The Governess Affair

Sad wasn’t the right word, but at the time he hadn’t yet learned tumultuous.

His father had tipped back his glass of spirits and stared at the ceiling. “It’s Hugo Marshall’s fault,” he’d said after a while. “It’s all Hugo Marshall’s fault.”

Robert hadn’t known what to make of that. What he’d finally ventured was: “Is Hugo Marshall a villain?”

“Yes,” his father had said with a bitter laugh. “He’s a villain. A knave. A cur. A right bloody bastard.”

That right bloody bastard had a son, and at the moment, that son was surrounded by other boys. In the upstairs room, his friends all turned to Robert. The library seemed too small, the air too hot.

“Never say you know who this Hugo Marshall is,” the older boy said.

“I have no idea.” It was the first time in a very long time that Robert had told a lie. “I’ve never heard of him,” he added swiftly, hoping the burn of his cheeks wouldn’t give him away.

On fine summer days after his talk with his father, Robert had wandered in the paddocks outside, wielding a switch instead of a sword, and challenging white-headed daisies to duels. Sometimes, he imagined himself fighting dragons. But usually, he fought villains—villains and knaves and curs, all named Hugo Marshall. When he defeated him—and Sir Robert always defeated his villains—he brought the right bloody bastard home, trembling and bound, and laid the cur at his mother’s feet.

After that, they all lived happily ever after. No more shouts. No more silences. No more separations.

“Do we stop it?” Sebastian asked.

Three boys turned to look at Robert. Possibly, Robert conceded, they might have looked to him because he was the only duke’s heir at Eton. Maybe it had to do with the clear, blue eyes he’d inherited from his father—eyes that he’d learned made other boys nervous, if he simply stared. But the most likely reason they looked to Robert—or so he told himself—was that they sensed he was innately a knight, and therefore superior in morals and worthy of following.

“No,” he said. “We encourage it. The little lag thinks he’s superior to us. When he’s drummed out, he’ll know better.”

Beside him, Sebastian frowned in puzzlement.

Robert turned away sharply. “You don’t have any questions, Malheur, do you?”

“No,” his cousin said after a long pause. “None at all.”

ROBERT MADE IT A POINT to avoid Marshall for as long as he could. It wasn’t hard—he’d been attending Eton for quite a while now, and the other boy was just starting. Normally, a new boy who arrived might go through the usual rounds of roughhousing, while everyone figured out where he stood. Once he found his place in the pecking order, he might keep it with a minimum of fuss and scarcely a blackened eye.

But Marshall had no place at Eton. Robert was determined that this would be the case. He chanced to remark on the boy’s jacket, and someone cracked an egg on it. He made a comment about how amusing it would be if a soap-seller’s son had to bathe in slops, and Marshall’s soap was replaced with bars of mud.

He had never expected Marshall to recognize that Robert was the instigator of his problems. He was even more surprised when the boy started to fight back like the ill-mannered cur that he was. Marshall began to construct snide insults in Latin—clever enough that the other boys sniggered about them. And after that incident with the mud, someone crept into Robert’s room and stole all his undergarments. He found them in the larder, stuffed into a barrel of pickles—wet, cold, and salty. No amount of laundering could remove the smell of vinegar.

Some things were not to be borne. That was when Robert knew he was going to have to confront the boy directly.

He found his quarry against the far stone wall of the cricket field. He wasn’t the first to have at him; by the time he got there, the boy had his back against the wall. He’d set his spectacles a few feet behind him, and he held his fists in the air.

“Come on, you cowards,” Marshall was saying. “Three-on-one not good enough odds for you?” It was the first time that Robert had seen Marshall this close. His hair was a thin, light orange; his skin was pale and freckled. His eye was ringed with a virulent red bruise; it would be purple in the morning. He spat pink and turned lightly on his feet, facing his attackers. That was when the boy caught sight of Robert.

“Speaking of cowards,” he said.

“I’m no coward.” Robert rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward. “Call me a coward again—I dare you. Don’t you know who I am?”

Everyone else stepped back, giving the two of them a wide berth. Robert circled the other boy, holding his fists up. And that was when he noticed something curious. Marshall’s eyes were blue—an icy blue.

A familiar icy blue. Robert saw eyes like that in the mirror every day.

“I know who you are,” Marshall said with disdain. “You’re my brother.”

Robert had always thought it a ridiculous thing to say in stories—that someone’s world turned upside down. But there was no other way to describe what happened. The other boy’s words hit with the force of a cannonball, crashing through everything he’d known.

“You can’t be my brother.”

But he recalled too clearly the crash of china, his mother’s shouts. Philanderer! Whoreson!

Philanderer. Marshall had Robert’s eyes. He had his father’s eyes.

Marshall sniffed and wiped at his nose. “Don’t your parents tell you anything?”

“No!” He wasn’t sure if it was an answer or a denial. And the other boy said that with such a matter-of-fact air—as if his parents were a single unit, who might sit a boy down and have a conversation with him.

Robert’s head was whirling. “How can you be my brother if your father is Hugo Marshall?”

The other boy spat once again and didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to. Robert had only the faintest notion of what philandering entailed—gambling and drinking and getting wenches with child. He’d never given much thought to the possibility that wenches who were gotten with child ended up having them.

The other boy simply shrugged all this away.

Five hundred days playing alone in the paddock, and he had a brother? It was not just his mother and father who were broken to bits. He was, too. Robert thought of soap turned to mud, of fights, of Marshall’s eye—which would be black by morning.