Chapter 6
Hugo wished he had the raw confidence of a damned poet who thought he could change the world with a few handy words.
It was different for Hugo; he didn’t need to see slavery in action to know that he had a shared heritage with the enslaved.
He was just pleased his father had been too busy spending his mother’s dowry locally to invest in overseas plantations.
He wasn’t about to credit his father with any level of morals, although perhaps his mother might have influenced him on that front.
He’d never know, as she’d died in her childbed along with his sister when he was only five.
“It’ll probably take my entire life to get rid of this scourge.” And he wasn’t sure he was the right person for the job. He liked rules. He liked the certainty of them. And he knew, deep in his heart, that when he asked for rules to changed, bad things happened.
“If it matters to you, make it your life’s work to change it. Put all your resources and all your time into it. Let me help you.”
“What if I want it too much?” What if he tried to change things and bad things happened? Like they always had when he was a child.
“It’s not a weakness to want. Who taught you that?”
Hugo blinked. “To want?”
“Who taught you that you shouldn’t want? Who crushed you? Yearning for a better life is what drives humanity forward.”
He shouldn’t argue with a poet. The drama was too much. “Earnest. Please don’t.”
Earnest leaped up and threw his arms around Hugo’s neck. “What is the matter?”
Hugo shivered as Earnest stood behind his chair and held him. No one had ever cared for him like this, and he’d been trained to not need it, except it felt so good to have someone hold him.
“Why are you so tense?” Earnest kissed the top of Hugo’s head, then slowly massaged his shoulders, fingers digging into his muscles. It hurt. Earnest increased the pressure, his thumbs sliding over the tension. “So many tight knots in your muscles.”
“I’m always like this.” He winced as Earnest rolled the ball of his hand over one spot.
He’d never experienced anything like this, with someone paying attention to him without wanting something in return.
Everything as the Earl was a transaction; his servants worked for money, his peers negotiated for favours in parliament.
No one did anything for no reason at all.
“It’s not good, Lord Horden. You can’t live your life being so tense all the time.” He did something that stretched out the tendon between Hugo’s neck and his shoulder and ...
“Argh, what are you doing?” Pain speared through the spot where Earnest was pressing but it stopped as soon as he moved his hand.
“Lord Horden. I’m helping you.” It didn’t feel like it except that after Earnest had finished, it did feel better. Looser.
Hugo sighed. “Call me Hugo. We’ve already been—” He stared at the door again, unable to finish the sentence. He couldn’t help it.
“Intimate, Hugo. We’ve been intimate.” Earnest dragged his fingers along Hugo’s neck and threaded them into his hair at the base of his skull, and then he pressed on a couple of spots that made him crumple.
The intimacy of it, combined with the sharp pain that Earnest applied, made him flinch.
He automatically glanced at the door, because if someone saw this, they’d know all about last night.
Instinct and years of worry couldn’t stop him from checking.
“Who are you worried about? And don’t say your guests, because I know for a fact that you know the Duke of Edenwick wouldn’t give a flying damn about this.”
Hugo breathed a few times—to hide his surprise that the Duke of Edenwick wouldn’t care if he saw Earnest touching him so intimately in the breakfast room—his breath burning his lungs as he tried to slow down his racing pulse.
“Please come to my office.” He pushed away Earnest’s hands and stood up. “No one will interrupt us there.”
He marched out of the breakfast room, not towards the main office that his father had used—he hadn’t entered that room since he’d inherited—but towards the room he’d chosen as his own office.
It overlooked the kitchen gardens and was located in the rear wing.
It’d been a storage room when he’d been a child.
“This is an unusual location for an office.”
“The Earls have always used the larger office on the first floor situated over the entrance hall.”
“And you don’t? Aren’t you the Earl?”
He swallowed. “I am unable to enter that room.” It was the closest he’d ever come to admitting the truth; that he was terrified of that room where he’d been beaten regularly by his father.
“Why? Is there something wrong with it?”
“Yes.” If it wasn’t the centre of the house, he’d burn it to the ground. Instead, he kept it locked.
“Then get it fixed. You are an Earl. Are you short on funds?”
“I am not short on funds.” Hugo let out a trembling breath and turned away.
