Forever a Lord by Delilah Marvelle

refused to be acknowledged?
    Nathaniel unbolted his own leased room and whipped the door shut. Stripping his great coat and shirt, he dropped to the floor, planting both hands flat apart. Gritting his teeth, he commenced pushing his entire body up and down, trying to huff out the tension in his muscles.
    He eventually lost count of body lifts at one hundred and eighty. His bare, sweat-sleeked shoulders, chest and arms burned in protest as he pushed on. When he could no longer lift his body in even takes, he rose to his feet and hissed out a harsh breath.
    Swiping up his shirt, he buried his drenched face in it. Whipping it over his shoulder, he veered to the corner of the room and squatted, digging his fingers between loose floorboards. Prying one up, he reached into the narrow space beneath and carefully pulled out his sister’s diary. He had learned to depend upon holding it and touching it whenever he desperately needed to remind himself that someone had once thought him worthy of being in existence.
    Smoothing a hand over the leather and sash, he veered back to the other side of the room and collapsed onto the sunken straw tick on the floor, his entire world swimming.
    Digging his fingers hard into the leather of the diary he wished to God he had the strength to read, he tucked it beside him and whipped off the linen shirt from his shoulder.
    He could still see his father’s veined hand reaching up, attempting to touch his face. He could still hear those hoarse, broken words. “No one needs to know. Let me die first. Then the world can know.”
    Nathaniel lay there, staring unblinkingly at nothing, unable to push out the reality that his father had indeed knowingly left him in that cellar to rot.
    Dazed, Nathaniel drifted into a deep sleep he hadn’t known in years. When he eventually awoke, he found himself staring at a cracked, mud-smeared window. The light of the day filtering through that window was fading and edges of impending darkness fingered their way across the dank room.
    The cellar.
    Nathaniel gasped, his chest too tight to let in any air, as perspiration beaded his upper lip and forehead. He almost screamed in riled disbelief until he realized there was a window. Not just walls and a door. There was a window.
    He drew air into his lungs, trying to steady himself and his mind. Jesus Christ. Rolling onto his back, he blankly stared up at the ceiling, knowing his father and all of London would be at the event the duke was hosting.
    Nothing would ever be able to make him forget his days and years spent in that cellar. Not whilst he lived. And not whilst his father lived.
    A large roach crawled in tick-tick-ticks across the uneven planked floor, taunting him into joining the lower species. Picking up Auggie’s diary, Nathaniel rose onto booted feet. Striding over to the wooden crate where he kept his leather belt, pistol and dagger, he knew what needed to be done.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    What Devil could have provoked him to exhibit his wonderful stock of honour, virtue, and benevolence in so public a manner, I am at a loss to divine.
    —P. Egan, Boxiana (1823)
    The following night
    A S IF ON CUE , eight well-muscled footmen in powdered white wigs scrambled into a firm shoulder-to-shoulder body wall, preventing Nathaniel’s entry to the vast ballroom beyond the foyer.
    He stared toward that glittering world majestically showcased by shimmering crystal chandeliers and oversize gilded mirrors that reflected rows and rows of candlelight and silk and color. Refined music from violins and flutes mingled with the thrumming gaiety of countless cultured voices that drifted out toward him into the corridor.
    It was the life he had been born into.
    Once upon a fucking time.
    He tightened his gloved hold on the hilt of his dagger sheathed within the scabbard belted to his hip and knew the only way he was going to get in was by announcing himself. “Inform His Grace that Viscount Atwood has at long last arrived in London and