Chapter 3“What are you doing today, Ivo?”
“Nothing, Papa.” He’d always been wary of his father, a crotchety, scholarly man. The relationship was of the type one had with a distant uncle that one was unfamiliar with and uncomfortable around.
Sitting at breakfast with his parents in the small breakfast room, which now served as a breakfast, lunch, and dining room, Ivo looked at his father, wondering how it was possible to be so old yet still moving around. When he had married, Lord Marsh Grange had been forty-five years old and his wife eighteen; he was past eighty now, having been over sixty when Ivo was born.
“Then why are you dressed so smartly? Is it too much to ask that you go out and procure respectable employment?”
Ivo wore his best lightweight summer suit, the only decent one he
