Chapter 7
In time, he’d turn two fingers up at the attention paid him. But it hadn’t begun that way.
The stares started early—as far back as he could remember.
It started with pitying servants who looked after the scrawny, shy, young master of the house.
And he needed looking after, he had. As the son of Mad Jack, the Crazed Kerr, young Kerr’s existence remained unpredictable at best, and violent at worst. The late viscount vacillated between explosions of jovial bursts of energy and wild behavior—at all hours.
Day. Night. The dead of night. The crack of dawn.
More often than not, Kerr found himself wakened by Mad Jack jumping up and down on his feather-tick mattress; calling for his son, like they were both lads and best of chums, to join in whatever wild escapade he had thought up for them.
And in a reversal of any normal sire-son relationship, young Kerr had been the one reasoning with the viscount to return to bed until a sensible hour.
On the worst of times, the late viscount succumbed to crying fits.
Crying was too tame a term. The gentleman sobbed, blubbered like a baby, and beat his fists against hair he was constantly tearing out.
As volatile as a sudden tempest, the viscount exploded into a violent rage.
Over the course of Kerry’s young life, his father smashed no fewer than half a dozen Trumeau Mirrors, a dozen gilded Chippendale ones, and too many to count Adam and Hepplewhite’s.
Each destruction always ended with the same conclusion: the late viscount sinking among the fragments, rocking, sobbing, and moaning, the seven years of ill-fortune he’d visited upon himself.
Kerr had observed from the shadows until the storm eased enough to safely go to the viscount, coax him to his feet, and escort him to his chambers. There, Kerr turned him over to the Hollis family doctor the viscountess had waiting for her husband.
The servants pitied the viscount and felt disgust for the viscountess.
“What wife and mother leaves a small lad to look after a madman?” they often asked one another.
Kerr hadn’t resented his mother. She’d always told Kerr stories and played toy soldiers with him. She taught him his numbers and how to read. The fact that she did those things during some of her husband’s worst fits earned Kerr’s admiration… and loyalty.
As such, he preferred dealing with the viscount’s violent tempers to leaving his mother, the small, slender, and always smiling for her son’s benefit, Viscountess Kerr, to weather them.
That said, when it was time for Kerr to enter Eton, he boarded the viscount’s carriage and headed for the North bank of the River Thames, with no small sense of relief—but an immense amount of guilt for his mother, whom he had left behind.
He couldn’t have got himself out of the viscount’s residence any faster than had someone set his heels on fire.
Something he could say with absolute certainty given the viscount once set the bottom of Kerr’s bed on fire to wake his son at three o’clock in the morning, for a game of Rounders.
It turned out Eton was not the haven Kerr expected to find.
There had been something far more dangerous than an erratic madman—hundreds of brutal little boys.
It would have been difficult for any frail-looking lad barely five inches past three feet and a stone and a half less than the others, but Kerr’s father may as well have stuck a “kick me” sign on his son’s scrawny arse.
Kerr’s mother had done her best, but at age ten, Kerr was the rare heir whose formal education had been neglected.
Where other noblemen brought the most elite tutors into their homes to school their sons, the late viscount hadn’t wasted time on the classics…
or with an actual tutor. Instead of Latin and Greek, he encouraged his son to practice pugilism—with him.
When other lads were learning Mathematics and estate business, he’d schooled Kerr in how to race a mount—against him.
Not only had Mad Jack made his son’s entry into formal schooling at Eton an uphill battle, but he’d sent Kerr into an all-out war, unarmed.
Streaking through Kerr’s first classes. After that, when indoors, Kerr spent an inordinate amount of time in the privy—upside down in it, to be precise.
As for the outdoors, he was also regularly dunked: Athens, just at the river bank beyond the Borcas as Cuckoo Weir—its name, which with Kerr’s mad lineage, hadn’t helped him any. Boveney Lock.
Scrawny as a fresh-picked chicken bone, he hadn’t stood a chance against the bigger lads or even the smaller ones.
To Kerr’s credit, he hadn’t made it easy for them. If they were going to dunk him, he wasn’t going down without a fight. The fights hadn’t lasted long. They’d been stronger. They’d hit harder.
