A Rose at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

was, he found he actually enjoyed scholarship. He’d been on the verge of some disastrous escapade, something guaranteed to blacken him in the eyes of all and sundry, when something would take his interest. And his interests were damnably wide.
    He studied the latest methods of agriculture, he studied the properties of electricity and the workings of the human body. He immersed himself in Greek and Latin, in the study of warfare, in the philosophies of Plato and Sophocles. He even allowed himself to be temporarily seduced by the workings of the legal systems, before his goal in life revived itself.
    That goal being to humiliate his father. The father who’d humiliated him, ignored him, turned from him in disgust when his elder son and beloved wife had died. Nothing Nicholas ever did was good enough for his father; no attempt at earning his love, or even his approval, succeeded. Eventually Nicholas had given up trying, deciding that if he was doomed to disapproval and dislike from his father, then he’d do his best to deserve it.
    Not that his father had lived a sober, blameless life. There was bad blood in the Blackthornes, the madness ran deep, and Jepthah Blackthorne, in his diligence to appear untouched by the family instability, had carried sedate behavior to an extreme. And Nicholas had rebelled, flinging the dark family history in his father’s face on every occasion, until finally, when he was close to graduating with honors, he’d made his move. A drunken brawl, followed by a horrendous scene in the ancient and conventionally silent library, followed by an inebriated disruption of a solemn church service, and Nicholas Blackthorne was out on his ear, disgraced.
    He hadn’t been nearly so drunk as he’d pretended. Just drunk enough to give himself the courage to do it. He’d remembered the shocked expressions on the faces of his peers, his second cousin Carmichael Fitzwater, for example, and that lazy fop, Antony Wilton-Greening. And he’d seen the horrified expression on his father’s face as he’d screamed imprecations at him before collapsing at his desk.
    He’d felt no triumph later that night as he’d stood by his father’s bedside and watched him struggle for breath. A matter of time, the doctor said. The next apoplectic fit would carry him off, and unless his black-sheep son made himself scarce, that fit would come all too soon.
    Nicholas felt no guilt. None at all, he told himself, as he watched his father struggle. He would have been more than happy to stay and watch his father die, if it hadn’t been for the implacable decision of his elderly Uncle Teasdale.
    His mother’s older brother was a bachelor, one of high-living tastes and an amazing amount of tolerance. Nicholas had always wished Teasdale had been his father, instead of the rigid, miserable old man who’d made his life a torment. Maybe then the blackness wouldn’t eat into his soul as it had. But then, blood will tell. And the tainted blood of the mad Blackthornes ran thick and blue in his veins.
    Even tolerant Teasdale drew the line at inadvertent patricide. He’d sent Nicholas off on his grand tour with more than enough funds from his own private account, and told him to come back a man. One ready to learn responsibility.
    And he might have done just that. He’d dallied in the brothels of Paris, fallen in love with Venice, and been bewitched by Rome, moving through the political turmoil that was Europe with a single-minded absorption in his own pleasure. He was ready to return home, ready to make peace with a father who was, against all odds, recuperating. It was then he made one of the worst mistakes in a mistake-strewn life.
    Responsibility, his Uncle Teasdale had told him. One responsibility was to make a courtesy visit to his godparents in Burgundy, godparents he’d never even met. The Comte and Comtesse de Lorgny had been friends of his mother’s, their position as his godparents only a formality. But those formalities