Chapter 3
Three
Sebastian left Lady Pemberthy’s house newly possessed of two documents and a deep, irritating sense of dissatisfaction.
Their cause was absurd.
And he’d just made a wager to support it.
This, he reflected, walking briskly down the sunny road, was a consequence of making rash decisions.
Generally Sebastian found it easy to say no.
He didn’t game for gaming’s sake. Unlike his friend Handley, he’d never been victim to that irrational hunger for risk.
And it wasn’t Handley’s eagerness which had prompted him to take the bet.
One couldn’t be friends with Handley without having the ability to decline his many wagers.
He would ruin—had already ruined—his friends several times over if they lacked the strength to say no.
Sebastian only gamed because it was the thing to do, because it was fashionable, because it cemented friendships with men whose friendship was valuable.
Realising this early in life, he had deliberately honed his innate gift for numbers and logic and learned to be good at it.
Skill commanded respect, and respect was far more valuable than mere financial winnings.
Those were the reasons Sebastian gamed—sensible, rational reasons—but something else had been at play yesterday in Mrs Fishbourne’s saloon.
His uncle.
As was often the case, his uncle was the cause of the uncomfortable situation Sebastian now found himself in. The doubting sneer in his uncle’s eyes had made Sebastian say I’m in.
Why, at eight-and-twenty, did he find it almost as impossible to say no to his uncle as he had at the tender age of seven?
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.
Awkward was 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 aunt getting her mixed up in all that dreary evangelical reforming business… ”
Hah. Needs a husband? So much for Beckford’s intelligence. The word had no right being anywhere near the boy.
And as for the ink… That would 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 he had pointed 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?”
He gave a dark laugh. “Nothing less than the complete abolition of all physical punishment against all children everywhere.”
His uncle’s eyes widened, and then he burst out laughing, much like Sebastian had done. But it no longer seemed funny.
“Just wait ’til Handley hears this,” said the major. “I daresay he’s in sore need of that two thousand.”
“I hardly feel the wager can stand when it was made in ignorance of the true stakes.”
His uncle pulled a face. “Back out? You? Don’t be a disgrace, Cote. I taught you better than that.”
For a moment, Sebastian looked at him, conscious in a way he hadn’t been in years of the various lessons his uncle had given him. Thanks to Mrs Ardingly, he couldn’t help but remember that a great many of them had involved a birch rod. Or worse.
“I’ll teach you what your father’s too weak to. I’ll make you a man, boy. You’ll never end up as pathetic as him…”
Well. That was true. He was nothing like his father and was grateful for it.
He rolled a shoulder as he eyed the major, aware of a thin, silvery scar there. As a young lieutenant, Jonathan Tait had once beaten him with his sheathed sword. He’d been drunk, and gone too far, and apologised in the morning. But the scar remained.
“He’d been flogged so roughly the weals still hadn’t faded three months later…”
Try fifteen years, Mrs Ardingly. And my only crime was to refuse a whore.
“Of course I’m not going to back down on a wager,” he said.
“Aye.” The major smiled, that mocking glint back in his eye. “A gentleman can’t.” Even with his sister made a countess and his own self-made worth on the battlefield, the foundry owner’s son had his own lingering scar. “And Sebastian Thorne can’t be seen to lose one.”
“Quite.”
“So then, what are you going to do about it? How does the high and mighty Sebastian Thorne win an unwinnable wager?”
Sebastian shrugged, looking both ways down the street this time before stepping into it.
“I have absolutely no idea. But I’ll win it. You taught me that, Uncle. I do not lose.”
It was the sixth time Sebastian had made a morning call to the marquess’s home at Grosvenor Square. On the third of those visits, he’d asked for the Lady Frances Elston’s hand, and her father, the marquess, had promptly given it.
That Lady Frances hadn’t acquiesced quite so promptly was mildly annoying but unsurprising.
A lady on the verge of becoming engaged was a far more interesting social object than one already and irrevocably betrothed—no one was likely to jilt him—and he could hardly blame the lady for milking the situation for all it was worth.
After all, her social nous was one of many reasons he’d selected her.
A marquess’s daughter, the family wealthy, the father sensible and well respected, even if not brilliant himself.
Lady Frances had been proclaimed a diamond on her debut and had shone bright ever since.
Now four-and-twenty and with all her schoolgirl naivety worn away, she was an established leader of fashionable society—clever, astute, politically aware, and ready to make him a perfect wife.
A porter bowed him into the house. A bewigged and liveried footman led him up the stairs.