Chapter Text
“A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.” –Lana Turner
.
In this life, filled with decadence and fine clothes and the occasional dosage of opium, there are many notions that are universally considered true. Harry Hart, as a rule, abides by absolutely none of them.
It’s not an entirely incidental quirk if he is being honest—a quality he rarely strives for—but rebelliousness not only comes quite naturally but rather suits him in point of fact.
While other defiant children found themselves at the mercy of the rod, Harry’s caretakers struggled to hide their laughter behind pressed hands and well-placed coughs. Their scoldings came out soft with poorly subdued amusement, a fact which never failed to encourage their young charge. He was nothing if not ostentatious.
The first time he realizes there is something truly deviant lurking within him, however, is when he finally crests from childhood into that tender age when boys become men and girls become hazards to their family’s good name.
It comes swift and sure yet somehow gradual, like the tide. All of his playmates begin whispering in their tight little circles about what lurks beneath the chamber maid’s skirt and petticoat or of Colonel Thorpe’s scandalously flirtatious second wife and the way her ivory breasts bubble up over swooping necklines.
Harry, for his part, is utterly flummoxed by the entire phenomenon. While aesthetically pleasing, feminine curves do little to attract his shrewd eye.
However—
However, he thinks, perhaps he understands their curiosity—their full bodied and vibrating obsession—when he thinks of the flat planes that must lie beneath Henry Abbott’s waistcoat or the jump of an Adam’s apple oft hidden under collar and cravat or the small triangle of stubble on the stable hand’s tanned jaw, perpetually missed during his morning shave.
He finds that he wants to place his tongue against that rough patch, feel the scratch of it on his lips with the same voracity that his comrades seem to wish they could lift the skirts of any willing female in their presence.
Harry doesn’t struggle over such realizations. He doesn’t disabuse this proclivity as though it is an error in need of correction. It is not a splinter of glass in his character, but a part of the whole. He would no more remove it than he would cut a hole in his cup and continue to fill it with drink. He lives in utter assurance of his own being even in this “perversion of nature” as he has heard it called by the church, though he struggles to decipher why it would be so.
(“Self-confident,” his mother had called him on more than one occasion, “and frighteningly intelligent.”
“Too cock-sure for his own good,” was always his father’s retort.)
Harry never takes a wife, though he feigns interest toward a few young ladies in the name of discretion. There is, he silently sustains, little honor in using another human being’s life as a shield from gossip, as a womb to be filled, as gilding on one’s cage. Essential as they may be, his masks will be of his own making.
It’s not as though he is alone in this venture after all. Harry discovers quickly that he’s far from the only man of his particular persuasion.
For a time, he takes up with the stable hand who had plagued his earliest fantasies, lets the servant ride him in his four poster bed and silken sheets. He learns how to use oils in order to enter another man’s body as he would a woman’s, how to use his mouth and hands to give pleasure, how to receive the same euphoria by those means from another. All things that would likely cause his mother to shriek and faint if she knew they had occurred just down the hall from where she slept.
(All things that would get him hung if anyone else did.)
But it is because of this, instead of looking for a wife, he finds himself educated too much on medicine for a man not interested in becoming a physician, consuming too much of the law for one without need to become one of its practitioners, and mulling too much over philosophy for anyone uninterested in the clergy. He learns to fence better than even his instructor, to shoot with an unmatched eye, to fight—although done mostly in secret—until his knuckles are as bloody as his opponent’s face.
In the end, he supposes, he was destined for Kingsman. He was destined for it in the same way some were destined for greatness or another’s love or the noose.
.
“Merlin, you ought to use your vast resources in order to discover a reliable method of removing blood from white linen,” Harry begins loudly with eyes fixed on his own, frankly, unseemly looking cuffs. The blood on them has begun to go brown. He would never be accepted into polite society looking so out of sorts. “I’ve grown rather tired of explaining to my tailor why I’m so often need of new shirts.”
His voice echoes off the walls of the cavernous laboratory as he comes around the hallway’s bend. 'Merlin’s Cave'—as most of those in Kingsman’s service have taken to calling it—is set off from the rest of manor, only able to be entered if one knows to pass through the servants’ corridor and down a winding set of steps into the bowels of the estate.
Although 'bowels' seems a bit inappropriate with the way Merlin keeps house. Stone walls are lined with bottles of various shapes and sizes, all neatly ordered with labels facing outward. The varying colors of liquid within them gleam in the golden light of the setting sun as it streams through small, vertically slit windows near the top of the wall. In the far corner of the room, a large, slatted board is suspended from the ceiling with various plants hung to dry and beside it an open archway leads to a secondary room outfitted with a wide furnace and tools for metal work.
