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as sullen as a spoiled prince.
    Money I wanted, a place to live I needed, but work! I wanted to cry out to God to save me. Why could I not be rich and free and live in some foreign clime where it was always warm and no one cared that I, a boy, preferred men to ladies? I favored girls when it came to chitchat, gossip and whispering about men’s
bodies. But I had always wanted a man to overpower me, to master me, to fall madly in love with me and make me his own. Since I was to be a servant of sorts, a secretary, you would think I’d be happy, but no! Any master I would end up with would be either some doddering old man I did not want near me, or some nasty married gentleman who would treat me with utter disdain, if he noticed me at all.
    It wasn’t fair.
    I suppose I must have looked disgruntled when I was shown into the study and made to stand in front of a broad oak desk whilst being looked up and down by an elderly woman dressed in black silk. She never invited me to sit. She fired questions at me while acting as if I had brought a smell of refuse into the house with me. All in all, I felt like reaching across the desk to slap her cadaverous cheek. I found my left eyebrow lifting as it often did when I was affronted. Remembering my mother’s admonition before I left that morning—“Keep that haughty look off your face, darling boy. An employer will not take kindly to it”—I lowered my eyebrow and attempted to look meek.
    â€œYour mother is on the stage? She calls herself Amethyst Swift?” Mrs. Wynterbourne asked. From her tone she might as well have said, Your mother is a prostitute, she has sex for money with perfect strangers.
    â€œMy mother is a singer, a coloratura, and that’s her real name.” My eyebrow shot up again of its own volition.
    â€œAnd she extended the family tradition of naming infants after stones by calling you Jade?” She actually sniggered, a very unattractive sound.
    I was outraged. I clasped my hands behind my back to control them. “Jade is very expensive. It is the same color as my eyes.” The first man who had ever taken me on his knee and petted me had told me my green eyes were fit to die in.

    â€œIs it indeed?” Mrs. Wynterbourne’s eyebrows both rose perilously close to her receding hairline. “Watch your tone, my lad! Why are you not on the stage yourself? You might be better suited to that life.” She was obviously referring to my long hair and velvet jacket.
    â€œMy mother wants something better for me,” I said quietly, ashamed to admit it.
    â€œDoes she indeed? Well, I suppose the job is yours.”
    â€œThank you,” I muttered, taken by surprise. The sun shone through the window behind her directly into my eyes, making me hot and crotchety. I wanted desperately to get away from her. “May I see my room please? Then I can go and fetch my belongings.”
    â€œYou will not be staying here,” she said as if the very thought was repugnant to her. “You are going to the country to work for my son, Mr. Marcus Wynterbourne, who fancies he is writing a book. He wants me to send him a young lady, but I don’t trust him with one.”
    Not to be trusted with young ladies? Just my luck!
    The journey to East Sussex on the public coach was hellish, to say the least. Squashed in for the first half of the journey between a fat, dirty woman and her farting husband, then for the second leg, alone in the carriage with a man with roving hands and halitosis, my senses were outraged along with my very person. The first I ignored as best I could: the second I slapped, then bit when he refused to accept my firm refusal.
    I arrived eventually in the pitch dark at a vast country estate, tired, hungry, dejected and wanting my mother. None of my needs were met except for a bed, and I retired hungry and miserable, bursting into tears under the covers. Sometime later I paused in my pathetic weeping,