Page 40 of The Forsaken

And his silence didn’t just sting; it cut to the core.

Everything did.

Her chest, arms, and legs from where his body had broken her fall. Her pride, most of all. Her…reputation.

A fresh watery sheen blurred her vision.

“Tears, next?” he scoffed. “Over some silly sack?”

Andromena bit her lip to keep it from trembling and started for her reticule. “It is not silly, and it is not a sack.” Nor did the bag in question account for her misery.

She did not want to cry. No, she did. She just didn’t want to do it here in front of Edgar. Maybe Edgar of old. Not this new, mean version of him.

Andromena collected her bag.

She didn’t remember standing.

She didn’t remember saying anything more to Edgar; thought he might have called out to her, after her, but that didn’t make sense; he hated her as much as she hated him.

She didn’t know how she got round to returning to her carriage and climbing inside to join her maid.

Only that she did.

And when she did, she had nothing but a silent carriage ride back to think about the trouble she had gotten herself into.

Chapter 7

The 9th Viscount Kerr had a long history of being gawked at.

In time, he’d turn two fingers up at the attention paid him. But it hadn’t begun that way.

The stares started early—as far back as he could remember. It started with pitying servants who looked after the scrawny, shy, young master of the house. And he needed looking after, he had. As the son of Mad Jack, the Crazed Kerr, young Kerr’s existence remained unpredictable at best, and violent at worst. The late viscount vacillated between explosions of jovial bursts of energy and wild behavior—at all hours. Day. Night. The dead of night. The crack of dawn.

More often than not, Kerr found himself wakened by Mad Jack jumping up and down on his feather-tick mattress; calling for his son, like they were both lads and best of chums, to join in whatever wild escapade he had thought up for them. And in a reversal of any normal sire-son relationship, young Kerr had been the one reasoning with the viscount to return to bed until a sensible hour.

On the worst of times, the late viscount succumbed to crying fits. Crying was too tame a term. The gentleman sobbed, blubbered like a baby, and beat his fists against hair he was constantly tearing out. As volatile as a sudden tempest, the viscount exploded into a violent rage. Over the course of Kerry’s young life, his father smashed no fewer than half a dozen Trumeau Mirrors, a dozen gilded Chippendale ones, and too many to count Adam and Hepplewhite’s.

Each destruction always ended with the same conclusion: the late viscount sinking among the fragments, rocking, sobbing, and moaning, the seven years of ill-fortune he’d visited upon himself.

Kerr had observed from the shadows until the storm eased enough to safely go to the viscount, coax him to his feet, and escort him to his chambers. There, Kerr turned him over to the Hollis family doctor the viscountess had waiting for her husband.

The servants pitied the viscount and felt disgust for the viscountess.

“What wife and mother leaves a small lad to look after a madman?” they often asked one another.

Kerr hadn’t resented his mother. She’d always told Kerr stories and played toy soldiers with him. She taught him his numbers and how to read. The fact that she did those things during some of her husband’s worst fits earned Kerr’s admiration… and loyalty.

As such, he preferred dealing with the viscount’s violent tempers to leaving his mother, the small, slender, and always smiling for her son’s benefit, Viscountess Kerr, to weather them.

That said, when it was time for Kerr to enter Eton, he boarded the viscount’s carriage and headed for the North bank of the River Thames, with no small sense of relief—but an immense amount of guilt for his mother, whom he had left behind. He couldn’t have got himself out of the viscount’s residence any faster than had someone set his heels on fire. Something he could say with absolute certainty given the viscount once set the bottom of Kerr’s bed on fire to wake his son at three o’clock in the morning, for a game of Rounders.

It turned out Eton was not the haven Kerr expected to find. There had been something far more dangerous than an erratic madman—hundreds of brutal little boys. It would have been difficult for any frail-looking lad barely five inches past three feet and a stone and a half less than the others, but Kerr’s father may as well have stuck a “kick me” sign on his son’s scrawny arse.

Kerr’s mother had done her best, but at age ten, Kerr was the rare heir whose formal education had been neglected. Where other noblemen brought the most elite tutors into their homes to school their sons, the late viscount hadn’t wasted time on the classics…or with an actual tutor. Instead of Latin and Greek, he encouraged his son to practice pugilism—with him. When other lads were learning Mathematics and estate business, he’d schooled Kerr in how to race a mount—against him.

Not only had Mad Jack made his son’s entry into formal schooling at Eton an uphill battle, but he’d sent Kerr into an all-out war, unarmed. Streaking through Kerr’s first classes. After that, when indoors, Kerr spent an inordinate amount of time in the privy—upside down in it, to be precise. As for the outdoors, he was also regularly dunked: Athens, just at the river bank beyond the Borcas as Cuckoo Weir—its name, which with Kerr’s mad lineage, hadn’t helped him any. Boveney Lock.

Scrawny as a fresh-picked chicken bone, he hadn’t stood a chance against the bigger lads or even the smaller ones.