Fic: When the stars threw down their spears
Title: When the stars threw down their spears
Author: lareinenoire
Play: pre-Richard II
Characters / Pairings: John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke, Elizabeth Lancaster, Philippa Lancaster, Gaunt/Katherine Swinford
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2729
Warnings: Extremely dodgy interior decoration
Summary: Henry had always hated his father's study.
NB: For angevin2 , who guessed one of my Yuletide fics correctly. Part of the 'Sweet Fortune's Minions' AU. Title comes from William Blake, 'Tyger, Tyger'. Thank you gileonnen for beta-reading!
Henry had always hated his father's study.
In part, it was the smell. Pipe tobacco mixed with a queer undercurrent of what Henry eventually realised was death.
And, of course, there were the eyes. Glass eyes, staring out from the walls and even the floor, pinned in place of real ones that had long since been eaten by worms. For this was where his father kept his Collection.
For much of Henry's boyhood, John Lancaster had been a figure from stories, a giant of a man in military khakis, armed with an elephant gun. That last, it turned out, was the only accurate element of his fantasy. Unlike his elder brother, John Lancaster had not been sent to India with Her Majesty's Army; rather, he had gone as part of the civil service, transforming paper-pushing and entertaining into a lucrative career.
It was during this tenure that he'd met Constance Castleton, whose husband had died of malaria, and the two had decided--far too quickly, it would later turn out--to marry. Henry's own mother had died of pneumonia, and it had been grief for her death, or so everyone had believed, that sent her husband to the far ends of the earth to escape, leaving his three children--Henry scarcely out of swaddling-clothes--in the care of quiet Miss Swinford.
Lizzy and Pippa could not talk about Mother without weeping, so it fell to Miss Swinford, who always smelt of violets and whose voice was low and soft, to tell Henry about her. She was so beautiful, Henry. Her face reminded me of cameo portraits. His father had ordered all the paintings--and there were many, for Blanche Lancaster's beauty was legendary in their circles--put away because he could not bear to look at them. It had not occurred to him that Henry, who only remembered her hazily, might wish to see his own mother's face.
Mother had also been an accomplished musician, or so Miss Swinford had said, and it was for that reason that every Sunday Henry would pay a visit to the family mausoleum and sing her a hymn, a new one each week. When his father returned from India, these visits ceased because his stepmother--he could not call her Mother, not in a thousand years--believed singing to be a source of vanity and therefore to be crushed with all speed.
Much to Henry's surprise, his father--perhaps on Miss Swinford's advice; he did seem to listen to her more than one might have expected from a man in his position--had permitted him to interview for a position in the choir school at Westminster, rather than attending Uppingham as his father and uncles had done. Ma'am had flown into a rage, calling Henry's father all sorts of dreadful names. Only when she started on Miss Swinford did his father shout back and Henry had curled up beneath his bed with pillows round his ears, trying to drown it out. It was the first of countless arguments, so many of which seemed to take place beneath the staring eyes of his father's trophies.
The worst of them all was the tiger, skinned and stretched on the floor before the hearth, its mouth forever opened in an awful snarl. Every time Henry returned home for school holidays, he would pray that it had disappeared, even that Ma'am had ordered it removed, but every time his father called him into the study, there it lay, poised on the brink of devouring him.
"There's nothing to be frightened of, Henry," his father would say, impatience sharpening his voice. "For God's sake, I killed it myself in Bengal."
That, somehow, did not help.
***
Other things did change. The pianoforte was moved from the front parlour to a dusty room at the back. The colours of the draperies and wallpaper grew progressively darker and the bookcases began to fill with volumes such as A Child's Guide and collections of sermons. Lizzy and Pippa grew sullen under their stepmother's eye. Lizzy in particular began to deliberately provoke her, much to Henry's resigned despair.
Thankfully, he'd made enough friends between Westminster and Eton that he'd begun to spend summer holidays with them, and it was only when his sister became unexpectedly betrothed that he was called home from Penzance, where he had been staying with Thomas Arundel and his family.
