Damn you, Jonathan Tait.But the invective was aimed at himself.
At seven, he’d some excuse. His father was a non-entity, weak and feeble from drink as much as grief. With Sebastian’s mother two years dead, there had been no one to arrange a tutor, no one to watch the boy.
Seven-year-old Sebastian wandered around a closed-up house, finding his friends in books and hiding under the table when his father came sobbing and stumbling into the library.
He’d been there when Miss Tait and her brother first came to visit. He’d been there when eighteen-year-old Jonathan Tait, huge and grinning, had hauled him out by the collar of his shirt and shaken him, laughing.“What have we here? Some runtish whelp of the old man’s?”
It’d been in the manner of a wolf cub adopting a downy chick. Clumsy, boisterous, and violent.
The young Tait was sporting mad, drinking mad, and just as mad for women—for whores and peers’ daughters and everything in between.
At seven, Sebastian listened, wide-eyed, to his exploits; at nine he was taken to taverns; at ten to cockpits and bear rings; at twelve to brothels and bawdy houses.
Tait went away to war, his colours bought with his new stepbrother’s money, and came back harder and tougher and bigger than ever. Sebastian hung on his every word, clung to the tails of his fine red coat, found the dankest tavern, the grimiest whorehouse preferable to the misery at home…
But then came Sebastian’s turn to go away—to Eton and then to Oxford, where he learned there were finer, smarter, cleverer ways of being a man.
He learned Sebastian Thorne was an earl’s son. And Jonathan Tait was a foundry owner’s.
And Tait had never forgiven him for it.
At Henrietta Street, Sebastian paused, debating between continuing on towards home, where his father would be lying somnolent and insensible in a darkened bedchamber, or onwards and to his club.
Onwards he went.
It was only when he reached his club door that he remembered he’d promised to visit Lady Frances that morning. Damnation. Somehow, in the depths of his irritation he’d forgotten, even though it was on her account he was now embroiled in this awkward business.
Awkwardwas certainly the word for it. And Sebastian hated feeling awkward. He’d been sure he’d stripped it out of himself in his first year at Oxford. When had he last felt wrong-footed?
But what else could a man be other than awkward when he surprised a young woman alone, found her with ink on her face, and then called her by the wrong name?
He blamed Beckford for that last. He should have known better than to trust the idiot boy’s“Oh yes, Clements they’re called, biggish churchy type family, down in Sussex or Kent or somewhere; think she gets sent up here every year to find a husband, never has though, probably never will with that auntgetting her mixed up in all that dreary evangelical reforming business…”
Hah. Needs a husband? So much for Beckford’sintelligence.The word had no right being anywhere near the boy.
And as for the ink…Thatwould have been awkward indeed to point out. But how hard it had been not to stare! And one couldn’t go around staring at women’s mouths without giving rise to all sorts of incorrect assumptions.
Though it might have been better if hehadpointed it out. It might have been less distracting. The bluish splotch had been about the size of his smallest fingertip, positioned near the left peak of her cupid’s bow. The ink had even feathered out into the fine, otherwise invisible lines there—how stupid that he’d thought her a young girl; up close he could see she must be almost his age—and just above the ink there was the smallest freckle.
She’d been talking of chimney sweeps, and he’d been fighting a vision of attempting to swipe away that ink splotch with his thumb, an image of licking his thumb before doing so, of licking—
“Woah, Cote.”
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, halting him at the curbside. A post chaise thundered past, the dust of its passage falling on his boot tips.
“Not like you to go wandering into the street in a daydream,” said his uncle. “Spending too much time with that Biscuit chap.”
“Beckford,” corrected Sebastian, stepping back from the road and shifting his shoulder so that his uncle removed his thick fingers.
“Or maybe I can guess what’s on your mind, eh?” His uncle nodded towards the street opposite. “Going to visit the fair one, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Got some evidence to give? That’s quick work. How’s it feel being on a charity board, my boy? Your soul all aglow, is it? Your step lighter?” His uncle mimed looking over his shoulder. “I reckon I can see the angels circling already.”
Sebastian gave a flat smile. “Do you know what their cause is?”
“Chimney sweeps, ain’t it?”
