Chapter 28
“Good day, Your Grace,” one of the snowy-haired trustees said as he left the meeting room, not even sounding that bitter as he used Hector’s title. “Congratulations.”
Across the room, Matthew was staring daggers at his brother. Hector didn’t much care.
The meeting with the trustees had gone about as well as Hector could have hoped. If anything, he had overprepared.
There had been one man, a Mr. Smythe, who was clearly and openly on Matthew’s side. He’d argued for Matthew’s cause, given even the slightest provocation, with the desperation of a man who was being paid for his loyalties and who did not want to lose a wealthy patron to a scarred brute of a duke.
But the head trustee—confusingly named Mr. Smith, because God forbid anything about this whole bloody process be easy—had been distinctly unimpressed by Hector’s younger brother.
“The codicil,” he said icily after Matthew had given a seven-minute speech on Hector’s unworthiness that had basically boiled down to but look at his leg; isn’t it ugly, “clearly states that your brother must marry a woman of noble birth to inherit. He married the daughter of the previous Duke of Redcliff. She is related, by blood or by marriage, to half the peers in England. Are you trying to argue that she is unsuitable?”
Matthew set his mouth mulishly. “There was a scandal. She had to marry him.”
Mr. Smith slid his copy of the codicil over to the youngest member of their party, a mousy, bespectacled fellow of about twenty-five years of age who looked as though he was having the time of his life.
“Mr. Denerofe,” Mr. Smith said to his assistant, “does this document say anything about scandal—or lack thereof—when it comes to His Grace choosing a bride?”
“It does not, sir!” Mr. Denerofe chirped, not even needing to look at the document.
“But they haven’t got an heir! I have an heir!” Matthew was openly whining now.
“Mr. Denerofe,” Mr. Smith said in sepulchral tones, “does this document say anything about an heir?”
“Not a thing, sir!” Mr. Denerofe said gleefully.
Mr. Smith turned to Mr. Smythe—bollocks, this was confusing, Hector thought—and Matthew’s erstwhile ally shrank in his seat, looking as though he wished himself to be anywhere else.
“Mr. Smythe,” Mr. Smith said. “You assured me that this meeting was necessary. You assured me that there were legitimate grounds to contest His Grace’s inheritance. And this is what you bring me?”
Mr. Smythe made himself as small as possible. Mr. Denerofe looked likely to get the vapors out of sheer pleasure.
“My apologies, sir,” Mr. Smythe said.
“This is idiocy,” Mr. Smith proclaimed. He didn’t have a magistrate’s gavel at hand, but his words held the same emphasis. “Your Grace, apologies for wasting your time. The estate is no longer in trust. Good day.”
And, just like that, it was over. Hector had won.
It was practically anticlimactic.
The trustees filed out—Mr. Smythe scurrying away like a mouse before the barn cat, Mr. Denerofe practically skipping, and Mr. Smith with a sage air of a man who had done well, leaving only Matthew and Hector alone in the dining room, which had been hastily appointed the best meeting space.
“I’ll contest the decision!” Matthew said hotly, but even he didn’t sound terribly convinced.
Hector was so fucking tired.
“No,” he said flatly. “You will get out. You’ll have an appropriate allowance, as befits my current heir.”
He put the slightest emphasis on the word current, just to remind Matthew that his situation was precarious, but, frankly, he didn’t have that much hope of replacing his brother in that role any time soon, not given how things were going with Clio. But that was a thought for another time.
“You will leave this house. I will, of course, pay for your son’s schooling when the time comes. I won’t have him suffer because he has such a bloody useless father.”
“You can’t speak to me that way!” Matthew protested, as if he hadn’t spent the past month or more speaking far more rudely to Hector.
“I think you will find that I can,” Hector said. “Because this is my house. You have until the end of the week to leave. Do not take anything that belongs to the estate, or, God help me, I will prosecute you. I’m certain that you know by now that I don’t give a damn about the scandal.”
Matthew’s face went an alarming shade of purple, and Hector privately allowed that he would rather prefer the scandal of having annoyed his brother to death. Fortunately, Matthew’s complexion quickly returned to one of the hues common to humans.
“That isn’t enough time to find a suitable place,” he said.
Hector shrugged. “Alas, that is not my problem. Perhaps you should have planned better. It wasn’t as though you didn’t know this meeting was coming. Unlike some of us, you had a full year to prepare.”
Matthew outright stamped his foot.
