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 bemyhouse,” 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 besonice 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 onlyslightlyresenting 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.