“This room was always my sanctuary as a child, and I like being here.” He’d been safe here, hiding among the unused furniture, where no one could find him.
He’d stashed books among the old objects stored here, and made a little nest to exist in.
“I think I’m missing something important.
” Earnest ran his hand down Hugo’s arm, a reassuring touch, the type of touch a mother or a nanny might give a child, or just how someone would show that they cared.
He’d never had that. His father had always employed vicious nannies who didn’t like children, especially grubby boys who needed discipline.
“I want you to know why I can’t change the rules.
” He wished he could believe Earnest when he said there are bad laws.
Objectively, he understood that, and he knew that the law was a flexible thing because he sat in Lords and watched the laws get changed in every session, but in his experience, if he asked to change the rules, bad things happened.
If you just did as you were told, I wouldn’t have to do this to you.
“Isn’t changing the rules exactly what you Lords do in Parliament?” Earnest asked the most obvious question, the one he’d just been contemplating.
“Technically, yes. I have a ...” Was he really going to talk about this with Earnest? “I have a problem with rules.”
Earnest laughed. “Oh, so do I. Rules are so boring, you know. I try to break as many as I can every day. Were you a complete terror as a child? I bet you put jam in your nanny’s socks and slid down the banisters every day.”
Hugo shuddered as his whole body froze. He would never have dared to even think of doing such things. “No. No. I did not. I followed every rigid rule to the absolute letter. Even the new ones that were made up every day.” It had taken all his energy to keep track of which rule applied when.
“What?” Earnest’s mouth dropped opened.
“My father ...” Hugo breathed out shakily. “Well, you may as well know this. If I didn’t follow the rules, my father would punish me. Bad things happen if I don’t know the rules and adhere perfectly to them.”
“Punish you?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, Hugo?” Earnest stood behind him, and wrapped his arms around Hugo’s waist and gently laid his head between Hugo’s shoulder blades. He tried to think of a story that wasn’t too bad, one that wouldn’t tell the whole truth.
“One time, I fell off my pony—” He’d been six years old, almost exactly one year after his mother had died.
“—and he put me on his horse and rode to the end of the estate and left me there. Told me to walk home because if I couldn’t stay on my pony, I didn’t deserve to have one.
” Hugo didn’t mention that his father had thrown him to the ground off his horse and he’d fallen awkwardly on his ankle.
“One of the farm workers saw me walking and put me on his horse and we rode back to the house, but I’d arrived too fast. No little boy can walk that fast, my father said, and he took me back and made me do it again. ”
“Hugo.” Earnest slid around him, always holding him, and looked up at him with tears in his brown eyes. “I’m so sorry. Your father was an ass.”
“Yes. But I still check for him every time I think about bending a rule. It’s been more than seven years since he died, Earnest. Seven years. When will this go away?”
“Maybe never, but you don’t have to deal with it alone.
” Earnest kissed his chin and his throat, and then lifted his head and Hugo bent to kiss him.
He threw all his pent-up worries into the kiss, pouring out all the things he couldn’t say—like how nice it was to have someone care about him—until he melted.
Eventually he’d expended everything, and he was spent, ready to collapse when he realised something.
“Earnest?”
“Yes.”
“You knew before I said anything, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it was your father, but I assumed someone had hurt you.”
“Does everyone know? Can they tell just by looking at me?” His pulse sped up again.
Earnest shook his head slowly. “I have some experience in the matter of terrible fathers.”
“Your father would beat you too?” Hugo should not have admitted that. Panic infused his whole body, and from the way Earnest blinked, Hugo wondered if he’d said too much. He held his breath, waiting for the inevitable blows.
“Does it count as a beating if he would get me to work the billows all day to make me stronger? Does it count if he would ignore my burns and make me work harder?”
“Billows?”
“My father is a blacksmith. I was the oldest of his eight children, destined to learn the craft from him and take over when I reached the right age.”
“But you are a poet?” Hugo asked, dumbfounded at this new information.
“Yes. Much to my father’s disappointment, I was not a very good blacksmith.
I often burned myself through inattention—” Earnest pulled up his shirt sleeves and showed Hugo several little scars on his forearms, “—and he thought I was a danger to him and the other apprentices, hence being put on the billows.”