By midwinter, Richard’s seclusion has become a fixed routine: he refuses all visitors except Katherine, family chaplain Julius March, and Dr. Knott, spending his days in Brockhurst’s Long-Gallery, adding to its collection of artifacts from his travels, studying family archives, and pursuing independent research into genealogy and natural science. He wrestles with a growing obsession with the long history of violent, untimely deaths that have plagued the Calmady family since the construction of Brockhurst centuries prior—a pattern documented in the family’s deeds, order-books, and diaries—wondering if a single “psychological moment” of moral catastrophe set the family’s generations-long curse in motion, and whether heredity, fate, or divine justice is to blame for their repeated suffering. One stark February afternoon, Julius March—returning from administering last rites to a dying laborer’s wife—finds Richard standing in silent communion with a Velasquez painting of a deformed dwarf that had been removed from the house’s study years earlier for its distressing subject. Julius confesses he hid the painting out of cowardly self-indulgent fastidiousness, not refined taste, and Richard dismisses his self-reproach with wry irony, noting the work only feels bearable to someone with his own history of deformity and public shame. Richard then presses Julius for any information about the origin of the family’s curse, and after Richard bitterly mocks an absent, uncommunicative God who refuses to offer clear answers to his questions, Julius agrees to bring him the hidden documents related to a long-buried local family legend that night, after Katherine has retired, so Richard can review the records in silence and alone.
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