or as far as he could trace back in time, Felix Rivendale had spent half an hour each day with his parents before teatime. And as far as hazy childhood memories could be trusted, he had always looked forward to and feared that time equally.

Every afternoon, his governess brought him to the door of the parlor. He’d scratch timidly at the heavy oak panel and be told to enter. His beautiful mother, seated in her favorite chair, would put aside her embroidery, rise, and open her arms to welcome him.

He always crossed the room as fast as his legs could carry him, and always stopped just short of the huge perimeter of her skirts. It wouldn’t do to run smack into Mother. Her hoops would fly up behind her, he had been told, and that would be a very awful thing to happen.

Felix was careful. He didn’t want anything awful to happen. Gingerly, then, he navigated his way around the tricky skirts and up the chair. This was his favorite part of the day, to be ensconced beside his mother and enveloped in her heavenly scent. She’d ruffle his hair and kiss his cheek and call him, to his delighted embarrassment, “muffin cake.”

Immediately, however, came his least favorite part. His father, who had been observing them keenly, would storm to a far window and stand with his back to the room. His mother, so affectionate until that moment, would smile an odd, rather chilling smile, cease all her petting, and return to her needlework. Felix was allowed to watch her quietly, which he did, a little miserably, constantly aware of his father’s turned back.

By his fifth birthday, he had decided that there was something wrong with him. He must be the cause of all the tension, which became more palpable, more breath-crushing when his parents were forced into close proximity with him. The daily half hour before tea was bad enough, but Sunday mornings, with all three of them sitting side by side in the front pew of the parish church, while the sermon droned on and on, were pure torture. Their desire to get away from him was a palpable weight upon his chest; every breath felt like inhaling needles.

At six he came to a shattering conclusion: His parents hated each other.

But after two more years of stealthy yet intense observation, he revised his previous verdict. It wasn’t quite true that his parents despised each other. His mother could not stand her husband, but the latter didn’t find her as loathsome as she did him. In fact, the marquess was always the one who started conversations, which were usually cut short by the marchioness’s chilly replies that barely fell short of discourtesy. He also bought her gifts, which she tossed into the bottom of her trunk without opening. Felix knew because he liked to sit in her rooms and touch her things when she was out of the house for her daily drive, imagining that she was sharing her time with him, imagining that the scent of her came not from lingering molecules of perfume in the air, but from the very fabric and folds of her gown as she let him snuggle next to her.

One afternoon, not long after he turned eight, he found a new packet in the trunk, a large, square black velvet box. Inside, nestled against cream satin, a magnificent necklace of rubies sparkled like crystalline drops of blood. He set the necklace next to the long strands of black pearls, the diamond earrings, the many rings and bracelets and brooches and jeweled hair combs—beautiful, exquisite things, each and every one.

Why wouldn’t his mother forgive his father?

Once, belowstairs, Felix had seen a footman give a chambermaid a small ring, saying that it wasn’t real gold, only made to look so, but he hoped to be able to afford a better one in the future. The maid had jumped into his arms and kissed him with great abandon.

Not even real gold, and the girl had been in seventh heaven. Why didn’t his father’s gifts please his mother in the same way? He decided to find out from the marchioness’s maid.

The story she told flabbergasted him.

Once upon a time, ten years ago to be exact, Mary Hamilton had been the most beautiful debutante in London. She had many admirers, Gilbert Rivendale, the Marquess of Wrenworth, among them. But she preferred another gentleman, who unfortunately had not a sou to his name. The marquess proposed and was politely turned down. Undaunted, he went to Sir Nigel, Mary’s father, and offered him an astonishing sum for his daughter’s hand.

Sir Nigel had a weakness for the gambling table; his gaming debts had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. The marquess’s offer was readily seized upon. Sir Nigel commanded Mary to marry according to his wishes. When she refused, she was locked in her room, with no means of reaching her beloved.

