Prologue

In the spring of 1792, Dominick Edward Guy de Ath Ballister, third Marquess of Dain, Earl of Blackmoor, Viscount Launcells, Baron Ballister and Launcells, lost his wife and four children to typhus.

Though he'd married in obedience to his father's command, Lord Dain had developed a degree of regard for his wife, who had dutifully borne him three handsome boys and one pretty little girl. He'd loved them insofar as he was able. This was not, by average standards, very much. But then, it wasn't in Lord Dain's nature to love anybody at all. What heart he had was devoted to his lands, particularly Ath court, the ancestral estate in Devon. His property was his mistress.

She was an expensive one, though, and he wasn't the wealthiest of men. Thus, at the advanced age of two and forty, Lord Dain was obliged to wed again and, to satisfy his mistress's demands, to marry pots of money.

Late in 1793, he met, wooed, and wed Lucia Usignuolo, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Florentine nobleman.

Society was stunned. The Ballisters could trace their line back to Saxon times. Seven centuries earlier, one of them had wed a Norman lady and received a barony from William I in reward. Since then, no Ballister had ever married a foreigner. Society concluded that the Marquess of Dain's mind was disordered by grief.

Not many months later, His Lordship himself gloomily suspected that his mind had been disordered by something. He had married, he thought, a very beautiful raven-haired girl who gazed at him adoringly and smiled and agreed with every word he uttered. What he'd wed, he found out, was a dormant volcano. The ink was scarcely dry on the marriage lines before she began to erupt.

She was spoiled, proud, passionate, and quick tempered. She was recklessly extravagant, talked too much and too loudly, and mocked his commands. Worst of all, her uninhibited behavior in bed appalled him.

Only the fear that the Ballister line would otherwise the out kept him returning to that bed. He gritted his teeth and did his duty. When at last she was breeding, he quitted the exercise and began praying fervently for a son, so he wouldn't have to do it again.

In May of 1795, Providence answered his prayers.

When he got his first look at the infant, though, Lord Dain suspected it was Satan who'd answered them.

His heir was a wizened olive thing with large black eyes, ill proportioned limbs, and a grossly oversize nose. It howled incessantly.

If he could have denied the thing was his, he would have. But he couldn't, because upon its left buttock was the same tiny brown birthmark in the shape of a crossbow that adorned Lord Dain's own anatomy. Generations of Ballisters had borne this mark.

Unable to deny the monstrosity was his, the marquess decided it was the inevitable consequence of lewd and unnatural conjugal acts. In his darker moments, he believed his young wife was Satan's handmaiden and the boy the Devil's spawn. Lord Dain never went to his wife's bed again.

The boy was christened Sebastian Leslie Guy de Ath Ballister and, according to the custom, took his father's second highest title, Earl of Blackmoor. The title was apt enough, the wags whispered behind the marquess's back, for the child had inherited the olive complexion, obsidian eyes, and crow black hair of his mother's family. He was also in full possession of the Usignuolo nose, a noble Florentine proboscis down which countless maternal ancestors had frowned upon their inferiors. The nose well became the average Usignuolo adult male, who was customarily built upon the monumental scale. Upon a very small, awkwardly proportioned little boy, it was a monstrous beak.

Unfortunately, he'd inherited the Usignuolos' acute sensitivity as well. Consequently, by the time he was seven years old, he was miserably aware that something was wrong with him.

His mother had bought him a number of handsome picture books. None of the people in the books looked anything like him—except for a hook nosed, humpbacked devil's imp who perched on Little Tommy's shoulder and tricked him into doing wicked things.

Though he'd never discerned any imps upon his shoulder or heard any whisper, Sebastian knew he must be wicked, because he was always being scolded or whipped. He preferred the whippings his tutor gave him. His father's scolds made Sebastian feel hot and clammy cold at the same time, and then his stomach would feel as though it were filled with birds, all flapping their wings to get out, and then his legs would shake. But he dared not cry, because he was no longer a baby, and crying only made his father angrier. A look would come into his face that was worse even than the scolding words.

In the picture books, parents smiled at the children and cuddled and kissed them. His mama did that sometimes, when she was in a happy mood, but his papa never did. His father never talked and played with him. He'd never taken Sebastian for a ride on his shoulders or even up in front of him on a horse. Sebastian rode his own pony, and it was Phelps, one of the grooms, who taught him.

He knew he couldn't ask his mother what was wrong with him and how to fix it. Sebastian had learned not to say much of anything—except that he loved her and she was the prettiest mama in the world—because nearly everything else upset her.

Once, when she was going to Dartmouth, she'd asked what he'd like her to bring back. He'd asked for a little brother to play with. She had started crying, and then she'd grown angry and screamed bad words in Italian. Though Sebastian didn't know what all the words meant, he knew they were wicked, because when Papa heard them, he scolded her.

Then they would quarrel. And that was worse even than his mother's crying and his father's angriest look.

Sebastian didn't want to cause any horrible quarrels. He especially didn't want to provoke his mama into saying the wicked words, because God might get angry, and then she'd the and go to Hell. Then no one would cuddle and kiss him, ever.

And so there was no one Sebastian could ask what was wrong and what to do, except his Heavenly Father. But He never answered.

Then, one day, when Sebastian was eight years old, his mother went out with her maid and didn't come back.

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.