That had rather a lot to do with the second bit of uncommon knowledge tumbling around Harry Valentine’s twelve-year-old brain.

Harry’s father, Sir Lionel Valentine, was a drunk.

This was not the uncommon knowledge. Everyone knew that Sir Lionel drank more than he ought. There was no hiding it. Sir Lionel stumbled and tripped (on his words and his feet), he laughed when no one else did, and, unfortunately for the two housemaids (and the two carpets in Sir Lionel’s study), there was a reason the alcohol had not caused his body to grow fat.

And so Harry became proficient in the task of cleaning up vomit.

It started when he was ten. He probably would have left the mess where it lay, except that he had been trying to ask his father for a bit of pocket money, and he’d made the mistake of doing so too late in the evening. Sir Lionel had already partaken of his afternoon brandy, his early-evening nip, his wine with supper, his port immediately following, and was now back to his favorite, the aforementioned brandy, smuggled in from France. Harry was quite certain that he had spoken in complete (English) sentences when he made his request for funds, but his father just stared at him, blinking several times as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what his son was talking about, and then promptly threw up on Harry’s shoes.

So Harry really couldn’t avoid the mess.

After that there seemed to be no going back. It happened again a week later, although not directly on his feet, and then a month after that. By the time Harry was twelve, any other young child would have lost count of the number of times he’d cleaned up after his father, but he had always been a precise sort of boy, and once he’d begun his accounting, it was difficult to stop.