She capitulated after four months of house arrest, living on only water and bread. Two months later, she became the Marchioness of Wrenworth.

The marriage, however, was doomed from the start. She abhorred the marquess passionately for his part in derailing her dreams. Since her father died not long after the wedding, she decided to dedicate the remainder of her days to making her husband forever rue the day he laid eyes on her.

The marquess was first given to believe that he had finally attained the sweet wife of his dreams. Then, bit by bit, she began to chip away at the happiness she had bestowed upon him, until in a great strategic blow, she let slip that Felix might not be his.

Felix did not run from the room, but it was only because he had become incapable of all movement. Jess Jenkins, the maid, had related the story as she cleaned the marchioness’s combs and brushes. When she was finished, she said, “Don’t feel so bad about it, young master,” and left to join the other upper servants for their own tea, served in the housekeeper’s parlor.

Felix, on the other hand, did not eat the rest of the day. That night he woke up from a nightmare. In his dream, he was being sent away from home. He couldn’t sleep again, even after he had made his way to the kitchen and wolfed down two stale scones for his gnawing tummy.

The next day his nightmare was confirmed. His father spoke of sending him to a preparatory school, now that he was fully eight years of age. Felix’s stomach roiled with fear. He kept beseeching his mother with his eyes. She said nothing.

He lived in a state of terror for the next month, checking his wardrobe twice a day to make sure his things hadn’t been packed yet. But nothing happened. No more was ever said of boarding schools. His tutor, Mr. Leahy, showed few signs of imminent departure. And at last, Jess Jenkins told him that his mother had refused to let him go.

He was incoherent with relief and gratitude.

The bad dreams, however, did not cease. He awoke always around half past eleven and could not go back to sleep before three. So instead of tossing and turning in his bed, after his midnight snack, he took to walking the grounds of Huntington and looking at the stars.

Soon he was learning the constellations with the help of Mr. Leahy’s books. There was something marvelously soothing about the movement of the stars, progressing through the firmament solemnly and predictably with the march of the seasons, unaffected by the human tumults that had Felix in their relentless grip.

The domestic situation deteriorated slowly and steadily. The years did little to mellow the marchioness’s icy rage. The marquess plunged into ever-deeper despair.

Felix tried to placate both of his parents. He gave presents—bouquets of wildflowers for his mother, rocks bearing fossilized leaf prints for his father. The marquess barely glanced at his gifts; the marchioness cooed over the bouquets and Felix himself.

And then the tension between all three would turn more poisonous than ever.

Gilbert Rivendale was squatly built, with pale hair, pale eyes, and indistinct, forgettable features. Felix, on the other hand, was often praised as an uncommonly beautiful child, his mother’s spitting image: dark hair and deep green eyes, tall and slender of build.

Felix desperately wished he had something of his father, be it the bulbous nose, the weak chin, or the scant eyebrows, so that the poor man wouldn’t search his face day in and day out, looking for some proof that Felix was a product of his loins.

The marquess would be plagued by doubts to the end of his days. But Felix became convinced of his paternity. In the marquess’s absence, Felix never got so much as a nod from his mother. The displays of affection and indulgence were only that—displays, intended to fire jealousy and discontent in the marquess, to make him think that a man she liked better had fathered the boy.

Felix hated her heartlessness, that she regarded her only child as but a pawn and used him with no concern for his welfare. He hated his father’s gross stupidity, that he could not understand it was a game and that she would never have dared drive a wedge between father and son had Felix actually been the result of adultery.

When he reached thirteen, he couldn’t wait to be sent away to a public school, to god-awful food and drafty residence houses where boys beat one another and were flogged in turn. Anywhere to be away from home, away from his mother’s machinations and his father’s unmanly wretchedness.

But somehow she prevented that, too. She wanted him around to plague her husband. Two more tutors were hired, and at home Felix was stuck.

So he learned to play the game.

