Hey guys, I'm back with an Easter present for you- a new chapter! :) Yes, my muse has still been having difficulties, and it's made me a terribly slow updater. However, I think I might have finally figured out where the plot is going, at least for now. So happy Easter to everyone, and I hope to be posting another chapter soon! Thanks for sticking with me.
The next day, a sealed chest arrived on the back doorstep of Phantomhive manor.
Ciel was used to the arrival of shipments at the manor, but this one he had not ordered. He strode to the back of the manor and watched as Sebastian and Bard assisted the older manservant in unloading it from the back of a sturdy cart. It was neatly wrapped in packing cloth and held together with twine. Its mysterious appearance unsettled him. The manservant had travelled from his grandfather's estate, but the chest was from his grandmother. It was not for Ciel, but rather for Lydia. The note which had come along with it explained in his grandmother's handwriting (it jarred him a little to see the script of her long-dead hand on paper once again,) that she had prepared the chest before her death and entrusted it to her most faithful manservant, who had been instructed to deliver it upon her husband's death. The letter stipulated that only Lydia be allowed to open the chest initially, and insisted that she must be alone in the room when she did so. This gave Ciel an odd feeling of mixed curiosity and foreboding. At the moment, Lydia was lying abed upstairs, trying to recover from her fever and probably quite unaware that another mysterious piece of her inheritance had found her. Ciel decided to have Sebastian carry the chest into her room and let her sleep. A small, insistent part of his mind wanted to crack the chest open himself, but it would be far beneath his honor to disregard the wishes of his grandmother and infringe upon his sister's privacy. Right now he had more pressing things to occupy him, anyway.
/
When Lydia awoke next, there were two concerned faces looming above her which she had not expected to be there. For a moment she lay quite still, blinking up at them in confusion. "Father? Aunt Angeli-"
"Thank goodness." Fred Aberlaine exclaimed lowly as Madame Red breathed a sigh of relief. Her aunt was holding a cool cloth to her forehead. Lydia's eyes were blurry, and the light in the room seemed rather frail.
"You're all right," she murmured softly, scooting herself upward in bed a little and staring directly at her father. "How did you get here?"
"After I got off the phone with you, I was just about to leave the house and take refuge at Thoms's lodgings- I was going to ride out here with him in the morning- when your aunt showed up at my door with her carriage behind her. She thought we'd both be better off at the manor as soon as possible, so we could offer our assistance directly. We rode through the night and made it here by seven o'clock." The red-haired man doffed his hat to the equally red-haired lady beside him. Lydia noticed that they both looked rather sleep-deprived.
"Thank you," she said to her aunt, feeling that she would have gathered them both in her arms and hugged them if she'd had the strength. It was so much less frightening to have them right in front of her, where she could be sure that they were safe. "I was so worried-!"
"You couldn't have been nearly as worried as we were!" Madame Red protested, sponging off her niece's forehead with the cloth. "First we heard that you'd nearly been murdered at the funeral, and then we arrived at the manor to find you collapsed with fever! And apparently the basement also caved in while you and Ciel were down there a few days ago-"
"What? I didn't hear about that!" Aberlaine exclaimed, straightening upright in concern. "When did this happen?"
"Ciel told me that Sebastian let his powers spiral out of control-"
"Sebastian collapsed the basement on top of you?" her father demanded, looking angry as she hardly ever saw him. Lydia heaved herself up in bed with great effort, determined to halt this train of misunderstanding.
"No, father, no! Sebastian did not collapse the basement on top of me. He pulled Ciel and I out of there before the ceiling caved in. It is true that he cracked the foundation with his powers, but it was only because he was in so much pain that he lost control of them. That's why I was down there….I was trying to help him get free. And then later on, in front of the Church, he saved my life….so please don't blame Sebastian for these occurrences." Lydia sank back under the covers as Madame Red went to open a window and let in some stronger light.
