He stumbled out into the night with both arms wrapped around his middle, the world around him narrowing to a single pinpoint. Staying alert felt essential to his survival, so he placed one foot in front of the other, refusing to give Lionel and the others the satisfaction of finding him unconscious in the mud. Dame Culpepper’s house loomed just ahead, and the notion that he would survive if he could only get inside gripped him tight.
The dame’s snores echoed through the corridors as he trudged up the stairs, his blood-soaked stockings staining the carpet as he went. He was bleeding from several places—his lip, his brow. His nose gushed like a geyser, making his nightshirt and stockings unsettlingly warm and sticky.
That he reached his bed felt like some sort of miracle, and relief swept over him as he fell face-first onto the mattress and lost consciousness.
When Benedict trudged into the kitchen the next morning—the only place in the house he was privileged to experience a warm fire—Dame Culpepper dropped a teacup and saucer at the sight of him. It took every ounce of his strength to stand tall and accept her wide-eyed perusal, along with that of ten other boys. Lionel gave Benedict a smug smirk from where he sat between two of the lads who had taken part in last night’s abduction and beating. Snickers and whispers passed between them as the dame approached, hands braced on her hips.
“All right then. Which of them did this to you?”
Benedict fairly trembled with the strain of remaining upright. The binding he had improvised from an old shirt torn into strips did little to support his ribs, which ached with every breath. He was aware that he looked ghastly, one eye swollen shut and purple, lip split and fattened like a ripe cherry. Beneath his clothes, he was a tapestry of mottled purple, red, and green—a depiction of violence and scorn.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Benedict replied, rolling one shoulder nonchalantly and biting back a scream at the pain it sent stabbing through his chest. “No one did anything to me.”
Lionel’s smirk spread into a grin as his companions traded confused glances. Benedict glared at them, clenching his hands so tight his fingernails gouged his palms. He would be damned if they accused him of being a milksop as well as a molly. Telling Dame Culpepper what they’d done would earn him another beating, and piss in his shoes every morning for the rest of the term.
“No one, you say,” the dame huffed, rolling her eyes. “And I suppose a ghost or demon pummeled you in your sleep?”
Benedict smiled, the split in his lip opening and sending a trickle of blood down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of one hand. “I fell out of bed last night.”
Sputters and guffaws filled the room.
“You fell … out of bed?” Dame Culpepper asked, pursing her lips. She narrowed suspicious eyes, taking inventory of his battered state.
“That’s right,” he said.
“You would have me believe that a tumble off the bed is responsible for the state of your face?”
“Benny sleeps like nothing I’ve ever seen, ma’am,” Lionel spoke up, taking a large bite of his toast. “Such tossing and turning about. One wonders why he doesn’t sleep on the floor and have done with it.”
There was much nudging with elbows and whispers from the table, a handful of boys chiming in to lend truth to Lionel’s claim. Benedict pulled a sheepish expression, though it did little to ease the dame’s suspicion.
Throwing her hands up, she bustled off to clean up the shattered porcelain, commanding Benedict to clean himself up at the basin before sitting at her table. All the while, she muttered under her breath about the stupidity of boys.
It hurt his jaw to chew, but Benedict wouldn’t let the others see it. He stared at Lionel from across the table as he nibbled on burned toast and swilled weak tea. Lionel wasn’t bigger or stronger than Benedict—the sod had simply caught him unawares, with a veritable army of other boys. Man to man, Benedict could pound him into mincemeat and intended to at the first opportunity.
He chose to bide his time for the rest of the week, allowing his battered body to begin healing. Lionel seemed to sense that a storm was brewing, lines of consternation creasing his brow whenever he caught Benedict staring at him with unflinching resolve. Surprisingly, Lionel ceased his usual jibes and derision—as if he understood what he had done with his little stunt. But Benedict wasn’t content with Lionel’s silence, or the possibility that his foe now understood that he was not to be trifled with. The message needed to be delivered loud and clear, leaving no room for doubt.
So, ten days after he was dragged from his bed to be humiliated, Benedict found himself alone with his tormentor. By chance, they happened to return to their bedchamber before the three other boys they bunked with returned from their classes. Pausing on the threshold of the room, Benedict found Lionel crouched over a trunk he kept at the foot of his bed, oblivious that he was no longer alone.
There was no gentleman’s code to be adhered to, no reason to alert Lionel to what was coming. After all, the attack against Benedict had been unexpected and unprovoked—and so would his vengeance.
He was across the room in a few rapid strides, taking a handful of Lionel’s hair. A shocked gurgle preceded a sharp cry as Benedict slammed Lionel’s head into the trunk. Once Lionel fell to his back, groaning and pressing a hand to his bleeding forehead, Benedict attacked. Trapping the boy between his knees, Benedict delivered blow after blow. His fists produced spurts of blood, then the satisfying crunch of Lionel’s broken nose. Attempts at self-defense were ineffectual in the face of Benedict’s unchecked rage. By the time the other boys arrived, Lionel’s face was a dappled mess of blood, swelling, and discoloration.
Benedict reared away from the hands wrenching him off his enemy, chest heaving as he snorted like a bull. Two boys stared at him in wide-eyed shock and horror as the other helped a sniveling Lionel to his feet. His knuckles throbbed like the devil, and he could taste the blood that had speckled his face, but the triumph swelling within him couldn’t be denied. No one said a word to chastise him as he swiped a sleeve across his mouth before staggering to the washstand to clean himself up. By the time he’d finished, Lionel and his friends had vacated the room.
Benedict flopped onto his bed and clasped his hands behind his head. There was no chance Dame Culpepper wouldn’t take one look at Lionel and know what had occurred. The woman might be a drunk, but she wasn’t a fool. There would be harsh repercussions for what he’d just done, with Lionel likely going unpunished. It paid well to be the son of an earl who made hefty donations to the school. Benedict’s status as a viscount’s cast-off, one who was so obviously unlike the other boys, made him vulnerable.
However, he couldn’t bring himself to care about the whipping the headmaster would inflict on him; not when he had finally done the thing he’d been fantasizing about the entire term. Benedict had been concerned with angering his father and worrying his mother. He’d wanted to prove himself a gentleman his father wouldn’t have to be ashamed of. But one glance at the sparse accommodations he suffered compared to his bunkmates demonstrated that the viscount didn’t give a bloody damn about him. His father saw him much the way Lionel did—broken, backward, wrong. A lost cause who would never be his heir. What did it matter if he was a gentleman in deed as well as in name? Trying to adhere to such strictures had won him nothing. Perhaps, what he’d just done to Lionel would earn him some peace of mind and the safety to sleep through the night without being accosted.