Page 2 of The Luckiest Lady in London

Felix desperately wished he had something of his father, be it the bulbous nose, the weak chin, or the scant eyebrows, so that the poor man wouldn’t search his face day in and day out, looking for some proof that Felix was a product of his loins.

The marquess would be plagued by doubts to the end of his days. But Felix became convinced of his paternity. In the marquess’s absence, Felix never got so much as a nod from his mother. The displays of affection and indulgence were only that—displays, intended to fire jealousy and discontent in the marquess, to make him think that a man she liked better had fathered the boy.

Felix hated her heartlessness, that she regarded her only child as but a pawn and used him with no concern for his welfare. He hated his father’s gross stupidity, that he could not understand it was a game and that she would never have dared drive a wedge between father and son had Felix actually been the result of adultery.

When he reached thirteen, he couldn’t wait to be sent away to a public school, to god-awful food and drafty residence houses where boys beat one another and were flogged in turn. Anywhere to be away from home, away from his mother’s machinations and his father’s unmanly wretchedness.

But somehow she prevented that, too. She wanted him around to plague her husband. Two more tutors were hired, and at home Felix was stuck.

So he learned to play the game.

He began to make demands, always at their gathering before teatime, to his mother’s beaming countenance as she looked upon her husband’s spawn with counterfeit tenderness. He asked sweetly for the best portable telescope yet built, for subscriptions to scientific journals, for classics on astronomy—and for exorbitant increases in his quarterly allowance to purchase whatever else he wanted.

He spun tales to undermine her smugness in her power. I’m so sorry, Mother, he’d say innocently when they were thrown together accidentally, alone.

Why? she’d ask.

Oh, you didn’t know? Nothing then! he’d exclaim, pretending to be distraught. But then, under her persistent probing, he’d let slip that he had heard that Father had set up a young mistress in town and was quite wild about her.

He milked the phantom mistress for nearly two years, watching with cynical amusement his mother’s fruitless search for the shameless tart who dared to ensnare the husband for whom she had no love and even less use.

She realized at last it was a hoax. And that her son had become, at age fifteen, a formidable player on his own. The last pretenses of maternal affection promptly disappeared.

And yet her unexpected death, two years later, devastated him. They had been engaged in a war of attrition, but he came to understand, as he sat by her lifeless body, his eyes burning with unshed tears, that for him, at least, the struggle for the upper hand had been only a front. He had never stopped trying to gain her love—or at least her admiration. All along he had been trying to show her that they were so much alike they could be great friends and allies, if only she would let it happen.

To his shock, when his father died within months, he was no less shattered for the obtuse, ungainly man who paid for his one great error with almost two decades of suffering, and who, according to the family physician, passed away of a broken heart.

And he realized at last, as he watched the late marquess’s casket being lowered to the ground, that though father and son had looked nothing alike on the surface, underneath they had yearned for love with the same intensity, the same stubborn hope that even years of antipathy could not completely erase.

* * *

Felix would recast his entire life.

At seventeen, he had become a peer of the realm, one of the richest at that. But just as important, the isolation of his early years afforded him a blank slate on which to create a whole new persona for himself.

It did not take him long to decide that, of course, he was his mother’s son. The late Marchioness of Wrenworth, despite her insidious domestic tyranny, had maintained an unblemished reputation as a perfect lady, a shining example of all that was good and pure in a woman.

He planned to eclipse her in both acclaim and influence—a fitting tribute from the son for whom she had so little regard.

As for his father, Felix’s tribute to him would be to never repeat the man’s great mistake of loving with all his heart and soul. Friendship he would permit, and perhaps some mild affections. Love, however, was out of the question.

Love made one powerless. And he had had enough powerlessness to last ten lifetimes. In this new life of his, he would always hold all the power.

And he succeeded remarkably.

He was extremely popular with his classmates at Cambridge, where he read mathematics and physics. He conquered London society with equal aplomb and became, in no time, one of the country’s most eligible bachelors.

In the beginning, he worried that he’d meet a girl who would enslave him. But Seasons passed, ladies he met by the gross, and not a single one caused the slightest ripple in his heart. It was as if his capacity to love had been buried six feet under, alongside his parents.

Once in a blue moon, when he was alone at night with the stars, he missed it: the ability to feel and feel deeply. But the rest of the time, he was all too glad to be in absolute control over every aspect of his life, particularly his heart.

In 1885, when he turned twenty-five, he let out the word that he was ready to settle down with the right girl. The matrons heaved a collective sigh of relief. How wonderful. The boy actually understood his duties to God and country.

He had no intention of marrying, of course, until he was at least forty-five—a society that so worshiped the infernal institution of marriage deserved to be misled. Let them try to matchmake. He did say the right girl, didn’t he? The right girl wouldn’t come along for twenty years, and she’d be a naive, plump-chested chit of seventeen who worshiped the ground on which he trod.

Little could he guess that at twenty-eight he would marry, out of the blue, a lady who was quite some years removed from seventeen, neither naive nor plump-chested, and who examined the ground on which he trod with a most suspicious eye, seeing villainy in everything he said and did.

Her name was Louisa Cantwell, and she would be his undoing.