Five years later
February 5, 1822
London, England
Most fighters, even the ones who crawled in from the grimiest, lowliest slums of London, hated the smell of Christian’s training ring. He didn’t blame them. It was a far cry from Gentleman Jackson’s Saloon at 13 Bond Street.
Christian’s facility was in a warehouse by the docks that had once been used for processing fish. Old fighters would spook the new boys by telling them the stone floors and walls, with their red and brown hues, were streaked with the blood of Christian’s victims, but really the marking were the remnants of fish guts from the previous occupant. Making the smell of the place even worse, the mats that lined half the floor were soaked in the sweat of men. Christian supposed he could have them washed daily, but only did so weekly on principle. The smell of a fight was unique. Fear and adrenaline made the body reek sharply, and it could be distracting to a novice fighter.
That was what separated Christian’s gymnasium from the other fighting sites. They just trained the body. But Christian also trained the mind.
Gamblers always made the mistake of betting on the biggest fighter with the best physique. Sometimes—as in his case—it paid off. But the real money was to be made on the scrappy fighter with the strong mind. The tenacious fighter who wouldn’t quit. The fighter who was willing to do anything and be anything to win.
A fighter like Peter Herron.
The boy was tall and wiry like a string bean, but quick on his feet and with his mind. Christian had him on the dummy—a tall column of wood with sharp sticks pointing out at all angles around it that he had set to spin. A modification of a training tool he’d seen while touring fighting facilities in Shanghai.
It was the only dummy of its kind in London. He’d sent a prototype to Gentleman Jackson, and while his old friend had kept it for his personal use, he’d never established it in training, fearing some hothead might come after him for reparations due to personal injury. It was impossible to step in to the column for a punch without taking a stick to the eye or the shoulder or leg. Not unless you twisted in just the right way. Judged the depth. Used your speed correctly.
Peter whirled around it with graceful movements, almost like a dancer. He jabbed and turned and ducked and slipped, landing quick punches to the face and body of the column. It wasn’t even his speed and agility that would make him a great fighter. It was Peter’s expression. Pure calm. Not a furrow to his brow. Not a clench to his jaw. His shoulders were relaxed and down, not up to his ears like most first-year fighters.
The boy had walked into Christian’s facility two months ago and had quickly become his favorite student. Peter was at peace when he fought, and that was a feeling Christian knew all too well.
“Stay angled. Make yourself a smaller target,” he barked.
The boy did as he was told, without any grunts of frustration. Another sign of a natural fighter. Rare for a boy who had known nothing when he walked in the door.
Peter was a bit of an enigma. Most fighters who came to his gymnasium weren’t up to snuff for Jackson’s Saloon. They entered the ring with troubles blazing on their backs. Debt, mostly, or just a plain mean streak. Not Peter. He’d walked in as meek as a mouse and asked how to properly wrap up for his gloves. As far as Christian knew, the kid hadn’t taken them off since.
There were demons riding this boy, of course, but Christian didn’t know them. Didn’t need to know them.
“Watch your breath,” Christian said. “Control it. Don’t let it control you.” There were a lot of platitudes in fighting. Most of them were simple reminders, but it never hurt to consider the fundamentals.
Just watching Peter made him want to tie his own wraps. He’d hung them up a couple of years back after a bout that had taken him forty rounds to win when it should have taken ten. The other fighter had been knocked down and later bled to death. While he’d had the nickname Homicide Hughes for years, it had never had any truth behind it before. It wasn’t quite the same having that moniker when it was real, and he’d never quite regained his taste for stepping into the ring to fight.
Training young fighters was his new calling. Something to set his mind to other than hitting a man. A distraction. Something he well needed.
Christian glanced back at his other students. “If one of you is stupid enough to drop your defensive stance, then I might just give you a reason to regret it.” He raised his own fists, and the boys immediately brought their hands up and returned to their drills. They just needed a firm hand.
He cocked his head at Peter. “Water,” he ordered.
Peter stepped away from the rotating column, moving back a safe distance before dropping his hands and heading to the barrel. Christian himself could use a drink. They hadn’t stopped for lunch and he imagined Peter needed some food for energy.
“Let’s take a break,” Christian suggested. “No use wasting all your energy before the fight.”
Peter shook his head and sweat dripped from his blonde hair. He gulped in air. It was a common problem—the breath got used to the pace of things and when it changed, even for the easier, it was a struggle to adjust. “I don’t need a break.”
