Prologue
Longlands, Northamptonshire
September 1826
The Duke of Ainswood’s family name was Mallory. Genealogy scholars agreed that the family originated in Normandy and was one of several by that name to settle in England in the twelfth century.
According to etymologists, the name meant unhappy or unlucky. In the Duke of Ainswood’s family history, however, the name meant Trouble, with a capital “T.” Some of the duke’s forebears had lived long, and some had lived short, but all had lived hard because that was their nature. They were hellions, born that way, notorious for it.
But times had changed, and the family had finally begun to change and quiet with the times. The fourth duke, a wicked old rip who’d died a decade earlier, had been the last of his generation. Those he’d left behind were a new breed of Mallory, more civilized, even virtuous.
Except for the only son of the fourth duke’s youngest brother.
Vere Aylwin Mallory was the last Mallory hellion. At well over six feet, he was the tallest of them all and, some said, the handsomest as well as the wildest. He had his father’s thick chestnut hair, and in his eyes—the darker green of earlier generations—glinted centuries of wickedness and the same invitation to sin that had undone generations of women. At nearly two and thirty years old, he’d done more than his share of sinning.
At present, he was making his way through the wood of the great Longlands estate, the country home of the Duke of Ainswood. Vere’s destination was the Hare and Pigeon public house in the nearby village.
In a mocking baritone, he was singing the words of the Anglican funeral service to the tune of a bawdy ballad.
He had heard the burial service so often in the last decade that he had it by heart, from the opening “I am the resurrection and the life” to the final “Amen.”
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother…”
At “brother,” his voice broke. He paused, his broad shoulders stiffening against the tremor that shook his big frame. Bracing an arm against a tree trunk, he gritted his teeth and shut his eyes tight and willed the wracking grief to subside.
He’d done enough grieving in the last decade, Vere told himself, and he’d shed enough tears in the seven days since his first cousin Charlie, the fifth Duke of Ainswood, had breathed his last.
He lay in the mausoleum at present, with the others Almighty God had “pleased to take” in the last ten years. The endless succession of funerals had commenced with that of the fourth duke, who had been like a father to Vere, his own parents having died when he was nine. Since then, death had claimed Charlie’s brothers along with their sons and wives, several girls, and Charlie’s wife and eldest son.
This latest funeral, despite years of practice, had been the hardest to bear, for Charlie was not only dearest to Vere of all his Mallory cousins, but one of the three men in the world Vere looked upon as brothers.
The other two were Roger Barnes, the Viscount Wardell, and Sebastian Ballister, the fourth Marquess of Dain. The latter, a dark giant more commonly known as Lord Beelzebub, was universally regarded as a hideous stain upon the Ballister family escutcheon. He and Wardell had been Vere’s partners in crime since Eton. But Wardell had been killed in a drunken brawl in a stable yard six years ago, and Dain, who had departed for the Continent some months later, seemed to be settled in Paris permanently.
There was no one left who mattered. Of the main branch of the Mallorys, only one male remained besides Vere: nine-year-old Robin, Charlie’s youngest, now sixth Duke of Ainswood.
Charlie had left two daughters as well—if one cared to count females, which Vere didn’t—and in his will named Vere, as nearest male kin, the children’s guardian. Not that this guardian need have anything to do with them. While family loyalty might dictate tolerance of the Mallorys’ last hellion—much as tradition dictated the naming of guardians—no one, not even Charlie, could be so blindly loyal as to believe Vere suited to the task of bringing up three innocent children. One of Charlie’s married sisters would do it.
The guardian position, in other words, was purely nominal, which was just as well, for Vere hadn’t spared his wards a thought since he’d arrived a week earlier—in time to watch Charlie depart for the hereafter.
It was all, horribly, exactly as his uncle had predicted ten years earlier, when Vere sat by his deathbed.
“I saw it when they were gathered about me,” his uncle had told him. “Saw them parading in and out. Unlucky ones. ‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower.’ Two of my brothers were cut down long before you were born. Then your sire. And today I saw them, my sons: Charles, Henry, William. Or was it a dying man’s fancy? ‘He fleeth as it were a shadow.’ I saw them, shadows all. What will ye do then, lad?”
At the time, Vere had thought the old man’s wits had failed. He knew better now.
Shadows all.
“Got that right, by Lucifer,” he muttered as he pushed away from the tree. “A bloody prophet you turned out to be, Uncle.”
He took up the service where he’d left off, singing the solemn words more lustily as he walked, and occasionally directing a defiant grin heavenward.
