“Will that be it tonight, Your Grace?” Abigail asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she smiled while slipping on a pink silk nightcap. “I will see you tomorrow. I take breakfast promptly at nine, toast and marmalade, fruit, coddled eggs, or at times, sweetened milk porridge.”
“I will tell Cook, Your Grace,” Abigail answered. “Have a good night.”
“Thank you. You too—oh, and before you go, can you tell me when His Grace takes his breakfast?”
Pausing at the door, Abigail hummed. “His Grace is… unpredictable, Your Grace. There are times he does breakfast, and there are times he imbibes coffee as his primary sustenance. He has been known to request mince pies for breakfast and at times, even sweet tarts.”
“I see,” Cecilia replied. “Thank you, and good night.”
Making her way to the majestic bed, she pulled the freshly laundered blankets before slipping under the cool sheets.
As much as she wanted to think over the events of the day and piece them apart moment by moment, there had been so much happening that it exhausted her. Nothing could keep her awake as her weighted lids sealed shut.
Clad in his robe and a pair of loose trousers, Cassian took a lamp and headed to his father’s old study. Pushing the door in, he looked around the rectangular room.
Behind his late father’s desk hung large, gilt-framed portraits of his veneratedFitzroyancestors. The first one of his many grandfathers spanned all the way back to Henry the Eighth.
“I bet that painted bastard was a dunghill too,” Cassian’s lips curled in a sneer of derision.
His father,Algernon Fitzroy, had directed all his attention to his older son,Roderick, leaving Cassian in the care of his mother. In all the years of schooling, from Eton to Oxford, he had never seen that tyrant happy.
His stomach soured. He could taste the metallic pain flooding his mouth when his father had stuck him to the ground after getting a near-failing grade on arithmetic.
From that day, he had given up on making the best grades because nothing less than trumping all his schoolmates and his seniors had ever given his father a flicker of approval.
He remembered his father’s eyes as cold and dark as midnight when he would repeat, “A powerful man is made by his sacrifices; he is not blinded by sentiment.”
Cassian snarled. “If I had a mind, I’d reopen your casket and drop my degrees on your corpse.”
Stepping into the old, abandoned study, he dragged his fingers over the large desk and came away with a streak of dust on his fingertips.
As a matter of fact, everything in this room was covered with years of dust. The room was more of a mausoleum than a study, as it was the one room he had ordered Andrews to abandon.
“How are you, old boy?” Cassian asked the portrait of his father, painted twenty years ago. Grabbing the gilt frame, he lifted the portrait off the wall.
“How is the afterlife? Are you burning in hell for your sins, are you languishing in limbo, or have you already unseated the Devil from his throne?” The disdain in his voice was hard to miss.
As distant and cold as he was, his father had had a one-track mind. With everything the old man had done, he had expected excellence and gained it as well. To his father, anything outside of excellence inevitably lumped you into the box of failures with the rest of the miscreants.
Moving to drop the painting on the table, he stubbed his toe on a pile of books and uttered a curse. Yanking the heavy tomes up, he dropped them on the table and hacked up a cough when the dust flew into his face.
“What do I do with this place…” he mused aloud. “Should I flood it with water or burn it to cinders? The only problem with that plan is that it would take the rest of the house with it…”
Going to the shelves, he shifted a set of books to the side and rolled his eyes at the ancient set of law, trade, and etiquette books.
His finger brushed the worn spine of another book, and plucking it up, he read, “The Mysteries of Udolphoby Ann Radcliffe. What is Mama’s book doing here?” Flipping it over, he pondered, “I wonder if my new wife will like this one. She might argue with the authors as well.”
“Sir?” Andrews came to the door. “What are you doing in here so late? It is veritably midnight.”
“Sleep eludes me this night, Andrews,” Cassian murmured while going to a cabinet that housed a plaque commemorating his brother’s marksmanship award from Oxford.
Plucking the cabinet open, he plucked the gun out just as his butler rested his lamp on the desk beside Cassian’s. “Do you recall Roderick ever shooting this gun again?”
“No, Sir,” Andrews answered. “If I recall, your father purchased that rifle simply for your brother to use in the competition. Since he won, there was no further need for it, and you know how your father views things that are of no more use to him.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Cassian lifted the rifle and lowered his eye to the sight on the rifle.