Then a new lad arrived. A year older and a whole lot bigger and full of good humor…
he’d turned up like a God to Kerr’s puck.
All the older lads loved him. The younger ones wanted to be him.
They’d laughed at his jests. To be fair, the obnoxiously perfect lad’s jests, be they naughty or not, had been deuced clever.
And Kerr hated him on sight. Cursed his soul. And pulled a face whenever the big-enough-for-Oxford lad of his same age entered a room to cheers and obsequious greetings.
Fortunately for Kerr, the same could not be said for the other lad.
August Archdale, the Earl of Culross, hadn’t tolerated fools or bullies.
When all the other lads went out to carouse about London, Kerr stayed behind to study in the common room and tried to make up for years of neglect and learning rudimentary Latin.
Unfortunately, that particular night, the lads bundled up to take their mindless play outside, but the Neanderthals bored quickly and decided to wreak havoc in the snow.
On their way, Lords Lenchwick and Snarford caught Kerr, turned him upside down, carried him by his legs, and hung him out the open windows.
As they’d dangled him over the snow-covered Eton courtyard, he thought about returning home, decided Mad Jack was worse, and took what they doled out in silence.
During the days that followed, those same boys marveled that Kerr hadn’t cried.
He never corrected them, never said, ‘If bloody fear and the harsh wind hadn’t sucked the air from my lungs, I’d have sobbed the school down.
’ In those unending moments where death stared up at Kerr with open arms, the action unfolding inside the common room would change the trajectory of his life: Kerr found himself snatched to safety.
Collapsed on the floor and shaking from cold—and terror—he took in the bodies of other boys littering the floor.
Young Culross towered over them.
He demanded they stand and apologize to Kerr. When the brainless bullies finished begging forgiveness, Culross leveled the pair with swift uppercuts. They’d gone down like a ton of bricks. Then, with Lenchwick and Snarford prone between them, Culross stretched a hand out.
“The name is Archdale.”
To which, Kerr placed his small palm in the much bigger boy’s. “Hollis.”
From that, a friendship was born and a brotherhood forged.
Kerr would have, and still would, die for the other man. Kerr’s loyalty went deep, so deep it accounted for actions he’d never condone—the attempted abduction of a lady from a rival shipping family.
After university, they each went their separate ways: Kerr for the Navy to fight Boney’s forces and Culross for his own sea adventure, as a privateer.
When Kerr’s service ended, and all soldiers and sailors went home to assume their rightful places as gentlemen, Culross offered Kerr the role of quartermaster: his right-hand man at sea, aboard his shipping line.
They’d sailed and plundered as pirates did, but were awarded the prettier title of privateer for their ‘service to the Crown’.
In the greatest irony, Kerr made it through the war with his visage unscathed and his body intact, only to get himself caught in a sea-battle when Culross was trying to steal away Linnie McQuoid-Smith of the McQuoid shipping line.
The crew jested they all finally had a chance against the godlike Kerr.
The stares of horror had returned—this time in a boon—from the respectable ladies—which mattered not at all.
He intended to let the mad-Kerr line die with him.
Conversely, he was the beneficiary of the perverse desires from the widows and wicked ones.
As for the university lads who once bullied him, once he outgrew their bullying—and reached more than six feet tall and came into himself, he’d attracted eyes of ladies, non-ladies, and every woman in between.
Everyone wanted to rub elbows with Viscount Kerr, even with the madness attached to his name.
Which was why, as Kerr strode through the double doors of White’s, not one of the gazes swiveled in his direction fazed him. He lifted a silencing hand to the occasional fellow. Held two middle fingers up for the vast majority of patrons.
As for him, his focus was set on one table and one table only.
The solid mahogany burnished one in burr-walnut finishes, dead center of the club because the member had always had a thing for being at the center of it all.
With a curly crop of golden hair, the gentleman might have Polite Society fooled into believing he was some saint, but there wasn’t a greater sinner among them.
Or that had been the case until he’d gotten himself caught in the parson’s mousetrap—and bound to the McQuoid-Smith family, and hence binding Kerr to the damned family.
More specifically to her.
