“If Jonathan Tait left me a shred of heart, do you know what crushed it?You.Having to clean you up. Having to pick my own father up from the floor, night after night, and wash his own filth off him. I’ll never forget that smell as long as I live. What heartam I meant to have left? What…whatsoftnesswas supposed to help me survive that?”
His father’s shoulders shook. Shoulders that were bent and curving. The man had a stoop. The breath he let out was more a gasp than a sob. “Sebastian…Sebby…I—”
He turned with a lurch, as though to embrace him, and Sebastian recoiled in horror. No. No. He would have no one sob against his chest. There would be no tears. None.
Instead, he strode to his desk, picked up the glass of brandy, and forced it into his father’s hand. The man fought him, feeble and trembling and sobbing. “No, no, no…” But Sebastian wrapped his own fingers hard around his father’s bony ones then opened the door and pushed the man through it.
“Go finish the job. Drink yourself to oblivion. And let me do the same.”
Of course, having given his father the glass, Sebastian drank from the decanter.
Like father, like son.
He supposed he passed out at some point because he was dimly aware of waking. He stirred, muggy and dizzy and sick, and found himself in his bed. Someone had removed his boots and his neckcloth and placed a basin by his side. He flopped on his back, staring up at the bed canopy, all the colours and patterns swirling, and tried to believe it was his valet.
But he could smell his father’s soap.
Damn the man. His fingers clenched into the bed covers at his sides. Damn the man. Couldn’t he leave him alone to hate him? Hate was so much easier than love. It hurt less.
He tried to get out of bed and stumbled, landing heavily on his knees. He swiped the clock from his bedside table and found itwas only a few hours since he’d returned home. His blood was still full of brandy, and God he felt wretched, sick, like the one time in his life he’d succumbed to the influenza. But there was an inch of amber liquid left in the bottom of the decanter, and he drank it like ambrosia, letting himself feel the burn of it.
There were his boots, set neatly in the corner. Unpolished, but they would do. There was a clean necktie. He fashioned the simplest knot his clumsy fingers could manage. What did it matter, these folds of damned cloth? What did any of it matter? He went downstairs.
Ah. Dinner. He smelt it as he reached the hall. Yes, it was that time, he supposed. His father and Tom were at the dining table, sitting at one corner of the enormous expanse. Even with the leaves removed, it still sat twelve.
They both looked up when he dragged out a chair and dropped into it. Tom opened his mouth, but his father gave a minute shake of his head.
“This chicken dish is very good,” his father said inanely. “Try it with these mushrooms.” He pushed the dishes over. Sebastian glanced at them and picked up the wine, filling his glass.
“Some bread at least would be wise,” his father said.
“And yet I have no appetite.”
“Tom, if you’ve finished—”
“But there’s syllabub!”
“Take the bowl, boy, go on. If you find Daniels, he said he was going to teach you the knots he learned in the navy, remember? Run along. That’s it.”
Sebastian’s hand tightened on the glass. Such a cloying, sickening tone he took with the boy! As ifhewould have ever been allowed to run around the house with dessert, annoying the servants.
“You’re spoiling him,” he said once the boy had slipped from the room.
“Don’t you think he deserves it?”
“I think he’s hardly special. There are thousands of street rats like him a stone’s throw from the door.”
“He’s incredibly smart, you know. Gifted even. He ought to have a tutor. If he can be trained to act a little more like a civilised human being, we could send him to Eton.”
Sebastian gave a snort of laughter and drank a mouthful of wine. “Yes, to be beaten. That’s what they do there, you know. All day long. And besides, like I said, there are thousands more like him. Do they deserve their fate because they’re slower with numbers? Because they didn’t happen to fall into our path?”
He felt his father’s careful study. Delicately—oh, so very delicately, as though Sebastian were made of glass and tissue—the man said, “This sounds like a discussion to have with Mrs Ardingly.”
It was good the glass’s stem was made of stern stuff. He watched his knuckles whiten. “Mrs Ardingly and I will be having no further discussions. The society is launched. The wager is won. Our need for association is over.”
A pause.
“I saw the parcels in the hall, you know. I would have recognised the fabric even if—don’t be angry at the boy—even if Tom hadn’t read the note before you got home and told me its contents.”
