The Monsoon Read Online Free PDF Page B

myself.”
    “Yes, sir,” William said humbly, and started back up the path to the chapel. As he left, though, he shot Tom a look that left no doubt in the boy’s mind that the matter was far from settled.
    “What happened to you, Tom?” Hal turned back to him.
    “Nothing, Father , he replied staunchly.
    “It’s nothing.” He wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve. It would have been a violation of his own code to carry tales, even of such a hated adversary as Black Billy.
    “Then what happened to make your nose bleed and your face swell and turn red as a ripe apple?” Hal’s voice was gruff but gentle: he was testing the lad.
    “I fell,” Tom said.
    “I know that sometimes you’re a clumsy clod, Tom, but are you sure someone didn’t push you?”
    “If I did, then it’s between him and me, sir.” Tom pulled himself up to his full height to disguise his aches and injuries.
    Hal placed an arm around his shoulder. With the other he clasped Dorian to his chest.
    “Come, boys, we’ll go home now.” He took the pair down to where he had left his horse at the edge of the woods, and lifted Dorian up onto its neck in front of the saddle before he swung up behind him. He slipped his feet into the stirrups then reached down to take Tom by the arm and haul him up behind.
    Tom placed both arms around his father’s waist and pressed his swollen, bruised face into the small of his back.
    He loved the warmth and smell of his father’s body, the hardness and strength of him. It made him feel safe from all harm. He wanted to cry but he forced back the tears.
    “You’re not a child,” he said to himself.
    “Dorry can cry, but you can’t.”
    “Where is Guy?” his father asked, without looking around.
    Tom almost said, “He ran away,” but he stopped the disloyal words before they were spoken.
    “He went home, I think, sir.” Hal rode on in silence, feeling the two warm bodies pressed gratefully against him, and hurting for them as he knew they were hurt. Yet he felt a sense of angry helplessness. This was far from the first time he had been sucked into this primeval conflict of siblings, the children of his three wives. He knew it was a competition in which the odds were heavily loaded against the youngest, and from which there could be only one possible outcome.
    He scowled in frustration. Hal Courtney was not yet forty-two William had been born when he was only eighteen, yet he felt old and weighed down with care when he confronted the turmoil of his four sons.
    The problem was that he loved William as much, if not more, than even little Dorian.
    William was his firstborn, the son of his Judith, that fierce, beautiful warrior-maid of Africa, whom he had loved with deep awe and passion. When she had died under the flying hoofs of her own wild steed she had left an aching void in his existence. For many years there had been nothing to fill the gap except the beautiful infant she had left behind.
    Hal had reared William, had taught him to be tough and resilient, clever and resourceful. He was all those things now, and more. And in him there was something of the wildness and cruelty of that dark, mysterious continent that nothing could tame. Hal feared that and yet, in all truth, he would not have had it any other way. Hal himself was a hard, ruthless man, so how should he resent those qualities in his own firstborn son?
    “Father, what does primo genital mean?” Tom asked suddenly, his voice muffled by Hal’s cloak.
    He was so in step with Hal’s own thoughts that his father started.
    “Where did you learn that?” he asked.
    “I heard it somewhere,” Tom mumbled.
    “I forget where.” Hal could guess very well where it had been but he did not press the boy, who had been hurt enough for one day.
    Instead he tried to answer the question fairly, for Tom was old enough now. It was high time that he began to learn what hardships life held in store for him as a younger brother.
    “You mean primogeniture, Tom.