In 1800s England, a well-meaning but selfish young woman will do anything to avoid matrimony to the county's finest suitors and to justly prove she doesn't need a husband to find her way in society. Even under the peril of her uncle losing his prope...
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September 1814,
"Grandfather? I-I don't understand—I thought you were staying in the Americas?" claimed Max in a confounded manner, for indeed it has been a whole cycle since his furlough, and accounting his father's disdain of the old man, it was a marvel should he return at all! Indeed why remained to be seen.
"By Jove! Is that how you greet an old gaffer?!" exclaimed Mr. Knightley gaily with rapturous arms and a queer writhing squirrel of a moustache. The young man found he was assailed by the merriment of flying limbs and wide inquisitive optics akin to the measuring of a unruly ophthalmologist, alas, Max was not entirely. . .accustomed towards this sort of affection. Especially from a relation he hasn't seen well within his years of clarity. Indeed, the impounding piquant musk of metals, cigars, camphor, and moth-balls could have played a great part in it.
"Father, you remember my son, Maxmillian," Lord Byron declared stiffly, where the shadows of the drawing room flattered his molding—funereal and lackluster. There, standing among the cache of his snuff-boxes and atomic trifles, Lord Byron pitted his frame where the grate growled and hissed—fire clambering upon rod iron where his fag shown most prominently. Alight the middle-aged man's features drew the flame, colorless; shapeless, yet all the while necromantic and arresting, surely. Glacial ice inhibited the man's fixation; melting against the fiery flames yet in no means passive by nature's course. The deft-slender fingers wound around the fag, unadulterated and especial, akin to a man whom upheld the airs of a steeple capstone.
The immense weight residing within Max's soles abounded greatly so he found himself rootless. So small had Max, for he could not amount so greatly. And how queer such a brooding man belonged to a gaffer the heart of a merry carouser.
Issac Newton's Law indeed created the funniest of anomalies.
"Lawks! What do you take me as?! A blundering fool? I know a Knightley when I see one!" scoffed Mr. Knightley wryly, "How be it young man?! Fine prigs and eyes sharp as a tact! You've acquired quite the chin of a marshal, eh?"
Max, having willed himself to pry open his lips, uneasily humored the old man's rambling, saying: "In truth, I'm quite small, sir."
"Jolly-good horse-feathers! You're a comely breadth! If I had as the Royal goes, you'd be as tall as British ambassador! Mind you, son, any taller like your father here and you'll be running gripes to and fro by the crack of the spleen!"
Something of the latter of negation and displeasure sounded in the form of a cough from Lord Byron's throat.
"I wager you should check that cough of your's! Wouldn't fancy having the entire fleet of doctors harboring this casa! Might as well, I believe your other son is far more at risk of that!—where is the rest of your sibs, eh?! In my time, we'd be making rugged entries and proper preambles!"