Stepping through the front door, the very air seemed to change around him, devoid of laughter and life. Even Miss Swinford's smile had grown thin, her face pale from want of sunlight. "They're in the front parlour, Mr Lancaster."
She had stopped calling him by his Christian name when he started his tenure at Eton. Even now, it sounded wrong.
"Ah, Henry. It's about time you got here." His father waved him in and motioned to one of the overstuffed chairs that Ma'am preferred. On the chaise, Pippa was seated beside a man perhaps four or five years her senior. "This is John Portman. Your sister's intended."
Henry murmured a greeting and settled himself gingerly in the chair. With a further clearing of his throat, his father continued. "We've discussed her dowry already, but I would very much like to give you a proper engagement party."
That Ma'am had not known of this was clear; her eyes bulged in sudden anger. "There's no need for any such nonsense, Mr Lancaster. Parties are a hotbed of sin, a sop to childish vanity--"
"Papa!" Henry's sister cried, dismayed. "You can't mean that."
The look his father gave Ma'am was positively poisonous. "I hadn't intended you to be involved, Mrs Lancaster. It would be held at Carnarvon Hall. Your cousin Richard has kindly offered to host, as his wedding gift to you."
"How marvellous!" Pippa leant close to her fiancé, no doubt telling him of the wonders of Carnarvon Hall, such as they were. Henry sighed inwardly. It wasn't that he disliked Cousin Richard. He simply couldn't help being just a little bit jealous. There were no sermons to be found on bookcases at Carnarvon Hall, and Aunt Joan had this way of telling you everything would be all right and meaning it in a way Ma'am couldn't possibly comprehend.
In the end, Ma'am cried off and took to her bed and five-year-old Kitty was forbidden from coming along, precipitating one of her fits. In all, the journey to Carnarvon Hall a few days later felt like the most glorious of escapes. He had promised to tell Kitty everything afterward and succeeded in coaxing a fluttering smile from his tiny half-sister before running to the coach and refusing to look back as they drove away from home.
Henry often wondered in retrospect if he might have been able to stop events from hurtling forward as they did, but Lizzy had hid her tracks alarmingly well. It was at the height of the evening, when Pippa's cheeks were flushed with champagne and praise that Lizzy had peremptorily linked her arm through Henry's and dragged him to the centre of the ballroom as the musicians began to play a Strauss waltz.
"Lizzy, I don't want to dance," he protested to no avail, forced by circumstance to desperately cast about for the proper steps to a Viennese waltz. "What's the matter?"
"I just wanted to show you something." Her smile was sweet enough to be cloying, immediately raising Henry's suspicions. She shifted her hand on his shoulder and, from the corner of his eye, Henry caught sight of a glint of gold on her wedding finger.
"Lizzy! What have you done?" he whispered. "Father can't know."
"He will tonight," Lizzy said, laughing wickedly. "Henry, I love him. I do. And he's perfectly suitable, even if Father can't see that yet."
He being Johnny, their cousin by marriage, Aunt Joan's eldest son by her first husband. Henry had known about it only by unfortunate happenstance, having accidentally discovered his sister and the gentleman in question in Kensington Gardens in a position that could only be described as compromising. Lizzy had promptly burst into tears and begged him to keep her secret, which Henry, desperate to avoid a scene, had agreed to do without hesitation.
"Is that all? May I go back now?" Knowing he was being petulant, Henry began to slouch. However, his sister's attention had wandered somewhere over his shoulder and her eyes had widened.
"Oh, the nerve of him! I can't believe it!"
"What?" Henry glanced back to find that his father was dancing. This would have been shocking enough on its own--Henry had never seen his father dance before, despite Aunt Joan's repeated insistence at Carnarvon's annual Christmas ball--but, as his partner spun out from behind the couple blocking Henry's view, he realised it was Miss Swinford and that all the stars in the sky were shining in her face.
