Lord of Scoundrels Read online

  “Anyone else?” he asked, though he could scarcely find breath for the words.

  No one uttered a sound. When he turned to leave, they made way for him.

  When Sebastian was halfway across the yard, Wardell’s voice broke the strange silence.

  “Well done, Blackmoor!” he shouted.

  Sebastian stopped in his tracks and looked round. “Go to Hell!” he shouted back.

  Then Wardell’s cap flew into the air, accompanied by a cheer. In the next instant, scores of caps were flying, and everyone was cheering.

  “Stupid sods,” Sebastian muttered to himself. He doffed an imaginary hat—his own was trampled beyond redemption—and made a farcical, sweeping bow.

  A moment later, he was surrounded by laughing boys, and in the next, he was hoisted onto Wardell’s shoulders, and the more he verbally abused them, the better the idiots liked it.

  He soon became Wardell’s bosom bow. And then, of course, there was no hope for him.

  Among all the hellions being thrashed and bullied toward manhood at Eton at the time, Wardell’s circle was the worst. Along with the usual Etonian pranks and harassment of the hapless locals, they were gambling, smoking, and drinking themselves sick before they reached puberty. The wenching commenced promptly thereafter.

  Sebastian was initiated into the erotic mysteries on his thirteenth birthday. Wardell and Mallory—the boy who’d advised privy dunking—primed Sebastian with gin, blindfolded him, dragged him hither and yon for an hour or more, then hauled him up a flight of stairs into a musty-smelling room. They stripped him naked and, after removing the blindfold, left, locking the door behind them.

  The room contained one reeking oil lamp, a dirty straw mattress, and a very plump girl with golden ringlets, red cheeks, large blue eyes, and a nose no bigger than a button. She stared at Sebastian as though he were a dead rat.

  He didn’t have to guess why. Though he’d shot up two inches since his last birthday, he still looked like a hobgoblin.

  “I won’t do it,” she said. Her mouth set mulishly. “Not for a hundred pounds.”

  Sebastian discovered that he did have some feelings left. If he hadn’t, she couldn’t have hurt them. His throat burned and he wanted to cry and he hated her for making him want to. She was a common, stupid little sow, and if she’d been a boy, he would have thrashed her to kingdom come.

  But hiding his feelings had become a reflex by now.

  “That’s too bad,” he said coolly. “It’s my birthday, and I was feeling so good-humored that I was thinking of paying you ten shillings.”

  Sebastian knew Wardell had never paid a tart more than sixpence.

  She gave Sebastian a sulky look which strayed down to his masculine article. And lingered there. That was enough to attract its attention. It promptly began to swell.

  Her pouting lip quivered.

  “I told you I was in a good humor,” he said before she could laugh at him. “Ten and six, then. No more. If you don’t like what I’ve got, I can always take it somewhere else.”

  “I ’spect I could close my eyes,” she said.

  He gave her a mocking smile. “Open or shut, it’s all the same to me—but I’ll ’spect my money’s worth.”

  He got it, too, and she didn’t shut her eyes, but made all the show of enthusiasm a fellow could wish.

  There was a life lesson in it, Sebastian reflected later, and he grasped that lesson as quickly as he’d done every other.

  Thenceforth, he decided, he must take his motto from Horace: “Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means money.”

  From the time he’d entered Eton, the only communications Sebastian received from home were single-sentence notes accompanying his quarterly allowance. His father’s secretary wrote the notes.

  When Sebastian was nearing the end of his time at Eton, he received a two-paragraph letter outlining arrangements for his studies at Cambridge.

  He knew that Cambridge was a fine university, which many considered more progressive than monkish Oxford.

  He also knew that his father had not chosen Cambridge for this reason. The Ballisters had attended Eton and Oxford practically since the time those institutions were founded. To send his son anywhere else was the closest Lord Dain could come to disowning him. It announced to the world that Sebastian was a filthy stain on the ancestral escutcheon.

  Which he most certainly was.

