Ritchie's head was spinning after class. The school subjects themselves were fine—they weren't difficult—but university-level economics was something else entirely.
I wonder how an eight-year-old boy coped with all this? Richie thought. I'm an adult who graduated from college, and even I have a hard time absorbing information at this level. Maybe he couldn't handle the heavy load on a child's body and ran away from it?
There was no time for prolonged reflection; there was still a lot to do.
First, Richie decided to explore the house. This proved to be a difficult task due to the sheer size of the building. He had to pass through dozens of rooms, each serving a different purpose. The second floor mainly consisted of bedrooms and offices, while the third floor housed a huge library and his father's study. The first floor was occupied by a dining room, kitchen, enormous living room, gym, and servants' quarters. There was also a basement.
The basement contained a wine cellar, a food storage room, a large industrial refrigerator—the kind usually found in restaurants—and, the icing on the cake, a home theater.
And it wasn't the usual high-powered holographic projector familiar to the transmigrator or even a flat-screen TV with an enormous diagonal, which would have been outdated by his standards anyway. It was a real movie theater, complete with a projector, a projectionist's booth, and a white screen on which the film was displayed. The seats, however, were far more comfortable than those in ordinary cinemas. They could accommodate about two dozen people.
At first, the valet followed the boy. More precisely, John hadn't intended to do so and only began shadowing the child when Richie decided to go down to the ground floor. But when Richie left the basement, John breathed a sigh of relief. He realized that the child was simply amusing himself, playing at being an "explorer of the house." Convinced that his charge was busy with his game and had no intention of getting into trouble, John left Richie to entertain himself. As the saying went, whatever the child was playing with was fine—as long as he didn't go poking around too deeply in the basement, where an explosion had recently occurred.
The most interesting room for the boy turned out to be the master bedroom. Apparently, his father lived there. The bedroom itself was larger than Richie's. It featured a spacious walk-in closet, a boudoir, and a bathroom with a jacuzzi.
In the boudoir, the boy discovered a storage room filled with cardboard boxes coated in dust. In one of the boxes, he unearthed a family photo album.
Richie began to examine the photographs with curiosity.
At first, the pictures showed the boy's father at around forty years of age. Beside him was often a tall young woman with light brown hair, about twenty years old. Soon, a small child appeared, who gradually grew into a girl of about five. The little girl in the photos continued to grow up, while her father and the brown-haired woman aged alongside her. When the man looked to be about fifty, the woman around thirty, and the girl roughly ten, another child appeared.
Thus, Richie leafed through the album until he reached the point where the second girl in the photographs was ten years old—and the first child, now a young woman, had disappeared from the pictures. Apparently, she had left her parents' home. At that point, the album ended.
After rummaging further through the box of belongings where the album had been stored, Richie found another one. Naturally, he began to look through the new photographs as well.
His father in these pictures looked only slightly younger than he did now. Beside him was a young blonde woman of about twenty. She was charming, blue-eyed, and bore a striking resemblance to Richie himself. One could easily mistake the pair for grandfather and granddaughter, but the boy knew that wasn't the case. His certainty only grew when he turned the page and found a photograph of his father, the blonde woman, and a baby. In the subsequent pictures, the baby grew older and gradually acquired familiar features—the same ones the transmigrator had been seeing in the mirror for the past few days.
But then the young woman vanished from the photographs. For a while, only the sixth Duke of Westminster and his five year old son Richard appeared in them. Then, quite suddenly, the photographs broke off halfway through the album.
After examining his discoveries, Richie came to a conclusion. His mother—the blonde woman in the photos—had married a wealthy lord. She had probably hoped to get her hands on the duke's fortune. Otherwise, what sense would it make for a young, beautiful woman to marry an elderly man in his sixties? But when Richard was around five years old, something had happened, and his mother disappeared. Where she went was unclear. Either she had died, or his father had divorced her and kicked his former wife out, leaving the child with him, the undeniable fact remained that Richie lived with his father.
At first, his father had spent a great deal of time with his son, but his enthusiasm lasted only about six months. After that, the duke distanced himself, leaving Richie's upbringing to the nanny, the valet, and various tutors. During meals, he even seated himself as far from the child as possible, deliberately maintaining that distance.
Richie returned the photo albums to their place and went back to his study. There, he rummaged through all the drawers and cabinets in search of diaries, but found only a pile of toys and scribbled-over school notebooks.
The most useful discoveries were notebooks containing notes from tutors' lectures on economics and etiquette. The boy studied them fairly quickly. When he finished reading the notebook on etiquette, John knocked on the door, asked permission to enter, and stepped inside.
"Mr. Richie, it's time for dinner."
"All right."
The boy set the notebooks aside and followed the valet.
The sixth Duke of Westminster was already seated at the table in the dining room. Richie took his place opposite his father, his curiosity bubbling over. He couldn't hold back and asked,
"Dad, can I ask you something?"
"Yes, son?" The man set his cutlery aside.
"Dad, what happened to Mom?"
"Hmm…" The duke frowned. "Son, we've already been through this," he replied dryly. "Don't you remember the conversation we had two years ago?"