"Is he quite mad?" Lizzy hissed. "I can't say I don't prefer her to Ma'am, but surely he can't be so besotted as to bring her out in public!"
"Besotted?" echoed Henry, staring helplessly at his laughing father--who had thought to see that expression on John Lancaster's face before the Second Coming?--as the awful truth began to dawn. "You mean...Father and Miss Swinford...?"
"Oh, Henry." Lizzy sighed. "You really are blind, aren't you?"
"You can't possibly be serious."
"Just look at them, Henry. She's positively mad for him. Mind you, I can't imagine why. Maybe she's read too many novels and has elected to find him desperately romantic." Lizzy snorted. "But, if he can get away with it, so can I."
Before Henry could stop her she'd spun away from him, cutting a swathe through the other dancers to reach their father's side.
What happened afterward made it as far as the back pages of the London gossip sheets, or so Aunt Joan later told Henry, her cheeks red with embarrassment. However, he could only remember it as a horrified, helpless observer, watching as Lizzy announced with her most brilliant smile that, whilst staying with a close friend of hers at Ramsgate, she had married John Holland.
Their father's reaction was predictably furious. "Have you taken leave of your senses, girl? And to announce it here, at your own sister's engagement! Have you no shame at all?"
"No more than you do, Papa," Lizzy snapped, eyes alight with shared rage. "What would you expect from the daughter of a man who makes a mistress of his children's governess?"
His face went bone-white and beside him Miss Swinford froze in place, a pale statue in one of Aunt Joan's old gowns. Henry silently begged him to call Lizzy a liar, to insist that nothing whatsoever had happened, but the silence stretched longer and longer until it was broken by, of all the people in the world, Cousin Richard.
"Uncle John, Cousin Lizzy, I believe you've both forgotten that this party is meant to celebrate Cousin Pippa's engagement." Holding himself perfectly straight, grey eyes steady in that quiet face, Richard stepped into the space between Henry's father and Lizzy. "Surely this can wait until some other time."
A glance back at Pippa revealed that his eldest sister was visibly fighting tears although John had taken her hand and was whispering what had to be words of comfort in her ear. Richard was still holding Henry's father's gaze as he nodded tightly and Henry could not help but marvel that his cousin, a good four years his junior, had forced his father to silent acquiescence.
What Miss Swinford made of it all might have remained a mystery had Henry not sneaked downstairs at half past midnight to forage for the remnants of a strawberry tart that he'd been far too nervous to eat earlier. He was just slipping past the library on the way back to his bedroom when the murmur of voices caught his attention.
Eavesdroppers never hear well of themselves, nor of others. That had been Miss Swinford's advice many years before but Henry could not help but peer through the keyhole into the dimly lit room. Miss Swinford was still wearing her ballgown, green satin melting into the shadows as she stared from the window.
"For God's sake, Katherine, what can I do?" His father was pacing back and forth before the hearth--where there was thankfully no tiger to be seen, not in Carnarvon where Aunt Joan would have had the dreadful thing consigned to the dustbin--one hand tangled in his hair. "I promise you, I swear on my life, that you will be well cared for--"
She laughed, the acid in the sound making Henry shudder. "I suppose that is how men pay for their whores, isn't it?"
"It isn't like--"
"Where will you put me, John? St John's Wood? Pimlico? Where do men of your station keep their mistresses these days?" On that word, her voice cracked. "I ought to have known this would happen sooner or later. But I will not stay, John. I won't have the boys laughed at in school for being bastards. I couldn't bear it."
"Where will you go?" Beneath the ice in his father's tone, Henry could hear despair, like a string tuned too tightly.
She shook her head. "It's safer this way, John. We both know that." Without looking at him, she stepped away from the window, moving as if to retreat to the door behind which Henry was now crouching.
Henry would never have thought to thank his father for any sort of deliverance but he did now. Miss Swinford had moved close enough that Henry could smell the light whisper of violets when his father came to her side and clasped her hands in his. "Katherine, please," he whispered, voice roughened. "Don't leave me here, I beg you. I couldn't bear it."