  He not only behaved like a monster—albeit never quite badly enough before authority figures to be expelled—but had become one in physical fact: well over six feet tall and every inch dark and brutally hard.

  He had spent the better part of his Eton career making sure he would be remembered as a monster. He was proud of the fact that decent people called him the Bane and Blight of the Ballisters.

  Until now, Lord Dain had given no sign that he noticed or cared what his son did.

  The terse letter proved otherwise. His Lordship meant to punish and humiliate his son by banishing him to a university no Ballister had ever set foot in.

  The punishment came too late. Sebastian had learned several effective modes of responding to attempts to manage, punish, and shame him. He had found that money, in many cases, was far more effective than physical force.

  Taking his motto from Horace, he had learned how to double, triple, and quadruple his allowance in games of chance and wagers. He spent half his winnings on women, diverse other vices, and private Italian lessons—the last because he wouldn’t let anyone suspect he was at all sensitive about his mother.

  He had planned to buy a racehorse with the other half of his winnings.

  He wrote back, recommending that his parent use the allotted funds to send a needy boy to Cambridge, because the Earl of Blackmoor would attend Oxford and pay his own way.

  Then he bet his racehorse savings on a wrestling match.

  The winnings—and influence exerted by Wardell’s uncle—got Sebastian to Oxford.

  The next time he heard from home, Sebastian was four and twenty years old. The one-paragraph message announced his father’s death.

  Along with the title, the new Marquess of Dain inherited a great deal of land, several impressive houses—including Athcourt, the magnificent ancestral pile on the fringes of Dartmoor—and all their attendant mortgages and debts.

  His father had left his affairs in an appalling state, and Sebastian hadn’t the smallest doubt why. Unable to control his son, the dear departed had determined to ruin him.

  But if the pious old bastard was smiling in the hereafter, waiting for the fourth Marquess of Dain to be hauled to the nearest sponging house, he was doomed to a very long wait.

  Sebastian had by now discovered the world of commerce, and set his brains and daring to mastering it. He’d earned or won every farthing of his present comfortable income himself. In the process, he had turned more than one enterprise on the edge of bankruptcy into a profitable investment. Dealing with his father’s paltry mess was child’s play.

  He sold everything that wasn’t entailed, settled the debts, reorganized the backward financial system, dismissed the secretary, steward, and family solicitor, installed replacements with brains, and told them what was expected of them. Then he took one last ride through the moors he hadn’t seen since his childhood, and departed for Paris.

  Chapter 1

  Paris—March 1828

  “No. It can’t be,” Sir Bertram Trent whispered, aghast. His round blue eyes bulging in horror, he pressed his forehead to the window overlooking the Rue de Provence.

  “I believe it is, sir,” said his manservant, Withers.

  Sir Bertram dragged his hand through his tousled brown curls. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and he’d only just changed out of his dressing gown. “Genevieve,” he said hollowly. “Oh, Lord, it is her.”

  “It is your grandmother, Lady Pembury, beyond doubt—and your sister, Miss Jessica, with her.” Withers suppressed a smile. He was suppressing a great deal at the
moment. The mad urge to dance about the room, shouting hallelujah, for instance.

  They were saved, he thought. With Miss Jessica here, matters would soon be put right. He had taken a great risk in writing to her, but it had to be done, for the good of the family.

  Sir Bertram had fallen among Evil Companions. The evilest of companions in all of Christendom, in Withers’ opinion: a pack of wastrel degenerates led by that monster, the fourth Marquess of Dain.

  But Miss Jessica would soon put a stop to it, the elderly manservant assured himself as he speedily knotted his master’s neckcloth.

  Sir Bertram’s twenty-seven-year-old sister had inherited her widowed grandmother’s alluring looks: the silken hair nearly blue-black in color, almond-shaped silver-grey eyes, alabaster complexion, and graceful figure—all of which, in Lady Pembury’s case, had proved immune to the ravages of time.

