Suzanne Robinson Read Online Free Page B

scowl.
    “Seeing as how Scotland Yard specifically asked for the services of yours truly, I think I’m allowed.” Mutton hooked his fingers in the armholes of his vest and expanded his chest.
    “They’re familiar with your criminal past,” Cheyne snapped. “That’s why they think you’ll do.”
    “Bloody smart thinking, that is.”
    “Cancel my appointments for the rest of the week.”
    “I got Smythe doin’ that right now.”
    Cheyne glanced at the document case beside him, then turned his icy regard on Mutton. “Then you’ll be so good as to get my dear mother on the telephone. I understand she has recently had one installed in Grosvenor Square.”
    Mutton whistled. “So you really are going back.After what you said when you was delirious with your wounds that time, I’d of thought you’d keep clear o’ them.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “This’ll be a show, it will.”
    “Shut up, Mutton, and go do as I said. I believe Her Grace is giving an intimate dinner for thirty or forty people next Thursday. The perfect opportunity to commence.”
    “Right.” Unperturbed, Mutton lumbered out of the room.
    When he was alone, Cheyne went to the mirror and stared into his own eyes. He wouldn’t mind seeing his mother so much. He’d grown used to her indifference. sometime after he entered Cambridge he’d realized she couldn’t help being shallow as a lake in a drought. The poverty of her mind wasn’t all her fault, for her character had been pruned and trimmed from birth to fit the narrow boundaries laid out for women of her rank. It had taken him years to recognize this, and many more to admit it without his attempts at objectivity being overwhelmed with childhood pain.
    No, Mother wasn’t the problem. The problem had always been his father.
Father
—what an ironic appellation.
    It had taken Cheyne quite a while to realize just how distasteful his existence was to his father. This was because, like all children of his class, Cheyne saw little of his parents until he was almost an adult. Raised by nannies, then sent to Eton and Cambridge,his contact with the duke and duchess had been limited to appearances in the drawing room at teatime. Even then Cheyne’s tastes had irritated His Grace. Frederick James William Tennant Allington’s ideal man was a sporting one. He remembered countless equine trivialities, such as the names of every Derby winner since 1870. He could recall hunt events in excruciating detail. But he couldn’t abide five minutes of conversation about philosophy, science, music, literature, or art. This last word, upon the duke’s lips, became an epithet, which he spat out as if it were the vilest obscenity.
    Cheyne winced as he remembered the times he suffered his father’s ridicule for daring to bring up a forbidden topic. The subject of Mr. Charles Darwin had earned him a beating. He worked his shoulders, trying to ease an imaginary sting. His back bore three crossed scars, the legacy of His Grace’s riding whip.
    And books. Books other than those on sport led a short life at Grosvenor Square. Cheyne learned to hide them, especially the Shakespeare, for if the duke found them, he would toss them into the fire. The day his father threw
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
into the flames was the day he earned Cheyne’s contempt.
    The memory was bright, like a painting by Renoir. Cheyne had been hiding in his room reading instead of going for a walk in Hyde Park with his brothers. No loud footsteps warned him of the duke’s approach. Suddenly he was there, looming over Cheyne like some fairy-tale giant.
    “What’s this? Shakespeare, that drivel!”
    Father ripped the small leather volume from Cheyne’s hands and hurled it into the fireplace. Cheyne yelped, jumped up and would have rescued the book had the duke not caught him and tossed him into a corner. Cheyne hit his head on the wall. With pain searing his skull, he curled into a ball and sobbed while the duke stomped out