Page 46 of Again, Scoundrel

“Yes,” he said. “I’m certain of it. But I’ve no idea what that thing might have been. We were fine, happy enough for the peerage, at any rate. And then one day we were not.”

“Tell me,” Violet said, stepping closer again until she’d closed the small distance between them. They were so close they were almost embracing.

“I was asleep in my bed at school,” Alistair began, “when the rank smell of tallow woke me up. The wax candles were reserved for the upperclassmen, you understand, not for us in the lower classes. To this day I can’t abide the reek of them.”

He paused and looked at her. “Do you really want to hear this?”

Violet nodded, so he went on.

“I was pulled from my bed and told to dress and then dragged down the hallway and pushed into the headmaster’s office. The whole time I was thinking I was there for pranks. The other boys and I played them often, hiding grass snakes in drawers or replacing the sugar with the saltpeter. That kind of thing, mostly harmless.

“But when I caught sight of my father standing in that office, I knew something much worse must have happened. He’d never come to Eton. Not once. But there he was, standing beside the headmaster’s gaslight, his face grim from the shadows and his eyelid twitching the way it only did when he was truly angry.

“‘They were only pranks,’ I said, but he wasn’t listening. He was already pulling me outside to the waiting carriage. My luggage had been stowed in the back and we were off without so much as a word of explanation.

“I let the silence sit for as long as I could before I finally dared ask if I’d done something wrong. It is a question I regret to this very day.”

Violet reached down for his hands and grasped them before she asked, “Why?”

“Because he told me, that’s why. Don’t ever ask questions, Violet, that you don’t care to know the answer to.

“I really hadn’t realized until that moment the Marquess had been cataloging my faults for the entirety of my life. Or that he would take my question as an invitation to regurgitate them back to me.

“He called me petulant and changeable. Told me I lacked the constancy of character to even be the spare, much less the heir. He said I was not serious. Nor studious. He accused me of caring far too much for pleasure and not at all for work. In short, he told me I was an utter failure, and that I would spend this summer becoming what my family needed me to be or I would not be part of it at all. I chose the latter option.”

“You joined the Navy.”

“Not right away, but yes. First, I went back to Rosehips, my beloved home in Kent, and there I learned that Mother had taken Darius away to France. Throughout those two awful days of the carriage ride, I’d been harboring this secret hope that we would arrive home and Mother would be there and the whole strange interlude would end.

“But it wasn’t so. She’d taken my brother on a continental holiday instead. Do you know that I cried when I learned that? As if I really were the snot-nosed brat my father accused me of being.

“I was quite tall even then, but it didn’t matter that I looked like a man because I could not act like one. I bent my shoulders down right on the threshold of Rosehips, and I sobbed. Let’s just say the Marquess was less than pleased.

“He kept on berating me but all I could see was this drop of spittle on his lip. I just kept staring at it, wondering if it would fall or just cling there forever. Imagine it, the Marquess spitting.”

The pain of the memory was etched into Alistair’s face, and Violet wanted to enfold him into her arms to soothe him. But she didn’t. She just kept ahold of his hands.

“You don’t have to tell me anymore,” she said eventually, “if you don’t wish to. But I’m here to listen, if you’d like to go on.”

Alistair shrugged as if it were nothing at all, those summer months with his father, but he continued his story.

“He woke me before dawn every morning for a three-hour course of calisthenics, horseback riding, and fencing. Which was exhausting but turned out to be my favorite part of the day because afterward he locked me in the library and made me memorize the estate ledgers.

“‘Your training in rigor,’ my father called it, as I sat there, squirming and hungry, trying to remember the catalogs of crops, or the tallies of rents, or who requested which land modification or equipment repair.

“I had to memorize all of it. And if I failed, which I invariably did, there would be no dinner. On and on it went for two months.”

“That’s horrible, Alistair. He shouldn’t have treated you that way. You were just a child.”

“Perhaps,” Alistair said. “I was rather a failure. I still am.”

He shrugged again, as if it were nothing, but Violet could see how he’d carried those words around with him all these years. As if they were sharp little knives just beneath the surface of his skin, waiting to cut him.

She tugged on his hands, and when he came close enough to wrap her arms around him, she did.

“Tell me one thing, Violet,” he said, dropping his forehead to rest on hers.

“What would you like to know?” she asked, knowing the words would be her undoing.