“This was meant to be my house,” he whined. “I’ll get it from you! I swear I will.”
“You will have to kill me,” Hector told him, and for a moment, as Matthew’s eyes darted wildly around the room, as though searching for a weapon to do just that, Hector almost hoped he’d do it.
It would be so nice to have an excuse to hit his younger brother, and attempted homicide would be just the thing.
Matthew’s better sense—something he had never previously been known to possess—prevailed, however, and he seemed to recognize that fighting his taller, broader, former blacksmith of a brother was a fool’s errand.
“You’ll regret this,” he hissed instead as he scurried from the room.
Hector was pretty certain that he wouldn’t. He had plenty of other things to regret, but not this.
He waited just long enough that he was confident that he wouldn’t run into his brother in the corridor—he’d had enough of Matthew to last a lifetime, let alone the day—and headed up to the library, where he knew Jonathan and Ramsay would be waiting.
He hadn’t been able to stomach going into his study in a week, not since he’d argued with Clio.
He hadn’t seen her since, either; he hadn’t even heard her moving around her bedchamber.
He thought she might have been visiting her brother, or another one of her endless relatives, but he didn’t feel he had the right to ask.
He pushed those thoughts away, just like he had all the other thoughts of his wife for the past week. He’d told himself that it was because he needed to be clearheaded for the trustee meeting.
He didn’t know what to tell himself now that it was over.
In the library, Ramsay was pretending that he didn’t know how to play chess so that Jonathan would teach him.
This little bit of ridiculousness had been going on for days now.
Ramsay kept “forgetting” how to use each of the pieces, apparently determined to see how far he could press Jonathan’s patience before it snapped.
“And this is the bishop, aye?” he said as he held up one of the knights.
Jonathan looked like he would have welcomed death with open arms.
“Mate,” he said—he always spoke more casually to Ramsay than he did to Hector, and Hector had come around to only slightly resenting his title for this distance between them. “It’s shaped like a horse. Tell me you know which one that is.”
“Ah,” Ramsay said sagely. “The rook.”
“If it didn’t offend my duties as a butler, with you a guest of this house,” Jonathan informed him, “I would murder you.”
Ramsay laughed heartily at this, then broke off when he spotted Hector in the doorway.
“It’s done?” he asked, leaning forward eagerly.
Jonathan got to his feet, clearly aiming for professionalism, though the excitement gleaming in his eyes somewhat undercut the effect.
“They’ve decided?”
Hector spread his arms, trying to meet their energy. “I am—formally and without any constraints—the Duke of Metford, fully in control of this estate.”
Ramsay whooped with delight. Jonathan briefly pumped a fist in an expression of satisfaction before remembering himself and nodding demurely.
“I never doubted it, Your Grace,” he said loyally.
“I bloody did,” Ramsay said. “I don’t trust any of these London snakes as far as I could throw them. And Matthew’s the slimiest bastard of them all. Did you give him his marching orders?”
He looked downright gleeful at the prospect.
“I did,” Hector said, leaning heavily on his walking stick as he crossed to the drinks cart.
His leg had been bothering him these past few days, no doubt a product of the sleepless nights he’d spent, desperately listening for anything on the far side of the wall.
“He’s to be out by the end of the week.”
“I would have given him until the sun touched the horizon, but you’ve always been more generous than me,” Ramsay commented, accepting the drink that Hector offered him.
Jonathan looked only briefly horrified at the idea of a duke pouring him a drink, but accepted, too, which was as good a sign as any for the momentousness of the occasion.
They all sat and drank for a moment, the abandoned chess game between them. Hector idly massaged the aching muscles in his leg.
When he looked up, he noticed that Ramsay and Jonathan were making pointed eyes at one another.
“What is it?” he asked wearily.
There was a beat longer of this glance-based exchange, which Ramsay appeared to lose, as he leaned back in his chair with a sigh.
“It’s just that—Hec, you don’t seem terribly happy about it,” he observed.
“I’m happy,” Hector said—a reflex rather than a true expression of feeling.
Ramsay raised his eyebrows and took a long sip of his drink. When Hector didn’t rise to this bait, Ramsay kept going, forcing Hector’s hand unless he wanted to watch his oldest friend half-drown himself in whisky.
“Oh, fine,” he said, putting down his own glass, its contents barely touched. “I am relieved that it’s over, I just … It isn’t quite as satisfying as I might have hoped.”