his peers who were similarly interested in the pastime, but that was presently out of the question. Sometimes he even visited a fencing studio—low sorts of places, but needs must—but it seemed that during his absence, something of a fashion for fencing had sprung up among the more daring sons of the aristocracy. And so Percy had spent the weeks since his return eyeing his weapons, occasionally taking them out to sharpen or polish, but with no prospect of putting them to good use.
It had been his mother who insisted that he learn to fence, on the theory that Percy, who had been so small as to be nearly delicate, needed to develop some talent at intimidation. He was the last of the Percys; his mother had hoped for more, but she got a thin, pale, invisible, charmless child and made the most of him. And for that, Percy was grateful.
Nobody would have considered the late Duchess of Clare to be a doting mother, but she had detected in her son the early signs of a fatal weakness and done her best to teach him to conquer this failing. She had seen that he was eager to please, generous of mind, and disinclined to cause pain. In a person born into ordinary circumstances, a person who need concern himself with nothing more than his acres and his family, these qualities might even merit praise. For the future Duke of Clare, they would get him trampled on, stolen from, and possibly killed. His very gentleness would make him putty in the hands of the wrong person.
She taught him that because he was the heir to an uncommon degree of wealth, power, and pedigree, people would try to use him. She taught him to trust nobody but herself and people who he paid enough to need him.
She taught him that there was no such thing as peace and that any struggle or skirmish would involve the Duke of Clare; for a man in his position there was no such thing as neutrality. She taught him to look for the seeds of unrest, and it wasn’t until much later that he realized she never told him what to do once he found those seeds—whether to stomp on the tender shoots or to water them.
Percy was to be aware of the hidden currents of power and strife that flowed beneath the surface of ordinary life, and he was to channel them for his own preservation. For preservation had been the duchess’s goal, and all her lessons had been for the purpose of teaching her only child self-defense against a world that she believed would eat him alive.
Percy insisted that he didn’t need to use a weapon in order to survive in this frightening world his mother described; he said that surely a sharp tongue and a title were all he needed, citing the duchess herself as all the precedent he required to support his argument. But she had prevailed, and a fencing tutor had duly been imported from France.
That had been ten years ago, and since then Percy had grown tall enough that he hardly needed a sword to intimidate. But now he thought he understood his mother’s motivation—she had probably been trying to improve Percy’s confidence more than his ability to physically defend himself. After all, life as the heir to the Clare dukedom and loyal son of his father’s principal enemy hardly required much in the way of physical combat. It did, however, require quite a bit of brazenness.
And it required even more, now that he knew he wasn’t the heir at all. It would be a great deal easier if he could simply go after his father and his hirelings with a sword.
Percy watched the prizefight with increasing interest, the delicate clash of swords soothing him in the way he supposed a hot cup of tea might work on someone with more reasonable sensibilities. He had witnessed prizefights as a child and abroad as a young man. The combatants were usually ruffians of a very low order who attempted to hack one another to pieces with badly honed weapons and no pretense to any skill whatsoever. And at first glance these swordsmen were little better than vagabonds: one of them had a long gash bisecting an eyebrow, and he didn’t think the two men had more than a dozen teeth between them.
But just as he was about to decide that this spectacle wasn’t worth his time, the fight ended and the