She was crying silently, cheeks stained with hectic red. "Don't, John. I've committed a grievous sin in the eyes of God and man and, may He have mercy on me that I can't regret one moment of it. I love you, John, so much I can barely breathe--"
"Then stay," he said. They were in one another's arms, Miss Swinford's face pressed into his shoulder. "Stay, Katherine."
The rustle of skirts galvanised Henry into action, and he tucked himself behind a nearby pillar as Miss Swinford fled into the hall, sobs echoing in the darkness.
The next morning, she was gone, as were Lizzy and her husband. Henry's father did not speak a word through breakfast, his eyes trained on nothing at all. It was Richard who kept the conversation turned to lighter matters, pretending as they all did that nothing had gone amiss.
Henry did not return home for another school holiday, pleading other engagements as tactfully as he could, and his father did not insist. The scent of his study clung to the letters Henry received, musty and stale, and Henry could almost imagine the tiger staring at him from between the perfectly formed words, its eyes alive with hunger, its mouth frozen in mid-snarl.
When one of his professors suggested he look into Sandhurst instead of Oxford, Henry jumped at the chance. This news, he did relay to his father in person, trying not to choke on the air in the study.
His father's smile was little more than a skull's grimace. "I suppose I should congratulate you, Henry. You've made something of yourself after all."
Henry merely inclined his head in response. "You're not too disappointed about Oxford, then?"
"How could I be, when you're following your illustrious uncle to fight for God and country?" The bitterness in his father's voice caught Henry by surprise, though he kept his composure. "I wish you all the best."
He could feel the tiger's glare and had to fight not to glance back at it. With studied blandness and a drawling tone stolen from Henry Percy, who had left Eton several years before, he enquired, "Why haven't you got rid of that rug yet, Father? It's been gathering dust for years now."
"The rug?" After a moment's consideration his father began to laugh, a horrible, dry, rasping sound. "By God, boy, you never do learn, do you?"
Henry could think of nothing to say to that. He turned and left the study, and he did not look back.
Author: lareinenoire
Play: pre-Richard II
Characters / Pairings: John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke, Elizabeth Lancaster, Philippa Lancaster, Gaunt/Katherine Swinford
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2729
Warnings: Extremely dodgy interior decoration
Summary: Henry had always hated his father's study.
NB: For angevin2 , who guessed one of my Yuletide fics correctly. Part of the 'Sweet Fortune's Minions' AU. Title comes from William Blake, 'Tyger, Tyger'. Thank you gileonnen for beta-reading!
Henry had always hated his father's study.
In part, it was the smell. Pipe tobacco mixed with a queer undercurrent of what Henry eventually realised was death.
And, of course, there were the eyes. Glass eyes, staring out from the walls and even the floor, pinned in place of real ones that had long since been eaten by worms. For this was where his father kept his Collection.
For much of Henry's boyhood, John Lancaster had been a figure from stories, a giant of a man in military khakis, armed with an elephant gun. That last, it turned out, was the only accurate element of his fantasy. Unlike his elder brother, John Lancaster had not been sent to India with Her Majesty's Army; rather, he had gone as part of the civil service, transforming paper-pushing and entertaining into a lucrative career.
It was during this tenure that he'd met Constance Castleton, whose husband had died of malaria, and the two had decided--far too quickly, it would later turn out--to marry. Henry's own mother had died of pneumonia, and it had been grief for her death, or so everyone had believed, that sent her husband to the far ends of the earth to escape, leaving his three children--Henry scarcely out of swaddling-clothes--in the care of quiet Miss Swinford.
Lizzy and Pippa could not talk about Mother without weeping, so it fell to Miss Swinford, who always smelt of violets and whose voice was low and soft, to tell Henry about her. She was so beautiful, Henry. Her face reminded me of cameo portraits. His father had ordered all the paintings--and there were many, for Blanche Lancaster's beauty was legendary in their circles--put away because he could not bear to look at them. It had not occurred to him that Henry, who only remembered her hazily, might wish to see his own mother's face.