The oven is—blissfully—unlit. On days when a fire rages in its mouth, the laboratory is near unbearable in its heat.
The rest of the area—somehow tidy even in its clutter—is laden with vaguely scientific looking paraphernalia, some of which Harry could not identify even if asked. Others he doubts even have names.
And at the center of it all is Merlin’s throne in the form of a stone workbench where the man himself is currently hunched over a fixed magnifying glass.
The space never seems to carry the same scent. Today it smells of gunpowder.
“Ah,” Merlin sighs, “how I miss the days when you bothered to greet me before you began placing your demands.”
“Was that ever something I did?” he replies casually as he rounds the workspace to stand across from his colleague.
The response is an affirmative hum.
Harry clutches his hands together behind his back and bends at the waist—posture still impeccable—to gain a closer look at Merlin’s project, “What are you working on?”
“A gun,” he answers simply. “My turn: whose blood is that?”
Even with cuffs decidedly out of sight, Harry is acutely aware of the stains in question. “The Viscount’s.”
The corners of Merlin’s lips twitch at this easy admission.
“And that’s why you seem a bit sullen, is it?” His hazel eyes flick up to meet Harry’s, amusement naked and dancing in his gaze. “Come now, we all know you couldn’t stand the man. There is no need to pretend for our sake.”
“He had,” Harry pauses here despite himself, “amiable enough qualities.”
“What?” his friend laughs. “His cock?
Harry does his utmost to look unimpressed and replies mulishly, “Do speak a little louder. I don’t think the magistrate heard you.”
“Dinnae be maudlin, Galahad. A magistrate loose within Kingsman would be as happy a wolf in the hen house.”
“Or as dead as a hen that stumbled upon a hungry pack of wolves,” he grumbles, straightening back to stand and tilting the glass flask closest to his hand in feigned interest of its contents.
“Perhaps,” Merlin concedes easily. “My point was that as appealing as the image of you swinging from the gallows may be, you are very likely to be overlooked by any civil officer in the company we keep. There is always fresher meat about.”
“Or sharper teeth.”
“Yes, yes I get it.” Merlin bats Harry away from his continued investigation of the glassware. “You’re all very dangerous.”
Harry pulls at his soiled cuffs and carries on, unperturbed, “I would think you at least would have a little more respect for the dead, my friend.”
“Oh of course,” the man replies with obvious false sincerity. “Where have my manners gone.”
They fall silent for a moment. The kettle Merlin has set out to boil on his small stove releases a low hum that crescendos into full blown whistle. Harry is relatively certain the burner is there for heating chemicals and not the satiating of his friend’s rabid tea addiction.
“He was rather insufferable though, was he not?” he finally concedes in lieu of commenting on the misuse of lab equipment. Merlin sets out three cups, one of which Harry is certain is meant for him. He wishes it wasn’t. For all his skill in chemistry, Merlin makes shite tea. “If I had to hear another word about muslin, I think I might have actually done myself harm instead of him.”
“I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say I’m glad such drastic measures were not reached.”
He pours water over the tea leaves without even warming the pot. Like an animal. Harry grimaces.
A new set of voices steadily build from down the hallway, tone low and jovial and a bit of laughter from one bouncing off the stone walls as they round the corner. Harry hadn’t noticed anyone ride in alongside him so he would wager they had already been hidden away in one of the manor’s many rooms when he’d arrived. Perhaps necking in the corridor if it is who he thinks it is.
“Galahad!” Lancelot exclaims, quickening his pace minutely as he spots the other man. His companion—Percival, as always—trails behind at a more subdued pace. “I thought I heard the sultry timbre of your voice.”
Harry extends his hand to accept a brief, two handed shake in greeting before returning it to his trouser pocket. To Percival, he simply tilts his head and receives a nod in return. “I was wondering for whom Merlin’s third cup of tea was prepared.”
“Yes, although I see he didn’t account for Percival joining me,” Lancelot punctuates the statement with a wink directed Merlin’s way. The man on its receiving end looks decidedly unimpressed.
“He ought to have. Quite the oversight from our personal ‘magician’.”
In fact, ‘oversight’ might be considered a gross understatement by some. It is widely known amongst the Kingsmen that their own Percival and Lancelot are nigh inseparable when not under orders from one of their prestigious leaders. There are no delusions as to why. The organization attracts what some might consider the ‘sexual immoral’ like rock pools collect nearshore fish when the tide is out.
