Lord of Scoundrels

Thanks to: Sal Raciti, for the choice Italian phrases; Carol Proko Easton, for the loan of her splendid books on Russian icons; Cynthia Drelinger, for computer processing my pencil hieroglyphics; and my husband, Walter, and our friend, Owen Halpern, for an unforgettable journey through England’s beautiful west country.

I
n the spring of 1792, Dominick Edward Guy de Ath Ballister, third Marquess of Dain, Earl of Blackmoor, Viscount Launcells, Baron Ballister and Launcells, lost his wife and four children to typhus.

Though he’d married in obedience to his father’s command, Lord Dain had developed a degree of regard for his wife, who had dutifully borne him three handsome boys and one pretty little girl. He’d loved them insofar as he was able. This was not, by average standards, very much. But then, it wasn’t in Lord Dain’s nature to love anybody at all. What heart he had was devoted to his lands, particularly Athcourt, the ancestral estate in Devon. His property was his mistress.

She was an expensive one, though, and he wasn’t the wealthiest of men. Thus, at the advanced age of two and forty, Lord Dain was obliged to wed again and, to satisfy his mistress’s demands, to marry pots of money.

Late in 1793, he met, wooed, and wed Lucia Usignuolo, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Florentine nobleman.

Society was stunned. The Ballisters could trace their line back to Saxon times. Seven centuries earlier, one of them had wed a Norman lady and received a barony from William I in reward. Since then, no Ballister had ever married a foreigner. Society concluded that the Marquess of Dain’s mind was disordered by grief.

Not many months later, His Lordship himself gloomily suspected that his mind had been disordered by something. He had married, he thought, a very beautiful raven-haired girl who gazed at him adoringly and smiled and agreed with every word he uttered. What he’d wed, he found out, was a dormant volcano. The ink was scarcely dry on the marriage lines before she began to erupt.

She was spoiled, proud, passionate, and quick-tempered. She was recklessly extravagant, talked too much and too loudly, and mocked his commands. Worst of all, her uninhibited behavior in bed appalled him.

Only the fear that the Ballister line would otherwise die out kept him returning to that bed. He gritted his teeth and did his duty. When at last she was breeding, he quitted the exercise and began praying fervently for a son, so he wouldn’t have to do it again.

In May of 1795, Providence answered his prayers.

When he got his first look at the infant, though, Lord Dain suspected it was Satan who’d answered them.

His heir was a wizened olive thing with large black eyes, ill-proportioned limbs, and a grossly oversize nose. It howled incessantly.

If he could have denied the thing was his, he would have. But he couldn’t, because upon its left buttock was the same tiny brown birthmark in the shape of a crossbow that adorned Lord Dain’s own anatomy. Generations of Ballisters had borne this mark.

Unable to deny the monstrosity was his, the marquess decided it was the inevitable consequence of lewd and unnatural conjugal acts. In his darker moments, he believed his young wife was Satan’s handmaiden and the boy the Devil’s spawn.

Lord Dain never went to his wife’s bed again.

The boy was christened Sebastian Leslie Guy de Ath Ballister and, according to the custom, took his father’s second highest title, Earl of Blackmoor. The title was apt enough, the wags whispered behind the marquess’s back, for the child had inherited the olive complexion, obsidian eyes, and crow black hair of his mother’s family. He was also in full possession of the Usignuolo nose, a noble Florentine proboscis down which countless maternal ancestors had frowned upon their inferiors. The nose well became the average Usignuolo adult male, who was customarily built upon the monumental scale. Upon a very small, awkwardly proportioned little boy, it was a monstrous beak.

Unfortunately, he’d inherited the Usignuolos’ acute sensitivity as well. Consequently, by the time he was seven years old, he was miserably aware that something was wrong with him.

His mother had bought him a number of handsome picture books. None of the people in the books looked anything like him—except for a hook-nosed, humpbacked devil’s imp who perched on Little Tommy’s shoulder and tricked him into doing wicked things.

Though he’d never discerned any imps upon his shoulder or heard any whisper, Sebastian knew he must be wicked, because he was always being scolded or whipped. He preferred the whippings his tutor gave him. His father’s scolds made Sebastian feel hot and clammy cold at the same time, and then his stomach would feel as though it were filled with birds, all flapping their wings to get out, and then his legs would shake. But he dared not cry, because he was no longer a baby, and crying only made his father angrier. A look would come into his face that was worse even than the scolding words.

