(Content Warning )
"Good God..." Alistair rasped, the horror leeching all inflexion from his voice. "Thomas, who...?"
The groundskeeper's reply was little more than a whisper, haunted and devoid of emotion. "Sophie. Lady Jennifer's personal maid."
Alistair felt the room tilt violently as recollection sparked – a cherubic young woman with soulful eyes whose gentle presence often lingered at the periphery of the Shaw household. Suddenly, those same eyes seemed to stare back at him from the motionless form, wide and pleading beneath the web of blossoming contusions.
"Evelyn!" The howl tore itself from Alistair's throat, unrestrained and primal. "EVELYN!"
Within moments, the rapid staccato of footfalls heralded his wife's arrival. She swept into the chamber with a swirl of skirts, only to falter as the full scope of the brutality registered.
"James!" She cried out, all thought of propriety abandoning her as she rushed to her son's side. "James, my love, what monster did this to you?"
Alistair recoiled as if struck when Evelyn cradled James' limp form, seemingly oblivious to the mangled innocence crumpled mere feet away. Her trembling hands ghosted across the lacerations scoring his back as she rained frantic kisses upon his brow.
"Evelyn..." Alistair's voice emerged strangled, his throat constricted by the profound disconnect fracturing her perception. "Evelyn, look around you. Look at what he's done!"
But Evelyn seemed heedless of her husband's urgings, lost in a myopic spiral of protective devotion as she fussed over James' insensate form.
"How many transgressions must I turn a blind eye towards before you accept the truth, Evelyn?" he asked, voice low and edged with weariness. "I have indulged James's indiscretions time and again, ignoring the whispers of impropriety swirling through the household staff."
Evelyn's chin lifted fractionally, the fire he knew lurked beneath her aristocratic poise flaring in her eyes. Before she could unleash the torrent of defensive outrage he could see brewing, Alistair pressed on.
"Dalliances with chambermaids, indecent liaisons in shadowed alcoves—I dismissed them all as the folly of youth, convincing myself it was but a phase to be outgrown." His jaw tightened. "But this...this was no mere act of petulance or bravado, Evelyn. This was a violation, a shattering of innocence as unforgivable as it was depraved."
"You speak as if our son is some remorseless deviant!" Evelyn's words emerged in a hiss laden with protective fury. "Did you not see the state he was left in after your...confrontation?"
Her hands clenched in the tattered fabric of her skirts. "Our child was broken, humiliated in front of the very people whose favour we have striven for decades to secure. If taking a maid to his bed was what he required to soothe his anguish, then so be it!"
Alistair recoiled as if struck by the frank brutality of her words, the willful denial that transmuted such grievous misconduct into something to be rationalized away. Gathering his fraying composure, he met his wife's blazing stare with one of his own.
"I will not dignify that repugnant assertion with a response," he stated in a tone savoured of granite. "Nor will I allow you to obfuscate this atrocity with your permissive indulgences any longer."
Evelyn opened her mouth, no doubt to unleash another blistering volley of defensive outrage. But Alistair raised a hand, a silent demand for parley that she reluctantly acceded to.
"Can you not see the path we are leading our sons down?" His words emerged rugged with mingled weariness and self-recrimination. "An utter disregard for propriety and human dignity born from a lifetime of privilege and indolence. James is no better than the worst sort of degenerate, parading as an aristocrat while revelling in his basest impulses."
For an endless instant, it seemed Evelyn teetered on the verge of unleashing her tongue once more, of rallying to their firstborn's defence with that same blind, corrosive ardour. Then, almost imperceptibly, something within her seemed to crumble beneath the weight of Alistair's brutal candour.
As if the visceral levee keeping her willed delusions intact had finally ruptured.
"How dare you..." she rasped, anguish fracturing her once imperious cadence. "How dare you besmirch him so, when your own vows were rendered every bit as hollow..."
Evelyn's face flushed with rage as she screamed at her husband. "At least James is not like you, going around dallying with the maids! Even after our son was born!"
