Courtney Milan (15 page)

She pulled back from him. “You struck Clermont?”

“Twice. And—that reminds me—I blackmailed him into promising to send your child to Eton.” Hugo tightened his grip around her. “I’ve never pretended to be a good man, you know. It’s just that…I’m yours.” He leaned his head against hers.

Her breath was warm against his face. “Did you hit him
hard?
”

“I’m afraid I did.”

“That’s my Hugo.” There was a grim satisfaction in her voice. “I love you, you know. If you hadn’t come, as soon as winter set in and the ground became too hard to work, I’d planned to come for you.”

“Well, I’m glad I came to my senses,” Hugo said. “You shouldn’t have traveled, not in your condition. Yet curiosity impels me to inquire. What did you plan to do, once you arrived?”

“Allow me to demonstrate.” She lifted her face to his, traced the line of his jaw with her fingers. “This.” She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “And this.” She kissed the other corner. “And…” She took his mouth full on, her lips soft against his, tasting of all the things he’d most wanted.

“I’d do that,” she whispered, “until you were forced to admit you loved me.”

“I love you.”

“Well, that’s no fun.” She kissed him again. “Now what excuse do I have?”

He drew in a shuddering breath and pulled her closer. “You could make me say it again,” he whispered. “Make me say it always. Make me say it so often that you never have cause to doubt. I love you.”

Aftermaths & Beginnings

Eton, not quite twelve years later.

“‘P
EACE SHALL GO SLEEP
with Turks and infidels, and in this seat of peace tumultuous wars shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound…’”

Robert Blaisdell, the Marquess of Waring and also the eleven-year-old heir to the Duke of Clermont, looked up from his seat at the window. Sebastian Malheur, his cousin, paused in the midst of reading his lesson in Shakespeare aloud.

The other boy frowned at his book. “What does
tumultuous
mean?”

What flashed through Robert’s head was not a definition, but a series of noises: the sound of china crashing against a wall; his father’s shouts, the words rendered indistinct through the walls, but the intent still clear.
Tumultuous
meant the slam of a door and the quiet sound of his mother’s sobs. But most of all, it was the long silence that followed: the servants not daring to draw attention to themselves by speaking, and Robert, holding his breath, hoping that maybe if he was very quiet and very good, it might not happen again.

“Tumultuous,” he said, “means broken to bits.”

Sebastian wrinkled his nose. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can a war be broken into pieces?”

Robert was saved from answering by a shout in the yard below, and then a great clamor. The other boys who were studying in this upstairs library—all four of them—were only too happy to leave their books and press their noses to the windows that overlooked the fracas.

A crowd was forming on the green below: a mix of boys of all ages gathering in a circle around one child. While Robert watched, an older boy grabbed the child by the collar; another hit him.

“Someone should stop that,” Sebastian said next to him.

Someone
was going to have to be Robert. He usually did put a stop to these rows; it was what a knight-errant would do. And while Robert would never admit it to the other boys, he still fancied himself one.

“Who is it?” Sebastian added, peering down at the crowd. “Is he new?”

“Yes. He’s a first form lag,” someone else said. “A Colleger.”

“Ah,” one of the older boys said. “A scholarship student. No wonder. Who are his parents?”

“Some kind of farmers. Or soap-makers.”

A derisive noise came at that. But Robert brushed his hands and stood up. Knights protected the weak, after all.

“Even worse,” the older boy was saying. “Davenant asked the boy who his father was, and he said, ‘Hugo Marshall.’ When Davenant said he’d never heard of him, the little lag said, ‘It doesn’t matter; he’s a better man than your sire, anyway.”

Robert froze.

Sebastian hadn’t moved from the window, but the other boy snorted. “He’s got stones, that’s for sure. Not so clear on the brains, unfortunately.”

Robert’s own brain fogged over. He set his fingertips against the glass and peered down once more. “Who did you say his father was again?”

“Hugo Marshall.”

Robert had heard that name before. He had heard it a few years ago, after another awful round of arguments ended in vicious separation. That time, it had been his mother who had left the house in a slamming of doors and a pointed ordering of carriages; his father had stayed morosely behind in the study.

Robert had tiptoed into the room, and, gathering up all his courage, he’d spoken. “Father, why is Mother always sad?”

Sad
wasn’t the right word, but at the time he hadn’t yet learned
tumultuous.

His father had tipped back his glass of spirits and stared at the ceiling. “It’s Hugo Marshall’s fault,” he’d said after a while. “It’s all Hugo Marshall’s fault.”

Robert hadn’t known what to make of that. What he’d finally ventured was: “Is Hugo Marshall a villain?”

“Yes,” his father had said with a bitter laugh. “He’s a villain. A knave. A cur. A right bloody bastard.”

That
right bloody bastard
had a son, and at the moment, that son was surrounded by other boys. In the upstairs room, his friends all turned to Robert. The library seemed too small, the air too hot.

“Never say you know who this Hugo Marshall is,” the older boy said.

“I have no idea.” It was the first time in a very long time that Robert had told a lie. “I’ve never heard of him,” he added swiftly, hoping the burn of his cheeks wouldn’t give him away.

