Page 9 of Taming of the Rake
His mother came to her feet first, crossing the distance between them with a ragged sob. “Oh, David … thank God!”
David hardly registered her face—tight with strain—before she was in his arms and sobbing against his waistcoat. She was thinner than he remembered, trembling as if shaken by a mighty wind. He tightened his hold on her and rested his chin atop her head.
“I came the moment Wren delivered the news. We were beset by trouble on the road, but I’m here now.”
His sisters came next, throwing themselves into the widening arc of his arms. Three watery pairs of eyes peered up at him from faces ravaged by grief—his sisters’ a deep brown, his mother’s the same vibrant blue as his.
Theodora Graham was where he had inherited his own looks, though at the moment, her classical beauty and riveting eyes were made dull and lifeless by sorrow. Her deep olive skin held a concerning pallor, and a few wisps of silver hair had begun to show at the edges of her lace cap. They hadn’t been there the last time he had visited, striking David with just how fast time seemed to be passing him by.
Petra and Constantia were identical twins who had inherited nothing of Theodora but her swarthy skin and thick head of black hair. Aside from that, they were matching mirror images of their father, with soft pleasing features. Mourning garb made them look older than their twenty-one years.
Was this what his neglect had caused? David had thought himself doing the right thing, sending his monthly bank drafts and telling himself that the money was being put to good use. But the shabby state of the drawing room and the outmoded attire of his mother and sisters told him otherwise. While he had been living in opulent excess, enjoying a never-ending string of soirees, dinners, and nights on the town, his family had been scraping together whatever existence they could manage.
“He called for you before he went,” Petra said, clinging tight to his arm. “We told him you were coming but might not make it in time. And he said—”
“He had faith in you,” Constantia put in, finishing Petra’s sentence that uncanny way of siblings who had shared a womb. “He knew you would take care of us, David.”
He held Petra as she began to weep, burying her face in his shoulder. His mother’s chin trembled, and her eyes brimmed with a fresh wave of tears. In the depths of those blue irises, he found the same hope he’d heard in the voices of his sisters. It was the same expectation Mrs. Moffat had leveled at him. The weight of such responsibility was already bearing down upon him before his father was buried, before he’d even opened a single ledger to take stock of their financial situation.
As the man of the house …
The housekeeper’s words echoed in his mind, reminding him that every duty befitting that of a landed gentleman and head of a household had just been thrust upon him. His own grief had been compressed, pushed into some deep part of him until he could get home. But now, as he blinked back tears and swallowed through a throat burning with grief, he realized it would have to wait. The time to grieve his father wasn’t now, with his mother and the twins looking at him as if he were their savior. He wasn’t certain he would ever have that time for himself, because now there was work to be done and there were hundreds of people counting on him—from his mother and sisters, to the servants of the manor, down to the tenants who worked land that now belonged to him.
The man of the house, Mrs. Moffat had called him. Funny; just now, he felt like a lost little boy.
Chapter 2
“News of the death of gentry landowner, Mr. G has reached London, forcing thetonto part ways with one of its darlings. The young Mr. G will likely be short on time to spend social-climbing now that he’s inherited a crumbling country pile. One does wonder when a marriage of convenience might follow. This writer would be willing to bet a proper period of mourning will not have passed before the gentleman has nabbed himself an heiress.”
-The London Gossip,4December 1819
His father’s steward was a charlatan. After only a few days at home, David could clearly see the signs of Gilbert Wren’s perfidy. How had his father gone about blind to the truth for so long? David might not be the smartest of men, nor had he always been the best at managing his own funds. However, when considering how much money he had sent home over the years, there was no reason for the house and farm to be in such a sorry state.
Burying his father had been the first order of business, which he had achieved with a small, modest funeral. Now he could see for himself that things were not as they should be, he couldn’t return to London and leave his family to fend for themselves. As well, there was the threat of scandal in London and his promise to lay low. So, he had set about taking control of the family holdings.
With each passing day, David grew more aware of how woefully unprepared he was to accept so much responsibility. He spent the first few days after his father’s burial in Mr. Wren’s office. Stuffed into the cramped space near the back of the house—which suffered from a terrible draft and an irking dampness—he had pored over the steward’s ledgers and records. Wren was a meticulous man, having kept all of David’s correspondence, as well as a record of each bank draft he’d sent. Three hundred pounds here, five hundred there … and after a particularly lucrative contract in which a duke had paid him to pleasure his duchess while he watched, three thousand pounds. It all amounted to an astronomical amount of money, which ought to have the estate running smoothly and generating income for his parents and sisters to live on.
“Your father made a number of poor decisions with the funds, I’m afraid,” Wren told him. “He insisted on investing a large sum into some scheme or another. Only, it turned out that the man he trusted with the money was a thief. He never invested it at all, and the money was lost.”
It sounded like something his father might have done, so at first David did not question it. He had made a number of poor choices himself, which led him to servicing women for funds. However, the deeper he dug, the more confused he became, and the more he began to realize that Wren had been the real problem here.
The steward’s records showed purchases for much-needed materials for repairing the mill, mending fences, and sprucing up tenant cottages. Only, the amounts spent had not been nearly enough, and David suspected the supplies hadn’t been of the best quality. However, Wren insisted that everything had been done on his father’s orders.
The man was so confident in his ability to pull the wool over his eyes that David was content to allow him to go on thinking he’d managed to get away with it. It was a common fact of David’s existence that most people didn’t think he possessed anything between his ears but air. Perhaps he had not made the highest marks in school, and he certainly did not help matters with his propensity of making a joke of absolutely everything. It could now work to his advantage that the steward thought him an imbecile. If Wren really had embezzled funds meant for his family, David intended to see him prosecuted. He could not do that without evidence, and it would be easier to gather proof if Wren went on thinking him oblivious.
When the steward was dismissed for the day, David interviewed what remained of the household staff and searched his father’s things for any hint to what had gone on in his absence. The house once boasted an army of maids, footmen, and gardeners, but many of them had been let go over the years. They were now down to a butler and housekeeper, two footmen, two chambermaids, a cook and a scullion, a stable groom, and a single ladies maid shared between his mother and sisters. It was a pitiful staff for a house of this size, which meant keeping most of the rooms closed off. The gardens and grounds were overgrown and unsightly, and the west wing was on the verge of collapse.
The cook reported receiving a pittance with which to purchase food to feed the Graham family, while the chambermaids had gone long stretches of time without pay. Those who complained had been dismissed, and others simply left after deciding not to countenance shabby treatment by their employer any longer. The house’s most costly objects d’art had been sold off piece by piece, and once those were gone his mother’s jewels had been the next to go. Tenants complained of miserable living conditions, and those who petitioned Wren for help were put off by either empty promises or cold dismissal.
And just where had his father been as the estate began falling down around his ears?
Drinking, according to Caruthers and Mrs. Moffat. The faithful servants had been reluctant to speak ill of his father, but David assured them he wanted the truth—however difficult it might be to hear.
“Mr. Graham grew morose in his final years,” Caruthers told him. “I often overheard him lamenting that he’d let you down, sir. He would leave a tarnished legacy for his only son, and you would come to hate him for his ineptitude.”
“I never resented him,” David replied. “He inherited an estate that was already on its last leg. He did his best.”
“He was ashamed that he’d reduced you to something as common aswork,” Mrs. Moffat added. “That he and your mother and sisters must live on your charity … he loathed it, he did. Drove him to the bottle.”
