Chapter 1
Prologue
1877
Harry Wolfe had failed his courses.
When he received his report at the beginning of the day, he glanced over his marks and shoved the contents into his front breast pocket, his movements practically in unison with his peers as they each confirmed aloud, one after the other, that they had aced their first terms at Oxford.
He celebrated with the rest of them, of course. He spent the afternoon drinking brandy, playing billiards, and laughing raucously at the clumsy jokes of doughy-limbed and whiskerless young peers vying to impress him. All the while, he managed to ignore that niggling question in the back of his mind:
What if he hadn’t passed?
He had no way of knowing. Not without squinting at the report for far too long as the letterings on the paper rippled and churned before him like the ocean’s surface during a storm. Only with great concentration and effort could he work out one word from another, and he couldn’t expel that effort in front of his classmates. Instead, he pretended and bided his time.
It was past midnight by the time he finally managed to reach his apartments. After allowing himself a brief respite to tussle with his two Irish wolfhounds, Henry and Jon—he knew that to name them really wasn’t the thing, but he hadn’t been able to help himself—he lit a few candles at his desk and sat. He had just begun to decipher the hieroglyphic scrawl that lay before him when he was mercifully interrupted.
“Mr. Wolfe,” his butler, Perry, had said, appearing at the doorway to his study. “The Duke of Bedford would like a word.”
“Send him—sorry, what?” Harry’s head jerked up so quickly that the vertebrae in his neck gave an audible pop. Why in the world would the Duke of Bedford want a word with him? What was his grace doing at Oxford in the first place?
His blood ran cold as the answer came to him. Harm had come to Stephen. Stephen or Thomas; there was no other explanation.
One of his two greatest friends in the world—and that was saying something, as he had more friends than he knew what to do with most of the time—was in trouble. That had to be it.
“Send him in,” Harry croaked, rising to his feet with effort. Perhaps it was only an injury, and they were both all right. Perhaps it was something else entirely, something that hadn’t occurred to him, and—
“Stephen,” The name was expelled from his lips in a whoosh of gratitude and relief. He fell back into his chair in an undignified heap of exhaustion.
It had been a very trying day.
It had been a trying day, and yet, as he stared at Stephen Beaumont, he suddenly knew that the day had been much worse for his friend. Stephen’s cravat was undone; his hair disheveled and his boots muddied—on Harry, all of these states of appearance were more or less constant. On the ever proper and disciplined eldest Beaumont brother, however, they were cause for a great deal of alarm indeed.
“Perry introduced you as the Duke of Bedford,” Harry remarked lightly, choosing not to comment on the fact that his friend looked like hell. “Odd, isn’t it? He’s seen you hundreds of times traipsing through my apartments all through the hours of day and night. He ought not to be confused—“
“He’s not confused,” Stephen interrupted. He raised his left hand. In it was clasped a wrinkled, wet bundle of paper. And there—around his smallest finger, glimmering in the candlelight—the signet ring.
“My father is dead. I’m the Duke.”
There was a moment of silence as Harry absorbed the news. He knew better than to offer his condolences. The late Duke of Bedford’s cruelty knew no bounds—as a child, he remembered his parents talking in hushed tones about the unexplained bruises along the Duchess of Bedford’s neck and her unexplained, unfashionably long absences from society.
They had been changing clothes for fencing when he’d first seen the scars raking down Stephen’s back. He never asked where they had come from. It was unnecessary; he already knew. Just as he knew now that the last thing his friend wanted from him—the one thing he’d likely receive in spades as soon as word spread of his newfound ascent in society—was words of well wishes or sorrow.
Instead, he grabbed his report from the desk and extended his arm. “My marks for the term,” he offered by way of explanation. “Haven’t read them.”
Stephen strolled into the study—his languorous, self-assured gait at utter opposition from the torment lining the features of his face—and took the papers. He showed no sign of surprise at Harry’s admission. Instead, he merely scanned the contents and, impossibly, grew even graver of countenance.
“You, ah,” he paused, clearing his throat. “Well, you did quite well in calculus, actually. Better than me. But the others….” He winced as his lips formed the words. “You, ah, failed. You will not be invited to return and complete the rest of your terms.”
So there it was.
Harry Wolfe had failed his courses.
He supposed he wasn’t surprised. As a boy, he’d always managed to charm his tutors into giving him credits he didn’t deserve. During his years at Eton he’d developed the skill of locating the most intelligent student in the room and attaching himself to that person at the hip. It was how he’d met Thomas Beaumont.
Thomas was a soft-spoken, pudgy boy when Harry met him. He would have been easy to bully, but there was something innocent and vulnerable about him that kept Harry from doing just that. Instead, he’d proposed a trade: Harry would let Thomas into his social circle—the sports, the practical jokes, the drunken debauchery, all of it—and Thomas would do the whole of Harry’s schoolwork. It was a partnership founded upon mutual benefit. Thomas wouldn’t have to spend his weekends and evenings alone, and no one would ever know how words tilted and flipped over on themselves whenever Harry tried to read them.
Then the two had moved up to Oxford—the expected path for gentlemen to take—and Harry had met Thomas’s elder brother. Thomas rarely spoke of Stephen, and when he did, there was always an underlying tension in his voice that sounded almost like fear. Harry expected a cruel, dark sort of scoundrel—someone like Thomas’s father. Instead, Stephen seemed to Harry like a more confident, mature version of Thomas. Stephen was hard where Thomas was soft, independent where Thomas was self-effacing, and brave where Thomas was craven.