There were a half dozen other men in the facility, all in various states of exhaustion, bent over their knees, breathing heavily, and they’d been at it for half the time doing half the work.
“You need what I tell you,” Christian said, keeping his tone light. “You need to win. What else is there to prove?”
The boy’s eyes, crystal blue like his own, remained hooded as his gaze flitted across the floor and walls of the facility. “I just want to do everything I can.”
Christian knew the feeling, but he also didn’t like relentless training without an end in sight. It was too easy to overwork the body. “If you want to be prepared, then help pack the carriages.”
Peter nodded and started for the door.
“After a good meal, though,” Christian quickly added. “I won’t have you passing out and knocking your head and bleeding out. Dirtying up my floors.”
That earned him a smile from the boy.
“When you return, try a few minutes without the wraps,” Christian said. “It’s good to build up some callouses.” While they trained with wraps, the fights were bare-knuckle. While it did no good to go home with bloody fists every day, it was smart to get used to feel of your skin splitting from a hit.
Having sent Peter on his way, Christian set about figuring out a meal himself. He hadn’t eaten his breakfast as it had been such a busy day. There was more to running a boxing training saloon than just barking orders at young men, of course. There were the books to do, the banker to check in with, the knee man and the bottle man to keep fresh, umpires to hire, and a fair amount of society nonsense, too. But he didn’t mind.
Maybe it was his desire to be known for something more than just having a fancy set of friends that compelled him into the ring. Maybe he had the same father issues he accused some of his set of having. But fighting was something Christian had always done well, and it had done well by him in return.
He kept an office, no larger than his closet lodgings, in the back of the warehouse. It had large windows looking out onto the space that allowed him to keep an eye on his fighters, in much the same way he imagined the owners before him had kept an eye on their fish making sure none of them made it home to become a worker’s supper.
He told the youngest pup in his gym to bring him a meal—paying his dues, as it were. The boy was exhausted and now would have to run down the street and back. It was good for his endurance.
Christian sat in his chair and flipped through his correspondence. He dug his fingers into his opposite shoulder, trying to ease some of the tension and ache.
Aye, he was getting older. His body felt it, as did his mind.
Why don’t you settle down, find a wife? You’ve trained enough instructors that you shouldn’t need do more than the occasional exhibition!
That was his friend Robert Crawford talking, and while Christian was used to taking orders from Robert in battle, and often in life—he’d been the one to suggest opening the gymnasium in the first place—Christian had no intention of leaving his students behind. Not when they needed him. Not when a wife would likely want him to quit.
The pup returned, breathing hard. “Your… meal… sir.” He set a steaming folded package, wrapped in newspaper, on the desk. The mouthwatering smell of sausage filled the room. The boy’s stomach grumbled loudly.
Christian wondered if he’d eaten. If he even had funds to eat. Half the boys who came to his saloon couldn’t afford to train here and did so with the agreement that their winnings would be shared. As much as Christian wanted to help them all, he knew a boy became a man when he stood on his own. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to offer the boy something to eat.
“Bit too much food here,” he said, opening the sheet to the sight of four sausages. “Best take one for yourself.”
The boy’s eyes grew wide. His hand clutched his belly. “Thank you, sir. If you insist, sir.”
Christian offered up the sausage and watched with satisfaction as the boy held it in his cupped hands. He took a bite and went out to the floor, sharing it with a few of the other fighters. He made a note to have some food delivered while he and Peter were out of town for Peter’s fight. He could do so under the guise of it being misdirected, and the boys would have something to eat while he was gone. It was only to be four days. They wouldn’t suspect a thing.
He hurriedly ate down the sausages while preparing the packing list. While the fight itself was to be secret, it seemed all of London was ablaze with gossip. Jackson had arranged it between Peter and one of his fighters. It would be the first time that any from their saloons had met in battle, and the people ripe for it, not only because Christian and Jackson had a great rivalry, but because they had both agreed to an exhibition performance the day before, thus turning the event into a four-day affair—the arrival, the preparation, the exhibition, and the fight itself.
He was too old and experienced to have nerves over a fight anymore, but Peter’s youthful anxiety whetted his own. He crumpled the newspaper but a name caught his eye, and he smoothed it back out.
Will Almack’s have a new Patroness? Lady Rivington’s golden touch has ensured her previous six wards found titled matches, with each marriage still happy. With a record to rival the Matchmaking Baron, her addition to the ranks is inevitable.
