Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone
Bonus Prologue
London, Ashbourn House, 1789
Benedict Edward de Reviers Lively was a very fortunate man, by any reasonable person’s standards. After all, he was a duke. And not just any duke, but the sixth Duke of Ashbourn, a noble and venerated title dating back to the Conquest.
He had other titles as well, several of them. Wealth. Lands. Horses. Carriages. A handsome wife, bred to be the perfect duchess, who’d done her duty and presented him with an heir, upon whom they had bestowed Benedict’s second highest title: Marquess of Coldwick.
The Lively family were fawned over at every Society gathering they deigned to attend. No whiff of scandal had been attached to the family name in five generations—not since the original Duke of Ashbourn, who, it must be said, had been a bit of a rogue, though handy with a sword. Most people chose to focus on his battlefield heroics, which had been rewarded by the creation of the duchy of Ashbourn, rather than his decidedly improper reputation for gambling, brawling, and fabulously beautiful mistresses.
Benedict, however, in his secret heart of hearts, always felt he had more in common with his scandalous scoundrel of an ancestor than he did with the rest of the Lively family.
For no matter how often he recited to himself his litany of riches and privileges, the sixth Duke of Ashbourn was miserable.
His wealth bored him; the time spent looking at balance sheets and speaking to his estate managers was nothing but torment. He avoided it as much as possible. Likewise he avoided visiting those estates, much preferring to stay in London.
Not that he was allowed to partake of any of that great city’s more dashing entertainments. Oh, no. He must behave always, in all circumstances, as befit his rank and consequence, or risk the ire of his duchess.
He would have preferred to avoid his wife, Augusta, as well, but other than escaping to his club, White’s, for stultifying evenings of drinks and cards with other bored, boring aristocratic gentlemen, Benedict was trapped with her.
The droning whine of Augusta’s criticisms, complaints, and commands was Benedict’s constant companion. According to her, he had a distressing tendency to comport himself in an undignified way. He laughed too much, and too loudly. He spoke too much, and too loudly.
He sighed too much, and too loudly.
Benedict’s life was a gray haze of assemblies, sedate rides in Hyde Park, and the torturously long, dull musical evenings Augusta so loved.
Until she arrived.
Henrietta Berring. The loveliest, sweetest, most vivacious and charming girl Benedict had ever met.
Hired on as his two-year-old son’s nursemaid and promptly christened ‘Berry’ by the lisping babe, she spent most of her days in the nursery, doing whatever it was nursemaids did with children. But once a day, just before supper, she would appear in the drawing room with her charge for a visit with his parents. Augusta would gingerly dandle baby Nathaniel…and Benedict would sit and stare at Berry.
Her rich brown hair, dark and gleaming like polished rosewood; her bright blue eyes, wide and tip-tilted at the corners as though she was always on the verge of a smile; her pink kiss of a mouth; her long, slender neck and delicately turned wrists—the only bits of her alabaster skin his starving gaze could devour. The rest of her (quite delectable) figure was swathed, neck to wrists to heels, in the prim, brown wool of a servant’s dress. She wore a lacy little white cap and a starched white apron at all times, signifying her status as a menial. But even that inflamed him.
Not that he did anything about it. Oh, perhaps a melting look or two was exchanged, even once a furtive press of their hands as they passed one another on the staircase, but for the most part, nothing changed…except now, Benedict had something to live for: the thirty minutes every day when he was in the presence of his goddess.
It was pleasant to see his son, too, of course. And as the boy grew, Benedict did his best to ignore his simmering jealousy of young Nathaniel. He knew it made no sense to envy a small boy for the amount of time he got to spend with Berry when that time was all made up of nappies and possets and toy soldiers and whatnot. Benedict wouldn’t mind being bathed and dressed by the lovely Berry, though, and he would have given his entire fortune for a single one of the kisses and cuddles she lavished on the child.
It was a halfway sort of life, being so near what he wanted yet unable to touch it. But it was better than what Benedict had before, so he cherished it. And dreaded the inevitable day when Augusta would decide their son was too old for a nursemaid and replace Berry with a valet and tutor.
He even overcame his distaste and visited Augusta’s bedchamber a few times a month, hoping against hope to get her with child again as that would necessitate keeping Berry on as nursemaid. He thought his plan had succeeded once or twice, but it all came to naught.
And as it turned out, the duke needn’t have bothered. When Nathaniel was seven, his mother, the duchess, took sick and died.
With her death, everything changed.
***
By the time Nathaniel was five, he understood that his mother liked everything to be perfect. If a vase of lilies stood an inch off center, she noticed. If a maid’s cap sat slightly askew, it bothered her. If the butler served the wrong wine at a dinner party, she took to her bed for three days.
She expected perfection in all things, from herself most of all. Nathaniel always knew when Mother was pleased with herself. There would be weeks at a time when she seemed almost jolly, when even her spare, straight-backed frame would soften a bit and there would be a prickly sort of hopeful look in her light gray eyes.
But then a day would come when the sight of Nathaniel did not make her smile; in fact, on those days his daily visit downstairs appeared to make Mother sad. Her eyes would get silvery with tears she would not let fall. She would be paler than usual and the softness would melt away over the weeks until she was all hard corners once more.
Her lap was less comfortable than Berry’s generous pillowy softness, and she didn’t hug him close or kiss his nose or ruffle his dark hair the way Berry did. She didn’t even pat his head with an absent smile like Father did. But she was Nathaniel’s mother, and he loved her desperately. So he tried very hard to be perfect.
