Free The Impostor by Lily Lang

his nurse, and Antonio, the baker’s son who had been his best friend and playmate, he could not seem to bring back his family.
    From the beginning, he had known that these illusions were something he must hide from his grandfather, must keep secret at all costs. But then, as the months passed and he had grown lonelier and more desolate, he had found the visions increasingly difficult to control. No matter how hard he tried to restrain his temper or his sorrow, in his moments of greatest emotional pain, they would appear.
    The illusions Sebastian conjured out of nothing had seemed to the earl the blackest magic, the work of the devil himself. The earl, like his ancestors before him, was a good, God-fearing Anglican, and this manifestation had been to him further proof of the boy’s wicked parentage.
    The earl had been determined to beat the Gift out of Sebastian. Surely, with the proper application of the birch rod, the visions would stop, the devil would leave his body. And so his grandfather and his tutor added a steady regime of whipping to Sebastian’s curriculum.
    Sebastian had endured. Moreover, he learned to control the illusions, until finally, he could suppress them entirely.
    At eleven, Sebastian was sent to Eton, and discovered it was possible to be happy again. Away from his grandfather and the daily canings, he soon discovered a passion for mathematics and music, and a talent for languages and science. He learned to play sports, and play them well; he studied hard, earning the respect and liking of his teachers; and for the first time since his early childhood, he began to make—cautiously—friends.
    At Eton, he met another who could do what he could. Francis Hughes couldn’t conjure up visions—but he could make things move with the lightest touch of his mind.
    It had been Francis who had first explained the nature of the Gift to him. Francis’s own family members were all, as Francis said cheerfully, afflicted with a variety of psychic powers.
    This Sebastian discovered to be true. He accompanied Francis home to Sussex during holidays, instead of responding to his grandfather’s summons for him to return to Grenville. The Gift, Francis’s kind father had explained to him, appeared to be hereditary, though it had been so imperfectly studied over the centuries that no one could be sure.
    Arthur Hughes had been the first to teach Sebastian that though the Gift was to be kept secret from those who did not understand, it was not something to be feared, and Sebastian had permitted himself to use the Gift, and conjure the illusions that had saved his sanity when he had lived with his grandfather.
    The secret he now shared with Francis had made them close friends. But even in later years, when the freshness of its horror had faded, he had never told Francis about his grandfather’s cruelty, his coldness, his harsh, pious narrow-mindedness.
    Nor had he ever spoken of his childhood in Italy, or the time in his life before he came to England. It was as though those memories were too precious to be shared and too sacred to be spoken aloud.
    Throughout his years at Eton, and later, at Oxford, which he attended with Francis, Sebastian never returned to either Montague House or Grenville. Though his grandfather wrote repeatedly, first with angry demands, and then, as the years passed, with increasingly feeble pleas for Sebastian to see him, he had tossed all the old man’s letters into the fire. He had no desire to see again the man who had hated his mother, cast out his parents and made his childhood a living hell.
    When he graduated, Sebastian took a first in mathematics, ignored yet another request from his grandfather to attend him at Grenville, where the old man was slowly dying of cancer of the stomach, and gone abroad with Francis while trying to decide what to do with his life.
    As a younger son who would inherit money but no lands, Francis intended to join the Navy, an idea which suited Sebastian.