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“Anyone else?” he asked, though he could scarcely find breath for the words.
No one uttered a sound. When he turned to leave, they made way for him.
When Sebastian was halfway across the yard, Wardell’s voice broke the strange silence.
“Well done, Blackmoor!” he shouted.
Sebastian stopped in his tracks and looked round. “Go to Hell!” he shouted back.
Then Wardell’s cap flew into the air, accompanied by a cheer. In the next instant, scores of caps were flying, and everyone was cheering.
“Stupid sods,” Sebastian muttered to himself. He doffed an imaginary hat—his own was trampled beyond redemption—and made a farcical, sweeping bow.
A moment later, he was surrounded by laughing boys, and in the next, he was hoisted onto Wardell’s shoulders, and the more he verbally abused them, the better the idiots liked it.
He soon became Wardell’s bosom bow. And then, of course, there was no hope for him.
Among all the hellions being thrashed and bullied toward manhood at Eton at the time, Wardell’s circle was the worst. Along with the usual Etonian pranks and harassment of the hapless locals, they were gambling, smoking, and drinking themselves sick before they reached puberty. The wenching commenced promptly thereafter.
Sebastian was initiated into the erotic mysteries on his thirteenth birthday. Wardell and Mallory—the boy who’d advised privy dunking—primed Sebastian with gin, blindfolded him, dragged him hither and yon for an hour or more, then hauled him up a flight of stairs into a musty-smelling room. They stripped him naked and, after removing the blindfold, left, locking the door behind them.
The room contained one reeking oil lamp, a dirty straw mattress, and a very plump girl with golden ringlets, red cheeks, large blue eyes, and a nose no bigger than a button. She stared at Sebastian as though he were a dead rat.
He didn’t have to guess why. Though he’d shot up two inches since his last birthday, he still looked like a hobgoblin.
“I won’t do it,” she said. Her mouth set mulishly. “Not for a hundred pounds.”
Sebastian discovered that he did have some feelings left. If he hadn’t, she couldn’t have hurt them. His throat burned and he wanted to cry and he hated her for making him want to. She was a common, stupid little sow, and if she’d been a boy, he would have thrashed her to kingdom come.
But hiding his feelings had become a reflex by now.
“That’s too bad,” he said coolly. “It’s my birthday, and I was feeling so good-humored that I was thinking of paying you ten shillings.”
Sebastian knew Wardell had never paid a tart more than sixpence.
She gave Sebastian a sulky look which strayed down to his masculine article. And lingered there. That was enough to attract its attention. It promptly began to swell.
Her pouting lip quivered.
“I told you I was in a good humor,” he said before she could laugh at him. “Ten and six, then. No more. If you don’t like what I’ve got, I can always take it somewhere else.”
“I ’spect I could close my eyes,” she said.
He gave her a mocking smile. “Open or shut, it’s all the same to me—but I’ll ’spect my money’s worth.”
He got it, too, and she didn’t shut her eyes, but made all the show of enthusiasm a fellow could wish.
There was a life lesson in it, Sebastian reflected later, and he grasped that lesson as quickly as he’d done every other.
Thenceforth, he decided, he must take his motto from Horace: “Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means money.”
From the time he’d entered Eton, the only communications Sebastian received from home were single-sentence notes accompanying his quarterly allowance. His father’s secretary wrote the notes.
When Sebastian was nearing the end of his time at Eton, he received a two-paragraph letter outlining arrangements for his studies at Cambridge.
He knew that Cambridge was a fine university, which many considered more progressive than monkish Oxford.
He also knew that his father had not chosen Cambridge for this reason. The Ballisters had attended Eton and Oxford practically since the time those institutions were founded. To send his son anywhere else was the closest Lord Dain could come to disowning him. It announced to the world that Sebastian was a filthy stain on the ancestral escutcheon.
Which he most certainly was.
He not only behaved like a monster—albeit never quite badly enough before authority figures to be expelled—but had become one in physical fact: well over six feet tall and every inch dark and brutally hard.
He had spent the better part of his Eton career making sure he would be remembered as a monster. He was proud of the fact that decent people called him the Bane and Blight of the Ballisters.
Until now, Lord Dain had given no sign that he noticed or cared what his son did.
The terse letter proved otherwise. His Lordship meant to punish and humiliate his son by banishing him to a university no Ballister had ever set foot in.
The punishment came too late. Sebastian had learned several effective modes of responding to attempts to manage, punish, and shame him. He had found that money, in many cases, was far more effective than physical force.
Taking his motto from Horace, he had learned how to double, triple, and quadruple his allowance in games of chance and wagers. He spent half his winnings on women, diverse other vices, and private Italian lessons—the last because he wouldn’t let anyone suspect he was at all sensitive about his mother.
He had planned to buy a racehorse with the other half of his winnings.
He wrote back, recommending that his parent use the allotted funds to send a needy boy to Cambridge, because the Earl of Blackmoor would attend Oxford and pay his own way.
Then he bet his racehorse savings on a wrestling match.
The winnings—and influence exerted by Wardell’s uncle—got Sebastian to Oxford.
The next time he heard from home, Sebastian was four and twenty years old. The one-paragraph message announced his father’s death.
Along with the title, the new Marquess of Dain inherited a great deal of land, several impressive houses—including Athcourt, the magnificent ancestral pile on the fringes of Dartmoor—and all their attendant mortgages and debts.
His father had left his affairs in an appalling state, and Sebastian hadn’t the smallest doubt why. Unable to control his son, the dear departed had determined to ruin him.
But if the pious old bastard was smiling in the hereafter, waiting for the fourth Marquess of Dain to be hauled to the nearest sponging house, he was doomed to a very long wait.
Sebastian had by now discovered the world of commerce, and set his brains and daring to mastering it. He’d earned or won every farthing of his present comfortable income himself. In the process, he had turned more than one enterprise on the edge of bankruptcy into a profitable investment. Dealing with his father’s paltry mess was child’s play.
He sold everything that wasn’t entailed, settled the debts, reorganized the backward financial system, dismissed the secretary, steward, and family solicitor, installed replacements with brains, and told them what was expected of them. Then he took one last ride through the moors he hadn’t seen since his childhood, and departed for Paris.
Chapter 1
Paris—March 1828
“No. It can’t be,” Sir Bertram Trent whispered, aghast. His round blue eyes bulging in horror, he pressed his forehead to the window overlooking the Rue de Provence.
“I believe it is, sir,” said his manservant, Withers.
Sir Bertram dragged his hand through his tousled brown curls. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and he’d only just changed out of his dressing gown. “Genevieve,” he said hollowly. “Oh, Lord, it is her.”
“It is your grandmother, Lady Pembury, beyond doubt—and your sister, Miss Jessica, with her.” Withers suppressed a smile. He was suppressing a great deal at the
moment. The mad urge to dance about the room, shouting hallelujah, for instance.