The infuriating, careless, feisty, fearless Andromena Smith who was not only determined, but insistent on getting herself killed.
And what he felt now—the same as when he’d spied her crossing New Bond Street—was most certainly not crippling terror. Kerr wasn’t afraid of a bloody thing. Kerr didn’t give a damn about some blasted chit who treated her own life like a cheap wager.
By the time he identified the emotion pumping hard in his veins as rage, he reached his friends and the one of them who deserved his wrath.
The Earl of Culross and Lord Alec Archdale made to rise.
Catching the scalloped back of the empty chair between the brothers, he pulled out a leather armchair and dropped into it.
Both men shared a look and reclaimed their seats.
“I expected you almost an hour ago.”
Do not kill him. He is your friend. That didn’t mean he couldn’t maim him. Kerr reminded himself of this several times, until his temper cooled.
As if to drive his point home, Culross withdrew and brandished his timepiece, which contained a perfect rendering of the countess, and said: “You’re late.”
“Am I? I had no idea.” Kerr greeted the other. “Archdale.” It wasn’t, after all, the younger man’s fault.
“Kerr.” Culross’s brother completed his pour. “Culross has a way of knowing just what to do and say to get under a person’s skin.” He passed the short-rimmed glass to Kerr.
Kerr grabbed the glass. “Fortunately for us, since your brother’s been leg-shackled, he’s not as clever as he once was.”
“I’ll toast that.”
They clinked rummers.
Culross reclined in his lounge chair. “You are both children.”
“Given that you’re expanding your brood, you know something of it.”
Archdale coughed on his drink.
Kerr failed to hear the captain’s response—and the other man was better for it.
The moment the word ‘child’ left Culross’s mouth, Kerr recalled the too-tempting-for-his-own-good chit who’d narrowly escaped death three times now.
More if one counted all the vagrants, he’d felled last night keeping her alive.
Not once last night, however, had tears filled her eyes the way they had when she walked away from him today.
And that set off a whole maelstrom of emotions he couldn’t name—and didn’t care to.
Kerr downed his drink in a long, swift swallow, grabbed the bottle, and poured himself another.
With this glass halfway to his mouth, a tingling feeling scraped his nape. From over the rim of his freshly made brandy, Kerr scanned the stodgy club. The usual stares met him, but there was something off this time.
People might—and did—stare at Kerr, but contrarily, Kerr, with a single sluiced stare, could shut those looks down. His glower served him well. Until now, it would seem.
Culross called his attention. “Ah, you’re growing soft. You only just noticed you’re all anyone’s talking about?”
“He always is,” Archdale pointed out.
Kerr took in the room and frowned. “Not this type.”
Culross barked his amusement. “High on the instep, much?”
The younger Archdale and Kerr spoke simultaneously.
“Logical is what the fellow is.”
“I’m being matter-of-fact,” said Kerr.
Culross wanted to get a rise out of him. This is what Kerr got for his loyalty to Andromena Smith. Blast and damn. Since he’d kissed that dauntless minx, his logic was in question. What was not, however, was his self-confidence. Culross could call it pride all he wanted.
Kerr knew better.
As a child, he was scrawny, chitty-faced, and the son of a madman.
He got his arse regularly handed to him because of it, and he understood why.
Later, when he grew tall and strong, and his pointy features finally fit his face—no longer rodent-like, as the other boys used to jeer—he also understood why tavern wenches and the cute bedmakers at Eton started climbing into his bed to become his bed partners.
“…You have an inflated sense of your own skills with women. That was an improvement, but I still don’t see it…”
He set his teeth hard enough that his jaw ached.
Archdale pushed the bottle at his fingertips.
Kerr splashed several fingerfuls until the amber brew touched the rim, and splashed drops over the sides.
One thing both he and Culross possessed in like measure?
Obstinacy. Neither intended to bow. No matter how many times Archdale volleyed his stare between them, waiting for someone to crack.
In the end, Culross looked away first.
Kerr turned back to find the one responsible for Culross’s surrender and scowl.
A familiar, towering figure shrugged out of his great cloak and handed it to servant stationed at the entrance of White’s.
Kerr smiled.
His younger brother, Lord Greyhold had arrived.