He’d shredded the pages in his hand before he realized it. Good for her, he thought. It was approaching two years since she’d been widowed. It was time for her to reenter society in a more meaningful way.
“Pup,” he called to the boy as he banged his fist against the glass.
The boy looked up and ran into the room. “Yes, sir?”
“Pack an extra bag for me. More travel clothes. I’m thinking of extending my trip after the fight to visit the Continent.”
It had been a while since he’d seen the Continent. There could be more fighting techniques to learn. He could have one of his senior fighters take over his operations in London.
Why come back at all? His friends would be more than happy to visit him. What was there in London for him, anyway.
Sera’s carriage rocked back and forth as the horses managed as aggressive a speed as could be managed on London’s crowded streets. She would normally never be so reckless, but the note in her hand implied urgency.
We need you. Please come home.
Much of Sera Abernathy’s life was at once a blessing and a curse. There was her beauty, of course, always the first thing to be remarked upon by strangers and those who knew her alike. She wasn’t feeble-minded and knew the advantages she reaped by virtue of her face were enough that she could have been poor as a church mouse, and just as witted, and still married well. Her moniker of the Belle Belle still stuck even after she’d married and been widowed.
Unfortunately, that meant no one referred to her as motherly or nurturing—a trait reserved for Alice, her eldest sister, nor bookish—that was Bridget, nor chubby—granted, an unkind reference to Charlotte, nor eerily intelligent—as was Dinah. No, she was pretty. Unlike her sisters’ nicknames, Sera’s represented a trait guaranteed to fade with time and when it did, what would she become?
Then there was the blessing of her family. Her father, Dominic Belle, was the richest industrialist in all of Europe, some speculated in the world. While her mother had died after childbirth, Sera had grown up wanting nothing. A far better scenario than most.
Yet, her father’s roots in trade also meant an obsession with titles that had seen her married at sixteen, far younger than she would have chosen, had choice ever been on the table.
Her marriage had also been a blessing in many ways, even if she hadn’t had much choice in the matter at the time. Tom had been nicknamed the Jolly Giant, and with good reason. He’d been kind and quite funny. They’d spent many mornings laughing. Once she’d made him laugh so hard with an impression of her sisters that coffee had sprayed from his nostrils. It pained her now to remember it. Because Tom had in many respects been her dearest friend.
Her widowhood—also a blessing and a curse. There was a deference, respect, and power she experienced now that a woman of twenty-two would not normally have. Yet there was the way in which people—even her own family—looked at her. Sidelong glances they thought she didn’t see, as though she might break. As though she were as fragile as her appearance suggested.
Then there was the more practical matter at hand of having many homes. Of course it was a blessing to be so well taken care of, to be so fortunate as to have her own home and to be welcomed in the homes of others. But it also meant that the simple logistics of meeting someone at “home” became fraught with uncertainty.
Please come home.
She had been seated in her parlor having tea and reading the gossip sheets—a particularly salacious account of an unnamed lady’s first viewing of the resplendent Viscount Savage—when her butler appeared, correspondence in hand. The scrawl was the familiar set of strong slashes and minimal loops that Alice employed.
Amidst the rising panic—for Alice, eternally in charge Alice, was not one to ask for help—there was also a bit of confusion. Come home? Alice’s home? What if it had to do with Alice’s baby?
Sera had been in the three-story town house that she and Tom had purchased shortly after their marriage. Unlike Tom’s other residences, the house was not entailed to the Rivington estate, and did not pass to Tom’s brother, Benjamin Abernathy, when he became the Duke.
Unfortunately, the footman who had brought the message had been immediately on his way before she could discover what Alice had meant by home.
She was in her coach in short order, but had stumbled over where to send her coachman.
The Belles had many homes.
There was Woodbury, the ducal estate, where her sister Bridget resided, having married Benjamin. It had been Sera’s for a while and she had spent many happy weeks there during the year. She’d personally never thought of it as home but understood it was Bridget’s home.
Dinah, recently married to Tom and Benjamin’s younger brother, Graham, would likely wax poetic about how the term home was misused to imply primary residence or a state of belonging—how it was just a building. And yet, when she announced she was going home, more often than not she meant their terraced apartment, although she and Graham also maintained a cottage in Surrey and an apartment in Bath.