Mother had also been an accomplished musician, or so Miss Swinford had said, and it was for that reason that every Sunday Henry would pay a visit to the family mausoleum and sing her a hymn, a new one each week. When his father returned from India, these visits ceased because his stepmother--he could not call her Mother, not in a thousand years--believed singing to be a source of vanity and therefore to be crushed with all speed.
Much to Henry's surprise, his father--perhaps on Miss Swinford's advice; he did seem to listen to her more than one might have expected from a man in his position--had permitted him to interview for a position in the choir school at Westminster, rather than attending Uppingham as his father and uncles had done. Ma'am had flown into a rage, calling Henry's father all sorts of dreadful names. Only when she started on Miss Swinford did his father shout back and Henry had curled up beneath his bed with pillows round his ears, trying to drown it out. It was the first of countless arguments, so many of which seemed to take place beneath the staring eyes of his father's trophies.
The worst of them all was the tiger, skinned and stretched on the floor before the hearth, its mouth forever opened in an awful snarl. Every time Henry returned home for school holidays, he would pray that it had disappeared, even that Ma'am had ordered it removed, but every time his father called him into the study, there it lay, poised on the brink of devouring him.
"There's nothing to be frightened of, Henry," his father would say, impatience sharpening his voice. "For God's sake, I killed it myself in Bengal."
That, somehow, did not help.
***
Other things did change. The pianoforte was moved from the front parlour to a dusty room at the back. The colours of the draperies and wallpaper grew progressively darker and the bookcases began to fill with volumes such as A Child's Guide and collections of sermons. Lizzy and Pippa grew sullen under their stepmother's eye. Lizzy in particular began to deliberately provoke her, much to Henry's resigned despair.
Thankfully, he'd made enough friends between Westminster and Eton that he'd begun to spend summer holidays with them, and it was only when his sister became unexpectedly betrothed that he was called home from Penzance, where he had been staying with Thomas Arundel and his family.
Stepping through the front door, the very air seemed to change around him, devoid of laughter and life. Even Miss Swinford's smile had grown thin, her face pale from want of sunlight. "They're in the front parlour, Mr Lancaster."
She had stopped calling him by his Christian name when he started his tenure at Eton. Even now, it sounded wrong.
"Ah, Henry. It's about time you got here." His father waved him in and motioned to one of the overstuffed chairs that Ma'am preferred. On the chaise, Pippa was seated beside a man perhaps four or five years her senior. "This is John Portman. Your sister's intended."
Henry murmured a greeting and settled himself gingerly in the chair. With a further clearing of his throat, his father continued. "We've discussed her dowry already, but I would very much like to give you a proper engagement party."
That Ma'am had not known of this was clear; her eyes bulged in sudden anger. "There's no need for any such nonsense, Mr Lancaster. Parties are a hotbed of sin, a sop to childish vanity--"
"Papa!" Henry's sister cried, dismayed. "You can't mean that."
The look his father gave Ma'am was positively poisonous. "I hadn't intended you to be involved, Mrs Lancaster. It would be held at Carnarvon Hall. Your cousin Richard has kindly offered to host, as his wedding gift to you."
"How marvellous!" Pippa leant close to her fiancé, no doubt telling him of the wonders of Carnarvon Hall, such as they were. Henry sighed inwardly. It wasn't that he disliked Cousin Richard. He simply couldn't help being just a little bit jealous. There were no sermons to be found on bookcases at Carnarvon Hall, and Aunt Joan had this way of telling you everything would be all right and meaning it in a way Ma'am couldn't possibly comprehend.
In the end, Ma'am cried off and took to her bed and five-year-old Kitty was forbidden from coming along, precipitating one of her fits. In all, the journey to Carnarvon Hall a few days later felt like the most glorious of escapes. He had promised to tell Kitty everything afterward and succeeded in coaxing a fluttering smile from his tiny half-sister before running to the coach and refusing to look back as they drove away from home.