He began to make demands, always at their gathering before teatime, to his mother’s beaming countenance as she looked upon her husband’s spawn with counterfeit tenderness. He asked sweetly for the best portable telescope yet built, for subscriptions to scientific journals, for classics on astronomy—and for exorbitant increases in his quarterly allowance to purchase whatever else he wanted.

He spun tales to undermine her smugness in her power. I’m so sorry, Mother, he’d say innocently when they were thrown together accidentally, alone.

Why? she’d ask.

Oh, you didn’t know? Nothing then! he’d exclaim, pretending to be distraught. But then, under her persistent probing, he’d let slip that he had heard that Father had set up a young mistress in town and was quite wild about her.

He milked the phantom mistress for nearly two years, watching with cynical amusement his mother’s fruitless search for the shameless tart who dared to ensnare the husband for whom she had no love and even less use.

She realized at last it was a hoax. And that her son had become, at age fifteen, a formidable player on his own. The last pretenses of maternal affection promptly disappeared.

And yet her unexpected death, two years later, devastated him. They had been engaged in a war of attrition, but he came to understand, as he sat by her lifeless body, his eyes burning with unshed tears, that for him, at least, the struggle for the upper hand had been only a front. He had never stopped trying to gain her love—or at least her admiration. All along he had been trying to show her that they were so much alike they could be great friends and allies, if only she would let it happen.

To his shock, when his father died within months, he was no less shattered for the obtuse, ungainly man who paid for his one great error with almost two decades of suffering, and who, according to the family physician, passed away of a broken heart.

And he realized at last, as he watched the late marquess’s casket being lowered to the ground, that though father and son had looked nothing alike on the surface, underneath they had yearned for love with the same intensity, the same stubborn hope that even years of antipathy could not completely erase.

• • •

Felix would recast his entire life.

At seventeen, he had become a peer of the realm, one of the richest at that. But just as important, the isolation of his early years afforded him a blank slate on which to create a whole new persona for himself.

It did not take him long to decide that, of course, he was his mother’s son. The late Marchioness of Wrenworth, despite her insidious domestic tyranny, had maintained an unblemished reputation as a perfect lady, a shining example of all that was good and pure in a woman.

He planned to eclipse her in both acclaim and influence—a fitting tribute from the son for whom she had so little regard.

As for his father, Felix’s tribute to him would be to never repeat the man’s great mistake of loving with all his heart and soul. Friendship he would permit, and perhaps some mild affections. Love, however, was out of the question.

Love made one powerless. And he had had enough powerlessness to last ten lifetimes. In this new life of his, he would always hold all the power.

And he succeeded remarkably.

He was extremely popular with his classmates at Cambridge, where he read mathematics and physics. He conquered London society with equal aplomb and became, in no time, one of the country’s most eligible bachelors.

In the beginning, he worried that he’d meet a girl who would enslave him. But Seasons passed, ladies he met by the gross, and not a single one caused the slightest ripple in his heart. It was as if his capacity to love had been buried six feet under, alongside his parents.

Once in a blue moon, when he was alone at night with the stars, he missed it: the ability to feel and feel deeply. But the rest of the time, he was all too glad to be in absolute control over every aspect of his life, particularly his heart.

In 1885, when he turned twenty-five, he let out the word that he was ready to settle down with the right girl. The matrons heaved a collective sigh of relief. How wonderful. The boy actually understood his duties to God and country.

He had no intention of marrying, of course, until he was at least forty-five—a society that so worshiped the infernal institution of marriage deserved to be misled. Let them try to matchmake. He did say the right girl, didn’t he? The right girl wouldn’t come along for twenty years, and she’d be a naive, plump-chested chit of seventeen who worshiped the ground on which he trod.

Little could he guess that at twenty-eight he would marry, out of the blue, a lady who was quite some years removed from seventeen, neither naive nor plump-chested, and who examined the ground on which he trod with a most suspicious eye, seeing villainy in everything he said and did.

Her name was Louisa Cantwell, and she would be his undoing.