  More important, in the practical Withers’ view, Miss Jessica had inherited her late father’s brains, physical agility, and courage. She could ride, fence, and shoot with the best of them. Actually, when it came to pistols, she was the best of the whole family, and that was saying something. During two brief marriages, her grandmother had borne four sons by her first husband, Sir Edmund Trent, and two by her second, Viscount Pembury, and daughters and sons alike had bred males in abundance. Yet not a one of those fine fellows could outshoot Miss Jessica. She could pop the cork off a wine bottle at twenty paces—and Withers himself had seen her do it.

  He wouldn’t mind seeing her pop Lord Dain’s cork for him. The great brute was an abomination, a disgrace to his country, an idle reprobate with no more conscience than a dung beetle. He had lured Sir Bertram—who, lamentably, was not the cleverest of gentlemen—into his nefarious circle and down the slippery slope to ruin. Another few months of Lord Dain’s company and Sir Bertram would be bankrupt—if the endless round of debauchery didn’t kill him first.

  But there wouldn’t be another few months, Withers reflected happily as he nudged his reluctant master to the door. Miss Jessica would fix everything. She always did.

  Bertie had managed a show of surprised delight to see his sister and grandmother. The instant the latter had retired to her bedchamber to rest from the journey, however, he yanked Jessica into what seemed to be the drawing room of the narrow—and much too expensive, she reflected irritably—appartement.

  “Devil take it, Jess, what’s this about?” he demanded.

  Jessica picked up the mass of sporting papers heaped upon an overstuffed chair by the fire, threw them onto the grate, and sank down with a sigh into the cushioned softness.

  The carriage ride from Calais had been long, dusty, and bumpy. She had little doubt that, thanks to the abominable condition of French roads, her bottom was black and blue.

  She would very much like to bruise her brother’s bottom for him at present. Unfortunately, though two years younger, he was a head taller than she, and several stone heavier. The days of bringing him to his senses via a sturdy birch rod were long past.

  “It’s a birthday present,” she said.

  His unhealthily pale countenance brightened for a moment, and his familiar, amiably stupid grin appeared. “I say, Jess, that’s awful sweet of—” Then the grin faded and his brow furrowed. “But my birthday ain’t until July. You can’t be meaning to stay until—”

  “I meant Genevieve’s birthday,” she said.

  One of Lady Pembury’s several eccentricities was her insistence that her children and grandchildren address and refer to her by name. “I am a woman,” she would say to those who protested that such terminology was disrespectful. “I have a name. Mama, Grandmama…” Here she would give a delicate shudder. “So anonymous.”

  Bertie’s expression grew wary. “When’s that?”

  “Her birthday, as you ought to remember, is the day after tomorrow.” Jessica pulled off her grey kid boots, drew the footstool closer, and put her feet up. “I wanted her to have a treat. She hasn’t been to Paris in ages, and matters haven’t been pleasant at home. Some of the aunts have been muttering about having her locked up in a lunatic asylum. Not that I’m surprised. They’ve never understood her. Did you know, she had three marriage offers last month alone? I believe Number Three was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lord Fangiers is four and thirty years old. The family says it’s embarrassing.”

  “Well, it ain’t exactly dignified, at her age.”

  “She’s not dead, Bertie. I don’t see why she should behave as though she were. If she wishes to wed a pot boy, that’s her business.” Jessica gave her brother a searching look. “Of course, it would mean that her new husband would have charge of her funds. I daresay that worries everybody.”

  Bertie flushed. “No need to look at me that way.”

  “Isn’t there? You appear rather worried yourself. Maybe you had an idea she’d bail you out of your difficulties.”

  He tugged at his cravat. “Ain’t in difficulties.”

  “Oh, then I must be the one. According to your man of business, paying your present debts will leave me with precisely forty-seven pounds, six shillings, threepence for the remainder of the year. Which means I must either move in with aunts and uncles again or work. I spent ten years as unpaid nanny to their brats. I do not intend to spend another ten seconds. That leaves work.”