Mother liked it when he exhibited proper manners, when he didn’t run or cry or shout or smile too widely. So Nathaniel didn’t do any of those things.
Or at least, he tried not to. It was hard to be good all the time.
By the time Nathaniel was six, he was aware that it was strange he had no younger brothers or sisters. He quite wished for some; Berry was nice, but she wasn’t as much fun as a brother or sister would be. But when he asked his mother about it one day during drawing room time, she looked for a moment as though he’d picked up the vase of lilies and dashed it full in her face. Then, without another word, she got up and left the drawing room.
The visit was very short that day. He never mentioned brothers or sisters again.
By the time Nathaniel turned seven, he had trained himself not to laugh or cry, no matter the provocation. He did not smile. He did not run. He never mussed his clothes or his hair. He spoke only when spoken to.
Mother never really seemed pleased anymore, but Nathaniel had mostly given up on trying to be the one to make her happy. From certain whispers and overheard conversations between the servants, Nathaniel knew that the duchess had experienced many ‘disappointments’ over the past few years. He wasn’t certain precisely what that meant, but he understood that it was something he could not control.
Yet.
Someday, Nathaniel reminded himself as he watched from the landing to see the doctor going in to tend to his mother after yet another disappointment, he would be duke. Then nothing would be beyond his control.
Sadly, that day was still far off in the future. For the moment, he was still quite powerless, as evidenced by the grave expression on the doctor’s face as he spoke with Nathaniel’s father. He was powerless to do more than stare as Father’s shoulders slumped and he put his face in his hands. He was powerless to stop the hoarse cry that left his own mouth, making everyone start and stare up at the landing where he hid.
He couldn’t stop them from taking his mother away, or putting her in a box and lowering her into the ground. He couldn’t stop his Father from weeping into Berry’s soft shoulder.
He was powerless to prevent Father from forgetting all about Mother and marrying Berry a shocking three months after Mother’s funeral, when they were all meant to be in deep mourning. When they decided it would be best to send Nathaniel away to school at eight, even though most boys of his class entered Eton at twelve, Nathaniel did not protest. It was beyond his control.
The only thing he could control was himself.
So Nathaniel focused on that. He vowed not to forget Mother the way everyone else had. And he worked every day to be as proper, as perfect, as she had wanted. And, for the most part, he succeeded.
The older boys at Eton, the brutes who liked to make the littler boys squeal, tried their best with Nathaniel. It should have been easy; he was tiny, a pale stick-skinny baby who’d just lost his mother, and whose father had disgraced the family by marrying a woman so unsuitable, most of their parents wouldn’t even mention her name in a letter.
“Does the widdle babykins miss his mummy? Wah wah wah,” they taunted Nathaniel on the way to class.
“Lucky Coldwick, your new mama is a whore! When you go home for hols, maybe you can stick it in her, just like your mad father does!” hooted Ivo, Viscount Lowesdown.
“No,” jeered Lord Rupert, heir to the Earl of Casterleigh. “His wick is cold as ice, he’d freeze the whore’s cunny off!”
When none of that made Nathaniel react with even the flicker of an eyelash, they moved on to more physical aggression: they tripped him, making him drop his books. He did not even frown.
They took his dessert every day as tribute. Nathaniel ignored them.
They hid his bed linens so he slept on a bare mattress, shivering through the cold winter nights. He showed no anger.
But he felt it. The burning in his chest and gut could only be contained so long, the fire stoked by every cruel taunt and painful prank. The effort of maintaining his mask of indifference only seemed to make the flames leap higher and higher until finally, Nathaniel would break.
He would get up from his chill bed and sneak from the dormitory down to the playing field where he’d found several old dummies meant to teach the boys boxing. Then, for hours at a time, he would unleash his fury and his fists on his sawdust-packed foes, until the fire had burnt itself back down to a sullen coal and he could drag himself, sweating and trembling in all his limbs, back to bed to don his mask again the next morning.
If Nathaniel hoped his lack of response would bore the brutes and make them leave him alone, he was destined for disappointment. They varied their torments, some petty and some severe, for the next few years, until finally Nathaniel had a growth spurt.
Once he topped six feet, he towered over most of the older boys and outstripped the breadth of their shoulders by what seemed like a mile. It suddenly seemed somehow menacing, the way Coldwick would stare through one as though one wasn’t even there. As though one was of so little consequence, Coldwick did not even recognize one as human.
They left him alone after that. His final few years at Eton were quiet and uneventful. No longer a target and, after all, the heir to a noble title even if his father had gone mad and married a peasant, there were boys who would have been his friend if he had given the slightest indication that he welcomed such a thing.
But it was too late. Nathaniel had learned that he had no need of friends. He had no need of affection, or love, or any of that soft, soppy, lower-class nonsense.
Love was a trap, meant to lure gentlemen into betraying themselves.
It was not for Nathaniel. He had mastered his own weaknesses, and therefore despised weakness in others. He learned the business of managing an estate, took up his seat in the House of Lords, and waited for the day he would be free of the humiliating connection to his deranged, self-indulgent father and his extremely scandalous wife and the embarrassing children she whelped.
And if there were times when the frozen emptiness inside him seemed to fill with something explosive and dangerous, a living, clawing rage that must find an outlet or burn him alive, well.
No one ever had to know.
