Chapter 17
Max was indeed not at the Season’s most boring soirée, though he was aware that it was taking place.
It would be a cold day in hell before someone of his obscure origins and undesirable complexion crossed over the Milton threshold.
He was at home again, alone, having unaccountably lost his taste for the sort of enjoyments he and his friends usually indulged in.
Tom had accused him of becoming a damn dull recluse just the other day, and perhaps it was true.
He was so deep in the past just now that it was a wonder he didn’t drown in it.
There had been no more revelations, after Madame Severin’s slip on the day of his arrival in Kent, and despite his close-held expectations, no Rose arrived in a grand carriage to catch him up in her arms and take him back home with her.
After a while he almost ceased to expect her, even on his seventh birthday in August. And his eighth, ninth and tenth…
Life was very quiet for the only child in the big house, though everyone was unfailingly good to him and he wanted for nothing money could buy, nor even for affection.
They did love him, he knew. He became more and more accustomed to speaking and even thinking in English as the years passed. But he still dreamed in Matinik.
In due time he went to school, as gentlemen apparently did, and by then he really was tall and strong, which meant that when English boys called him foul names and tried to knock him down, he could hit them till they thought twice about what they’d said, as they lay in the dust themselves, groaning.
Mr Severin had warned him how it would be, and had taught him to box in preparation.
The old man had told him, ‘I could keep you at home and have you tutored, as your mama wishes, Max, but then I fear that the outside world would be even more of a shock when you finally meet it. I only hope you won’t hate me for sending you.
I know that your life won’t always be easy, at school or afterwards.
Maybe I’m deluding myself that you can force them to accept you.
’ This was a question that he thought still hadn’t been fully resolved, so many years later.
He’d been away at school through large parts of 1793 and 1794, so he’d missed a lot of the anxious discussions that must have gone on at Severin Court during that time.
He knew, of course, even as a schoolboy, that there was a great uproar in France just then.
They’d had a violent revolution and killed the King, later the Austrian Queen too, along with thousands of others, and in England people of all ranks could talk of little else, with varying degrees of vicarious excitement and genuine, open-mouthed horror.
At school, this news could be measured by the fact that people stopped taunting him because he was brown and a bastard, and began taunting him instead because he was French and a bastard.
He was frequently accused of chopping people’s heads off, which was blatantly, ridiculously unfair.
It was so preposterous that it was very nearly funny, though of course he couldn’t in all honesty deny that he might on occasion have wanted to, if the opportunity had arisen.
When charged with regicide, he usually replied with impressive belligerence that yes, he had done that, and he’d be quite happy to take their heads off too, and would, they could be sure, as soon as he’d finished building his new guillotine and sharpening the blade.
He’d accompanied this threat with various blood-curdling gestures and sounds – CHOP, THUMP, GASP – and the whole performance had been satisfyingly effective, even causing some of his more impressionable would-be tormentors to burst into tears and call out piteously for their mamas.
Now he thought that it had been childishly obtuse of him not to realise that he might have some personal cause for anxiety.
If he’d known that his own mysterious French-Creole mother was locked away in a foul prison all through this time, in fear of her life by precisely the same grisly means, he’d have kept quiet and endured the taunts. But they hadn’t told him.
There was so much they hadn’t told him. And now, now that he knew it all, his youthful ignorance seemed like bliss.