“I watched your late mother withdraw from the world, and your father grow harder with every passing year. I watched you grow up in this house with very little kindness shown to you. And then Miss Hart came here, and for the first time in many years, I saw this place come alive again.”
Christian stared into the untouched tea.
“She deserved better than me.”
“Perhaps,” Mrs Blackley allowed gently. “But that was not the question before her. She wantedyou, Your Grace. She chose you freely.”
Her voice softened, though her gaze remained steady.
“And you chose fear.”
Christian said nothing.
“You are not the first Hale to do so,” she continued quietly. “But I had hoped you might be the last.”
Christian said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Mrs Blackley straightened her apron. “Drink your tea. Eat your toast. And when you are prepared to set aside this indulgence in misery and consider how matters might yet be mended, you know where to find me.”
She left, closing the door firmly behind her.
Christian stared at the tea in his hands. It was growing cold, a skin forming on the surface, steam no longer rising from the cup.
He drank it anyway.
It tasted like ashes.
The third day, he began to destroy things.
It started small—a glass hurled against the wall, a book torn in half, a chair overturned in a fit of sudden rage. But the rage, once unleashed, would not be contained. It fed on itself, growing larger and wilder, until Christian found himself tearing through his chambers like a madman.
He ripped the curtains from the windows, sending dust motes swirling through the sudden flood of light. He swept the contents of his desk onto the floor, sending papers and inkwells and quills scattering across the carpet. He seized the mirror above his washstand and hurled it against the wall, watching it shatter into a thousand glittering shards.
The sound of breaking glass was satisfying. He wanted more of it.
He stormed through the castle, leaving destruction in his wake. In the library, he pulled books from shelves and threw them across the room, their pages fluttering like wounded birds. In the drawing room, he overturned tables and smashed vases, china and flowers exploding across the floor. In the yellow parlour—their parlour, the room where they had taken tea and fallen in love—he seized the settee where she had sat anddragged it to the fireplace, intending to burn it, to erase every trace of her presence from this wretched house.
But when he lifted the settee, something fell from beneath the cushions.
A hairpin. Simple, unadorned, the kind any woman might wear. It must have slipped from her hair during one of their afternoon conversations, lost and forgotten in the upholstery.
Christian stared at it.
Such a small thing. Such an insignificant object. And yet, holding it in his hand, he felt all the rage drain out of him, replaced by a grief so vast and overwhelming that he could not breathe.
He sank to his knees on the parlour floor, surrounded by the wreckage of his own temper, and pressed the hairpin to his chest as though it were a talisman.
“Fiona,” he whispered hoarsely. “Fiona… I am sorry. So very sorry.”
But she was not there to hear him.
And she would not be there again.
After that, the days began to blur together.
Christian stopped keeping track of time. He stopped leaving his chambers, stopped eating unless Mrs Blackley forced him, stopped doing anything except existing. He slept fitfully,plagued by nightmares in which Fiona walked away from him again and again, each repetition more painful than the last. He woke sweating and gasping, reaching for a body that was no longer beside him, and the emptiness of the bed was a fresh agony every time.
He stopped shaving. Stopped bathing. Stopped caring about his appearance at all. His hair grew wilder, his beard thicker, his clothes more dishevelled. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the remaining mirrors and saw a creature that barely looked human—hollow-eyed, gaunt, more beast than man.