“No matter though. Percival is more than welcome to have mine,” Harry continues. Lancelot’s companion catches his eye just beyond Merlin’s peripheral. He sends a pointed glare Harry’s way, knowing that manners prevent him from declining such an offer. Harry looks on in feigned innocence though he is acutely aware that the illusion is lost on someone who knows him quite so well as Percival.
“I did call you here for a reason, gentlemen,” Merlin interjects, sounding rather huffy. Likely from being called out on his misstep. He loathes being wrong.
“You did not call for me at all,” Harry points out, his urge to exacerbate winning out against better judgement.
“Yes well I knew you might be popping by about this time.”
“How could you possibly have guessed such a thing?” he asks incredulous, for Harry himself hadn’t even known when his mission would be completed. He can’t imagine Merlin could have been privy to such fluctuating details.
“Guessing has nothing to do with it. It’s no concern of yours regardless, Galahad.” He sounds rather proud of his own omnipotence regained. “Carrying on. Guinevere has a task she would like the two of you to carry out, the details of which she desires to be handled with the utmost discretion. If you could give us a moment, Percival. You may take your tea. Lancelot will rejoin you in the parlour.”
“Of course,” Percival agrees with a nod. He presses an open palm briefly to the small of Lancelot’s back in silent farewell. It’s a kind of kiss which only longtime lovers can partake, not given with the lips but with familiar touches and gestures received without hesitation or uncertainty.
Harry’s eyes catch the movement and hold for just a moment.
As Percival retreats, Merlin hands the two remaining Kingman each a letter. They are closed with wax seals bearing the Kingsman crest—an encircled ‘K’ sitting sideways like the profile of a table. Harry breaks his open with a soft crack and skims its contents.
“Roxanne Morton, heretofore referred to as Bors,” Merlin continues once Percival’s footsteps have receded down the hallway completely, “will also be joining you as will Tristan and Iseult. Their presence is for interference only and back up as needed. They will not be briefed on the specifics of this venture.”
“Such secrecy for a…country village?” Lancelot asks skeptically, dragging eyes up from the contents of Guinevere’s correspondence.
“Arthur has shown a particular interest in the area. Guinevere wants to know why. It is possible that your investigation will turn up nothing of interest. It is also possible, however, that you could be entering into a very dangerous situation almost entirely blind.”
“Guinevere is investigating Arthur?”
“Hence the clandestine airs. She has suspected him of something nefarious for some time though she’ll not tell me what.”
“Perhaps she herself does not know,” Harry interjects, his eyes still flitting across the page. “Our lady has always had excellent intuition.”
“Indeed.” Merlin observes him warily. “And she has chosen the two of you, not only because you feels you are most suited for the task, but because she knows you are more loyal to her than Arthur.”
“Well look at that, Galahad,” Lancelot says with a smirk. “Some good’s finally come of your tendency toward pandering to Guinevere after all.”
Harry’s reply is dry as ever, “I might be defensive if the statement was coming from someone not in the same position as myself.”
“The both of you are wildly sycophantic,” their magician cuts in easily. “You needn’t compete.”
“You wound me, Merlin,” Lancelot simpers.
“Then I’ve done my job admirably. Off with you then. All else you need know is written in Guinevere’s correspondence. As usual, burn them once you’ve made yourself familiar with their contents.”
Lancelot nods and bends a little at the waist, theatrical and playful but ultimately sincere. When he turns to leave, Harry pulls the papers detailing his last assignment from the inside pocket of his tailcoat and sets them on the corner of Merlin’s workbench. The pages are folded but unsealed and his writing is shaky in places from attempting to pen it on the journey over. It’s no matter though. Merlin is skilled at reading the near illegible writing only Kingman agents can occasionally provide.
Having completed the task he set out to do upon arriving, Harry moves to follow Lancelot out of the laboratory with only a hot bath and a well-made tea with splash of scotch on his mind. He avoids thinking of the hours he will be spending in his carriage in order to partake in such indulgences.
“Harry,” Merlin’s voice stops him before he can reach the hallway’s bend. “You know what this means, do you not?”
“That Arthur is likely every bit the prick I had suspected him?” He tucks his thumb into waistcoat pocket and drifts lazily in Merlin’s direction. Even so, he is anchored to the exit. Attentive, but ultimately ready to depart at the first given opportunity. “I gathered as much.”
“No, Harry,” his friend continues gravely. “Guinevere wants you as Arthur.”
Harry opens his mouth twice—like a damn fish, he thinks—and then straightens. “You can’t know that,” he states firmly.
