Wardell lifted his pale eyebrows and gazed at his assembled comrades. “Did you hear that?” he asked them. “It isn’t enough he’s ugly as Beelzebub, but he’s got a filthy mouth besides. What’s to be done, my lads?”
“Toss him,” said one.
“Dunk him,” said another.
“In the crapping case,” another added. “Looking for turds, ain’t he?”
This suggestion met with howling enthusiasm.
In an instant, they were upon him.
Several times en route to his doom, they gave Sebastian a chance to recant. He had only to lick Wardell’s boots and beg forgiveness and he would be spared.
But the monster had taken hold of him, and Sebastian answered defiantly with a string of all the wicked English and Italian words he’d ever heard.
Defiance didn’t help him much at the moment. What helped was certain laws of physics. Small as he was, he was awkwardly formed. His bony shoulders, for instance, were too wide to fit into the privy. All Wardell could do was stuff Sebastian’s head into the hole and hold it there until he threw up.
The incident, to Wardell and his comrades’ irritation, did not teach the earwig respect. Though they devoted the better part of their free time thereafter to educating him, Sebastian wouldn’t learn. They mocked his looks and his mixed blood and made up filthy songs about his mother. They dangled him by his feet from windows, tossed him in blankets, and hid dead rodents in his bed. Privately—though there was precious little privacy at Eton—he wept with misery, rage, and loneliness. Publicly, he cursed and fought, though he always lost.
Between constant abuse outside of the classroom and regular floggings inside, it took Eton less than a year to thrash out of him every inclination toward affection and gentleness and trust. Etonian methods brought out the best in some boys. In him they awakened the worst.
When he was ten years old, the headmaster took him aside and told Sebastian his mother had died of a fever in the West Indies. Sebastian listened in stony silence, then went out and picked a fight with Wardell.
Wardell was two years older, twice his size and weight, and quick besides. But this time the monster inside Sebastian was cold, bitter fury, and he fought coldly, silently, and doggedly until he’d knocked his nemesis down and bloodied his nose.
Then, battered and bleeding himself, Sebastian swept a sneering gaze round the circle of onlookers.
“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 hehatedher 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.
