The Impostor

by Lang, Lily

  As he had anticipated, Wellington’s mouth tightened with displeasure. The old snob had disliked the Omega Group even more than he had disliked the professional soldiers of Wycombe, though Sebastian had never been on the receiving end of Wellington’s dislike, due to the Grenville title.

  “Yes,” he said. “What of it?”

  As briefly as possible, Sebastian summed up what he had learned from Tessa about the disappearances of the members of the Omega Group, as well as Pierre Sevigny’s return. Wellington listened in silence.

  “I would like permission to go to Abchurch Street and search through the archives there to see if I might find what Sevigny was interested in,” he concluded. “As I understand, all documents pertaining to the Omega Group are kept there?”

  Wellington nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, very well. I would, of course, be delighted to write you a letter granting you entrance. If you will follow me, please.”

  He led the way to his study, where he went to his desk and wrote a quick note before sealing it with a splash of red wax. When he handed it to Sebastian, however, he said, “You said that it was Edward Ryder’s daughter who came and warned you of Sevigny’s return?”

  Sebastian nodded, looking surprised.

  “Hmm,” said Wellington, studying him closely. The letter remained loosely clasped between his fingers. “Did you ever meet Miss Ryder on the Peninsula?”

  “No,” said Sebastian. “I have never met Miss Ryder before.”

  “I see,” said Wellington. He hesitated. “Do you not find it curious that she came to you, of all people?”

  Sebastian stiffened, feeling every cell in his body going on alert. “Yes, actually,” he said slowly. “But she said her father wished to warn me.”

  “I see,” said Wellington. “How very curious.” He held out his hand and handed Sebastian the letter. “Well then, there you are,” he said. “You are to report immediately back to me as soon as you discover anything of importance, do you understand?”

  “Yes, of course, sir,” said Sebastian.

  Wellington nodded. “Your grandfather would be proud of you,” he said, evidently believing this was a compliment of the highest order.

  Sebastian stiffened, but thanked the duke as politely as he could manage before making his farewells and climbing back into his carriage.

  After all, it was hardly Wellington’s fault that Sebastian had hated his grandfather for as long as he could remember.

  No one, not even Francis, who had been his oldest and closest friend, understood the true depth of the enmity between Sebastian and his irascible, reactionary grandfather, Henry Montague, the third Earl Grenville.

  Gossip had generally assumed the estrangement between the third Earl Grenville and his half-Italian grandson had derived from old Henry Montague’s disapproval of Sebastian’s mother. William, the old earl’s only son, had married a common singer, a girl of no birth or fortune or even great beauty.

  But the truth was far more complicated. Certainly the third earl had not cared for Diana Antonacci, the beautiful Florentine contralto who, in the spring of 1784, had captivated London with her rich, melting voice. When William had quietly announced his intention to marry, the old earl had made terrible scenes and ultimately cut off his son’s allowance.

  The title and much of the Grenville estates were entailed, of course, but the earl had hoped the prospect of living in penury would change his only son’s mind. Women such as Diana Antonacci were acceptable as mistresses and whores, the earl had shouted, but when a Montague married, he looked to higher places.

  Though faced with his father’s legendary temper, William had neither bent nor broken. He had married Diana, and faced with Society’s shock and horror, returned with her to Italy, where they had settled down on a small vineyard in the countryside.

  Perhaps the old earl might have eventually relented and called his son home to England. After all, William was his only heir. But when Sebastian was six, his parents and infant sister had died in a carriage accident, and any chance of reconciliation was lost forever. As his mother had had no living family, Sebastian had been sent to live with his grandfather.

  To Sebastian, whisked away from the only home he had ever known mere hours after his entire family was buried, the tall, arrogant, old man who had come to fetch him had seemed as large and terrifying as a monster.

  He had promptly burst into tears.

