“I…I can nurse the boy, he is my responsibility—”
“Tomorrow, Mrs Ardingly. We’ll discuss all this tomorrow. Go home.”
She looked up at him, her eyes gritty and hazed. She had to steel herself to keep them focused on his.
“Have…have I undone it? All the progress we made today? Did I undo it all by running from Lady Frances’s carriage like I did?”
He smiled, polite. Then went to open the door for her, equally polite.
And he was only polite when he was angry.
“Go home, Mrs Ardingly, and go to sleep.”
Eleven
Sebastian was at breakfastwhen his uncle called.
The major might be a creature of late nights and debauchery, but he kept his military habit of early rising. His was a vital, animal energy, and despite everything, Sebastian couldn’t help but occasionally admire it.
“Damn you and your French chef,” said the major, walking into the breakfast room unannounced and taking one of each kind of pastry from the table. He stacked them in his left palm in lieu of a plate, then dragged a chair back and sat down, taking a large bite of the first. “Unpatrioticandirresistible. How you don’t beat Prinny’s girth, I’ll never know.”
Sebastian sipped his coffee, the newspaper spread on the table by his plate. “Moderation, uncle. Moderation.”
The major finished his first pastry in one more bite. “Still beating that stick, eh? And still got it up your arse.”
Crumbs fell onto the major’s blue coat, a dusting of icing sugar on one of the brass buttons. Sebastian hadn’t slept. Was in no mood for his uncle.
But then…he seldom was. It never paid to show it. He refilled his coffee.
The boy had slept fitfully, waking in fear and pain, the one feeding the other and making each worse. It had been…distressing.
He could have ordered a servant to take the watch. Indeed, he’d told himself he would, once those first six hours had passed and the next dose of laudanum been given. But by then dawn wasn’t too far away, and the earliest servants were already busy around the house at their own business. And besides…she was trusting him to care for the boy.
So the night’s watch was his, and all the damned frustration and fear of it. You couldn’t demand someone live, for God’s sake. You couldn’t reason with them when they were terrified and sweating with pain. It’d been the doctor’s talk of internal damage that’d most worried him, horrible images of secret inside places bleeding and swelling…“Some internal infection, some inflamed organ…”
He’d imagined telling Mrs Ardingly the boy was dead.“Something inside him,”he’d have to say, or the doctor would,“some internal damage…”He’d sat there all night, watching, useless, and imagined that.
Of course, he’d thought of other things too. He’d thought of how small a boy’s frame was, how fragile the bones, how easily hurt by a bigger man. At seven or eight or nine, he’d been better fed but no bigger than this boy. He hadn’t really imagined—couldn’t imagine, never having been much around children—howlittlethey were. The boy had sweated and groaned on the sofa, bony arms and legs and ribs and elbows, and Sebastian glanced at his own tensed fist and wondered…wondered how anyone could.
And then Sebastian had turned his face to the dark window and thought instead of boats. He’d seen boats in the clouds andboats by moonlight, and it had seemed, at the chill grey hour of five in the morning, that bonnets and dresses and boots couldn’t quite compare to sails against stars and moonlight on water…
“Last night was an interesting one,” his uncle said, dispatching half of his next pastry with another bite. “Everywhere I went, I heard a different story of you. You and your Pretty Pariah.”
Sebastian turned a page of his newspaper. “Oh?”
“Lady Frances apparently brought her to her picnic. Quite the coincidence, her taking a sudden interest.”
“Fortunate, indeed.”
“Pah. She’s in on your wager, is she? I suppose you’re taking that as encouragement, that she’s exerting herself on your behalf.”
“I’m the optimistic sort.”
The man gave a short laugh. “As if you’d ever even spit onchanceandhope.You’re as calculating as a snake. And taking your Pariah to the picnic was a smart move, all right. Not so many stiff manners, not so many eyes, company mixing freely, and yet it has that air of exclusivity—not everyone got an invite.”
Like you?
His uncle would never behaut ton,for all that his sister hadmarried herself an earl.All the brute strength and bravado that had served him in the military held no weight in London. It only made people think harder of that foundry. That’s what the man could never understand. And the more he paced and snarled, a wolf denied a bone, the more shoulders would turn against him.
