Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [2]
His father had gone to London, and the servants told Sebastian his mother had decided to go there, too.
But his father came back very soon, and Mama wasn't with him.
Sebastian was summoned to the dark study. His papa, looking very grim, sat at an immense desk, his Bible open before him. He ordered Sebastian to sit. Trembling, Sebastian obeyed. That was all he could do. He couldn't speak. The wings were flapping so hard in his stomach that it was all he could do not to throw up.
"You are to stop plaguing the servants about your mother," his father told him. "You are not to speak of her again. She is an evil, godless creature. Her name is Jezebel, and 'The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.'"
Somebody was screaming very loud in Sebastian's head. So loudly that he could hardly hear his father. But his father didn't seem to hear the screaming. He was looking down at the Bible.
"'For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil,'" he read. "'But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to earth; her steps take hold on hell.'" He looked up. "I renounce her, and rejoice in my heart that the corruption has fled the house of my fathers. We will speak of it no more."
He rose and pulled the bell rope, and one of the footmen came and led Sebastian away. Still, even after the study door closed, even while they hurried down the stairs, the screaming in Sebastian's head wouldn't stop. He tried covering his ears, but it went on, and then all he could do was open his mouth and let it out in a long, terrible howl.
When the footman tried to quiet him, Sebastian kicked and bit him, and broke away. Then all the wicked words came out of his mouth. He couldn't stop them. There was a monster inside him and he couldn't stop it. The monster snatched a vase from a table and hurled it at a mirror. It grabbed a plaster statue and sent it crashing to the floor. It ran down the great hall, screaming, and breaking everything it could reach.
* * *
All the upper servants rushed toward the noise, but they shrank from touching the child, each and every one certain he was possessed by demons. They stood, frozen with horror, watching Lord Dain's heir apparent reduce the Great Hall to a shambles. No word of rebuke, no sound at all, came from the floor above. His Lordship's door remained shut— as though against the devil raging below.
At last the enormous cook lumbered in from the kitchen, picked the howling boy up, and, oblivious to his kicking and punching, hugged him. "There now, child," she murmured.
Fearing neither demons nor Lord Dain, she took Sebastian to the kitchen and, banishing all her helpers, sat down in her great chair before the fire and rocked the sobbing child until he was too exhausted to cry anymore.
Like the rest of the household, Cook was aware that Lady Dain had eloped with the son of a wealthy shipping merchant. She had not gone to London, but to Dartmouth, where she'd boarded one of her lover's ships and departed with him for the West Indies.
The boy's hysterical sobs about dogs eating his mother made the cook want very much to take a meat cleaver to her master. The young Earl of Blackmoor was the ugliest little boy anyone had ever seen in all of Devon— and possibly Cornwall and Dorset as well. He was also moody, quick-tempered, and generally unappealing. On the other hand, he was only a little boy, who deserved better, she thought, than what Fate had dealt out to him.
She told Sebastian that his mama and papa did not get along, and his mama had become so very unhappy that she ran away. Unfortunately, running away was an even worse mistake for a grown-up lady than it was for a little boy, Cook explained. It was such a bad mistake that it could never be fixed, and Lady Dain could never come back.
"Is she going to Hell?" the boy asked. "Papa s-said— " His voice wobbled.
"God will forgive her," Cook said firmly. "If He is just and merciful, He will."
Then she