Henry often wondered in retrospect if he might have been able to stop events from hurtling forward as they did, but Lizzy had hid her tracks alarmingly well. It was at the height of the evening, when Pippa's cheeks were flushed with champagne and praise that Lizzy had peremptorily linked her arm through Henry's and dragged him to the centre of the ballroom as the musicians began to play a Strauss waltz.
"Lizzy, I don't want to dance," he protested to no avail, forced by circumstance to desperately cast about for the proper steps to a Viennese waltz. "What's the matter?"
"I just wanted to show you something." Her smile was sweet enough to be cloying, immediately raising Henry's suspicions. She shifted her hand on his shoulder and, from the corner of his eye, Henry caught sight of a glint of gold on her wedding finger.
"Lizzy! What have you done?" he whispered. "Father can't know."
"He will tonight," Lizzy said, laughing wickedly. "Henry, I love him. I do. And he's perfectly suitable, even if Father can't see that yet."
He being Johnny, their cousin by marriage, Aunt Joan's eldest son by her first husband. Henry had known about it only by unfortunate happenstance, having accidentally discovered his sister and the gentleman in question in Kensington Gardens in a position that could only be described as compromising. Lizzy had promptly burst into tears and begged him to keep her secret, which Henry, desperate to avoid a scene, had agreed to do without hesitation.
"Is that all? May I go back now?" Knowing he was being petulant, Henry began to slouch. However, his sister's attention had wandered somewhere over his shoulder and her eyes had widened.
"Oh, the nerve of him! I can't believe it!"
"What?" Henry glanced back to find that his father was dancing. This would have been shocking enough on its own--Henry had never seen his father dance before, despite Aunt Joan's repeated insistence at Carnarvon's annual Christmas ball--but, as his partner spun out from behind the couple blocking Henry's view, he realised it was Miss Swinford and that all the stars in the sky were shining in her face.
"Is he quite mad?" Lizzy hissed. "I can't say I don't prefer her to Ma'am, but surely he can't be so besotted as to bring her out in public!"
"Besotted?" echoed Henry, staring helplessly at his laughing father--who had thought to see that expression on John Lancaster's face before the Second Coming?--as the awful truth began to dawn. "You mean...Father and Miss Swinford...?"
"Oh, Henry." Lizzy sighed. "You really are blind, aren't you?"
"You can't possibly be serious."
"Just look at them, Henry. She's positively mad for him. Mind you, I can't imagine why. Maybe she's read too many novels and has elected to find him desperately romantic." Lizzy snorted. "But, if he can get away with it, so can I."
Before Henry could stop her she'd spun away from him, cutting a swathe through the other dancers to reach their father's side.
What happened afterward made it as far as the back pages of the London gossip sheets, or so Aunt Joan later told Henry, her cheeks red with embarrassment. However, he could only remember it as a horrified, helpless observer, watching as Lizzy announced with her most brilliant smile that, whilst staying with a close friend of hers at Ramsgate, she had married John Holland.
Their father's reaction was predictably furious. "Have you taken leave of your senses, girl? And to announce it here, at your own sister's engagement! Have you no shame at all?"
"No more than you do, Papa," Lizzy snapped, eyes alight with shared rage. "What would you expect from the daughter of a man who makes a mistress of his children's governess?"
His face went bone-white and beside him Miss Swinford froze in place, a pale statue in one of Aunt Joan's old gowns. Henry silently begged him to call Lizzy a liar, to insist that nothing whatsoever had happened, but the silence stretched longer and longer until it was broken by, of all the people in the world, Cousin Richard.
"Uncle John, Cousin Lizzy, I believe you've both forgotten that this party is meant to celebrate Cousin Pippa's engagement." Holding himself perfectly straight, grey eyes steady in that quiet face, Richard stepped into the space between Henry's father and Lizzy. "Surely this can wait until some other time."