  The earl had taken one disgusted look at his grandson and only surviving heir, and seen in the sobbing, sniveling child the echoes of a woman he considered beneath the noble Montague name—the olive skin, the dark hair, the black eyes. And worse still, the sensitive, trembling mouth, and that huge Italian nose with its flared nostrils, surely a sign of a temper and ungoverned passion. The earl decided in that moment he should stamp out any trace of the boy’s low birth and his common, foreign blood. He would engrain in his grandson a sense of responsibility to his title, his heritage and his land.

  He was going to make a man out of the boy.

  As Parliament was in session and the earl was in the midst of quashing the absurd reforms championed by the Whigs, he brought Sebastian back with him to Montague House in London and began the task of seeing to his education.

  The boy, he soon discovered, was surprisingly well-read, but then, it had been William himself who had seen to it that Sebastian had received thorough instruction in mathematics, natural science and the classics.

  Despite the child’s sensitive nature, the earl had begun to see promise in his heir. He had engaged a strict tutor to instruct Sebastian in the subjects he would study when he was eventually sent away to Eton, where generations of Montague men had been sent.

  To crush the boy’s Italian nature, the earl had forbidden the boy to speak his mother’s name, or of his appallingly rustic life in Italy. He was now the Viscount Montague, the earl had informed him, heir to the Grenville earldom, and he must put everything else out of his mind. He must violently uproot any flowering of his mother’s foreignness—her language, her love of music, her quicksilver laugh and easy tears.

  For awhile, the earl was pleased with himself and the boy’s progress. His plan seemed to be succeeding. The boy had grown thin and pale, true, and he seemed undersized even for his age, but his tutor had grudgingly admitted that Sebastian was an intelligent boy, and he had not cried once since first stepping foot on English soil.

  Then, when Sebastian was eight, the Gift had manifested itself.

  His first illusions had grown out of his wild longing for the home he had lost forever. Late at night, tucked in the high bed in the big, terrifyingly elegant room to which the earl had assigned him, Sebastian had begun to build his dreams. Green hills, blue skies, the distant shimmer of the ocean, all had filled the darkness of his immense chamber like living paintings.

  Sebastian had not understood how, or why, he could do what he did—conjure lifelike visions of the vineyards and villas, dirt roads and sandy shores that had filled his childhood. He simply could. He conjured sunlight and fish stews and green grass, and dogs for his companions, and he had given them names, and played with them in the silence of his room.

  The only illusions he could never seem to conjure were those of his family. He had tried, but somehow, though he could conjure old Maria, his nurse, and Antonio, the baker’s son who had been his best friend and playmate, he could not seem to bring back his family.

  From the beginning, he had known that these illusions were something he must hide from his grandfather, must keep secret at all costs. But then, as the months passed and he had grown lonelier and more desolate, he had found the visions increasingly difficult to control. No matter how hard he tried to restrain his temper or his sorrow, in his moments of greatest emotional pain, they would appear.

  The illusions Sebastian conjured out of nothing had seemed to the earl the blackest magic, the work of the devil himself. The earl, like his ancestors before him, was a good, God-fearing Anglican, and this manifes
tation had been to him further proof of the boy’s wicked parentage.

  The earl had been determined to beat the Gift out of Sebastian. Surely, with the proper application of the birch rod, the visions would stop, the devil would leave his body. And so his grandfather and his tutor added a steady regime of whipping to Sebastian’s curriculum.

  Sebastian had endured. Moreover, he learned to control the illusions, until finally, he could suppress them entirely.

  At eleven, Sebastian was sent to Eton, and discovered it was possible to be happy again. Away from his grandfather and the daily canings, he soon discovered a passion for mathematics and music, and a talent for languages and science. He learned to play sports, and play them well; he studied hard, earning the respect and liking of his teachers; and for the first time since his early childhood, he began to make—cautiously—friends.

  At Eton, he met another who could do what he could. Francis Hughes couldn’t conjure up visions—but he could make things move with the lightest touch of his mind.

