Work Text:
Son,
It pleases me to receive word of your exploits so soon following your departure, given your junior rank and scant tenure as an officer. Your receipt of the Gryphon of Rendower reflects well on the Everleigh name, and is a mark in favour of your overeager decision to join The King’s Army. Nevertheless, take care not to be shepherded by your sentiments. So long as you continue to apply those lessons and virtues with which you were raised, it is likely your service will be most fruitful.
I remain,
Your Father
Maxime d’al Everleigh, recently invested Lord Fleetwood, set the tersely written letter down on his father’s—his desk. It would not do for his now clenched fists to ruin its paper.
Had he been present to bear witness to the current scene, he was sure the late Lord Fleetwood would pick out this or that reason to reproach his son. His father had never much cared for his sentimentality, and he would have doubtless found the hesitance with which he settled into his duties as Baron Fleetwood to be nothing short of regrettable.
Part of him was grateful for the timing of the courier who delivered to him news of his late father’s passing. Then, he was compelled to divert his energies to the upcoming engagement at Mhillanovil, with but a moment’s consideration to spare for the deceased. But the war was now over, and he was deemed surplus to requirements: Maxime at last had the liberty of attending to his bereavement. This truth insinuated itself into his mind following his investiture, and it bore upon him with greater intensity the closer he inched towards his ancestral lands upon roads much neglected and opposite the pragmatic Saundersley.
Saundersley, who had known his own father longer than he and who now addressed him with the proper yet ill-fitting ‘your lordship’.
Yet now that the time of reckoning had arrived, that selfsame part proved a hindrance. He could not acknowledge, let alone grapple with the truth. Nevertheless, unbidden, thoughts, memories, and emotions all rose to his consciousness in tandem—some soothing, others embarrassingly enfeebling, many conflicting, and each of them demanding his undivided attention.
He recalled how he felt when he first received the letter curled before him a decade ago at the newly christened Fort Kharan. How keenly he had latched onto his father’s open approbation of his receipt of his first ever decoration. How even the barest grant of appreciation had done much to warm him in the wake of the recently departed Antari winter, the first such he had endured. It had been enough to reduce the despondency at his father’s customary staidness to an almost inconsequential twinge.
Right now, he wanted nothing more than to grab the letter and the piece of metal and ribbon that had inspired its authorship, march towards the already lit hearth, and toss both into its tantalizingly consuming flame. And then maybe toss himself off the roof for good measure.
Was he alone unworthy of his father’s approval? Was that something to be doled out only when he had accomplished something fit to be favoured by polite society first? He suspected the answer, but he could no more confirm his belief than temper Blaylock’s duel lust.
Even at fourteen years old, Maxime had been sufficiently astute to conclude that if he was to win his father’s esteem, he would need take drastic action; something that could coat his house with lustre. Fortunately for him, the war had provided such an opportunity, one at which he leapt. And his father had assented: despite his youth and the not so inconsiderable price of an officer’s commission, he was given the funds adequate to purchase a cornet’s commission in the Royal Dragoons.
He had been ever so pleased with himself that day. Even the derisive expression worn by the clerk at Grenadier Square when he had communicated his intention to purchase a commission in The King’s Army had done little to dim the afterglow of self-satisfaction. But the longer he spent abroad—as his brother-officers and enlisted were slain by weaponry or disease, as he won promotion and acclaim and was entrusted with an increased command and an eminent yet fragile reputation—the more did he resent himself and his father. Nobody as young as he ought be able to obtain the resources necessary to fulfill their ambitions without guidance.
It was almost enough to make him wish that the clerk had refused him that day.
And now he had returned home from Antar, eleven years later. His father hadn’t even the courtesy to greet him alive, to behold with his own eyes the man he had become. Instead, he was to inherit his obligations as Lord Fleetwood, head of the house of Everleigh. He was to adjust to peace after living and breathing its contrary for a little over a decade. And he was to do so with alacrity and poise.
So he did the only thing a gentleman of the blood responsible for a noble estate could do: he folded up the letter and placed it inside one of his desk’s drawers. He still had to consult with Luisa about a thus far inscrutable passage in one of their father’s notes about the administration of the barony, further reacquaint himself with the domestic staff, and make arrangements to meet with Lord Monteferro to formalize his engagement to Lady Theresa.