A glance back at Pippa revealed that his eldest sister was visibly fighting tears although John had taken her hand and was whispering what had to be words of comfort in her ear. Richard was still holding Henry's father's gaze as he nodded tightly and Henry could not help but marvel that his cousin, a good four years his junior, had forced his father to silent acquiescence.
What Miss Swinford made of it all might have remained a mystery had Henry not sneaked downstairs at half past midnight to forage for the remnants of a strawberry tart that he'd been far too nervous to eat earlier. He was just slipping past the library on the way back to his bedroom when the murmur of voices caught his attention.
Eavesdroppers never hear well of themselves, nor of others. That had been Miss Swinford's advice many years before but Henry could not help but peer through the keyhole into the dimly lit room. Miss Swinford was still wearing her ballgown, green satin melting into the shadows as she stared from the window.
"For God's sake, Katherine, what can I do?" His father was pacing back and forth before the hearth--where there was thankfully no tiger to be seen, not in Carnarvon where Aunt Joan would have had the dreadful thing consigned to the dustbin--one hand tangled in his hair. "I promise you, I swear on my life, that you will be well cared for--"
She laughed, the acid in the sound making Henry shudder. "I suppose that is how men pay for their whores, isn't it?"
"It isn't like--"
"Where will you put me, John? St John's Wood? Pimlico? Where do men of your station keep their mistresses these days?" On that word, her voice cracked. "I ought to have known this would happen sooner or later. But I will not stay, John. I won't have the boys laughed at in school for being bastards. I couldn't bear it."
"Where will you go?" Beneath the ice in his father's tone, Henry could hear despair, like a string tuned too tightly.
She shook her head. "It's safer this way, John. We both know that." Without looking at him, she stepped away from the window, moving as if to retreat to the door behind which Henry was now crouching.
Henry would never have thought to thank his father for any sort of deliverance but he did now. Miss Swinford had moved close enough that Henry could smell the light whisper of violets when his father came to her side and clasped her hands in his. "Katherine, please," he whispered, voice roughened. "Don't leave me here, I beg you. I couldn't bear it."
She was crying silently, cheeks stained with hectic red. "Don't, John. I've committed a grievous sin in the eyes of God and man and, may He have mercy on me that I can't regret one moment of it. I love you, John, so much I can barely breathe--"
"Then stay," he said. They were in one another's arms, Miss Swinford's face pressed into his shoulder. "Stay, Katherine."
The rustle of skirts galvanised Henry into action, and he tucked himself behind a nearby pillar as Miss Swinford fled into the hall, sobs echoing in the darkness.
The next morning, she was gone, as were Lizzy and her husband. Henry's father did not speak a word through breakfast, his eyes trained on nothing at all. It was Richard who kept the conversation turned to lighter matters, pretending as they all did that nothing had gone amiss.
Henry did not return home for another school holiday, pleading other engagements as tactfully as he could, and his father did not insist. The scent of his study clung to the letters Henry received, musty and stale, and Henry could almost imagine the tiger staring at him from between the perfectly formed words, its eyes alive with hunger, its mouth frozen in mid-snarl.
When one of his professors suggested he look into Sandhurst instead of Oxford, Henry jumped at the chance. This news, he did relay to his father in person, trying not to choke on the air in the study.
His father's smile was little more than a skull's grimace. "I suppose I should congratulate you, Henry. You've made something of yourself after all."
Henry merely inclined his head in response. "You're not too disappointed about Oxford, then?"
"How could I be, when you're following your illustrious uncle to fight for God and country?" The bitterness in his father's voice caught Henry by surprise, though he kept his composure. "I wish you all the best."
He could feel the tiger's glare and had to fight not to glance back at it. With studied blandness and a drawling tone stolen from Henry Percy, who had left Eton several years before, he enquired, "Why haven't you got rid of that rug yet, Father? It's been gathering dust for years now."
"The rug?" After a moment's consideration his father began to laugh, a horrible, dry, rasping sound. "By God, boy, you never do learn, do you?"
Henry could think of nothing to say to that. He turned and left the study, and he did not look back.