Those who knew him best, could they but observe him at this moment, would understand he was goading the Almighty as he’d so often goaded his fellow mortals. Vere Mallory was looking for trouble
, as usual, and this time he was trying to pick a fight with Jehovah Himself.
It didn’t work. The troublemaker neared the end of the service without Providence offering so much as a thunderclap of disapproval. Vere was about to launch into the Collect when he heard twigs snapping behind him and leaves rustling amid the hurried patter of footsteps. He turned…and saw the ghost.
It wasn’t truly a ghost, of course, but near enough. It was Robin, so painfully like his father—fair and slight, with the same sea-green eyes—that Vere couldn’t bear to look at him, and had managed not to for this last week.
The boy was running toward him, though, so there was no avoiding him. There was no ignoring, either, the sharp tug of grief—and yes, rage as well, to Vere’s shame, because he could not help resenting that the child lived and the father was gone.
Jaw set, Vere stared at the boy. It was not a welcoming look, and it made Robin stop short a few paces away. Then the boy’s face reddened, and his eyes flashed, and he hurtled at Vere head foremost, butting his surprised guardian in the stomach.
Though Vere’s abdomen was about as soft as an and-iron—like the rest of him—the lad not only kept butting, but added punching. Oblivious to their vast disparity in age, size, and weight, the young duke pounded away at his cousin, a maddened David trying to fell Goliath.
None of the civilized new breed of Mallorys would have known what to make of this unprovoked, desperate, and seemingly deranged attack. But Vere was not civilized. He understood, couldn’t help it.
He stood and let Robin rain ineffectual blows upon him, much as Robin’s grandfather, the fourth duke, had stood once, many years earlier, while an enraged, newly orphaned Vere pounded away. He hadn’t known what else to do except cry, which at the time was for some reason absolutely out of the question.
As Vere had done, Robin kept on, fighting an unmoving pillar of adult male until he wore himself out and sank, exhausted, to the ground.
Vere tried to remember his rage and resentment of moments before. He tried to wish the child to the devil, tried not to care, but it didn’t work.
This was Charlie’s boy, and a desperate boy he must be, to slip past the family and servants’ vigilant guard and brave a dark wood, alone, to find his dissolute cousin.
Vere wasn’t sure what the child was desperate for. It was clear enough, though, that Robin expected Vere to provide it, whatever it was.
He waited until Robin’s panting subsided to more normal respiration, then hauled the boy to his feet. “You shouldn’t come within a mile of me, you know,” Vere said. “I’m a bad influence. Ask anyone. Ask your aunts.”
“They cry,” Robin said, looking at his scuffed boots. “They cry too much. And they talk too soft.”
“Yes, it’s horrid,” Vere agreed. He bent and brushed off the boy’s coat. The child looked up at him…with Charlie’s eyes. But younger and too trusting. Vere’s own eyes stung. He straightened, cleared his throat, and said, “I was thinking of leaving them to it. I thought I’d go to…Brighton.” He paused, and told himself he was mad even to contemplate it. But the boy had come to him, and the boy’s father had never once failed Vere. Except in dying. “Would you like to come with me?”
“To Brighton?”
“That’s what I said.”
The too-young, too-trusting eyes began to glow. “Where the Pavilion is, you mean?”
The immense architectural phantasmagoria known as the Royal Pavilion was the analogously immense King George IV’s idea of a seaside cottage.
“It was, the last time I looked,” Vere answered. He started walking, back toward the house.
His ward promptly followed, running to keep up with his elder’s long strides. “Is it as fanciful as it looks in the pictures, Cousin Vere? Is it truly like a palace in The Arabian Nights?”
“I was thinking of starting out first thing tomorrow morning,” Vere said. “The sooner we leave, the sooner you can judge for yourself.”
If it had been up to Robin, they would have started out that very minute. If it had been up to his aunts and their husbands, Vere would have set out alone. But it wasn’t up to anyone else, as he told them a short while later. As the child’s legal guardian, he didn’t need anybody’s permission to take Robin to Brighton—or Bombay, for that matter.
It was Robin himself who silenced their objections, however. The sound of thumps drew the family out of the drawing room in time to see the young duke lugging his portmanteau down Longlands’ great staircase and through the cavernous hall to the vestibule.
“There, you see?” Vere turned to Dorothea, Charlie’s youngest sister, who’d protested longest and hardest. “He can’t wait to get away. You’re too damned dismal, the lot of you. It’s the tears and hushed voices and crepe and bombazine—that’s what scares him. Everything’s dark and grown-ups are crying. He wants to be with me because I’m big and noisy. Because I can scare away the monsters. Don’t you see?”
