"You wouldn't want outsiders finding out about this either, would you?"
It took Hibbert several seconds to recover from his utter terror and register what Lorne had said.
"Huh?"
Am I being blackmailed?
This "Hero" the newspapers have praised to the skies, Viscount Scott, who just saved my life, is now... actually blackmailing me with this pile of damned letters?!
This...
Hibbert's expression became extraordinarily colorful in an instant: bewilderment, confusion, panic, and a certain aristocratic wariness buried in his subconscious...
But once he calmed down and thought it through, the other man was, in a sense, right.
The Hall Family was embroiled in multiple scandals, facing a relentless barrage of public attacks from the extreme Conservatives every day. Its reputation was already teetering on the brink and could not withstand even the slightest additional bad publicity.
And these letters before him...
At best, they were merely a dull prank, a little eccentricity he had developed as a young nobleman under too much recent pressure. At worst, under that interpretation, he would become a temporary laughingstock in Backlund's social circles, something for ladies and young women to discuss over afternoon tea.
But taken seriously, they constituted malicious threats! And if someone insisted on it, all that occult nonsense in the letters could easily be linked to cults and worship of evil gods.
After all, Backlund had only recently suffered a terrorist attack by the Aurora Order. Society as a whole was exceptionally sensitive to the word "cult."
If, at this critical juncture, another scandal broke about "the Hall Family's eldest son secretly circulating letters containing curses"...
Combined with the recent newspaper rumors accusing Earl Hall of "profiting from a national crisis," the damage... did not bear imagining.
Most importantly, his handwritten letters were now in Viscount Scott's hands. He could