It was good to be gone. With all due respect to Grandmère and her favorite monarchs, it might even have been great.

Harry’s life as a student proved just as rewarding as he’d hoped. He attended Hesslewhite, a reasonably rigorous academy for boys whose families lacked the clout (or, in Harry’s case, the interest) to send their sons to Eton or Harrow.

Harry loved school. Loved it. He loved his classes, he loved sport, and he loved that when he went to bed, he did not have to detour to every corner of the building, doing his late-evening check for his father, fingers crossed that he’d passed out before making a mess of himself. At school Harry took a straight journey from the common room to his dormitory, and he loved every uneventful step of the way.

But all good things must draw to a close, and at the age of nineteen, Harry was graduated with the rest of his class, including Sebastian Grey, his first cousin and closest friend. There was a ceremony, as most of the boys wished to celebrate the occasion, but Harry “forgot” to tell his family about it.

“Where is your mother?” his aunt Anna asked him. Like Harry’s mother, her voice betrayed no trace of an accent, despite the fact Olga had insisted upon speaking to them only in Russian when they were small. Anna had married better than Katarina, having wed the second son of an earl. This had not caused a rift between the sisters; after all, Sir Lionel was a baronet, which meant that Katarina was the one called “her ladyship.” But Anna had the connections and the money, and perhaps more important, she had-until his death two years prior-a husband who rarely indulged in more than one glass of wine at supper.

And so when Harry mumbled something about his mother being a bit overtired, Anna knew exactly what he meant-that if his mother came, his father would follow. And after Sir Lionel’s spectacular display of stumbling grandiosity at Hesslewhite’s convocation of 1807, Harry was loath to invite his father to another school function.