Her father huffed, seeming grudgingly placated. "In any case, it would seem that you've been involved in a great many dangerous situations lately."
The brown-haired girl smiled wanly. "When have I ever not been involved in dangerous situations?"
"Well, I'd like for it to stop." Aberlaine declared firmly. "That's why I'm here. We need to outwit these money-hunting relatives of yours and make sure that they never try to harm you again."
"Hear, hear!" Madame Red concurred, coming to sit down at Lydia's bedside again. At that moment, there was a knock on the door. After a pause, a white-gloved hand pushed it open and the sleek black figure of Sebastian bowed to the room's inhabitants.
"Master, I am glad to see that you are awake. Do you feel strong enough to eat a bit of lunch?"
Lydia blinked at him in bemusement. "Lunch? What time is it?"
"It is eleven-thirty, master. You had a rather restless night last night, so I decided that you should sleep in."
Lydia eased herself upward, imagining how outraged her father would be if he found out that Sebastian had dared to come into her bathroom while she was bathing. She decided to let that one lie in the interest of preserving the peace. "In that case, I- what is that?" She pointed to a rather ornate wooden chest that was sitting at the foot of her bed, packing wrappers scattered underneath its carved feet. That definitely had not been there last night, or she would have tripped over it.
The demon stared at it with an unreadable expression. "It was delivered for you this morning. It is from your grandmother's estate."
"Is it really? What's in it?" the brown-haired girl exclaimed, leaning on her father's arm as she placed her feet upon the floor and tried her luck at standing. She still felt rather dizzy, so she walked over to the chest quickly and kneeled down. She raised her eyebrow worriedly. "Is it part of the will?"
"Pardon me, master, but no one has yet opened it. The letter which arrived with it gave specific instructions that no one but yourself should be allowed to look inside, and that you must be alone in the room when first doing so." Sebastian intoned softly, gazing directly at Lydia as she surveyed the chest.
She tilted her head in confusion. "Did my grandmother give a reason?"
"She did not."
"….Bother."
"Are we sure that it's not anything dangerous?" Aberlaine asked, looking to Sebastian for clarification.
The demon shook his head. "There is no darkness emitting from this chest. Whatever its contents are, they are material in nature and entirely stationary." He moved a step closer to Lydia. "Will you be wanting to open it, then, master?"
"I suppose so," she mumbled, fingering the lock gingerly. "I don't imagine I'll be able to focus on anything else, what with mysterious boxes showing up in my room and that."
"In that case, please allow me to escort our other guests downstairs to lunch. You may join them when you are through." Sebastian inclined his head toward her father and Madame Red, who stood up reluctantly and slowly retreated toward the door. Lydia fought through a moment of wanting to call them back, no matter what her grandmother's note had said. She didn't want to face whatever ghosts lay within the large chest on her own.
"Master." Lydia glanced up as Sebastian slipped her the key. "I will be just down the hall." He bowed again and followed her relatives out the door, and all too quickly, Lydia found herself alone with the chest. She stared at it as if it were an opponent she was trying to outwit. She peered through the keyhole and saw darkness. She rapped her knuckles against the lid, and jumped backward when she thought she heard something stir inside. The window was still open, making her feel cold and unprotected as she crept closer to the strange chest once again. Sebastian had said that it was harmless, and it would be completely out of character for him to allow something like this near her without being certain of its safety. Even so, with all of these things that were happening…. Lydia slipped two fingers underneath a stretch of the bandages on her right arm and worked them loose, preparing herself to tear them off entirely if anything unfortunate occurred. With her other arm, she gingerly unlocked the heavy padlock and let it clang against the floor. With a burst of courage, she threw the lid back and braced her right arm in front of her face protectively.