Alice and her husband, Robert, kept a primary residence in Leeds while they built more permanent lodgings on his new land, recently granted by the Crown. They had no London home, not because Alice could not afford one but because among all the Belles there were homes to spare. But what could Alice’s note mean now?
Surely not their father’s London’s flat.
After a moment, Sera sent the coachman to their Aunt Margaret’s London home. After the death of their mother, the Belle sisters had spent much of their youth growing up with their Aunt Margaret. Their father ran a shipping company, after all, and spent most of his time at sea. To this day, Charlotte still remained in residence. Still, if Charlotte was in residence, whyever had Alice sent for Sera?
She could not imagine a scenario in which she would be the person most capable of help. She had to stop herself from wiping her damp palms on the skirt of her half-mourning dress. Tom had died in March, nearly two years ago, and she was one month away from shedding her purple and moving to lavender and gray. Still, it wouldn’t do to have it ruined.
As the carriage came to a stop, she threw open the door and climbed down, never mind the coachman assisting her. But for all her haste in being led to her aunt’s parlor, she suffered from no deshabille. That was part and parcel of being a diamond of the first water. Never a hair out of place, even when she tried.
Sera was announced by a servant and stopped short at the scene that greeted her. Alice and Charlotte, standing side by side. The former biting her nails, her large belly protruding.
Alice. Biting her nails?
It was enough to make Sera’s knees weak as she swayed into a seat.
“What is it?” she asked. God, not Robert. Alice’s husband was so young and their first child was due in three months. Why was her first thought now always of tragedy, that someone would lose her husband as Sera had lost hers?
“Roberta is missing,” Alice said. “I saw her at breakfast, and she was gone by lunch.”
“That’s hours ago,” Sera said. “But hardly reason for concern. She could be distracted at the shops or have met up with a friend for tea.”
Roberta Crawford was Alice’s niece by marriage, and Sera had accepted her as her new charge and meant to see her well married. A young girl with butterscotch curls, she was fifteen, from Leeds, and would be the crowning glory of Sera’s career. Sera had seen many young girls well married, but for someone from Roberta’s respectable but simple background to achieve a match within a titled family, which was Sera’s intention, the rumors of her being made Patroness at Almack’s were a mere formality once her light mourning was finished next month.
Of course this was about more than her aspirations. Roberta had quite fallen in love with a boy, Peter Herron, an amiable sort, whose uncle was Earl of Landale—a family with whom she was already acquainted.
Charlotte yanked at the ends of her red hair. “It’s more than tea. There’s a note.” She handed Sera a crumpled piece of paper. She took it and smoothed it between her gloves. The script was hurried and splotched.
I’ve gone to rescue him.
“Rescue him?” she asked. “Whom?”
“Peter Herron,” Alice said.
“Peter is in need of rescue?” And what possible situation could have left him at the tender mercy of a fate in which only Roberta could intervene? Roberta, while lovely and kind and intelligent, had no real influence over society and, as far as Sera knew, no particular life-saving skills.
Charlotte sighed. “I have it on good authority that the boy has engaged in an unsavory professional matter that will mean a risk to his health.”
“On whose authority? And whatever do you mean a risk to his health?”
“A fight,” Alice said.
Sera had been in mid-sip, and her swift intake of breath swept the tea into her throat. She coughed, sputtering. A fight? “Does he train with Gentleman Jackson?” she asked, even though she knew it would not be he. No, with her luck, it would be the other instructor in London whose name was much bandied about.
“Lord Savage did not say.” Charlotte said, lightly rubbing Sera’s back. “I only overheard him mention he was to be out of town for several days for a boxing match, and he listed the tickets, including Peter. He must have no idea that Peter and Roberta were… well… they had an understanding, did they not?”
“Not officially,” Sera said. “The Season has not even begun, but I do believe her quite taken with him. She must have been, to have behaved so recklessly.”
“I haven’t told Robert yet,” Alice said. “He’ll do something foolhardy with his pistols.”
Sera glanced again to her sister’s belly. “Surely he would not be so irresponsible.”
“I would hope not, but his fatherly instincts are easily riled lately, and Roberta is his favorite niece and namesake. Oh, but I must tell him soon, I suppose.”
“But tell him I have gone after her. Gone after them both,” Sera said.
“Peter, too?” Charlotte asked. “Whatever for?”
“To persuade him to give up this nonsensical attempt at manliness and do right by Roberta.”