in large part a pit of filth, it does contain these occasional diamonds. A couple of them are very close to things I might say myself, if I could write love poems—physical, emotional, spiritual.” He gave Will a tiny smile. “So I wanted you to read them.”

  Will took the book from him. “I’ll do that. Thanks.”

  “Not the dog one, though.”

  “No, best not.” He leaned forward, cupping the back of Kim’s head. “What was that line you liked again?”

  “‘A strong man’s love is my delight.’” Kim’s eyes smiled into his. “Would you care to delight me before dinner, at all?”

  “Christ, yes.”

  WILL’S EXPERIENCE WITH men had been pretty limited before Kim. They knew each other deeply now, had learned the rhythms of mutual desire over the months together, and he could confidently say that familiarity didn’t breed contempt.

  He loved knowing Kim’s body, being able to choose the words and the acts that would transfigure his narrow face into beauty and make his dark eyes black with anguished pleasure. This time Will had him on his ha
nds and knees, for the pleasure of seeing him twist and writhe, arching back towards him. Touch me; I shudder and my lips turn back Over my shoulder...

  He bit that shoulder as Kim came, wanting to mark the pale skin, finished in a few forceful thrusts that wrung out a last spasm of pleasure from his lover, and collapsed over his back with a grunt.

  “Missed me?” Kim enquired breathlessly.

  “On and off.” Will kissed the place he’d bitten. “You’ve been all right?”

  “Extremely so. I will tell you at dinner. On which—”

  Will glanced at the clock and heaved himself off. Peacock seemed to accept his employer’s goings-on as a matter of course, but his work had to be respected, which meant not messing around when food was ready. “Better get dressed.”

  They were restored to decency by the time Peacock announced that dinner was served, in tones more appropriate to a State funeral. Kim filled two wine glasses with a good French red. They clinked.

  “Cheers,” Kim said. “To book sales and hidden treasures. And absent friends.”

  There was something in his voice that made Will’s ears prick up. “What’s that?”

  The smile on Kim’s face was like the sun breaking through after rain. “I’ve been waiting to tell you. I had a letter from Phoebe.”

  Will put down his glass. “You did?”

  Kim’s former fiancée was in Paris, working with aspiring couturier Marguerite Zie, also known as Will’s best friend Maisie Jones. Kim had written to her several times but Phoebe had not replied before. She’d lost her father, Lord Waring, just as she’d learned he was the head of Zodiac, the criminal organisation Kim and Will had been up against. Devastating stuff, played out in a pretty brutal way, and while that hadn’t been Kim’s fault as such, he’d handled the whole business about as badly as possible. Will couldn’t blame her for wanting space after that, but Kim loved her dearly and her absence was another of his unhealed wounds. A letter from Phoebe mattered.

  “I did,” Kim said, turning the glass in his fingers. “Not a long one, but she’s a surprisingly poor epistolary correspondent, considering. She says that she’s well, that they’re both having a high old time. Detailed a few successes. Apparently Teddy Molyneux has asked after you. Should I be jealous?”