Nothing happened, or at least, nothing jumped out at her. Still holding her arm out, Lydia leaned over the chest and peered inside. She saw linen. Lots of linen. Some of it was shining, indicating that it was worked silk. She saw gold tassels and broaches, delicate filigree boxes, and what looked to be a collection of glass fountain pens. She saw nothing to indicate why her grandmother had been so insistent that she open this chest in secrecy. Lydia began to dig carefully through the chest's contents, lifting them out one by one and arranging them on the carpet around her. On the wooden bottom, she uncovered an envelope with her name written on it in elegant cursive script. She lifted it out and slipped a finger underneath the margin, tearing the top away until she could reach what was inside.
/
Leaning carefully against the wall in the hallway, Sebastian was not particularly surprised to hear Lydia's voice call loudly to him from the bedroom. He glided over to the door immediately, and opened it to see the brown-haired girl kneeling amid a melee of objects, clutching at an ink-heavy piece of parchment with both hands. He inclined his head somberly. "Well, master?"
"This." Lydia waved the parchment in the air. "It says-"
"I am sure that I already know what it says, master. Your grandmother was a rather predictable woman." Sebastian flicked his red eyes at the paper nonchalantly.
Lydia gestured furiously for him to keep his voice down. "Get in here! And close the door!" she whispered, and the demon complied. He sidestepped the stacks of linens and boxes and came to kneel beside his master on the carpet. She was gazing deeply at the paper again. "….This is no surprise to me, of course. I already knew about all this from my parents, and I guess grandmother knew that I knew. This letter is basically appealing to me to make sure Ciel doesn't find out…." She paused suddenly, staring straight ahead past the wall, past the forest and the sky, out toward something Sebastian could not see. "Oh…." Her eyes widened a little, then settled again. "I understand." Abruptly, she threw her head back and laughed, a noise which was not entirely bitter, but was certainly not sweet. "I understand! It makes sense now! And to think I was so confused too, almost ready to believe…. Ah, ha ha…. I must be truly stupid."
"You only found out about your grandmother's will yesterday. You are hardly stupid." Sebastian murmured, somewhat relieved that Lydia seemed to have figured it out now that her fever had gone down.
She snorted and brushed the hair out of her eyes. "I should have known it the moment I read that document. Why would grandmother leave me anything? She wasn't trying to make up to me, she was trying to pay me off, to make sure I'd never tell Ciel the truth…. It all makes sense now. Of course it does." She glanced sideways at him out of the corner of her eye. "You knew, didn't you? But you weren't going to tell me. Not until the last moment."
"I thought it best not to disturb your period of illness with more sour news," the demon said quietly.
Lydia nodded, accepting this, and looked back down at the letter. "I'm almost insulted. As if I would have told Ciel, anyway! It's as though I were some unscrupulous street urchin, too lowly to recognize any good but money. Then again, that is what she thought of me, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised…."
Sebastian was waiting for the inevitable question. Lydia did not ask it right away. Instead she began piling things back into the chest with significantly less care than she had taken them out. Linens and silks tangled together, boxes fell open and spilled their delicate contents, and precious broaches disappeared into the darkness until the only thing left out was the letter. Lydia banged the lid shut and fumbled with the lock again. "I meant to ask you after the funeral yesterday, but with everything that happened, I forgot." She lowered her hands from the chest and looked at him steadily. "Does he know, Sebastian? Have you told him?" The demon shook his head solemnly. Lydia tilted her own. "Why? Was it because of my mother's orders?"
A fanged half-smile stretched out across his pale lips. "No. I have kept the secret of my own volition. Master, are you familiar with the phrase 'shoot the messenger'?"
"Yes."
"Then you will understand why I did not wish to incur your brother's wrath against me by being the one to deliver such discomfiting information to him."
"Ah. I suppose I can see that." Lydia sighed a faint sigh of relief, then stood up swiftly. "Well, then. You must never tell him. That is an order, do you understand?"
"Of course, master." Sebastian purred, standing up also to offer her his arm in case she swayed. "Now that you're here, it doesn't really matter anyway…."
"It would matter to him." Lydia asserted gravely.
