Anytime he visited grand English estates, it wasn’t just the guests and servants who tracked him with covert stares. For he saw the dark shadows lurking in the brightly lit ballrooms. The veneer of gentility that failed to mask the tainted history imprinted on the foundation. The stares were in the bricks and stones and mortar that comprised the manor itself. The blood of their makers, whose flesh was bought and sold to support such idyllic country houses, called to him. To the burning flame inside his heart that his grandmother protected and carried, and passed on to him.
