“And why should your family care to assist me?” he asked as he leaned against the thick wooden frame of the huge window and looked at Olympia.
“You and Ashton are very close and Ashton is now a part of the Wherlocke-Vaughn clan.”
Brant knew it was foolish but he was deeply touched by her words. It had been a long time since he had heard anyone say such things. Through his own actions he had lost touch with most of his friends. Ashton was married and his other closest friends did not care to join him once he had begun to sink so deep into debauchery. Cordell, Whitney, and Victor were busy doing the tour of the various estates holding grand house parties, none of which Brant had been invited to.
That good feeling began to fade beneath anger although he was not truly certain exactly what or whom he was angry at. It was just wrong that his only offer of aid and support should come from a young woman he barely knew. The fact that there was no one else close at hand was not fully his fault either, despite his poor behavior of the last two or three years.
“I do thank you, m’lady, but this is my trouble, my family, and I will tend to it.”
“I believe you will have more than enough to do, m’lord, since it is not just a new staff you must needs tend to, is it?”
“The fact that my sister Agatha is in dire need of whatever assistance I can give has not escaped my attention.”
Olympia knew she should just step back and say nothing for a while. The man was getting angry. She knew it was not really an anger aimed at her, but whatever he said or did if he let that anger loose would be directed right at her. She was the nearest target, the bearer of the bad news. Backing away from an argument was not in her nature, however.
“If you wish a fight, m’lord, then I am more than ready to give you one. But, if all you are looking for is someone or something to shake a fist at, mayhap you should take a walk until your blood cools.”
Brant cursed and began to pace the room. He was being forced to look too closely at the wreck his life had become in the last few years and he did not want to see it. Seeing it made him also see what he could have done differently. For one thing, he would not be wondering what he could do to help Agatha for he would have her in his home, out of reach of their mother’s plots and schemes.
“I should have done something about the woman,” he muttered.
“Such as what? She is your mother, a countess. You probably cannot even threaten to beggar her to bring her in line. I suspect she has a few holdings of her own as well, does she not?”
“She does, but nothing of any great value. Her lands produce a good income, adequate for a widow. It was her dower property. When she married my father she did appear to gain more and more access to all of his properties, her skill with the finances of them all making him amiable to the arrangement. And, she did keep the lands running efficiently and at an impressive profit for a while despite all his profligate ways. Then shortly after my father died things grew a little less profitable and efficient which is why I entered into some investments with my friends.”
“In other words, as soon as your father was no longer watching her so closely or perhaps when all entailed lands went to you at his death, she was not so careful with the money.”
“You believe she has been cheating me.”
“I do.”
He sighed. “That is highly possible. I have been the one dealing in the investments since the beginning so she gets only what I send her from that for maintaining her households. I have consistently had difficulty in getting all the accounts from the other properties but I did get the ones from this one. It being the main seat of the earls of Fieldgate, it was rather difficult for her, or the man of business my father used, to hide them.”
Olympia had to bite her tongue to keep from asking him why he had not torn the woman’s greedy little hands off everything he owned. It was not her trouble, not her family. She supposed it was a hard thing to face. He would have had to accept that his mother not only sold the woman he loved into death but had been cheating him of his inheritance from the beginning. One crime, no matter how vicious and cold, could be excused, explained, ignored. Two could not be. What he was being forced to see was that his own mother was not simply cold and heartless to others, able to do things to others he found reprehensible, but she had no real feeling for her own children, either. He had faced that enough to try and get his younger siblings out of the woman’s reach but Olympia suspected a lot of the drinking and wenching were done to help him ignore the full, vicious truth.
“There were a lot of inconsistencies,” he said quietly. “A lot.”
“So she has been bleeding you dry for a long time.”
“I suspect she started even before my father died. I was looking into it but now believe the men I had doing the work of unearthing the truth were already her men, never mine.”