"….Although I must admit, I would like to see that arrogant little runt knocked down a peg."
"Don't talk about my brother that way." Lydia ordered, making her way over to the fireplace. "And don't you even think about doing any knocking-down, Sebastian. I don't care how you feel about Ciel personally. The truth would destroy his sense of who he is. That's all he's had to hold onto throughout these many years."
"Yes, master." Sebastian bowed gracefully, and Lydia sighed, staring into the low flames in the hearth.
"Well now, I suppose there's only one thing left to do…." She ran a pensive finger over the length of the letter's spine, its contents filling her face. A moment later, she tossed it swiftly into the flames. Both demon and human watched as the fiery tendrils roped themselves around the missive and ate it up, until all that remained were curdled ashes. Lydia turned away. "I'll change my clothes now and go down to lunch. Sebastian, please do something with that chest."
"Where would master like me to put it?"
"I don't care. Anywhere. Down in the basement," the young girl decreed, slipping out of sight behind the changing screen. She did not look back at either the chest or the demon beside it. Sebastian knew instinctively that she was hiding her face on purpose.
/
When Lydia came downstairs to lunch, Ciel could immediately sense that something was amiss in her face. He suspected that Aberlaine could sense it too, for the father and daughter exchanged a steady glance before she sat down. Even Madame Red was looking their way, and Sebastian, following silently behind his sister, had the same impenetrable expression on his face as always. Ciel could not help feeling rather left out of the situation. As Lydia took her seat and Sebastian filled her teacup, the young heir raised his eyebrow and demanded, "Well? What about the chest, then?"
Lydia shook her head slowly. "It was full of linens….and things. Silks, broaches, jewelry boxes, and the like. I had Sebastian put it away into storage." Ciel noted that she seemed even less excited about this than she had been regarding the discovery of her inheritance yesterday. But that wasn't the only puzzling thing….
"To be frank, it seems….rather uncharacteristic of her. But perhaps she was truly trying to make up to you. Perhaps she had a change of heart," he suggested courteously.
Lydia shook her head again, even more slowly. She did not seem to be aware that there was food on the plate in front of her. "I do not think so." There was a brief, encompassing pause, in which Ciel got the impression that everyone at the table was trying to avoid the eyes of everyone else. "Father, have you spoken to anyone at my school?"
"I have, and I've brought your texts and papers here as well, so you won't fall behind. They were rather curious as to what you're up to, I do say….but I think I managed to throw them off. We'll have to talk about that later, so we can make sure our stories match for when you return." Aberlaine sat up straighter in his chair, running a hand through his unruly red hair. "For now, I want you to hear about what Ciel's just told me. According to him, the sooner you receive your inheritance from your grandmother, the safer you'll be."
"Right now, all of the value of grandmother's last will and testament is still in her name, which means that the clause stipulating that your share of it will go to our other relatives if you die is still in effect." Ciel chimed in, placing his fork back on the tabletop. "However, once the will is validated and processed legally, your percentage of it will be put down in your name. As soon as that happens, you can write a will for yourself, leaving your inheritance to whomever you wish in the event of your death. Therefore, even if our lovely relatives did manage to murder you- which they won't- but if they did, they would gain nothing from it but the wrath of our house upon them. Once you file your will, you should be safe."
"Ciel has sent Sebastian this morning to London to file your grandmother's will at a legal office. I've contacted Scotland Yard and filled them in on the information Sebastian obtained about the two gunmen atop the Church yesterday." Aberlaine continued as Lydia nodded seriously.
"The office has been given strict instructions to go about processing the will as quickly as possible if they wish to remain in the good graces of the Phantomhive household." Ciel declared, twisting the bright blue ring upon his thumb.
"Once they hear of it, your other relatives will probably try to hold up the process by filing complaints on the matter. Unfortunately, they have the right to do so, since they are also beneficiaries of the will. The complaints are required to be substantiated, but the legal office will have to go through an investigation process to determine whether they are or not. That being said…."