  It had been Francis who had first explained the nature of the Gift to him. Francis’s own family members were all, as Francis said cheerfully, afflicted with a variety of psychic powers.

  This Sebastian discovered to be true. He accompanied Francis home to Sussex during holidays, instead of responding to his grandfather’s summons for him to return to Grenville. The Gift, Francis’s kind father had explained to him, appeared to be hereditary, though it had been so imperfectly studied over the centuries that no one could be sure.

  Arthur Hughes had been the first to teach Sebastian that though the Gift was to be kept secret from those who did not understand, it was not something to be feared, and Sebastian had permitted himself to use the Gift, and conjure the illusions that had saved his sanity when he had lived with his grandfather.

  The secret he now shared with Francis had made them close friends. But even in later years, when the freshness of its horror had faded, he had never told Francis about his grandfather’s cruelty, his coldness, his harsh, pious narrow-mindedness.

  Nor had he ever spoken of his childhood in Italy, or the time in his life before he came to England. It was as though those memories were too precious to be shared and too sacred to be spoken aloud.

  Throughout his years at Eton, and later, at Oxford, which he attended with Francis, Sebastian never returned to either Montague House or Grenville. Though his grandfather wrote repeatedly, first with angry demands, and then, as the years passed, with increasingly feeble pleas for Sebastian to see him, he had tossed all the old man’s letters into the fire. He had no desire to see again the man who had hated his mother, cast out his parents and made his childhood a living hell.

  When he graduated, Sebastian took a first in mathematics, ignored yet another request from his grandfather to attend him at Grenville, where the old man was slowly dying of cancer of the stomach, and gone abroad with Francis while trying to decide what to do with his life.

  As a younger son who would inherit money but no lands, Francis intended to join the Navy, an idea which suited Sebastian. Unfortunately, during their travels, Sebastian discovered that he grew violently seasick as soon as he stepped on board a ship, and so he elected to purchase a commission in the army instead.

  A few years later, war broke out, first against the Emperor Napoleon’s France, and then America. At the request of Wellington himself, Sebastian had joined his staff and become an operative on a highly secret group of psychic soldiers, his life so perilous that he hardly dared imagine he would survive the war. Francis, meanwhile, served on board a ship-of-the-line on the Atlantic, where his American heritage and Gift had made him a valuable asset to the Royal Navy.

  Then, in April of 1815, Sebastian received news that his grandfather had finally died, leaving him Montague House and Grenville, its villages, forests and stables, fields and farms. Sebastian, engaged in a series of highly sensitive operations leading up to the battle of Waterloo, had not bothered to return home to England for the funeral.

  At Waterloo Sebastian received the bayonet wound that destroyed his face and nearly took his eye. While he lay in a Brussels hospital, Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena and the wars ended.

  He returned to a London in the midst of the victory celebrations to find himself feted as a hero. The Duke of Wellington himself commended Sebastian on his work during the war, and he found himself welcome in the best drawing rooms and ballrooms. Now that he was both titled and wealthy, the ambitious Society mothers stalked him discreetly, throwing their dimpled, white-frocked daughters at him.

  But Sebastian did not need any particular Gift for clairvoyance to realize his title and his wealth were the only attraction he held for these blushing young maidens, who, well-trained from the cradle by their ambitious mothers, would have married a man of eighty, so long as he was wealthy and a duke.

  But their averted eyes whenever they accidentally saw the scar that disfigured the left side of Sebastian’s face, their barely concealed disgust when he asked them to dance with him, were ample evidence they did not care for him.

  Sebastian found that it did not matter greatly. He hadn’t been handsome even before he received his wounds, so he could not mourn something he had never had. Moreover, he had little interest in marriage. Marriage meant procreation, and he had no interest in propagating the noble house of Montague. The whole rotten line, of which Henry Montague had been so proud, could die out, as far as he was concerned. He cared nothing for the title or the family name.

