#1 The Brazen Bluestocking
#2 The Scandalous Vixen
#3 The Wicked Wallflower
#4 One Wedding and an Earl
#5 Two Scandals and a Scot
Prequel to the series: The Ice Duchess
Christmas novella: The Governess Gamble
He’s more of myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Bronte
Epiphanies
His
Where a boy learns his father is a very cruel man indeed
Ollie’s stomach tilted as the village constable dragged his brother down the winding drive leading from the estate.
Xander Macauley didn’t struggle, didn’t once glance toward his window. He wasn’t going to forgive this transgression, not ever. Ollie had had one chance to have even a sliver of a family, and he’d ruined it. Been too cowardly to speak up, and now it was too late.
When he could no longer see the figures in the setting sun, Ollie swallowed his misery, his heart lodged in his throat. With an oath that shouldn’t pass the lips of an eleven-year-old boy, he cracked his forehead against the glass pane. His shoulder ached to the bone, dislocated a week ago, and popped back in place by the sibling he’d come to love this summer.
A young man who thought Ollie had betrayed him.
Oliver. His father preferred Oliver. He would never be Ollie again.
Anger took him on a raging river, emotion he rarely allowed. His elevated position as the future earl hammered into his brain long enough to keep him wary of every move he made. Before he took his next breath, he was striding down the corridor and into his father’s study, the glossy walnut door that had kept him out since birth slapping against the wall.
His father glanced up from the ledgers spread across his desk, eyes exactly like his and Xander’s heating behind wire frames. Their shade was unusual, tarnished silver, nothing else like them in England. In the world, though Ollie hadn’t yet seen much of that. Enough resemblance to declare Xander as his father’s bastard as incontrovertibly as a brand.
“Oliver.” His father snapped his quill to the desk, a move that displayed the impatience his calm tone buried. His face was flushed, his hair unkempt, his clothing rumpled. The room reeked of brandy and sweat. Since his wife’s death, the earl did nothing in half measure, including slowly killing himself. “You know not to interrupt when I’m working. The earldom doesn’t run itself. I only pray you can pull your weight when the time comes. Not lose what the title stands for, as seems to happen with the younger set.”
Ollie advanced until his knees, quivering but concealed by woolen trousers that were also good at concealing bruises from his father’s temper, bumped the massive mahogany desk. A family treasure his great-grandfather had won in a horse race with the Duke of Manchester in 1788. He’d often imagined dying slumped atop it, the earldom swallowing him whole. “Xander didn’t steal your pocket watch.”
The fifth Earl of Stanford bowed his head, his laugh dry and hard, pure contempt for the boy that would be the sixth flowing between them. Wrestling a cheroot from his waistcoat pocket, he took flint to tinder, set flame to tip. “I know that, silly lad. It was that imbecilic footman, Alexander. I only brought him on as a favor to my solicitor. He’s known the family since the Dark Ages. Trying to get him off the savage city streets, bring him to the country.” He sucked in a breath and released a rank, filmy vapor into the air. It swirled about his head like the mist that enfolded the meadows surrounding the estate. “He’s suffering due punishment, then he’ll be sent back to London to make his way as best he can. I’ve been charitable and found him a position as a chimney sweep. You’d better be thankful that half brother of yours has too hulking a frame to be a climbing boy or that’s what he would have got, too.”
Black dots swirled before Ollie’s vision, his eyes pricking with tears. Xander’s sentence was worse than this, even. “If you knew he was innocent… then why? Why send your son away? Why let him think I betrayed his trust? He’ll be returned to the workhouse, my lord, the workhouse.” Xander had told him tales of the place, haunting, horrible tales of beatings and gruel served with worm-ridden bread. Sickness and despair, such things a child should never see. He’d alleged that Ollie would never make it a month there, what with his feeble lungs and forgiving nature. Ollie wanted to argue, had even started to before shutting up because he feared his brother was right.
Xander Macauley was anything but forgiving. His belligerence was one point in his favor. The tough survived in forbidding worlds, it seemed.
The earl braced his fists on the desk and rose, close enough to strike, a sufficient threat to have Ollie backing up a step. “He’s the child of a doxie I made the crude error of associating with in my youth. She was as beautiful as they come, and he has her look about him, I’ll admit. That is my only excuse. He’s nothing more to either of us, Oliver. Those damned eyes gave me little alternative but to recognize him. You have them, too, curse it. This little gift tossed in my lap, a stolen timepiece, presented a satisfactory solution. No one expects me to house a common thief, a rookery rat, due to a trace of shared blood crawling through our veins.” He thumped his fist to the desk. Three defining knocks. “You’d best, and soon, my boy, forget him.”
Ollie took a breath, a big, stinking-of-smoke one. He kept himself from coughing by sheer will when his lungs were burning from the effort. He waged a fight with himself to steady his voice during these confrontations. To sound steady and sure, like Xander always did, not rasping and feeble.
His lungs were weak; he was scrawny. But he was growing. Getting stronger every day. Xander had said he would likely be as tall as he was someday. The moment Ollie could leave, he would. Find his brother. Apologize. Beg if he had to. He could send a note easily from Harrow, take a hack, and meet him in the city. It didn’t have to be long; he was returning to school in less than a month.
He'd repair this muddle. Because no boy should grow up without his brother by his side. It was the best plan for both of them.
“I can see the wheels spinning, lad. Christ, if you don’t have your mother’s impotent tendency to let every emotion show on your face. It’s a handsome face, however, so there is that. Spineless and unattractive would have been a trial to overcome.” He leaned until his fetid breath rushed past Ollie’s cheek. Until there was no whisper of sound aside from the wind shrieking against the fogged panes, the tick of a clock on the mantel signaling the end of this childhood. “There’ll be no more Harrow. I’ve let them know you aren’t returning and have arranged for a local tutor. Derbyshire’s best, I’m told. Where I can keep a close watch on my ailing heir. An heir who crafted foolish notions about his bastard brother this summer and brought this conclusion down on his own head.”
Ollie squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out the shimmer of delight rippling across his father’s face. He was going to be sick all over this bloody desk that his father loved more than he loved his sons. Sinking into the armchair, he dropped his head to his hands. His lungs would not, at the moment, allow enough air to keep him standing. “You can’t. You won’t. You don’t even like when I’m around. Send me away, let me go.”