Perhaps there was truth in that, though Solomon had never thought about it in those terms.
“So you’ll pass on my message?”Vaughan insisted.“We need you, Solomon.Wallace and I both.And I know you never let a friend down.”
Solomon bit his lip.He could pass on the message, at least.Wallace had the right to make up his own mind, surely.“Well—” he began.But something about Vaughan’s words bothered him.He studied Vaughan’s smiling face.“You know exactly what to say to get through to me, don’t you?You’re playing me like a fiddle!”
Anger flashed, very briefly, in Vaughan’s eyes, and then he was smiling again.“Solomon, my dear boy, do be serious.You can’t hide him from me for ever.”
There was an intensity in him that was closer to the surface now.It prickled uncomfortably at Solomon’s skin.
“He don’t want to see you.Can’t you just leave it at that?I mean—this happens all the time.People are lovers until they en’t.”
“It doesn’t happen to me, Solomon.”
Solomon took a step back, disturbed by the look in his eyes.“Listen, I’ll see you around, Hugo.”
And he almost ran out of the alehouse.
“Vaughan is back in town,” Solomon told Wallace.
They were in the kitchens.
“Oh,” Wallace said in a small voice.He put his hand to his mouth.“I’m sorry, I—” He turned and ran from the room.
After a few minutes’ search, Solomon found him retching into the bushes behind the inn.Alarmed, Solomon put a cautious hand on his back.
When Wallace finally straightened up, he wiped his mouth with a trembling hand.“Lord help me.My stomach has been in knots all week.”
“What happened, Wallace?
“Nothing.Nothing.You’re probably imagining all sorts of dire things.But the truth is—nothing.He just—got inside my head.That’s all.I think he’s broken me.I’m clay in his hands.”
“Here, come here.”Solomon got him sitting on one of the crates stacked up against the inn’s back wall, and fetched him water from the pump.
They sat in silence for a while.Solomon was thinking guiltily about all the little things he’d ignored: all the warning signs he’d missed, all the times he’d seen Vaughan put Wallace down.
“I’m sorry I came here bothering you,” Wallace said after a while.“I wasn’t even sure how you’d receive me.I seem to have drifted away from everyone I used to know.Hugo didn’t like me to, well… have other friends.”
“I’m glad you came here.”
“If Hugo comes looking for me, don’t let me leave with him?”
“I won’t even let him see you,” Solomon said firmly.
He knew how it would be if Vaughan got his claws back into Wallace again.Vaughan would know precisely what to say to get under his skin.
Solomon thought back to when they first met.The fellow feeling that had seemed to bind him and Vaughan, and the uncanny insight Vaughan had sometimes seemed to have.But perhaps he had only pumped Wallace for useful information about Solomon, and Solomon for useful information about Wallace.
“I can’t stay here at the Crown.”
“No,” Solomon agreed, fighting his first impulse to keep Wallace close by, where he could keep an eye on him.“What about the Wheatsheaf on the Kensington road?Robert Keller is head ostler there now—you remember that red-headed fellow as used to work here?”
But when Solomon walked out to Kensington two days later to see Wallace, he received a shock.
“Wallace Acton?He en’t here.Some gent came asking for him this morning, and he ran out the back and en’t come back.In debt or something, is he?”
“Something like that,” Solomon said.
He spent the next two hours searching, in vain, every inn and hostelry along the Kensington road.When he finally gave up and returned to the Crown, Wallace wasn’t there, but Vaughan was.