Alistair's jaw clenched, but before he could respond, Evelyn continued her tirade, guilt and remorse fueling the flames of her outburst. "And when one of them became pregnant, you had the audacity to keep her with you! Telling me you loved her equally as you loved me?" Her voice dripped with disdain. "And that you'd treat the bastard child born from that sordid affair as our own daughter?"
Alistair's expression darkened with fury at his wife's accusations dredging up his own sordid past. He raised his hand as if to strike Evelyn across the face for her insolence. For a tense moment, the atmosphere thrummed with the threat of explosive violence.
But Evelyn did not flinch or shrink back. She met Alistair's gaze unflinchingly, almost daring him to follow through in a catalyzing act of mutual destruction. Despite the regret already creeping in, her eyes burned with a simmering defiance.
With visible effort, Alistair lowered his hand. When he finally spoke, his voice was cold and controlled, betraying none of the roiling turmoil within. "Jennifer is as much my daughter as James and Percival are my sons."
Without another word, he turned and left James's ruined chamber, the unresolved anguish and recriminations hanging like a miasma.
Evelyn sank into a chair beside her son's bed, emotionally spent from the confrontation. Bitter tears streamed down her cheeks as her gaze fell upon the motionless form of James, dropping unheeded upon his ravaged back.
As the hateful words she had flung so recklessly echoed in her mind, she felt the fractures in their marriage splinter wider - irreparable chasms born of moral failing and willed disillusionment. At that moment, she could not have felt more alone.
As Alistair was going out with thoughts, This...this was how it would always be, was it not? How it had been since the poisoned seeds of their union first blossomed into the monstrous hypocrisy consuming their existence. Sins would be acknowledged, even deplored...until blind loyalty to dynastic preservation overrode reason and basic human decency.
With a weary nod of resignation, Alistair signalled for Woodridge to attend to his wife who arrived from the family vault.
"Thomas," he addressed the silently watching chef, "See that the young woman receives any medical care or respite she requires from...this. And inform her family to come meet me, I will personally apologise to them and see to it that they receive proper compensation"
The other man regarded him through hollow, haunted eyes, searching for some infinitesimal glimmer of genuine compassion or resolve amidst Alistair's impotent directives. When he found none, Thomas uttered a soft, broken sound–part bitter chuckle, part bereft sob.
"As you say, Lord Shaw," he rasped, already moving to gather Sophie's battered form with infinite care. "Though perhaps now you can appreciate why such...niceties are destined to ring hollow in the face of the darkness devouring your House from within."
With those final lacerating words hanging in the air like a pall, he turned to depart, leaving Alistair alone amid the visceral aftermath of his son's latest outrage.
For long, suspended moments, the Shaw patriarch simply stood motionless, permitting the full implications of what had occurred here to sweep over him in withering waves. Sins of the father, indeed–how many more innocents must be brutalized, how many more lives shattered upon the altar of dynastic supremacy before the cycle was finally broken?
Heaving a weighted sigh, Alistair pivoted on his heel and strode from the ruined chamber, his footfalls heavy against the scarred floorboards. Thomas's parting words reverberated through his mind, each step seeming to carry him farther from the path of rectitude he had sworn his life to upholding.
As the vaulted spaces of Shaw Manor closed in around him once more, Alistair felt the weary resignation replace any lingering outrage. There would be no grand denouncements, no severing of these cancerous ties–not yet, at least. The mechanisms were already in motion, greased by centuries of indoctrination and aristocratic detachment.
Woodridge would instruct the staff to maintain their silence. Evelyn would retreat into her own delusional oasis, soothing the bruises upon James's soul with the same blind devotion she'd lavished upon his physical wounds. And the heir himself...Alistair's jaw tightened as he envisioned his son's battered form, the truth unveiled behind the careless dissipations and hedonistic excess.
Perhaps there was no rehabilitating this particular arch flaw in their dynastic edifice. Perhaps the only path forward lay in preparing another to one day assume the mantle of leadership–one untainted by the moral sickness rotting away at the family's core.