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 attractitsattention. 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 ’spectmy 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 aneedyboy 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.
