Chapter 27
For a long moment Nic stared at the man before him, seeing himself reflected back. “Lord Francis Monterris,” he said, eventually finding his voice. “Back from the dead.”
The older man’s smile slipped a little. “I think you should both come in. Don’t worry, I have no intention of harming you.”
“Your word as a gentleman?” Nic said, surprised at the bite in his words.
“My word as a gentleman.” Turning to Leaf, Lord Francis added, “Lady Leaf Serral, we haven’t been properly introduced. I am Lord Francis Monterris and it is an honour to meet you.”
He held out his arm, and with a glance at Nic, Leaf took it. “A pleasure to meet you too, Lord Francis,” she said as he led them along the short passage into the grotto. “I’ve never met someone who has come back from the dead before.”
Lord Francis laughed at that, everything about him polished and charming.
“I assure you the story is far from exciting. I am merely the hairless sheep of the family, eating all the grass and providing no wool, as Val always says.”
Despite the assurance of safety, Nic was glad of the weighty pistol in his pocket as he followed them into the cavernous grotto.
He had been there often in his time, but never had it been so brightly lit, the light from the old chandeliers glinting off a shimmering stone ceiling like a sea of stars.
The slick obsidian walls once used as conjuring screens had always looked like dark portals, but now the round tables dotting the space were shabby anchors to reality, each covered in books and gears and oil tins, and coiled-up lengths of shimmering sigil tape.
At one, a tray of scones sat with a coffeepot sentry, and Lord Francis pushed his tools into a messy pile to make space before offering them chairs at the hastily cleared table.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what brings you?” Lord Francis said, as though they were merely paying a morning call.
A mountain of questions pressed against Nic’s tongue, yet he knew they needed to tread carefully. Start small. He gestured at the pieces of automata scattered on the tabletop. “We ran into your automaton upstairs.”
“Impressive thing, isn’t it? I didn’t expect any of them to still work. The reel inside that one was badly corrupted, but that’s hardly surprising after so many years.”
“You mean all that ‘I am here for you, Nicholas’ stuff is meant to be on there?” Leaf asked.
“Yes, although I assure you it didn’t used to sound quite so frightening. And at least it did a good job of scaring you away before you found me.”
“Was that why you left it there?”
Lord Francis gave an easy laugh. “Oh no, winding it up to scare you off was just a very desperate plan on my part. Like the darkness. That is just a particularly thick variant of conjurer’s black, used to make a canvas.
It was the first thing that came to mind when I panicked and needed to stop you seeing me, but then when it worked so well, I started having more fun with it. ”
“Fun?” Nic repeated. “It isn’t so fun when you’re on the receiving end.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” the man said affably, and poured out a cup of coffee. “Coffee, Lady Leaf? I only have the one cup, I’m afraid, but I’m quite sure Nicholas isn’t a coffee drinker.”
“Oh, thank you, no,” Leaf said.
“All the more for me then.” And with the cup in hand, Lord Francis leaned back in his chair, gaze fixed on Nic. “I don’t think you came to find me just because of my automaton, did you, Nicholas.”
The nonchalance piqued Nic, and he had to swallow a snap of annoyance and the urge to punch the older man in the face.
“No. You’ve been following me around. It was you I saw in the first night.
And in the service passage. And in the hallway outside my room.
Twice. You’re the ghost that disappeared beneath my fingers. ”
Lord Francis smiled at that, a handsome smile beneath the hints of dissipation. “Mere illusory trickery.”
“But why?”
For the first time since they’d sat down, the smile on Lord Francis’s face slipped into something wry and solemn.
“If I’m honest? Curiosity. You were but a wrinkled, screaming little bundle in your nurse’s arms when I left, and Val has never brought you to town. I wanted to see how you’d turned out.”
“Because you’re my father.”
Nic hadn’t thought to say it, yet the words were out and could not be unsaid, and he found he wasn’t sorry. Especially not when chagrin eclipsed the man’s easy smile.
“Resemblances can be—”
“You don’t need to deny it,” Nic said. “Silla told me.”
“Ah.” Lord Francis set his cup on the table.
“I don’t imagine she’s all that complimentary about me, but…
yes. It was never officially in the contract, but Val made it clear an heir would be my duty.
Not that it was an onerous task. Georgie and I loved each other in a way, though perhaps more as havens from the life Val built for us.
She didn’t want me to leave at all, but Val and I… came to an agreement.”