  His pale blue eyes widened. “Work? You mean, earn wages?”

  She nodded. “I see no acceptable alternative.”

  “Have you gone loony, Jess? You’re a girl. You get shackled. To a chap who’s plump in the pocket. Like Genevieve done. Twice. You got her looks, you know. If you wasn’t so confounded picky—”

  “But I am,” she said. “Fortunately, I can afford to be.”

  She and Bertie had been orphaned very young, and left to the care of aunts, uncles, and cousins barely able to support their own burgeoning broods. The family might have been comfortably well off if there hadn’t been so very many of them. But Genevieve descended from a line of prolific breeders, especially of males, and her offspring had inherited the talent.

  That was one of the reasons Jessica received so many marriage offers—an average of six per annum, even at present, when she ought to be on the shelf, wearing a spinster’s cap. But she’d be hanged before she’d marry and play brood mare to a rich, titled oaf—or before she’d don dowdy caps, for that matter.

  She had a talent for unearthing treasures at auctions and secondhand shops, and selling same at a tidy profit. Though she wasn’t making a fortune, for the last five years she had been able to buy her own fashionable clothes and accessories, instead of wearing her relatives’ castoffs. It was a modest form of independence. She wanted more. During the past year, she had been planning how to get more.

  She had finally saved enough to lease and begin stocking a shop of her own. It would be elegant and very exclusive, catering to an elite clientele. In her many hours at Society affairs, she’d developed a keen understanding of the idle rich, not only of what they liked but also of the most effective methods of drawing them in.

  She meant to start drawing them in once she’d hauled her brother out of the mess he’d got himself into. Then she’d see to it that his mistakes never again disrupted her well-ordered life. Bertie was an irresponsible, unreliable, rattlebrained ninny. She shuddered to imagine what the future held for her if she continued to depend upon him for anything.

  “You know very well I don’t need to marry for money,” she told him now. “All I need do is open the shop. I’ve selected the place and I’ve saved enough to—”

  “That cork-brained rag-and-bottle-shop scheme?” he cried.

  “Not a rag and bottle shop,” she said calmly. “As I’ve explained to you at least a dozen times—”

  “I won’t let you set up as a shopkeeper.” Bertie drew himself up. “No sister of mine will go into trade.”

  “I should like to see you stop me,” she said.

  He screwed up his face into a threatening scowl.
r />   She leaned back in the chair and gazed at him contemplatively. “Lud, Bertie, you look just like a pig, with your eyes all squeezed up like that. In fact, you’ve grown amazingly piglike since last I saw you. You’ve gained two stone at least. Maybe as much as three.” Her gaze dropped. “And all in your belly, by the looks of it. You put me in mind of the king.”

  “That whale?” he shrieked. “I do not. Take it back, Jess.”

  “Or what? You’ll sit on me?” She laughed.

  He stalked away and flung himself onto the sofa.

  “If I were you,” she said, “I’d worry less about what my sister said and did, and more about my own future. I can take care of myself, Bertie. But you…Well, I believe you’re the one who ought to be thinking about marrying somebody plump in the pocket.”

  “Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said.

  She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce—just before falling into the punch bowl—to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”

  She didn’t wait for Bertie to sort through his mind for definitions of the big words. “I know what men find hilarious,” she said. “I’ve lived with you and reared ten male cousins. Drunk or sober, they like jokes about what they do—or want to do—with females, and they are endlessly fascinated with passing wind, water, and—”

  “Women don’t have a sense of humor,” Bertie said. “They don’t need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce that the Almighty is a female.”

  He uttered the words slowly and carefully, as though he’d taken considerable pains to memorize them.

  “Whence arises this philosophical profundity, Bertie?” she asked.

  “Say again?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It wasn’t a drunken jackass, Miss Sneering and Snide,” he said smugly. “I may not have the biggest brain box in the world, but I guess I know a jackass when I see one, and Dain ain’t.”