In the picture books, parents smiled at the children and cuddled and kissed them. His mama did that sometimes, when she was in a happy mood, but his papa never did. His father never talked and played with him. He’d never taken Sebastian for a ride on his shoulders or even up in front of him on a horse. Sebastian rode his own pony, and it was Phelps, one of the grooms, who taught him.

He knew he couldn’t ask his mother what was wrong with him and how to fix it. Sebastian had learned not to say much of anything—except that he loved her and she was the prettiest mama in the world—because nearly everything else upset her.

Once, when she was going to Dartmouth, she’d asked what he’d like her to bring back. He’d asked for a little brother to play with. She had started crying, and then she’d grown angry and screamed bad words in Italian. Though Sebastian didn’t know what all the words meant, he knew they were wicked, because when Papa heard them, he scolded her.

Then they would quarrel. And that was worse even than his mother’s crying and his father’s angriest look.

Sebastian didn’t want to cause any horrible quarrels. He especially didn’t want to provoke his mama into saying the wicked words, because God might get angry, and then she’d die and go to Hell. Then no one would cuddle and kiss him, ever.

And so there was no one Sebastian could ask what was wrong and what to do, except his Heavenly Father. But He never answered.

Then, one day, when Sebastian was eight years old, his mother went out with her maid and didn’t come back.

His father had gone to London, and the servants told Sebastian his mother had decided to go there, too.

But his father came back very soon, and Mama wasn’t with him.

Sebastian was summoned to the dark study. His papa, looking very grim, sat at an immense desk, his Bible open before him. He ordered Sebastian to sit. Trembling, Sebastian obeyed. That was all he could do. He couldn’t speak. The wings were flapping so hard in his stomach that it was all he could do
not
to throw up.

“You are to stop plaguing the servants about your mother,” his father told him. “You are not to speak of her again. She is an evil, godless creature. Her name is Jezebel, and ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.’”

Somebody was screaming very loud in Sebastian’s head. So loudly that he could hardly hear his father. But his father didn’t seem to hear the screaming. He was looking down at the Bible.

“‘For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil,’” he read. “‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to earth; her steps take hold on hell.’” He looked up. “I renounce her, and rejoice in my heart that the corruption has fled the house of my fathers. We will speak of it no more.”

He rose and pulled the bell rope, and one of the footmen came and led Sebastian away. Still, even after the study door closed, even while they hurried down the stairs, the screaming in Sebastian’s head wouldn’t stop. He tried covering his ears, but it went on, and then all he could do was open his mouth and let it out in a long, terrible howl.

When the footman tried to quiet him, Sebastian kicked and bit him, and broke away. Then all the wicked words came out of his mouth. He couldn’t stop them. There was a monster inside him and he couldn’t stop it. The monster snatched a vase from a table and hurled it at a mirror. It grabbed a plaster statue and sent it crashing to the floor. It ran down the great hall, screaming, and breaking everything it could reach.

All the upper servants rushed toward the noise, but they shrank from touching the child, each and every one certain he was possessed by demons. They stood, frozen with horror, watching Lord Dain’s heir apparent reduce the Great Hall to a shambles. No word of rebuke, no sound at all, came from the floor above. His Lordship’s door remained shut—as though against the devil raging below.

At last the enormous cook lumbered in from the kitchen, picked the howling boy up, and, oblivious to his kicking and punching, hugged him. “There now, child,” she murmured.

Fearing neither demons nor Lord Dain, she took Sebastian to the kitchen and, banishing all her helpers, sat down in her great chair before the fire and rocked the sobbing child until he was too exhausted to cry anymore.

Like the rest of the household, Cook was aware that Lady Dain had eloped with the son of a wealthy shipping merchant. She had not gone to London, but to Dartmouth, where she’d boarded one of her lover’s ships and departed with him for the West Indies.

The boy’s hysterical sobs about dogs eating his mother made the cook want very much to take a meat cleaver to her master. The young Earl of Blackmoor was the ugliest little boy anyone had ever seen in all of Devon—and possibly Cornwall and Dorset as well. He was also moody, quick-tempered, and generally unappealing. On the other hand, he was only a little boy, who deserved better, she thought, than what Fate had dealt out to him.