“Kick you out, did he?” Nic sneered. It was exactly the sort of thing the duke would do, preferring to pretend his brother was dead than deal with the consequences of having a profligate on his hands. “I know about the debts.”
“I see.” Some of Lord Francis’s suavity vanished beneath a bite.
“You are rather better informed about me than I expected.” With something of a shrug, he spread his arms in defeat.
“Behold, then, the family wastrel. That explains why you’ve been shooting daggers at me at least. Though you cannot pin the whole of the Monterris ill fortune on me, however convenient a scapegoat I am. ”
“I know about your father’s and grandfather’s debts.”
“Ah, but did you know Val lost a substantial amount of Georgie’s fortune in bad business debacles? No? Well, you can thank Lord Ricard Serral for that.” He gave a mock little bow in Leaf’s direction.
If he had hoped for surprise, he was to be disappointed. “Millie told us that,” Leaf said. “She said he did it after his marriage fell through.”
“Ah, he may have started then, he’s just never stopped.”
“Is that something you help him with too?” Nic asked.
“Too?”
Unable to hold on to the question any longer, Nic pulled the crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket.
Keeping his hand on it, he slid it a little way across the table.
“Ten thousand pounds to Lord Francis Monterris for services rendered. You’re not here because you were curious about me.
You’re here because you were paid to be here—paid to ruin this contract with your ghosts and automata.
Ransacking people’s rooms? Making darkness leak through the dining room ceiling?
What was he hoping to achieve? Scaring everyone into calling it off? ”
A hint of wariness entered the man’s face as he glanced from Nic to Leaf. “Something like that, yes.”
“And Rowerre stole this from Lord Ricard.”
It wasn’t a question, but as Lord Francis nodded, a collection of disparate thoughts coalesced around a single memory.
The slicing charm that had ruined Nic’s awful waistcoat the afternoon the Serrals arrived—something no one in the house ought to have been able to do.
Something that had not just been an act of sabotage, but a statement to catch someone’s attention. That someone just hadn’t been Nic.
“Rowerre was your valet before he was mine,” Nic said. “You sliced that waistcoat to get his attention and then asked him to steal this. Why?”
Lord Francis’s look became sardonic. “You might have noticed the date on this page. That it proves I’m alive makes it particularly useful for blackmail, don’t you think?”
“Lord Ricard is blackmailing you as well as paying you?”
“Handy that the one allowed him to undertake the other, isn’t it?” Lord Francis’s hand twitched as though to reach for the page, only to stay the impulse. “I assure you that if I had known Rowerre would get caught, I wouldn’t have asked him.”
Rowerre, more father to Nic than any Monterris had been, because he had stayed.
Nic withdrew the page and tucked it back into his coat pocket, Lord Francis watching all the way. “Perhaps you’ve noticed Ricard hates Val with the heat of a thousand suns,” the man said. “Some of that has always blown onto me, you see.”
“Because His Grace refused to change the contract he smithed between Uncle Ricard and Caroline Wivenwood.” This time it was Leaf’s unexpected knowledge that earned her a long stare from the prodigal Monterris. “Millie told us that too.”
Lord Francis’s brows rose, and a smile flickered back onto his features.
“There’s more to it, you know. Would you believe Ricard and Val used to be friends?
No? Inseparable, they were. Our father spent more time in town than here—not many gambling hells in the Northumberland wilds, you know—and we always went with him.
Val and Ricard were both studying vowsmithing at the time under Lord Kettering, while Charles went to Harrow and then Oxford, studying his classics—the pretentious older brother they both sneered at. Until one day Val didn’t.”
Both studying, like Nic and Dashiell, side by side with their work every day. How easy it had been to become the best of friends. How easy to become more.
“Val totally ignored Ricard after he discovered Charles,” Lord Francis went on, his lips curving as though he enjoyed the taste of his tale.
“He loves hard, does Val, the sort of love that forgets other people exist. I was used to it, to being out in the cold, but Ricard was used to being in the sunshine, to being Val’s whole world.
He didn’t take the change well. That contract with Caroline Wivenwood—Ricard didn’t want Val to be involved, but Charles insisted.
He was Lord Charborough by then and had that power.
It ended up the last contract Val ever smithed, too, because our father died not long after and Val had to give up his work.
No doubt that’s why Ricard thought it would be nothing to him to make the changes he needed. ”