I didn’t rebel. I was not inclined to be different from my father. It was both natural to love the things he loved and beneficial.
My mother loved me deeply, but I didn’t have to do anything to warrant that love, and somehow, it meant more to me that my father’s affections had to be earned.
It became my childhood and adolescent mission to deserve it.
For years, I did. So well, in fact, that on my ninth birthday, Noel began my introduction to the Order.
To this day, I remember every moment of Yana’s beating in the dungeon of Pearl Hall. The wet scent of cold stone and subterranean earth, the heaviness of the damp air, and the creak of the old wood steps beneath my feet as I followed my father into the dark.
Yana herself was cemented in my memory like a headstone memorializing the death of my childhood, a marble angel weeping over the grave of the love for my father.
She was so young, eighteen as Cosima had been when I acquired her, but without any of the Latin passion and fire that made my wife blaze from the inside out. She was as thin as the waifs Edward and I imagined wandered the moors of the Peak District at night in white nightgowns, their mouths wide in eternal screams, their eyes dark with nightmares. I was terrified by the sight of her, slim and wan as she was kneeling on the ground in the middle of the chamber with her head bent and her hands clasped.
She was so fragile I worried the very vibration of our foot strikes against the floor would shatter her into millions of porcelain pieces.
Noel, it became clear, had no such compunction.
“This is Yana, Alexander, but formally, she is known as slave Davenport. You see, our family has been an established member of a very prestigious society since its inception in 1655. We are the wealthiest, most powerful men in the United Kingdom, and together, we run the country from the shadows. We also participate in a game of wits and domination. It is the practice of the Order of Dionysus to acquire a slave to break them and train them to be the best. We have annual gatherings to assess which lord has the best pet.”
His words rolled over me like the morning mist on the hills, cold and opaque. My child’s mind could not begin to comprehend what he was trying to explain to me. I knew the history of England and of the Greythorn dukedom inside and out, but I had never heard of the Order, only of the Greek god Dionysus, the deity of revelry, wine, and a certain kind of madness.
Noel moved with the undulating, feline gait I’d tried to emulate my entire life to the shelves and hooks of bizarre tools lining the stone walls and retrieved a long, coiled rope like the one I’d once seen in an Indiana Jones film.
My mild confusion and unease shattered just the way I’d imagined Yana doing as he stood behind her, cocked the whip, and smiled at me.
“This, son,” he’d said with the paternal, warm grin, “is how you beat your slave.”
What followed was too graphic to put into words. It was the dissolution of my childhood and any purity I might have inherently retained because of my age.
Noel ruined me in that dungeon just as assuredly as he ruined Yana.
My mother noticed the abuse done to my back, of course. She was a caring woman and also an Italian one—she had eyes on the back of her head and a sense for everything that went wrong with her children. She tried to tend to the open wounds, but Noel found her and forbade her from nursing me.
I’d earned the punishment. In fact, I’d asked for it to spare the girl I’d been sure would break apart like a human vase on the cold stone floor of my father’s favourite room in Pearl Hall.
Noel would not see me coddled. There were consequences to every action, and I had to learn that, in order to avoid the consequences, I had to be the driving force behind every action.
It was the first lesson he taught me that I wasn’t happy to know, but in the end, it turned out to be the most powerful.
I was reminded of the gravity of that lesson the day Noel finally discovered I was working against the Order.
It was the same day I had irrefutable evidence that Amadeo Salvatore did not kill my mother.
It was just over a year since Cosima had been taken from me, and I’d never been colder, inside or out. My father took it as he was meant to, as a sign that I had moved onward and upward from my fleeting mistake with an Italian slave girl. He involved me in his business dealings once more, happily plying his sudden access to my influence to make rash, ill-advised business dealings across Great Britain.