“Things were happening that you knew nothing about,” he protested feebly. “I tried, Ben, I … I wanted nothing more than to run away with you. I wanted it so badly.”
“You never came!” Ben roared, whirling to face him with his waistcoat hanging open, face flushing red. “I waited until sunrise like some idiotic, besotted chit, convinced you would arrive! Then, to see the announcement of your engagement to Katherine in the papers only days later …” Ben pressed a thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and sighed, shaking his head. “No, I do not care to hear your explanation now when you never bothered to make one back then. I learned all I needed to know the day I sat in St. George’s and watched you bind yourself to someone else. Just because her life conveniently ended doesn’t mean I’m eager or desperate enough to have you back.”
Alex watched Ben finish dressing in silence, his usual skill for words failing him. During the journey from Kent, he had ruminated over all the things he wanted to say and how he wished to express them. Just now, his mind was a jumbled mess of words unsaid, all of it fighting to slip off his tongue at once.
All he could manage was a pathetic, “I’m so sorry.”
Now fully dressed—though his open shirt and lack of cravat made him look as much a rogue as ever—Ben pinned Alex with a baleful glare. “You should be,” he spat before taking up his brandy and thundering from the room.
Alex slumped against the wall, each of Ben’s heavy footfalls on the steps resounding through him like a nail being hammered into his chest. The wound Alex inflicted had festered over time, and now there might be no healing it. By coming here, was he only tearing into a painful scar? Was it selfish of him to pursue Ben, knowing how hurt he had been by Alex’s actions?
Spotting a crumpled, abandoned cravat atop the neatly made bed, Alex went to it. Sinking onto the lumpy mattress, he took up the linen and pressed it to his nose with a deep, slow inhale. Ben still smelled of laundry starch and clean, earthy Bay Rum. No fuss, simple and compelling—like the man himself. He was such a sharp contradiction to Alex, who collected scents, colored cravats, and eclectic waistcoats, and was as fussy about his appearance as a debutante. It was a wonder they’d ever come to love one another at all. The sheer impossibility of it reminded Alex of his determination. Some things were simply meant to exist, and he could never be convinced that he and Ben as a pair weren’t among those things. It wasn’t selfish to want to make everything up to Ben, to make right what he had broken.
Tucking the cravat into the breast pocket with his peppermints, Alex left the tiny, sparse room—shaken but not broken. As far as he was concerned, he and Ben were far from finished. They had hardly even begun.
Chapter 2
Eton College, 1799
Benedict clamped his lips shut to muffle a whimper of agony. In his sleep, his mind forgot that movement of any sort was out of the question. The fiery stripes across his shoulders burned at the touch of nightshirt or bedclothes, so he slept in only a pair of old breeches, the sheets draped across his backside. The punishment he’d earned after being caught brawling in the late hours of last evening had been the harshest yet. Dame Culpepper’s unexpected appearance in the yard off the back of her house had earned him a caning at the hands of the headmaster. It was bad enough the dame had caught them red-handed; that cowardly bastard Lionel Blackburn had been waiting in the wings to report that the fights had been going on for months—and that Benedict had encouraged the other boys to engage in the vice of gambling by orchestrating bets.
Of course, Benedict hadn’t been alone in his actions, but pummeling Blackburn and his friends had painted a target on his back. He had been threatened with expulsion on more than one occasion, and was told after the lashing that this was his final chance. It had taken every bit of his self-control to keep from laughing in the headmaster’s face. They both knew all it would take was for his father to make a generous contribution to the college to ensure Benedict’s continued education. It didn’t matter that the viscount despised him; no Sterling man had ever been ejected from Eton, and his father wasn’t going to allow such a thing to besmirch their illustrious name.
As he lay there breathing through the pain of half a dozen cane marks, his head rested on a goose-down pillow, and his bedclothes were the finest that could be found in England. The warmth of the coal he’d purchased kept not only him warm, but all the other occupants of the room. He ate like a king every day, having learned that slipping a pint of gin to Dame Culpepper along with the money for ingredients to stock her larder was enough to earn the woman’s generosity. While those around him benefited from his improved finances, Benedict couldn’t pretend he had done it for any of them. Five of the boys he’d beaten had requested new living quarters, and those who shared his room now were tolerable if not exactly likable. However, a sense of self-preservation and resolve not to suffer another cold winter or half-empty belly drove him.
Benedict had been raised in a world where a good name, blue blood, and a fortune were supposed to make life easier. Yet, he had been denied the ease that guided the lives of his brothers and some of the other lads attending school with him. Despite his youth and lack of experience with the world at large, Benedict had learned one very important lesson: if he wanted anything for himself, he was going to have to fight for it. His father certainly wouldn’t smooth his path or give him a hand up, and his brothers were too fond of their places as the favored sons to go against the viscount.
“If you would just try harder to please him, things wouldn’t be so difficult for you,” his elder brother, Esmond, often said. “You must try.”
“You could stop clinging to Mother’s apron strings, for a start,” Francis, the secondborn, would agree.
Closing his eyes, he shifted his mind away from the wounds on his back and drifted toward slumber.
Benedict snapped open his eyes, his restless thoughts disturbed by the shuffle of footsteps and the thunk of something against the floor. A burst of lamplight made him squint, and he recognize the figure of Alexander Osborne, one of the new transplants from a different boardinghouse. He had replaced Lionel a few weeks before the end of the previous term, and had returned in the spring to resume his place on the other side of the room.
He was a peculiar sort, swathed in his decadent banyans when in their chamber, lounging on his bed to pore over the books he kept organized beneath the mattress. The boy was just as richly dressed outside this room as he was in it—perhaps more so. He stood out like a peacock among the somber, dark colors the other boys wore, seeming not to notice the attention he drew wherever he went.
However, it wasn’t Osborne’s dandified fashions that made him odd. Often, Benedict would feel a prickle down his spine, registering the sensation of being watched. He was used to being gaped at as the other boys passed rumors about him back and forth. But this was different. It was as if something within Benedict instinctively knew whose eyes rested on him, alerting his senses. Sure enough, whenever he glanced up, it was always to find Osborne observing him with a pensive look in his eye. Even more discomfiting was the fact that he never looked away when Benedict caught him staring. Sometimes Osborne would simply meet Benedict’s gaze, almost as if issuing a silent, but not necessarily threatening, challenge—one Benedict didn’t understand.