"They will doubtless try to cheat the process." Ciel intoned flatly, now speaking to the whole table. "They will lie; they will invent evidence; they will tell wild stories in order to stall for time. We must expect these tactics. But I do not intend to play by the rules either, and we are the ones with a demon as a pawn."
An ominous silence followed this announcement. Ciel broke it by glancing over at Aberlaine. "Anything else that we need to consider?" he asked, and the man shook his head in the same slow way his daughter did. There was another parturient pause, and then everyone resumed eating, even Lydia. The quiet lay still all around them; even Madame Red was being strangely untalkative this afternoon. Ciel could sense the uneasiness that seemed to thin the air. He was not immune to it. He knew his aunt through and through, and he was gradually getting used to Lydia, but it was positively awkward to be exchanging conversation with her father, of all people. He had not seen Fred Aberlaine for many years, and he had barely known him back when he had seen him; but it wasn't just that. Ciel honestly had no idea what to say to the man who had fallen in love with his mother, suffered through having her taken away from him and forced into an arranged marriage with another, and then continued to maintain an undercover and highly scandalous relationship with her until her untimely death, one which had driven his own father mad with possessive jealousy. Ciel had no lingering doubts about which man his mother's heart had truly belonged to, and it made him think uncomfortably of the Undertaker's brazen words once again. But Aberlaine had made his mother happy during her too-short life, and it was for this reason that Ciel could sit next to him at the table in his own manor and feel no anger, although he had probably felt more destabilized this morning than he could remember feeling in years.
"How can I help?" Lydia asked once they had finished eating. The downcast sheen had gone from her eyes, although the circles remained and her face was still overly flushed.
Her father gave her a quick glance-over. "I don't think you ought to be throwing yourself into the fray just yet. You're still weak. You should rest and recover…."
"Yes, but all this trouble is because of me in the first place-"
"Aberlaine is right." Ciel concurred. "You should rest until you've passed out of your illness completely. I will make sure that the servants do not disturb you, injure you, or throw another chicken into your room. But as soon as you feel recovered, please report to my office immediately. Sebastian and I have rather a lot of work to do with you."
"What work?" Lydia inquired interestedly, as Sebastian perked up behind her.
Ciel steepled his fingers above the table and leaned forward. "Listen; the process of validating this will is going to require a several public appearances from you. You'll have to go with me to the legal office and present yourself to a mediator who specializes in these sorts of cases. We will also be required to gather with other members of the family in order to hear the will read aloud and put forward any concerns that we might have. Given that the majority of the money in the will is not for them, there will be many concerns from the rest of the beneficiaries. Added to the issue of your immediate safety, I feel that this process would be most likely to lean in our favor if you were able to present yourself as a true member of the Phantomhive family."
Lydia slowly covered her mouth with her hand. "Oh dear."
"I want to dress her!" Madame Red squealed, nearly whacking Aberlaine in the face as her hand shot up in the air like a schoolgirl. Lydia looked even more alarmed.
"I will have Sebastian instruct you on the myriad of things you will need to know in order for this process to go smoothly, from your conversation to your physical….mannerisms." Ciel declared, eyeing his older sister's lackadaisically slouching shoulders and half-lidded eyes. "During these meetings, we will have the opportunity to closely observe our list of possible suspects. Every word we speak to them must be carefully calculated. Aside from that, it would be beneficial if you were able to ensure your own safety as much as possible. We are dealing with people who have a vast amount of resources at their disposal and no interest in following conventional laws. In order to keep away from their schemes, you will need to know about the laws of the underworld. To that end, I will be your instructor."
He laid his hands on the table, looking about the room and taking stock of his human resources. Aside from Sebastian, they all looked as though they were not quite sure what was going on; but then, he'd had to make do with far less competent partners in the past. "So," he finished authoritatively, glancing out the window at the dense forest which would eventually give way to London, "this is how it shall be for us."
