“I’m skittish about you two boys on your own on the Continent for a year.”
“Well, you should have raised that concern a bit earlier than the day we leave.”
My mother purses her lips and goes back to poking at her egg.
Like a summoned demon, my father appears suddenly in the doorway to the dining room. My pulse rocks, and I tuck into my toast, like food might disguise me as his gaze roams the table. His golden hair is slicked back into a tidy queue, the way mine might have a prayer of looking if it didn’t spend most of its life getting raked through by the fingers of interested parties.
I can tell he’s come for me, but he casts his attention first upon my mother, just long enough to kiss her on the top of the head, before it snags upon my sister. “Felicity, get those goddamn spectacles off your face.”
“I need them for reading,” she replies without looking up.
“You shouldn’t be reading at the breakfast table.”
“Father—”
“Remove them at once or I’ll snap them in half. Henry, I’d like a word.”
My Christian name from my father’s mouth jars me so badly I actually wince. We share that ghastly Henry, and every time he says it, there’s a bit of a grit-toothed grimace, like he deeply regrets my christening. I half expected him and Mother to call the Goblin “Henry” as well, in hopes of bequeathing the name to someone who still has a chance of proving worthy of it.
“Why don’t you sit and have some breakfast with us?” Mother says. Father has his hands on her shoulders, and she places one of hers overtop, trying to drag him into the empty chair on her other side, but he pulls away.
“I need a private word with Henry.” He nods at Percy’s aunt and uncle with hardly a glance—proper salutations aren’t for lower members of the peerage.
“The boys are leaving today,” Mother tries again.
“I know that. Why else would I wish to speak to Henry?” He lobs a frown in my direction. “Now, if you don’t mind.”
I toss my napkin onto the table and follow him from the room. As I pass Percy, he looks up at me and his mouth curls into a sympathetic smile. The faint freckles he’s got splattered below his eyes twist up. I give him an affectionate flick on the back of the head as I go by.
I follow my father into his sitting room. The windows are thrown open, lace drapes casting lattice shadows over the floor and the sickly perfume of spring blossoms dying on the vine blowing in from the yard. Father sits down at his desk and shuffles through the papers stacked there. For a moment, I think he’s going to start back in on his work and leave me to sit and stare at him like an imbecile. I take a calculated risk and reach for the brandy on the sideboard, but Father says, “Henry,” and I stop.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you remember Mr. Lockwood?”
I look up and realize there’s a scholarly swell already standing beside the fire. He’s redheaded and ruddy cheeked, with a patchy beard decorating his chin. I had been so intent on my father, I’d failed to notice him.
Mr. Lockwood gives me a short bow, spectacles slipping down his nose. “My lord. I’m sure we’ll become better acquainted in the coming months, as we travel together.”
I’d like to throw up on his buckled shoes, but I refrain. I hadn’t wanted a bear-leader, primarily because I’m not interested in any of the scholarly things a bear-leader is meant to teach his charges. But a guardian presence of their selection had been one of my parents’ conditions for my touring, and as I had very few chips to wager in that game, I had agreed.
Father laces the papers he was mucking with into a leather skin and extends it to Lockwood. “Preliminary documents. Passports, letters of credit, bills of health, introductions to my acquaintances in France.” Lockwood tucks the papers into his coat, and Father twists around to face me, one elbow resting on his desk. I slide my hands between my legs and the sofa.
“Sit up straight,” he snaps. “You’re small enough without slumping.”
With more effort than it should take, I pull back my shoulders and look him in the eye. He frowns, and I nearly sink straight back down.
“What do you think I wish to speak about, Henry?” he says.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, take a guess.” I look down, which I know is a mistake but I can’t help it. “Look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
I raise my eyes, staring at a spot over his head so I don’t have to look straight at him. “Did you want to discuss my Tour?”
He rolls his eyes, a short flick skyward that’s just long enough to make me feel like a bleeding simpleton, and my temper flares—why ask such an obvious question if he was just going to mock me when I answered?—but I keep silent. A lecture is gathering in the air like a thunderstorm.
“I want to be certain you’re clear on the conditions of this Tour before you depart,” he says. “I still believe your mother and I are foolish to indulge you a single inch further than we already have since your expulsion from Eton. But, against my better judgment, I am giving you this one year to get ahold of yourself. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Lockwood and I have discussed what we think is the best course of action for your time abroad.”
“Course of action?” I repeat, looking between them. Up until this moment, I’d thought we all understood that this year was for Percy and me to do as we pleased, with a bear-leader along to arrange the annoying things like lodging and food and provide an obligatory parental eye that, like any good parental eye, would be frequently blind to youthful iniquities.
Mr. Lockwood clears his throat rather grandly, stepping into the light from the window, then back out at once, blinking the sun from his eyes. “Your father and I have discussed your situation and determined that you will be best served with some restraints placed upon your activities while on the Continent.”
I look between him and my father, like one of them will crack and confess this is a jest, because restraints were certainly not part of the understanding I came to with my parents when this Tour was first agreed upon.
“Under my watch,” Lockwood says, “there will be no gambling, limited tobacco, and absolutely no cigars.”
Well, this is turning a bit not good.
“No visitations to any dens of iniquity,” he goes on, “or sordid establishments of any kind. No caterwauling, no inappropriate relations with the opposite sex. No fornication. No slothfulness, or excessive sleeping late.”
It’s beginning to feel like he’s shuffling his way through the seven deadly sins, in ascending order of my favorites.
“And,” he says, rust on the razor’s edge, “spirits in moderation only.”
I’m ready to protest loudly to this until I catch my father’s hard stare. “And I defer entirely to Mr. Lockwood’s judgment,” he says. “While you travel, he speaks for me.”