The Gentleman's Guide To Color and Credence

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a/n: Hey! I think this is the first TGGTVAV fanfic on this website, I really hope you like this!

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"We're not courting trouble, flirting with it at most" - Henry "Monty" Montague, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

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When Chasity told me that she was to be married months ago, I laughed. I laughed because out of every person secluded to the local estates I was surrounded by since birth, she was the last person I'd ever expect to be wed. She didn't choose to, her eyes were red when she had barged into the garden that day. She wept all her pain onto me, I couldn't help but cry with her. Ever since then, I had been falling for an engaged girl who wasn't able to live freely, let alone be mine. I was to be best man at her wedding, and to never see her again afterward. It's not like the world around us ever catered to our every need, let alone want. I'd learnt that when I was young, when caught reading a letter on my father's desk.

That's when I learned about my brother, Henry.

My brother was someone whose name I'd never seemed to get out of my head. His name, the same name my father yelled out when hitting me for misbehaving. The same boy who's rib blood was dried on the floor. The same boy who had affaires with Mr. Peele when they were young. The same brother who hadn't been present in my life but it was as if he were there anyway. The brother I was taught to hate. The brother who Chasity and I had tried to evaluate months after her inevitable engagement to a man she hadn't even met before the plan was made.

"I believe your father had to oppose something extremely harsh for him to break your brother's rib."

The sun was shining above us in the garden, something very uncommon in Cheshire. I was sitting on the grass, picking it as my hands had never wanted to stay still. Chasity sat on the bench, her one leg hanging off, the other atop the bench with her legs spread apart. Many would say this was unladylike, especially for a bride-to-be, but to me, it was the same girl I had tried to kiss when I was seven and had been forbidden to talk about it ever since.

"Cracked, if he had broken it my father would have mentioned an unforgivable birth defect. Like his height." I contradicted. She had turned her head.

"I think it's irrational that he had two bedrooms as well. Your father is one for dramatizing things." She commented.

The locked bedroom across from my brother's, told that it was another to fulfill his greediness. When I heard that I knew it was a lie, and Chasity rolled her eyes so only the white could be seen when I had told her weeks ago. The mysteries of figuring out who my brother was always something found in fiction novels we had read as children, but a consulting detective was nothing without his doctor when his father broke his wrist.

"My mother had been told to not talk about that room in front of me. What if there's a person locked in there for imprisonment?" I asked, Chasity, with her dark eyes, stared at me as if I were really serious.

"You are indeed joking right? You'd have found out about that already. How could they have hid that so well when your father told you five different reasons for the blood stain on the floor before telling you the real reason?" Chasity questioned rationally. I shrugged, looking up from the grass to her pale complexion. The both of us were in the shadow of the tree that towered above us, neither liking the burning sun of the spring all too much.

"Maybe my brother is in there, forced to be starved for weeks at a time and bagged eyes for his sins?" I asked, she scoffed.

"You father believes a sin is you coming into his office stuttering and not him hitting you for it. If there were even a rumor about that, you and I wouldn't be sitting here right now." She reasoned. She wasn't wrong.