Somebody was screaming very loud in Sebastian’s head. So loudly that he could hardly hear his father. But his father didn’t seem to hear the screaming. He was looking down at the Bible.
“‘For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil,’” he read. “‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to earth; her steps take hold on hell.’” He looked up. “I renounce her, and rejoice in my heart that the corruption has fled the house of my fathers. We will speak of it no more.”
He rose and pulled the bell rope, and one of the footmen came and led Sebastian away. Still, even after the study door closed, even while they hurried down the stairs, the screaming in Sebastian’s head wouldn’t stop. He tried covering his ears, but it went on, and then all he could do was open his mouth and let it out in a long, terrible howl.
When the footman tried to quiet him, Sebastian kicked and bit him, and broke away. Then all the wicked words came out of his mouth. He couldn’t stop them. There was a monster inside him and he couldn’t stop it. The monster snatched a vase from a table and hurled it at a mirror. It grabbed a plaster statue and sent it crashing to the floor. It ran down the great hall, screaming, and breaking everything it could reach.
All the upper servants rushed toward the noise, but they shrank from touching the child, each and every one certain he was possessed by demons. They stood, frozen with horror, watching Lord Dain’s heir apparent reduce the Great Hall to a shambles. No word of rebuke, no sound at all, came from the floor above. His Lordship’s door remained shut—as though against the devil raging below.
At last the enormous cook lumbered in from the kitchen, picked the howling boy up, and, oblivious to his kicking and punching, hugged him. “There now, child,” she murmured.
Fearing neither demons nor Lord Dain, she took Sebastian to the kitchen and, banishing all her helpers, sat down in her great chair before the fire and rocked the sobbing child until he was too exhausted to cry anymore.
Like the rest of the household, Cook was aware that Lady Dain had eloped with the son of a wealthy shipping merchant. She had not gone to London, but to Dartmouth, where she’d boarded one of her lover’s ships and departed with him for the West Indies.
The boy’s hysterical sobs about dogs eating his mother made the cook want very much to take a meat cleaver to her master. The young Earl of Blackmoor was the ugliest little boy anyone had ever seen in all of Devon—and possibly Cornwall and Dorset as well. He was also moody, quick-tempered, and generally unappealing. On the other hand, he was only a little boy, who deserved better, she thought, than what Fate had dealt out to him.
She told Sebastian that his mama and papa did not get along, and his mama had become so very unhappy that she ran away. Unfortunately, running away was an even worse mistake for a grown-up lady than it was for a little boy, Cook explained. It was such a bad mistake that it could never be fixed, and Lady Dain could never come back.
“Is she going to Hell?” the boy asked. “Papa s-said—” His voice wobbled.
“God will forgive her,” Cook said firmly. “If He is just and merciful, He will.”
Then she took him upstairs, chased his stern nursemaid away, and put him to bed.
After she had gone, Sebastian sat up and took from his bedstand the small picture of the Blessed Virgin and the Baby Jesus his mother had given him. Hugging it to his chest, he prayed.
He had been taught all the proper prayers of his father’s faith, but this night he uttered the one he’d heard his mother say, holding the long strand of beads in her hand. He’d heard it so many times that he knew it by heart, though he hadn’t yet learned enough Latin to understand all the words.
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus,” he began.
He did not know that his father stood outside the door listening.
He did not know that the popish prayer was, to Lord Dain, the very last straw.
A fortnight later, Sebastian was bundled into a carriage and taken to Eton.
After a brief interview with the headmaster, he was abandoned to the immense dormitory and the tender mercies of his schoolmates.
Lord Wardell, the oldest and largest in the immediate vicinity, stared at Sebastian for a very long time, then burst into laughter. The others promptly followed suit. Sebastian stood frozen listening to what seemed like thousands of howling hyenas.
“No wonder his mama ran away,” Wardell told the company when he found his breath again. “Did she scream when you were born, Black-a-moor?” he asked Sebastian.
“It’sBlackmoor,” Sebastian said, clenching his fists.
“It’s what I say it is, insect,” Wardell informed him. “And I say your mama bolted because she couldn’t stomach the sight of you another minute. Because you look precisely like a filthy little earwig.” Clasping his hands behind his back, he slowly circled the bewildered Sebastian. “What do you say to that, Black-a-moor?”
Sebastian gazed at the faces sneering down at him. Phelps, the groom, had said he would find friends at school. Sebastian, who’d never had anyone to play with, had clung to that hope through the long, lonely journey.
He saw no friends now, only mocking faces—and all well above his head. Every single boy in the vast Long Chamber was older and bigger than he was.
“I asked a question, earwig,” Wardell said. “When your betters ask a question, you’d best answer.”
Sebastian stared hard into his tormentor’s blue eyes. “Stronzo,” he said.
Wardell lightly cuffed his head. “None of that macaroni gibberish, Black-a-moor.”
“Stronzo,” Sebastian repeated boldly. “Bumhole turd.”
