Chapter Two
FAIR HILL, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1800
Damon Carleton, the Earl of Amherst, pinned Lucien with a look like a rapier blade, glinting, gray, and cold. “You need an occupation.”
Despite the autumn chill of the library, sweat pricked under Lucien’s high, starched collar. He resisted the urge to tug at his neckcloth. “I had an occupation,” he reminded the earl. “I was an angel. Now I am nothing. A cipher. A human.”
“You have had eight years to accustom yourself to that condition,” Amherst said evenly. “During which time you have been sheltered, educated, and well provided for.”
Lucien stiffened. He was well aware that he owed everything to Amherst. Still, the reminder stung. “Because the world believes me your bastard.”
Amherst raised his eyebrows. Even if one disregarded the earl’s earthly rank and powers, he was a formidable man, with a brawler’s build and an aesthete’s face. “When the old earl took me into his nursery to replace his dead heir, only the boy’s mother knew of the substitution. But you arrived on my doorstep as a youth of seventeen. I could hardly claim you as my legitimate son.”
“Especially as you never married,” Lucien said.
Amherst shrugged. “I have brought eleven bastard children to live at Fair Hill. Fallen, every one, of course. No wife could be expected to tolerate such flagrant reminders of her husband’s excesses.”
Lucien inclined his head. “Indeed, sir, we are all grateful for your single state. As well as your ongoing liberality.”
“Ongoing,” Amherst said, “but not without limit.”
Lucien eyed him warily. It had been years since he was last summoned to the earl’s study for discipline, but he recognized that tone. “Sir?”
“It is time you demonstrated some initiative. Made something of yourself. Made a difference in the world.”
Lucien swallowed the bitterness in his mouth. “My last attempt at initiative could hardly be termed a success.”
And that, of course, was the source of his discontent.
Amherst, he was sure, was aware of the resentment simmering under his small rebellions. But even the earl, the head of the Nephilim, the Fallen ones, in England, did not guess at Lucien’s loss of faith.
His heart burned.
He had been punished—cast out of Heaven, demoted to the mortal world—for trying to make a difference. For trying to do some good. For answering a dying woman’s selfless prayer.
In recent years he had concluded it was better not to try. Only with Fanny . . .
“You did well enough during the Terror.” Amherst interrupted his thought. “Gerard tells me you saved his life or Tripp’s on more than one occasion. The three of you rescued hundreds of innocents from the guillotine. You were only a boy then, but you cannot have changed so much.”
He remembered. He had made the moonlit channel crossing too many times to count, nearly puking with seasickness and excitement. At least when he’d been dodging French gendarmes and secret police, he had not questioned the value of his existence or the rightness of his decisions. Hundreds of innocents saved. The memory kindled a flicker of satisfaction.
But then . . .
“The Terror ended six years ago,” he said flatly. “Napoleon is in power now.”
And Lucien had been bundled off to Oxford for a gentleman’s education. To equip him, Amherst had said, for what was to be the rest of his life on earth. Older than most of his classmates, lacking any of the shared boyhood experiences that might have helped him fit in, Lucien had been stamped as Amherst’s acknowledged bastard. Neither man nor angel, neither noble nor of humble birth.
Outcast in a completely different way.
“Napoleon’s ambition threatens all Europe,” Amherst said. “If it’s action you crave, I will purchase you a commission.”
“I have no wish to kill for England.” Lucien stared out the library windows; the dying sun stained the winter brown hills the color of blood. “I have seen too much of men in war to believe one side is any better than another.”
“Ah.” The earl studied him with those too-perceptive gray eyes. “It will have to be the church, then. There are not many angels among the clergy, but if you are prepared to study and be patient—”
Lucien shook his head. He was disillusioned, even angry. But not yet so cynical he would lead others into unbelief for the price of a vicar’s living.
“You must do something. I will not stand by while you waste your life along with my capital. I have here”—the earl tapped a sheaf of papers on his otherwise ordered desk—“a report of your expenses in London. Boots, wine, candles, horses . . .”