On fine summer days after his talk with his father, Robert had wandered in the paddocks outside, wielding a switch instead of a sword, and challenging white-headed daisies to duels. Sometimes, he imagined himself fighting dragons. But usually, he fought villains—villains and knaves and curs, all named Hugo Marshall. When he defeated him—and Sir Robert always defeated his villains—he brought the right bloody bastard home, trembling and bound, and laid the cur at his mother’s feet.

After that, they all lived happily ever after. No more shouts. No more silences. No more separations.

“Do we stop it?” Sebastian asked.

Three boys turned to look at Robert. Possibly, Robert conceded, they might have looked to him because he was the only duke’s heir at Eton. Maybe it had to do with the clear, blue eyes he’d inherited from his father—eyes that he’d learned made other boys nervous, if he simply stared. But the most likely reason they looked to Robert—or so he told himself—was that they sensed he was innately a knight, and therefore superior in morals and worthy of following.

“No,” he said. “We encourage it. The little lag thinks he’s superior to us. When he’s drummed out, he’ll know better.”

Beside him, Sebastian frowned in puzzlement.

Robert turned away sharply. “You don’t have any questions, Malheur, do you?”

“No,” his cousin said after a long pause. “None at all.”

R
OBERT MADE IT A POINT
to avoid Marshall for as long as he could. It wasn’t hard—he’d been attending Eton for quite a while now, and the other boy was just starting. Normally, a new boy who arrived might go through the usual rounds of roughhousing, while everyone figured out where he stood. Once he found his place in the pecking order, he might keep it with a minimum of fuss and scarcely a blackened eye.

But Marshall had no place at Eton. Robert was determined that this would be the case. He chanced to remark on the boy’s jacket, and someone cracked an egg on it. He made a comment about how amusing it would be if a soap-seller’s son had to bathe in slops, and Marshall’s soap was replaced with bars of mud.

He had never expected Marshall to recognize that Robert was the instigator of his problems. He was even more surprised when the boy started to fight back like the ill-mannered cur that he was. Marshall began to construct snide insults in Latin—clever enough that the other boys sniggered about them. And after that incident with the mud,
someone
crept into Robert’s room and stole all his undergarments. He found them in the larder, stuffed into a barrel of pickles—wet, cold, and salty. No amount of laundering could remove the smell of vinegar.

Some things were not to be borne. That was when Robert knew he was going to have to confront the boy directly.

He found his quarry against the far stone wall of the cricket field. He wasn’t the first to have at him; by the time he got there, the boy had his back against the wall. He’d set his spectacles a few feet behind him, and he held his fists in the air.

“Come on, you cowards,” Marshall was saying. “Three-on-one not good enough odds for you?” It was the first time that Robert had seen Marshall this close. His hair was a thin, light orange; his skin was pale and freckled. His eye was ringed with a virulent red bruise; it would be purple in the morning. He spat pink and turned lightly on his feet, facing his attackers. That was when the boy caught sight of Robert.

“Speaking of cowards,” he said.

“I’m no coward.” Robert rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward. “Call me a coward again—I dare you. Don’t you know who I am?”

Everyone else stepped back, giving the two of them a wide berth. Robert circled the other boy, holding his fists up. And that was when he noticed something curious. Marshall’s eyes were blue—an icy blue.

A
familiar
icy blue. Robert saw eyes like that in the mirror every day.

“I know who you are,” Marshall said with disdain. “You’re my brother.”

Robert had always thought it a ridiculous thing to say in stories—that someone’s world turned upside down. But there was no other way to describe what happened. The other boy’s words hit with the force of a cannonball, crashing through everything he’d known.

“You can’t be my brother.”

But he recalled too clearly the crash of china, his mother’s shouts.
Philanderer! Whoreson!

Philanderer
. Marshall had Robert’s eyes. He had his father’s eyes.

Marshall sniffed and wiped at his nose. “Don’t your parents tell you anything?”

“No!” He wasn’t sure if it was an answer or a denial. And the other boy said that with such a matter-of-fact air—as if
his
parents were a single unit, who might sit a boy down and have a conversation with him.

Robert’s head was whirling. “How can you be my brother if your father is Hugo Marshall?”

The other boy spat once again and didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to. Robert had only the faintest notion of what
philandering
entailed—gambling and drinking and getting wenches with child. He’d never given much thought to the possibility that wenches who were gotten with child ended up having them.

The other boy simply shrugged all this away.

Five hundred days playing alone in the paddock, and he had a
brother?
It was not just his mother and father who were broken to bits. He was, too. Robert thought of soap turned to mud, of fights, of Marshall’s eye—which would be black by morning.

He thought of the three boys who had been fighting him when Robert arrived. They’d done that ungentlemanly thing because Robert had encouraged it.

Even if this boy wasn’t his brother,
Robert
was the villain in this piece. And if what Marshall said was true…

Robert was the knave, the cur, the right bloody bastard. Nothing would ever end happily ever after again. Not unless—

Some decisions were not difficult at all. “Hit me,” he said urgently, low enough that the other boys couldn’t hear. “Hit me hard. Knock me down.”

Marshall didn’t even hesitate. He stepped forward and smashed his fist against Robert’s nose. Robert didn’t need to pretend to fall; his legs crumpled of their own accord. When he picked himself off the ground, his nose was running red. He swiped the blood away and pushed himself to his feet.