  He spent less and less time in Society, and to focus his attention instead on the comfort of his tenants, as well as his responsibilities to his seat in Parliament. The other lords might lambaste him for his views on slavery and the Corn Laws, but no one cared about his limp and scars.

  Meanwhile, Francis, despite the loss of his arm in the war against America, had taken over his own father’s work as an agent of the Crown, controlling the network of Gifted spies and diplomats that protected British interest overseas at home and abroad in the chaos that was Europe after Napoleon’s wars. He and Sebastian remained close friends, though there were times, as in the last few years, when they were both too busy to see much of each other.

  As the carriage rolled through the streets and back to Montague House, Sebastian cursed himself for not making a greater attempt to spend time with Francis. Perhaps if he had, Sevigny would not have had the chance to kidnap him. Perhaps if he had, he would have noticed Francis’s disappearance sooner.

  Remembering all that Francis had done for him, remembering all that Francis had been to him, Sebastian knew he must rescue his friend and bring him home.

  Chapter Eight

  At nine o’clock, Tessa sat across from Sebastian in a hired hackney that drew to a stop on Abchurch Street in front of the small house that served as an annex to the Horse Guards. The pistol Sebastian had lent her to replace the one she had lost while fleeing their pursuers the night before was tucked into the pocket of her plain skirts.

  She was very tired. She had slept little the night before, and she knew her exhaustion was plain on her face, in the dark, almost bruise-like shadows beneath her eyes and the skin drawn tight across her forehead.

  Sebastian pushed open the door and climbed out of the hackney, turning to offer her his hand. She rose as well, and though her wound gave a twinge of pain she suppressed her wince, knowing he watched her.

  Hesitantly, she placed her gloved hand in his. Even through the worn kidskin, she could feel the familiar heat and strength of him.

  She glanced uncertainly up at him. His harsh, scarred face was unreadable in the watery morning light, but as his fingers closed over hers, a muscle ticked once in the strong line of his jaw. He desired her.

  She looked away as she descended the steps. She had known him for too long not to recognize that look, the intensity of his gaze, the tension in his jaw. Though six years had passed and he did not remember her, he still wanted her.

  Heat and trepidation pooled in her be
lly. She fought back a confusing welter of emotions: satisfaction and panic, a powerful yearning for this man she had never stopped loving, and an even more powerful fear that this time, she could not resist him.

  “You ought to have stayed at Montague House,” he said. “You should be resting. You will hurt yourself even more with all this gadding about.”

  Since Tessa had been hearing this argument, or some variation of it, all morning, she ignored him and concentrated instead on the unprepossessing exterior of the townhouse.

  They were here to retrace Sevigny’s steps and his attempts to discover the names of the Omega Group’s members. They had decided to begin by reading the dispatches Sevigny had mentioned to Sebastian the night before.

  Tessa furrowed her brows as she transferred her attention to Sebastian. He leaned more heavily than usual on his walking stick as he made his way up the steps to the front door and knocked. No doubt his leg pained him after last night’s escapade through the streets of London.

  She repressed the urge to ask him how he had slept. It was not the sort of question a lady might pose to a gentleman she had ostensibly just met. But she remembered only too well the nightmares that haunted him in the darkest hours of the night. How often had she slipped into his tent to hold him close? How often had they slept together, tangled in the skeins of her hair, their limbs entwined, their hearts beating perfectly in time?

  She looked away from him. Though she had wanted it, she could not bear looking at him and knowing he did not remember.

  It seemed a very long time before an ancient porter opened the door a crack and peered at them through rheumy eyes. “Yes?”

  “The Earl Grenville, with a lady,” he said. He handed over a letter stamped with Wellington’s signet, allowing him access to the dispatches kept here in secret. Apparently, he had paid a call to his old commander before Tessa had even risen that morning and obtained permission to enter the secret annexes where, among other top secret documents, dispatches related to the Omega Group were kept.