“I do, in fact. Not only have you proven to be one of the most capable in her employ, but your financial and political position are apt as well.” He speaks as if in warning. There can be no doubt of his sincerity. Harry cannot be sure if his methods of coming by this information are reliable, but Merlin’s belief in its truth certainly is. “She wants Chester out and you in. If you find something—if you find anything, those wheels will be put into motion.”
The idea rolls around in Harry’s skull like a marble. He cannot say he has never thought of it before, but it certainly was not often. The position of Arthur—as well as that of Guinevere—is far and away from that of a knight like Galahad. His life as Arthur would be much more…sedentary.
“I—,” he breaks off to check his words. “I will keep it under advisement.”
“See that you do.”
.
He tries not to think of it that evening, standing at his window in nightshirt and breaches. The empty tumbler in his hand—a dribble of amber liquid still pooled within the crease—grants him no assistance in this venture.
The very idea of being Arthur both exhilarates and frightens him to his core.
The truth is, while the Viscount had been a deplorable sort as well as deplorably dull, he had provided Harry with something he rarely had the chance to experience. He could blame Kingsman of course. He could say that the organization afforded him with little time for the comfort that another’s presence could provide.
Percival and Lancelot were proof enough that it wouldn’t be entirely true though, weren’t they?
As Galahad, however, he can easily find himself in the facsimile of companionship that people like the Viscount could provide. As Arthur, he would have no such creature comforts.
“Have you ever been married, Mr. Bridgmont?” Harry asks suddenly, a strange curiosity coming over him in a rush. The butler doesn’t even look up as he pulls a copper warming pan from the fire. Not that Harry would be able to tell if he did. His eyes are firmly fixed on a gaggle of geese bobbing in the reflection pool out front.
“Once sir,” Bridgemont replies steadily as he pulls up the corner of his master’s bedding and tucks the pan securely beneath. The implication is clear. He was married once and now he is not. The odds that they had simply parted ways are slim indeed.
“How did she die?”
“In childbirth. Neither she nor the child survived.” His voice betrays none of the emotion that absolutely must be lurking beneath the surface. “But I suspect you know that, m'lord.”
Of course he is correct. Harry knows everything about his servants. He knows that Miss Ashworth’s young charge is not in fact the product of a sister with too many children to care for but that of her own indiscretions out of wedlock. He knows that young Mr. Reed is not actually Mr. Reed but Mr. Johnson who escaped a mistress that had quite cruelly taken things from him that he was in no way ready to give.
And he knows that Mr. Bridgemont had once been rather terribly in love and instead of that love creating something wonderful, it had instead turned inward and eaten itself whole.
Harry pulls his eyes away from the window, catching sight of the butler’s salt and peppered hair in his peripheral as Bridgemont turns down the bed.
“Nearly two decades have passed since then. Do you ever feel—” Harry stops here, vision cast down to the glass in his hand as he strokes its rim with his thumb. “Do you ever feel rather lonely?”
“I suppose so sir.” The servant pats down the bedding in completion and straightens. He casts a pointed look at his master’s form. “Do you?”
Silence reigns for a moment before Harry drains his cup of the last remnants of liquid within it. It’s so scant that he can barely even taste it on his tongue.
“I rather think I’d like another glass of scotch if you please,” he says finally. “I’m feeling a mite chilled."
.
“Who ought we be,” Lancelot had asked Harry as the latter was setting off from the manor earlier that day, “do you think? Two wealthy rogues come to sweep the ladies off their feet.”
Harry had raised an amused brow at the mere idea, “Certainly not. Not very efficient in a quaint town like Meryton.”
“Quite right, Galahad,” he replied with that smirking tone as if he had known all along. Perhaps he had. “Then maybe simply two kind gentlemen, the type who might make someone’s daughter a very satisfactory prospect.”
“A fine plan. Although, I would make one adjustment to it.”
“And what would that be?”
Harry arrived at the bottom of the manor’s stone steps and turned to face his companion, shoes crackling on gravel, “Only one kind gentleman. The second, though, ought to be a right ponce of whose company no one is ever desirous.”
Lancelot had clasped his hands firmly behind his back and looked positively eager, as always, to see parts and plans unfold, “One man that everyone pays far too much attention to and the other not enough.”
“Precisely.”
“And which character might you be playing?” he inquired curiously.
Harry had barely been able to contain the upward twitch of his lips at his own witticism as he responded, “Oh the ponce of course,” and stepped up into awaiting carriage, leaving Lancelot grinning madly in his wake.