Harry never told Stephen he couldn’t read. After a single evening on the town, during which Harry turned onto several wrong streets and requested an unlisted drink at a tavern, Stephen deduced it himself and offered to help. And he was, indeed, a great help.
But he wasn’t enough. Oxford was much harder than Eton. Stephen could write Harry’s essays and read aloud to him, but he couldn’t take his exams for him. Harry needed at least three times as long as everyone else to read his exam questions, and more often than not he turned his work in after wildly guessing at the answers and hoping that whatever he wrote strung together to form somewhat legible sentences. Stephen had done all he could, but it was ultimately a useless effort.
Harry laughed as the sudden discrepancy in their stations hit him. Stephen Beaumont, owner of the Billings estate, Duke of Bedford. And he, an untitled failure.
It was funny, in a dark and knife-twisting sort of way.
With that, he launched to his feet and barreled out the door. “Perry!” he yelled for his butler. “Get someone to pack my trunks and ready a carriage! Send the dogs and the rest of the staff to Mountbatten.”
He made it to his bedchamber and threw open his wardrobe. He didn’t know what he needed, so he began tearing out its contents at random and tossing them onto the bed. It was smarter to wait for help; he had never packed his things before. He didn’t even know where his trunks were located. But he needed a job to do.
“What are you doing?” a voice behind him inquired.
The voice did not belong to Perry or one of his housemaids. It was Stephen again; suspicion breathing new life into his deadened countenance.
“I’m headed for the continent,” Harry said, not bothering to turn around. “My father has a ship leaving for France in a week. If I go tonight—“
“You’re not going to France.” Stephen cut him off.
“I am,” Harry confirmed. “There’s nothing for me here. My father made his fortune without funds, connections, or formal education. I have all of those things—or the first two anyway—and I’ll be damned if I let my advantages turn me into some—“ he faltered, searching for the right words. “Some lazy, stupid—“
“I understand.”
At that, Harry was given pause. With a pair of riding breeches in one hand and a boot in the other, he turned.
“You do?”
Stephen jerked his head once. “You have to leave. You want to be a self-made man. To live up to your father’s name.”
“No,” Desperation, shame, and brandy were stripping him of all good sense—not that he had a lot of good sense in the first place—and making him honest. “I need to live up to my father’s name. I can’t disappoint him, even if—“
He paused, the words hitching at his throat as he struggled to get out what he’d thought all his life without ever actually saying it aloud.
“Even though I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“I am,” Harry insisted, glaring at him. “You know that better than anyone. I’m illiterate. But it doesn’t matter.”
He tossed another armful of clothes onto the bed. One of his maids, Lydia, had brought his trunks into the room, and she was hustling about, folding all of his possessions inside.
“A man doesn’t need intelligence to get rich. He needs—luck. And damn it if I’m not the luckiest bastard I know—or I was, until today.”
He strode forward until he and Stephen were nose to nose. Steel bands of determination had wrapped themselves around Harry’s chest, and now they squeezed. Harry glared into his friend’s eyes as he made a promise—the only promise he’d ever made to anyone.
“I swear I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure my father is paid ten times over for all he’s done. I won’t shame him by being known as the first generation Wolfe to both attend and fail University. I’m not coming back to England until I’ve made enough money for our surname to rival any other in the country—even yours.”
Stephen shook his head.
“No,” he said slowly, “Not mine. Because I’ll be right alongside you.”
Harry stopped cold. He didn’t know what he had expected Stephen to say in response to his declaration, but it certainly wasn’tthat.
“What are you saying?”
“You need to live up to your father’s name, and I’m terrified of living up to mine.”
For the first time in his life, Harry had no idea what to say. The only sound was Lydia locking Harry’s trunks closed behind them as he worked out exactly what Stephen meant by his pronouncement.
“What—no, you can’t come with me,” Harry fumbled. “You’re a duke now; your responsibilities are here—“
Stephen jerked his head, an ugly expression crossing his face. It was one Harry had never seen before, one of total disgust and fury. “My responsibilities,” he spat. “Yes, my responsibilities. Take a wife, produce an heir, and produce a backup. Beat them all senseless with my fists every time I take a drink, and throw in canes and knives to the mix whenever I get bored. Fire pokers on holidays. Those are my responsibilities.”
Harry felt the color drain from his face.
“My father took his ‘responsibilities’ very seriously,” Stephen said venomously, “I can’t go back there. I’m not going back to Billings. I’m not going to be the Duke of Bedford. My father was the Duke of Bedford, and I hated him with everything I had.”
Well.
It was the longest speech he had ever given, and Harry found that he could not argue with it.
“Fine,” he said softly, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’ll come with me. We’ll turn my father’s business into an empire.”
Stephen smiled half-heartedly. “It’s already an empire.”
“We’ll double it in size, then,” Harry said briskly. “Triple it. Whatever we have to do.”
“Whatever we have to do,” Stephen repeated. The rest of the sentence hung unspoken in their air between them:
Whatever we have to do to put our demons to rest.
The two nodded at one another and exited the room.
The carriage was packed and ready. Harry instructed the coachmen to stop at Stephen’s apartments before heading for the coast, and the two settled in for a long trip.
“Oh, and Harry,” Stephen said, pulling out a cigar. “You’re not lucky.”
“What?”
“You’re not lucky,” he repeated, lighting it and taking a long drag. “Earlier, when you said you were the luckiest bastard you knew?”
He paused for a moment, opening the window and blowing smoke through it.
“You’re wrong. It’s not luck. Someday you’ll learn that.”
