Chapter 22 #2
Despite his best efforts, Benedict had never successfully encouraged any natural growth on Blackwood.
Every tree, every shrub he planted, met a quick demise.
Even weeds refused to grow. On dreary days such as this, the bare earth turned into thick muck that stuck to his boots.
Flat slate built upon dingy mud, set against an ashen sky—Benedict’s home was a lifeless wasteland.
It was good that he hadn’t brought Eliza here. She didn’t belong in a barren place such as this. Even Eliza’s lively heart did not posses the magic necessary to turn Blackwood Grange into something habitable.
As he grew nearer to the house, Benedict sighed. His father’s study was aglow—there would be no delaying the inevitable.
Finally, Benedict stood before the peeling, inky midnight paint of the French doors. He stared at them, cowardly and pathetic, with the inane wish that God would strike him down before he reached the study.
The door creaked angrily when he pushed it open.
And it was as though he’d never been absent.
The thin layer of dust that always clung to the ornate, swirling rosewood carvings along the archway and matching banister had neither grown nor shrunk.
Formerly fine, the oriental rugs were still so worn and faded they were unrecognizable.
The same cobwebs dangled from the chandelier, catching against the dim, dreary light from the film-coated window.
“Benedict.” His father’s silvery, distant voice—not raised in the slightest—slid along his spine. A metallic bite filled Benedict’s mouth as his feet made for the study down the hall without his input. A sinister, portentous note was evident in that single word.
Bella.
Benedict had been preempted—without question. The disgruntled creak of the floorboard under his boot masked his weary sigh. He couldn’t bring forth a sense of betrayal as he rounded the corner and stepped into his father’s study. Not when he would have done precisely the same thing.
Framed by the large window, his father was no less intimidating in silhouette.
Though Benedict was a man grown, fully capable of defending himself physically for more than a decade, he had never shaken the instinctive nausea that accompanied his father’s presence.
Ambrose Sinclair was a tall man, taller even than Benedict, but age had claimed much of his musculature and stature.
His father’s form was thinner, and his spine had begun to display that familiar curve that overtook most men who reached their seventh decade.
The years had yet to claim his silver hair though—a fact that satisfied Ambrose’s vanity.
The study had not changed during Benedict’s absence any more than the rest of the house.
Faded velvet curtains trapped dust as they brushed the window.
Air seeped in through the cracked panes, casting candle flames about.
Ancient ledgers remained piled half to the ceiling along one entire wall—lending an older paper scent to accompany the grease and soot of the tallow.
Scars lined his father’s desk. All of the furnishings were ragged save one—his father’s prized rosewood tilt-top gaming table.
That alone was polished to a shine and unmarred, despite age and too frequent use.
It stood proud and gleaming before the tower of ledgers—a preemptive answer to any question about the negative balances within.
“Well, have you nothing to say for yourself?” A frigid hatred laced his father’s question.
“Bella wrote you?” A pathetic pride surged through Benedict at the steady note in his words and gave him the courage to meet his father’s icy gaze.
The man matched his house: cold, grey, barren but unbent, unbroken, still standing.
Benedict rather thought the spite fueling his father would carry him for several decades more—much like the grange.
“Obviously.”
“Then there is little else to say.”
“Little to say. You return here after such a betrayal with nothing to say?”
Benedict could have argued that the greater betrayal would have been to his heart if he had followed through with the plan to hurt his Eliza.
Or that Ambrose’s betrayal of his duty as a man and a father when he charged his son in service of his hateful scheme was much worse.
Neither sentiment would calm the arctic fury of the man before him.
“So it would seem,” Benedict muttered.
A ruddy flush rose over his father’s cheeks—a violent reddish-purple shade.
“You disgust me. It is a humiliation to have such a failure for a son. That you are to inherit everything, my lands and title, after you’ve failed so spectacularly…
and in the only request I’ve ever made of you.
So simple a task… I would rather burn Blackwood to the ground and leave you to inherit the ashes rather than continue to call you son.
No son of mine would come before me as you have—and without the slightest hint of remorse. ”
Benedict was disgusting. He was a failure—in the way he abandoned Eliza, certainly. But not in this. The failure his father spoke of was rather the opposite of humiliation. He would take solace in that knowledge alone.
Irascible retorts flitted through Benedict’s mind. “I wish you could not claim me as your son at all.” Or “I’m certain you’ve dozens of natural sons crawling about the nunnery, claim one of them.” And “I suspect smoking ashes would be an improvement on Blackwood’s present condition.”
Instead, Benedict replied, “As you say.” It was less than he wished but more than he’d ever dared before.
“My whip. Fetch it!” It was a bold strategy, one his father hadn’t employed since it became evident that Benedict could physically overpower him if the occasion called for it. No, that was when threats against Bella became far more effective.
Ironically, his father had chosen the singular moment when the furious kiss of leather on flesh was nearly appealing to Benedict.
The poignant, burning lacerations would prove a furious diversion from the tight, throbbing anguish that had claimed his chest the moment his hack pulled away from Eliza.
That promised relief was a temptation he hadn’t dared to consider.
Even so, the tattered shreds of Benedict’s pride that remained after the whippings of his youth wouldn’t allow him to be forced back to his knees.
Instead of obliging his father, Benedict raised a challenging brow.
The older man wavered, his gaze darting to the wall behind Benedict—the tack where he kept the hide-and-bone lash. Benedict couldn’t recall such a moment of hesitation before.
“Never mind!” his father spat. “It would be a waste of my time. You cannot beat a sense of duty and honor into a boy, nor courage where there is none to be found. Get out of my sight!”
Benedict spun on his heels and strode from the room, soon followed by a growing sense of unease. That could not be the end of the matter. Ambrose Sinclair could not possibly be so easily defeated. Because if he was… What did it mean that Benedict had never managed it before? Never tried?
“Failure” echoed through his mind in his father’s bitter tenor.
“Humiliation. Shameful. Failure.”