Chapter 5 #2
He used his stick to rap at the door, not bothering to be gentle.
The response came almost immediately in the form of a middle-aged butler who was going slightly bald on the pate of his head.
He had that ‘stiff upper lip’ look that Hector most hated about the aristocrats and their hangers-on …
right until he took in Hector, damaged leg and all, and broke into a smile.
It wasn’t there for long; that proper look resumed. But Hector had seen it. And even if he hadn’t, the man’s words would have confirmed it.
“Excuse me for saying it, Your Grace … But it is good to have you home at last.”
And damn him if the man’s Northern accent didn’t almost make Hector smile in return.
“Thank you …”
“Jonathan,” the man said, supplying a bow.
“Forgive me for leaving you here on the doorstep.” He stepped aside and took Hector’s battered old coat and shoulder bag, which he’d carried from the carriage himself; he wasn’t some lily-handed lord who needed a servant to help him every time he so much as needed to take a piss.
“Shall I let Lord Ferrars know that you’ve arrived?”
It was a jolt, hearing Hector’s old title—a courtesy title—applied to his brother. Jonathan didn’t seem as though he liked saying it any more than Hector liked hearing it.
Damn it all, he liked this butler fellow.
“May as well get it over with,” Hector replied. He might as well be candid about how he felt. “I take it, then, that Matthew is in residence?”
“Lord Ferrars is indeed in residence,” came an icy voice that was at once foreign and all too familiar from the landing. “Given that this is my home.”
Hector looked up … and his heart skipped a beat as he saw the spitting image of his father.
It wasn’t just the black hair and dark eyes, nor was it the sharp, Roman nose.
Hector shared those features, except for his blue eyes, which had come from their mother.
It was more that Matthew held himself the way their father always had, like he was a king forced to suffer the indignity of looking down on disgusting peasants when he would have preferred to be stepping on them.
Hector was not a boy any longer, however.
He could not be bullied by a dismissive look and a few errant slaps.
Although he wouldn’t have minded if Matthew tried, Hector had spent the last two decades over a sweltering forge while Matthew had been primping and prancing about. Hector liked his odds in a fight.
“Technically,” he said, feeling rather pleased with the way his own rough accent contrasted his brother’s schooled, plummy tones, “I think ye will find that it is my home.”
Matthew smiled, but it really looked more like a grimace.
“I understand that you may feel that you were compelled to return, given Father’s passing,” Matthew said.
He still hadn’t come down from the landing, the imperious prick.
“But I’m certain that you will find that everything is in order.
I was, after all, learning how to manage this estate at Father’s side for years. ”
Oh, so that was how Matthew was going to play it.
“A strange way for our father to spend his time, I admit, given that I was his heir,” Hector returned. “But maybe he just liked spending time with ye. Maybe ye were his wee hobby.”
Hector let his accent be as thick as it could be. Behind him, he thought he heard the butler snort quietly.
Hector made a mental note to give the man a raise. Those blasted ducal coffers ought to be good for something besides padding his brother’s vanity.
Matthew stalked down the stairs, fury lining his features. He came up short a few paces away from Hector. Matthew was taller—which was strange enough to realize, as the last time Hector had seen his brother, Matthew still had most of his milk teeth—but Hector was significantly broader.
“You should have stayed in the North,” Matthew said, hissing the word in the same tone that he would have used to say the pits of hell. “My father raised me to this role. I was the one born to do this. You were … a mistake. Why do you think they sent you away?”
The animosity in Matthew’s words nearly made Hector smile. His brother was showing his hand too early—that was all he had in his personal armory.
“Perhaps so,” Hector allowed. “But still, I think you will find that I am the duke.”
“In name only,” Matthew insisted. “When I wrote to tell you that Father had died, you told me you planned to stay in the North.”
He sounded petulant, like a child who had just been denied his favorite sweet.
“I had a few things to see to,” Hector said vaguely. Maybe it was his own shameful aristocratic pride, but there was a great deal of pleasure in the fact that Matthew could not force Hector to answer him. He bet it drove Matthew mad, too.
“What could possibly lure you away from your important work playing blacksmith?” Matthew seethed.
Hector gave his brother a feral sort of grin. “I thought I might come to meet my little nephew,” he said. “Before your wretched influence turns him into yet another spoiled lordling, that is.”