Whether she saw or not, she gave in, and when she did, the others followed suit. It was only for a few weeks, after all. Even Vere Mallory couldn’t corrupt a child’s morals irrevocably in a matter of weeks.
He had no wish to corrupt the boy’s morals, and he set out fully meaning to return Robin in a fortnight.
Vere could not be a father to him or any child, he was well aware. He was not a suitable role model. He hadn’t a wife—and had no intention of getting one—to do the things females did, the soft things, to balance his rough, uncivilized ways. His household comprised one servant, his valet Jaynes, who possessed all the soft, maternal qualities of a dyspeptic porcupine. This “household,” furthermore, had not occupied a fixed abode since Vere had left Oxford.
It was no way to rear a child, in short, especially one destined to assume the burdens of a great dukedom.
Nonetheless, the few weeks somehow stretched into a month, then another. From Brighton they traveled up into Berkshire, to the Vale of the White Horse, to view the ancient etching in a chalk hillside, thence to Stonehenge, and on to the West Country, following the coast and exploring smugglers’ coves all the way to Land’s End.
Autumn chilled into winter, which in turn warmed into spring. Then the letters came, from Dorothea and the others, with their gentle but not overly subtle reminders: Robin’s education could not be ignored indefinitely, his sisters missed him, and the longer the boy wandered, the harder it would be for him to settle down.
It was all true, Vere’s own conscience told him. Robin needed a real family, stability, a home.
Still he found it hard, returning Robin to Longlands, hard to part from him, though it was obviously the right thing to do. The household was not so dismal as before.
Dorothea and her husband were settled there now, with Robin’s sisters as well as their own brood. The halls rang again with the children’s songs and laughter, and in a defiance of convention Vere had to approve, the crepe and jet borders and black bombazine had already given way to the less lugubrious tones of half mourning.
It was also clear that Vere had done his job. He’d scared away the monsters, beyond question, for within hours, Robin was bosom bows with his boy cousins, Dorothea’s sons, and joining them in tormenting the girls. And when it came time to say good-bye, Robin showed no signs of panic. He didn’t take a temper fit or hit Vere, but promised to write faithfully, extracted his guardian’s promise to come back in late August for his tenth birthday, then ran off to help his cousins reenact the Battle of Agincourt.
But Vere returned long before the birthday. Not three weeks after leaving Longlands, he was racing back.
The sixth Duke of Ainswood had contracted diphtheria.
The disease was not well understood. The first accurate account of the infection had been published in France only five years earlier. What was understood and not debated was that diphtheria was highly contagious.
Charlie’s sisters pleaded with Vere. Their husbands tried to stop him, but he was bigger than any of them, and in a fury, as he was
now, a regiment of soldiers couldn’t have held him back.
He stormed up the great staircase and marched down the hall to the sickroom. He chased away the nurse and locked the door. Then he sat beside the bed and grasped his ward’s weak little hand.
“It’s all right, Robin,” he said. “I’m here. I’ll fight it for you. Let go of it and give it to me, do you hear me, lad? Throw off this curst ailment and let me tangle with it. I can do it, my boy, you know I can.”
The cold little hand lay unmoving in his big, warm one.
“Give it up, please,” Vere urged, choking back tears, stifling the useless grief. “It’s too soon for you, Robin, you know it is. You’ve scarcely begun to live. You don’t know a fraction of it—what there is to see, to do.”
The young duke’s eyelids fluttered and opened. Something like recognition seemed to flicker there. For an instant, his mouth shaped a ghost of a smile. Then the boy’s eyes closed.
That was all. Though Vere went on talking, coaxing, pleading, though he clung to the little hand, he could not draw the disease away and into himself. He could do nothing but wait and watch, as he’d done so many times before. It was a short watch, this time, the shortest, hardest of all.
In less than an hour, as twilight slipped into night, the boy’s life slipped away and fled…like a shadow.
Chapter 1
London
Wednesday, 27 August 1828
“I’ll sue ’em!” Angus Macgowan raged. “There’re libel laws in this kingdom, and if that isn’t libel, I’m a bull’s blooming bollocks!”
The enormous black mastiff who’d been drowsing before the editor’s office door lifted her head and gazed with mild curiosity from Macgowan to her mistress. Upon ascertaining that the latter was in no imminent danger, the dog laid her head down upon her forepaws again and closed her eyes.