Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(28)
I am lower even than that, ma’am, she had said in answer to her grandmother’s remark about resembling a lowly governess. Or higher, depending upon one’s perspective. I have the great privilege of being teacher to a school of orphans, whose minds are inferior to no one’s.
He had had to turn to the window to hide his amusement, for she had not spoken in either anger or defiance. She had spoken what to her was the simple truth. She and her fellow orphans were every bit as good as the ton, she had been saying—the whole lot of it, himself included. He admired such poise and conviction. It would be a vast shame if her relatives had their way and she were made to change beyond recognition. He doubted, though, that she would allow it to happen except upon her own terms. It would be interesting to see what sort of person would emerge from the education of Lady Anastasia Westcott. He hoped she would remain interesting.
They passed two people on South Audley Street, a maid carrying a heavy bag and a gentleman Avery vaguely recognized. The maid kept her eyes lowered as she hurried past. The gentleman looked startled, recovered himself, touched the brim of his hat, and did not even wait to be fully past them before his head swiveled for a longer, closer look. He would have a tale to tell when he got wherever he was going.
“I am concerned about my half brother,” Anna said as they turned toward Hyde Park Corner, speaking for the first time since they had started walking. “Are you concerned? He could be anywhere by now. He could be in grave danger or just very, very unhappy. I know he is no blood relative of yours, but he is your ward. Is it not irresponsible to say you will leave him be until he stops laughing?”
“I always know where Harry is likely to be found,” he told her. “This occasion is no exception.” It had not taken him long last night to locate the boy, deep in his cups and sprawled in a low armchair in the scarlet visitors’ parlor of a rather seedy brothel, surrounded by cronies as inebriated as he and painted whores with improbably colored hair. Avery had not shown himself. One glance had assured him that Harry was in no condition to avail himself of the main services the whores were there to provide and thus was safe from the pox.
“Are you so all-seeing, then?” she asked him. “And so all-powerful that you can rescue him from whatever depths he may have sunk to?”
Avery thought about it. “I am,” he said.
He had made himself all-powerful. It had not been easy. He had had an exceedingly unpromising start to life when he had been born resembling his mother rather than his father. His father had been a robust, imposing, manly figure, who had stalked and frowned and barked his way through life, commanding terror in inferiors and respect in his peers. His mother had been a tiny, blue-eyed, dainty, sweet-natured, golden-haired beauty. Avery did not remember that she feared his father, or that his father had ever barked at her or been displeased with her. Indeed, it was altogether probable that theirs had been a love match. She had died when Avery was nine of some feminine complaint that had never been explained to him, though it was not pregnancy. By that time it was obvious that he had inherited most of his mother’s traits and virtually none of his father’s. His father had always treated him with casual affection, but Avery had once overheard him remarking that he would have been well enough if he had been a girl but was not what any red-blooded man would desire of his heir.
Avery had been sent away to school at the age of eleven and might as well have been consigned to purgatory. He had been horribly bullied. He had been small, puny, golden haired, blue eyed, meek, gentle, cringing, and terrified. And he had known nothing would change, for his nurse had once explained feet to him—the sort of feet that were attached to the ends of one’s legs and had five toes apiece. The size of a boy’s feet, she had said, was a sure predictor of the size of his person when one grew up. Avery’s feet had been small, dainty, and slender.
He had been beaten up quite badly by a boy a year younger than himself on the playing fields one day when he had tried to catch a ball but had slapped his hands together instead while the ball bounced off one of his small feet and made him hop in pain. He had escaped sexual assault from the prefect to whose service he had been assigned only after he had burst into tears and the older boy had looked at him in disgust and complained that he was ugly when he cried, not to mention ungrateful and cowardly and girly. Both incidents had happened during his first week at school.
By the end of the second week he had learned very little from his books and his masters and tutors, but he had learned a number of other things, most notably that if he could do nothing to change his prospective height and body type and hair and eye color, he could change everything else, including his attitude. He joined the boxing club and the fencing club and the archery club and the rowing club and the athletics club and every other club that offered the chance of building his body and honing it and making of it something less pathetic.
It did not work well at the beginning, of course. In his very first bout in the boxing ring he pranced about on his little feet, his small fists at the ready, and was put down and out by the only punch thrown by his opponent. That opponent had, of course, been chosen deliberately to provide maximum enjoyment to the spectators who had gathered around in larger-than-usual numbers. The fencing instructor told him after his first lesson that if his foil was too heavy for him to hold aloft for longer than a minute at a stretch, he was wasting everyone’s time by continuing—perhaps he ought to join a knitting club instead. The rowing instructor told him he would be a champion if only a race required rowing in a circle because he needed both hands to wield one oar. At his first footrace, every other runner, even the one dubbed Fat Frank, had crossed the finish line almost before he had left the starting line.