Matthew scoffed, looking away. In profile, he looked even more like their father. Or maybe it was just that Hector had almost always been looking at his father from this angle, watching keenly for the late duke’s reaction while his father had completely ignored him.
“Fine,” he said tersely after a moment. “I’ll summon the boy. You can meet him. And then you can go back to … wherever you came from.”
Hector wasn’t sure when he’d decided. Had it been at some point on the long trip south? Had it been when he’d seen that the city was the same decadent, flimsy place he’d remembered from his childhood? Or had it been when he’s seen his brother?
It didn’t matter when he’d decided—just that he had decided.
“I’m not going back,” he said, then paused to enjoy the sight of his brother’s face going a mottled purple-red.
“Where,” Matthew asked through clenched teeth, “do you plan to live?”
Hector made a show of looking back and forth at the gaudy entryway. It turned out that Hector had greater depths of pettiness in him than he’d realized.
“Here, I suppose,” he said as though the idea was just occurring to him. “Since it is my house, after all.”
“But—but I live here,” Matthew sputtered. “My family lives here!”
What was it with these aristocrats and repeating themselves when things didn’t go their way? Were they so accustomed to their own power that their minds simply shut down when they were defied?
“Then, I suppose ye will have to acclimate yourself to living on the benevolence of the Broken Duke.”
Matthew’s flinch confirmed what Hector had suspected; his brother was absolutely responsible for that title.
“If you can make peace with that,” he went on, “then perhaps I will allow you to remain at one of the title’s estates.”
Matthew’s eyes went wide. “Not in London?”
Hector shrugged. “If you have the funds, you are welcome to find your own lodging in Town.”
Matthew didn’t have the funds, not without the family’s money. They both knew that. And no doubt it was a shock to Matthew to no longer find himself the cherished, cossetted son of the duke but, instead, the younger brother, forced to live on the elder’s charity.
But Hector had found it shocking to suddenly live a stone’s throw from Scotland and to become a blacksmith’s apprentice at eight years old. And he had survived.
Besides, he wasn’t throwing Matthew out on his arse. The man was getting a bloody estate to live in, for goodness’ sake.
“Right,” he said, when Hector continued gaping at him. “Well, you will find that the ducal chambers belong to me now—”
“For now,” Matthew interjected darkly, halting Hector as he began to turn away.
“What was that?” Hector growled, glaring at his younger brother. He didn’t need to accept impertinence. He’d been forced to accept insults and denigration his whole life, but he didn’t have to any longer. If Matthew pressed him, Hector would throw him out on his arse, family loyalty be damned.
But maybe Hector had been too soon to dismiss his brother’s weapons. Because Matthew looked far, far too smug for Hector’s comfort.
“I said,” Matthew repeated, a grim smile crossing his face, “that you own the ducal chambers for now. Because, brother—” He spat the word, making it an insult.
“—before he died, Father set up a board of trustees to manage the ducal properties. He couldn’t undo the entailment—believe me, he tried—but he could set up certain … terms for his successor.”
“What terms?” Hector growled. Maybe he should have been more surprised, but he wasn’t, not truly. It was just like his father to find a way to inconvenience Hector, even from beyond the grave.
And it would be a blasted inconvenience, judging by how pleased Matthew looked.
“As it happens,” Matthew went on, clearly enjoying having a captive audience, “Father was able to issue a requirement that his successor take a wife. An appropriate woman, of course,” he added sardonically. “The daughter of an aristocrat.”
Hector growled. Inconvenient, but not impossible. There were plenty of women who would look past the man to the title. He’d find some demure, quiet lass that wouldn’t bother him and make an honest woman out of her.
“And you really think I can’t find one greedy woman?” Hector scoffed. “In London?”
He was sure that Matthew thought that Hector had been living as a monk, given the damage to his leg that he’d had all his life and the injury he’d taken to his ear that had made his hearing rather more acute on one side than on the other.
But Hector had actually never found that he had that much trouble attracting women.
They weren't snobbish aristocratic women, but still.
Matthew didn’t look nearly distressed enough for Hector’s comfort.
“Not in two weeks, I don’t.”
Hector was so bloody tired of playing Matthew’s game.
“Speak plainly!” he demanded.