Then the professor gave a lecture on economics and gave his student homework.
Richie's head was pounding after class. School subjects 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, an adult who graduated from college, have a hard time absorbing information of this level. Maybe he couldn't handle the high stress on a child's body and escaped?"
There was no time to indulge in reflection; there was still much to do.
Richie's first step was to explore the house. This proved challenging due to the sheer size of the structure. He had to explore dozens of rooms of various uses. The second floor was mostly occupied by bedrooms and offices, while the third floor housed a huge library and his father's office. The first floor was occupied by a dining room, kitchen, a gigantic living room, a gym, and servants' quarters. There was also a basement. It housed a wine cellar, food storage, a large industrial refrigerator (the kind typically found in restaurants), and the icing on the cake-a home theater. And not the high-powered holographic projector he was accustomed to, nor even the large-screen flat-screen TV, which was outdated by his standards. This was a full-fledged theater, complete with a projector, projection booth, and a white screen onto which the film was projected. Admittedly, the seats were much more comfortable than in typical theaters, seating two dozen people.
At first, the boy's valet followed him. More accurately, John hadn't intended to do so initially, only following 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 the child was simply having fun, playing "house explorer." Realizing his charge was preoccupied with his game and wasn't about to get into trouble, John left Richie to his own devices. As the saying goes, whatever amuses a child, as long as he doesn't venture deep into the basement where an explosion recently occurred.
The master bedroom seemed the most intriguing to the boy. Apparently, his father lived there. The bedroom itself was larger than Richie's. It had a spacious dressing room, a boudoir, and a bathroom with a Jacuzzi.
In the boudoir, the boy discovered a closet filled with cardboard boxes, dusty. Inside one of the boxes, he unearthed a family photo album.
Richie began to look at the photographs with curiosity.
At first, the photographs showed the boy's father, aged around forty. A tall, young woman with light brown hair, around twenty, often stood by his side. Then a small child was added, who soon became a girl of about five. The little girl in the photographs grew, and the father and the brown-haired woman aged. When the man looked fifty, the woman thirty, and the girl ten, another child was born.
Thus, Richie scrolled through the album until the moment when the second girl in the photographs was ten years old, and the first (now a young woman) disappeared from the pictures. Apparently, she left her parents' home. At this point, the album ended.
After rummaging through the box containing the album, Richie found another one. Naturally, he began examining the new photographs.
His father in the photo looked only slightly younger than he does now. Next to him was a young blonde woman of about twenty. She was charming and blue-eyed, very much like Richie. One could mistake the couple for grandfather and granddaughter, but the boy knew they were anything but. His confidence was reinforced when he turned the page and discovered a photograph of his father, the blonde woman, and the baby, who in the following pictures grew older and acquired familiar features-they'd been seen in the mirror for a couple of days now.
But then the girl disappeared from the photographs. For a while, only the sixth Duke of Westminster and his five-year-old son, Richard, appeared. Suddenly, the photographs ended halfway through the album.
After examining the finds, Richie came to the conclusion that his mother (the blonde in the photographs) had married a wealthy lord. She likely hoped to acquire the duke's fortune. Otherwise, what would be the point of a young, beautiful woman marrying an elderly man in his sixties? But when Richard was around five, something happened and his mother disappeared. Where she disappeared to is a matter of debate. Either she died, or his father divorced and kicked his ex-wife out, keeping the child for himself. In any case, the certainty is that Richie lives with his father.
At first, the father spent a lot of time with his son, but his enthusiasm lasted only about six months. Then he distanced himself from his son, leaving his upbringing to a nanny, a valet, and tutors. He even sits as far away from the child as possible during mealtimes, deliberately distancing himself.
Richie put the photo albums away and returned to his office. There, he began rummaging through all the drawers and cabinets, looking for his diaries. But he found only a pile of toys and scribbled school notebooks.
The most useful finds turned out to be notebooks with notes from tutors' lectures on economics and etiquette. The boy studied them quite quickly. As he was finishing the notebook with the etiquette lectures, John, after knocking and being asked to enter, popped his head into the office.
- Mr. Richie, it's time to go to dinner.
- Fine.
The boy put his notebooks aside and followed the valet.
The sixth Duke of Westminster was already seated at the dining room table. Richie took his place opposite his father. He was bursting with curiosity. The boy couldn't hold back and asked:
- Dad, can I ask you something?
"Yes, son?" the man put his cutlery aside.