Disgust…or interest.
Fitzgilbert was hard to read as he steepled his fingers and examined Gray. “An interesting thing, though I suppose you had little choice what with your family’s…issues.”
Gray stiffened. “Issues?” he repeated.
Fitzgilbert shrugged. “Come, we can be honest, can’t we? Discuss things plainly.”
“I’m not sure what it is you wish to discuss.”
“It’s no secret that your brother needs my granddaughter’s dowry.” Fitzgilbert reached out to grab his teacup from the table beside him. He took a slow sip before he said, “Some of the best marriages start that way.”
Gray nodded slowly. His dislike for this man was growing by the moment and yet he didn’t pull away. Fitzgilbert had opened a door that led to the answers Gray wanted.
“Some men wouldn’t see it that way. It seems to be in vogue at present to encourage love matches.”
Fitzgilbert wrinkled his nose in disgust. “What use is it to have children or grandchildren if one cannot increase one’s value through them? Encourage a love match? That is pure poppycock.”
“How did you further yourself through Rosalinde’s first marriage?” Gray prodded, trying to remain nonchalant.
Fitzgilbert’s eyes narrowed, his face twisting with cruelty. “That nothing she married? Laughable. Rosalinde has never brought me anything but heartache. She is an out of control, impertinent she-devil who lives to torment me when I was kind enough to take her in. I should have taken her to a foundling hospital. I’ve told her so a dozen times since I took her in.”
Gray flinched at the icy tone of his companion’s voice. At the cruelty in his eyes.Thiswas what Rosalinde had endured her entire life. It was no wonder she was so protective of her sister.
“I can’t imagine you would say something like that to a child,” Gray said, now through clenched teeth.
“If it keeps a child in line, why wouldn’t I?” Fitzgilbert sputtered. “If I’d done the same with that mother of hers, we never—”
Gray straightened up as the other man cut himself off. He could see from the expression on his face that he’d gone too far, revealed too much.
“Your daughter?” he pushed.
Fitzgilbert sniffed. “Such as she was.”
Gray was stunned by the coldness. This man’s daughter had died, leaving him with two young children to raise, and he couldn’t even bother to look sad at that fact. He was truly a bastard.
But a bastard who had given Gray an insight. Rosalinde had run off with a man of no title or money and it had angered Fitzgilbert. More importantly, it also reminded him of his own daughter.
Gray had looked into the history of Celia’s parents in the past. It was vague, at best. Their mother had at some point gone to live with relatives, where she had married a gentleman who no one seemed to be able to identify. When she and her husband died, Fitzgilbert had come to collect his grandchildren. But it had always been curious to Gray that their grandfather had insisted they go by his last name rather than that of their father.
Who had that man been? And why did Rosalinde and Celia’s mother inspire such hatred in her own father?
More to the point, could the answers to those questions be Celia’s undoing? If the scandal was big enough, it was possible straight-laced Stenfax would shy away from it.
Gray’s investigator was already working on the answers to those exact questions, but now more than ever he felt this might be the path. He’d have the results of their investigations in a couple of days, when he expected his reports to be brought in by friends who were attending the wedding.
“It’s interesting you have so many questions about my family’s past,” Fitzgilbert said, drawing Gray’s attention back to him. “After all, you have not exactly made it a secret that you don’t approve of Celia and Stenfax’s match.”
Gray arched a brow. So now they were to the heart of it. “Celia told you this?”
“She was blubbering about it to her sister and I overheard. Though it wasn’t so hard to believe. Anyone with eyes in their heads can see how you glare at her.”
“And you think I’ve judged her too harshly?” Gray asked, preparing for a defense of Celia from this man, just as he’d received defenses of her character from Rosalinde.
Instead Fitzgilbert stared at him blankly. “I don’t give a damn how you judge her. She’s hardly worth considering, in truth. But whatisworth considering is that your brother has already agreed to this union, sir. We have signed papers and arranged for monies to be exchanged. Monies that your family so desperately needs.”
Gray drew back. “This is beginning to sound like a threat, Mr. Fitzgilbert.”
“You may take it however you would like to take it.” Fitzgilbert said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It matters little to me. What may matter on a larger scale is how your family will survive if this money was taken away.”
