How to Train Your Viscount

Chapter 2-2

Thankfully he did not follow. She hurried back through the darkened rooms and found a tiny alcove filled with strange statues. She ducked inside and slumped onto a plush bench, not trusting her trembling legs to take her any farther. Deep down, she had always known this day would come, the day she would have to face him again. They were part of the same world—their fathers were both earls, and he was her brother’s best friend to boot. But was avoiding him for her first few weeks in London too much to ask?

She closed her eyes. She could picture the moment it had all started, the moment he’d come riding up to the house…

Although that wasn’t quite right. Really, it had started years before that.

In his first letter home from Eton, Harrington described how the senior boys had challenged the newcomers to “borrow” a goat from a local farm and sneak it into the headmaster’s rooms. Most of them balked (not Harrington, obviously, as there was no form of mischief he wouldn’t try at least once). But there was one other boy who was game: Henry Greville, the young Viscount Thetford and heir to the Earl of Ardingly. The two of them were successful in liberating the goat and getting it up the stairs and into the headmaster’s rooms (it turned out that Lord Thetford was a dab hand at picking a lock). But before they managed to quit the room, the headmaster, Mr. Davies, walked through the door, in the very moment the goat took a bite out of his copy of Xenophon’s Anabasis.

Edward is in despair, Harrington wrote, because he’s never been flogged, not even once, and his little brother got twenty strokes on his first day. But everyone else says Thetford and I are regular swells. We shared a feast of sausages with the older boys to celebrate, and Thetford and I tried our first cheroots. I’ve been here six days and Thetford and I have both been flogged six times. School is brilliant.

Every letter that followed was filled with tales of Harrington’s misadventures with “Thetford,” with whom he became inseparable. Through Harrington’s letters, Caro felt as if she got to know Lord Thetford, too. She knew that Harrington was the better shot, but Thetford was the better horseman; even at the age of twelve, there was no rail he would not take. She knew of his love of any variety of pickled food, from vegetables and fruits to eggs and meats, and how he delighted in disgusting his schoolmates by putting them on everything. And she knew that he always made an excuse when his friends wanted to go bathing in the river, because he had a terror of leeches he thought no one else knew about.

But most of all, Caro enjoyed the young viscount’s sense of humor, which was every bit as caustic as her own. How many hundreds of times had she laughed aloud at one of his witticisms, which Harrington took care to include in his letters because he knew how much she enjoyed them?

Caro had therefore been thrilled nine years later, when Harrington, who by then was attending Oxford, had asked to bring a few friends home during the April break between terms. She had wanted to meet Lord Thetford for years, after all. She recalled standing on the portico with her family, waiting to greet Harrington and his party, thinking to herself that although she and Lord Thetford were not yet friends, they were going to be. They would have the best conversations, just the way Harrington described in his letters.

But then Harrington and his friends rounded the bend, and she saw him for the first time. And she could recall the roaring in her ears, and the racing of her heart, as his face came into view. She grabbed her mother’s wrist and whispered, “Mama, who is the gentleman on the black horse?”

Her mother raised an eyebrow. “That, my dear, is Lord Thetford.”

And in an instant, Caro fell horribly in love with Henry Greville, in that very particular way one can only fall in love at the age of fifteen. He consumed her every thought, both waking and sleeping. When she was in his presence, she was simultaneously desperate for him to notice her and terrified that he would, because at fifteen, Caro had been able to see nothing but her own flaws, so she was convinced that all he would see were the spots on her face, the embarrassing things she said, and how awkward and horrible she was.

Alas, even friendship proved a bridge too far. On the handful of occasions she had the opportunity to speak with him, she was tongue-tied with nerves and nothing like her usual self. Meanwhile, he didn’t seem to notice her at all.

She knew full well he didn’t feel the same way, and she honestly didn’t mind. No matter how much you might wish otherwise, you couldn’t force someone to return your feelings.

What she did mind was the fact that he had made sport of her to all his friends. It was one thing to have a sad case of unrequited love; it was something else entirely to be made into a laughingstock for it.

She had thought she knew Henry Greville through the stories in Harrington’s letters. She had been wrong. The boy she’d been drawn to, the one with the irrepressible spirit and wry sense of humor, had never even existed. He was—

From a few rooms away, she heard that dratted doorknob creak.

He was coming.

* * * *

Caro searched the room for a place to hide. The alcove was tiny, little more than a closet, and there was only one entrance. If Lord Thetford cornered her here, there would be no escaping. Fortunately, Mr. Hope being Mr. Hope, the room was lined with bright red curtains. Caro scurried behind them. Scorch marks blackened her ruined gloves as she snuffed out all but one of her candles, which she shielded behind a cupped hand.

She heard the door to the adjacent room open, and she held her breath…

… only to hear his footsteps pass and see the glow of his own candle fade to nothingness. He had headed back toward the main stairs, not the sculpture gallery where the rest of the party was gathered.

She was rid of him at last.

She exhaled and let her head fall back in relief. Strange, the curtains extended overhead, and—no, wait—this couldn’t be a—

A burst of laughter emerged from Caro’s throat, surprising her, as she realized that Mr. Hope had constructed a tent inside of a closet, in order to house his idols in a befitting style. A red tent, with gold fringe (naturally). Suddenly her evening crossed some indelible line and went from being merely horrible to being comedically horrible. She had known that adventures would await her in London, and here she was sneaking by candlelight through rooms that either were or were not opium dens, searching for the Eye of Ra amongst the mummies, and hiding from her first love and current nemesis in a Bedouin tent.

She smoothed her skirts, preparing to rejoin the party. Really, it was for the best that she ran into him tonight, like this. She could not have spoken a tenth so frankly had she encountered him in a crowded ballroom. Tonight she had told him plainly that she never wished to speak to him again. Her message was inescapable. So when their paths crossed in the future, she would never have to do more than nod and smile. That much she could bear. But he would avoid her, and she would avoid him, and everything was going to be all right.