Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(45)
His eyes roamed listlessly around the table. All the usual suspects. His future father-in-law, Lytchett Matravers, had his eyes closed in what he doubtless hoped was an expression of intense concentration, but was almost certainly trapped wind due to a rushed breakfast. Next to him was Lytchett’s chum Lord Rix, who appeared every bit as bored as Gavar felt. He noticed Gavar looking and sent him a comradely roll of the eyes.
Rix was all right, but sat on his other side was Gavar’s bitch-queen fiancée. She was scribbling down notes as if any of this actually mattered. Bouda had placed herself next to Zelston, at the top of the table. If Father was mistaken, and securing the Chancellorship required a modicum of effort even for the Jardine heir, Gavar felt sure his future wife could take care of greasing the wheels.
After all, there had to be some benefit to marrying a harpy like Bouda. As Father had reminded her that day Zelston dropped his little Proposal bombshell, it wasn’t like they really needed the Matravers millions. And Gavar wasn’t currently getting any other benefits either. Bouda had tried to slap him when he had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion following the First Debate dinner. It was so much easier with commoner girls, when you never had to bother asking.
Not unless you actually cared about them.
Gavar clenched his fists beneath the table. He wasn’t going to think about Leah. It only made him furious – and that was what had caused the whole horrendous mess in the first place.
He breathed deeply, feeling his chest strain against his crisp white shirt. Then relaxed again, rolling his shoulders.
It was easier here in London. His anger was always much worse at Kyneston. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was the burden of expectation of it all. There was the house he’d inherit; the portraits of dead ancestors who he would have to live up to. And for what? So he could watch his own heir trudge the same path he had, and in time pass on the estate to them, just as Father would to him, as Grandfather Garwode had to Whittam.
It was all spectacularly pointless.
‘And what can you tell us about the perpetrators?’ he heard a voice say.
It was Rix. Gavar had never heard anyone sound less interested in the answer to a question they’d asked. Anything to alleviate the boredom, he supposed.
‘We have one in custody,’ reported the Millmoor Overseer, slipping a photograph out of a fold of brown manila and sliding it to the centre of the table. ‘He was at the scene of a sabotage of the East Sector Labour Allocation Bureau. It’s believed a presently unidentified female was conducting the intrusion. However, when she was surprised by a Security patrol he made a show of force that enabled her to escape. He was subsequently subdued and apprehended.’
Couldn’t this peon speak plain English? The man had fought the guards to buy the woman time to get away. Under other circumstances it might have been an honourable thing to do.
Gavar glanced at the photograph. It showed a muscular black man, one of his eyes swollen shut. His skin was too dark to make out any injuries, but his T-shirt was heavily bloodstained. He looked about the same age as Zelston, though this man’s skull was shaved and he had none of the dandified Chancellor’s fine clothes and fancy ornaments.
The accident of birth, thought Gavar, recalling another of his father’s favourite phrases. The accident of birth had given this criminal slave and the most powerful man in the land the same skin on the outside, but very different abilities within. And from that difference, their fates had diverged.
Libby had Gavar’s own skin on the outside. His hair. His eyes.
He remembered the boat drifting across the lake towards them that day. Could she really have the same abilities within?
‘You said “Security patrol”?’
Bouda’s officious voice broke into Gavar’s thoughts. He just knew the sound of it was going to grate on him for the rest of his natural life.
The Overseer nodded, her face guarded. Bouda had clearly spotted something the woman had hoped would go unremarked.
‘I presume you mean a routine patrol?’ the blonde girl said. ‘In other words, after several weeks of multiple incidents, including the defacement of your own headquarters, you have managed to catch one perpetrator – by accident?’
The commoner’s expression turned from guarded to dismayed. Gavar almost laughed.
‘You do understand’ – Father sat forward in his chair, the thickly stuffed red leather seat creaking faintly – ‘that the authority of the Overseer’s Office in Millmoor is not your own. It is our authority. That of your Equals and the government of this country. And therefore these attacks, which you have failed to prevent, are attacks directly upon us.’
Gavar had to hand it to his father: the man knew how to make an impression. The room suddenly felt several degrees colder. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see the condensation turning to ice on the inside of the windows.
‘Naturally,’ Whittam went on, ‘the continuance of these outrages cannot be tolerated. Now that you have one of the perpetrators in your custody, I trust that you have taken every step to discover his associates?’
‘Well . . .’
Even Gavar could have told the woman that wasn’t the correct answer.
Whittam leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and staring over the top of them. It was a posture that, on one humiliating occasion in his childhood, had caused Gavar to wet himself. He’d never forgotten the look in Father’s eyes as the hot liquid trickled miserably down his leg. It hadn’t been anger, merely contempt.