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Venison for dinner this week in honor of Father’s birthday. He always did like a good roast, and now he’s Duke, Rupert seems determined to be just like him. For better or worse, I suppose.
It would be nice if he cared as much about the mines up north as his next hunting trip, though.
Henry wasn’t given to flowery prose, but he did enjoy a casual dig at his brother. Unlike some of his predecessors who penned overblown adulations of everything from blooming roses to sunrises (His Grace the ninth Duke of Kendal simplyadored“crystalline rays of angelic light”), Henry wrote with a familiar shorthand that championed brevity. It had taken me a minute to track the abbreviations he used for common people (HG for His Grace the Duke of Kendal, i.e., his brother, VO for Viscount) and get past his tendency to write in incomplete sentences, but I soon found a good bit of wry wit inserted between dry observations.
21 June 1984
VO’s wedding today. HG couldn’t be bothered. Morning suit for me, then. Reasonably small affair in the village. M wore a pink dress. Excellent fruit cake.
“Well, well, well, Henry. Got a bit of a girlfriend, do we?” I murmured as I turned the page to read about the Viscount of Ortham’s wedding. Whoever M was, she figured a lot in these pages. Henry apparently couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
Lamb for dinner. Odd taste. Mrs. Colson tells me there’s a new assistant cook—a Japanese student from town looking for summer work. I’ve told her the students never stay long, but she won’t listen. Shan’t interfere. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that.
I sat straight up on the couch as I finished the last paragraph. There was no one else it could be—Xavier’s own mother was making an appearance in the journals at last, which meant Xavier himself probably wasn’t far behind. I flipped back to the date—it was a little early, since Xavier wasn’t actually born until 1986.
But this was when it started. Holy crap.
As if the pages themselves called him, a door slammed downstairs, and I could hear a pair of big feet stomping over the vinyl floors.
I checked my watch. Xavier was almost never home during the day, not to mention he never used the basement entrance. And to be coming back at not quite one in the afternoon was odd, to say the least.
Determined not to pay attention to the disturbances below, I continued reading through the next several entries.
14 July 1984
Ordered new landscaping for the back pond. Looking to restock with fish for fall. HG wishes to return to uni. Postgrad work, apparently. Am rather shocked.
06 Aug 1984
HG in the garden with new cook and VO. Must say unsurprised. M is lovely. No doubt the boys are having a field day fighting over her. Would that Rup could keep his quill in the pot. We may lose another cook.
I stared at the words. They weren’t exactly clear, but this was pretty obviously referencing Xavier’s mother and father’s relationship. If I was reading this right, it also sounded like both Rupert and the Viscount of Ortham, his next-door neighbor, might have been fighting over the girl—even more of a scandal if the newly married viscount was somehow involved.
“Masumi, you saucy minx,” I murmured, searching the rest of the page for any more clues. “Are you writing with two quills, you little jezebel?”
“Quill in the pot” made Henry sound like a seventeenth-century writer, not the young twenty-something he was at the time. He probably thought he was being subtle. He probably didn’t realize these would be read by an anglophile who loved historical romance more than anything in the world.
I continued to read through the rest of the journal for the next hour or so, and when I didn’t find anything more, I decided to bring what I’d found down to Xavier. If anything, he might get a laugh out of it. Or maybe a smirk. He might like knowing that at one point, Masumi had not one but two noblemen wrapped around her little finger.
Or maybe you just want to see him, you horn dog, Kate’s voice rang clearly through my mind.
Oh hush, I told my pretend-sister silently, even as I crept down the stairs to the basement entrance.
Before I reached the bottom, however, the conversation Xavier was apparently having on the other side stopped me.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Xavier’s voice rumbled on the other side of the door, still open from this morning. “I’m doing everything I can, you know? Trying to be patient. Trying to be caring. But it’s likeshedoesn’t care. But she still loves me. I know she does. She can’t hide a bloody thing on her face, you know.”
“Does she know you feel that way?” A woman’s voice purred through the room with an English accent.
I frowned. Who in the hell was he talking to? Oh my God, it wasn’t Imogene Douglas, was it?
Terror seized my gut. Followed by outright rage.
OMG, jealous much?This time, it was Joni’s singsong taunt that floated through my brain.
Not at all, I answered as I took several deep breaths.
I was not jealous. We weren’t together. He could talk to whomever he wanted. Even if it was a snooty English hussy who tracked him like a bloodhound. It shouldn’t matter.