She told Sebastian that his mama and papa did not get along, and his mama had become so very unhappy that she ran away. Unfortunately, running away was an even worse mistake for a grown-up lady than it was for a little boy, Cook explained. It was such a bad mistake that it could never be fixed, and Lady Dain could never come back.

“Is she going to Hell?” the boy asked. “Papa s-said—” His voice wobbled.

“God will forgive her,” Cook said firmly. “If He is just and merciful, He will.”

Then she took him upstairs, chased his stern nursemaid away, and put him to bed.

After she had gone, Sebastian sat up and took from his bedstand the small picture of the Blessed Virgin and the Baby Jesus his mother had given him. Hugging it to his chest, he prayed.

He had been taught all the proper prayers of his father’s faith, but this night he uttered the one he’d heard his mother say, holding the long strand of beads in her hand. He’d heard it so many times that he knew it by heart, though he hadn’t yet learned enough Latin to understand all the words.

“
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus
,” he began.

He did not know that his father stood outside the door listening.

He did not know that the popish prayer was, to Lord Dain, the very last straw.

A fortnight later, Sebastian was bundled into a carriage and taken to Eton.

After a brief interview with the headmaster, he was abandoned to the immense dormitory and the tender mercies of his schoolmates.

Lord Wardell, the oldest and largest in the immediate vicinity, stared at Sebastian for a very long time, then burst into laughter. The others promptly followed suit. Sebastian stood frozen listening to what seemed like thousands of howling hyenas.

“No wonder his mama ran away,” Wardell told the company when he found his breath again. “Did she scream when you were born, Black-a-moor?” he asked Sebastian.

“It’s
Blackmoor
,” Sebastian said, clenching his fists.

“It’s what I say it is, insect,” Wardell informed him. “And I say your mama bolted because she couldn’t stomach the sight of you another minute. Because you look precisely like a filthy little earwig.” Clasping his hands behind his back, he slowly circled the bewildered Sebastian. “What do you say to that, Black-a-moor?”

Sebastian gazed at the faces sneering down at him. Phelps, the groom, had said he would find friends at school. Sebastian, who’d never had anyone to play with, had clung to that hope through the long, lonely journey.

He saw no friends now, only mocking faces—and all well above his head. Every single boy in the vast Long Chamber was older and bigger than he was.

“I asked a question, earwig,” Wardell said. “When your betters ask a question, you’d best answer.”

Sebastian stared hard into his tormentor’s blue eyes. “
Stronzo
,” he said.

Wardell lightly cuffed his head. “None of that macaroni gibberish, Black-a-moor.”

“
Stronzo
,” Sebastian repeated boldly. “Bumhole turd.”

Wardell lifted his pale eyebrows and gazed at his assembled comrades. “Did you hear that?” he asked them. “It isn’t enough he’s ugly as Beelzebub, but he’s got a filthy mouth besides. What’s to be done, my lads?”

“Toss him,” said one.

“Dunk him,” said another.

“In the crapping case,” another added. “Looking for turds, ain’t he?”

This suggestion met with howling enthusiasm. In an instant, they were upon him.

Several times en route to his doom, they gave Sebastian a chance to recant. He had only to lick Wardell’s boots and beg forgiveness and he would be spared.

But the monster had taken hold of him, and Sebastian answered defiantly with a string of all the wicked English and Italian words he’d ever heard.

Defiance didn’t help him much at the moment. What helped was certain laws of physics. Small as he was, he was awkwardly formed. His bony shoulders, for instance, were too wide to fit into the privy. All Wardell could do was stuff Sebastian’s head into the hole and hold it there until he threw up.

The incident, to Wardell and his comrades’ irritation, did not teach the earwig respect. Though they devoted the better part of their free time thereafter to educating him, Sebastian wouldn’t learn. They mocked his looks and his mixed blood and made up filthy songs about his mother. They dangled him by his feet from windows, tossed him in blankets, and hid dead rodents in his bed. Privately—though there was precious little privacy at Eton—he wept with misery, rage, and loneliness. Publicly, he cursed and fought, though he always lost.