Free The Impostor by Lily Lang Page A

Unfortunately, during their travels, Sebastian discovered that he grew violently seasick as soon as he stepped on board a ship, and so he elected to purchase a commission in the army instead.
    A few years later, war broke out, first against the Emperor Napoleon’s France, and then America. At the request of Wellington himself, Sebastian had joined his staff and become an operative on a highly secret group of psychic soldiers, his life so perilous that he hardly dared imagine he would survive the war. Francis, meanwhile, served on board a ship-of-the-line on the Atlantic, where his American heritage and Gift had made him a valuable asset to the Royal Navy.
    Then, in April of 1815, Sebastian received news that his grandfather had finally died, leaving him Montague House and Grenville, its villages, forests and stables, fields and farms. Sebastian, engaged in a series of highly sensitive operations leading up to the battle of Waterloo, had not bothered to return home to England for the funeral.
    At Waterloo Sebastian received the bayonet wound that destroyed his face and nearly took his eye. While he lay in a Brussels hospital, Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena and the wars ended.
    He returned to a London in the midst of the victory celebrations to find himself feted as a hero. The Duke of Wellington himself commended Sebastian on his work during the war, and he found himself welcome in the best drawing rooms and ballrooms. Now that he was both titled and wealthy, the ambitious Society mothers stalked him discreetly, throwing their dimpled, white-frocked daughters at him.
    But Sebastian did not need any particular Gift for clairvoyance to realize his title and his wealth were the only attraction he held for these blushing young maidens, who, well-trained from the cradle by their ambitious mothers, would have married a man of eighty, so long as he was wealthy and a duke.
    But their averted eyes whenever they accidentally saw the scar that disfigured the left side of Sebastian’s face, their barely concealed disgust when he asked them to dance with him, were ample evidence they did not care for him.
    Sebastian found that it did not matter greatly. He hadn’t been handsome even before he received his wounds, so he could not mourn something he had never had. Moreover, he had little interest in marriage. Marriage meant procreation, and he had no interest in propagating the noble house of Montague. The whole rotten line, of which Henry Montague had been so proud, could die out, as far as he was concerned. He cared nothing for the title or the family name.
    He spent less and less time in Society, and to focus his attention instead on the comfort of his tenants, as well as his responsibilities to his seat in Parliament. The other lords might lambaste him for his views on slavery and the Corn Laws, but no one cared about his limp and scars.
    Meanwhile, Francis, despite the loss of his arm in the war against America, had taken over his own father’s work as an agent of the Crown, controlling the network of Gifted spies and diplomats that protected British interest overseas at home and abroad in the chaos that was Europe after Napoleon’s wars. He and Sebastian remained close friends, though there were times, as in the last few years, when they were both too busy to see much of each other.
    As the carriage rolled through the streets and back to Montague House, Sebastian cursed himself for not making a greater attempt to spend time with Francis. Perhaps if he had, Sevigny would not have had the chance to kidnap him. Perhaps if he had, he would have noticed Francis’s disappearance sooner.
    Remembering all that Francis had done for him, remembering all that Francis had been to him, Sebastian knew he must rescue his friend and bring him home.

Chapter Eight
    At nine o’clock, Tessa sat across from Sebastian in a hired hackney that drew to a stop on Abchurch Street in front of the small house that served as an annex to the Horse Guards.