He'd been drinking. He'd charged the whiskey to his room.
Now Chandler Manning stumbled upstairs to his wholly inadequate room in this dingy inn to which he had been exiled. His eyes were bleary, and he scratched at the sandy stubble upon his neck. Have to do something about that. Have to do something about…all of it. But not now. In the narrow upstairs passage, he lurched side to side as if on the deck of a ship, lightly laying his hand upon the wall to keep his balance--but he lurched quietly, in spite of the heaviness of his shoes. Wouldn't do to wake the guests at this hour. He'd been too well-brought-up not to be a civilized drunk. Still he had to count the doors to figure out which was his own.
At the door, he dug into his pocket and wrapped a handkerchief--really more of a great tasteless strip of blue flowered cloth wholly alien to his otherwise fine attire--around one hand, as if he disdained to dirty himself with the iron door handle, and pushed the door open just enough to slither through the gap and snap it closed behind him. His expression brightened to find an identical dark-haired man already inside, huddled over his desk as he scratched out a letter by the ill-suited light of a cheap, guttering candle.
At once he straightened his back, drew back his shoulders, ran a hand over his rumbled hair and was miraculously undrunk, unrumbled, eyes clear and brilliant and brutal with merriment, mouth narrowing to a thin-honed knife's slash of a smile.
"You're going to want to hear me out before you start screaming," he began.