Excerpt: The Exiles Club

On the walls of one of the several sweeping staircases around which the house was constructed hung the standard family portraits. They dated back to the earliest generations of Montforts, each painstakingly labeled with the subject’s full name and relevant dates, and it is a good indication of the familial personality to note that even with this data thus prominently on display, it had been decades since any Montfort had bothered to use the numbers thus conveniently provided to estimate the age of the house or the precise lineage of the family. To be born a Montfort was, then, not only to inherit the perpetual security of a place where one was unconditionally and always accepted. It was also, at least in those generations then living, to inherit a certain intellectual malaise. It was not quite a laziness, for several of the family -- as will be seen -- were employed in pursuits of an academic or creative nature. Nor was it an inability to do the calculations required, for the Montforts were rightly known to be considerably brighter than average. It was, if anything, a complacency. Montforts were as Montforts did. And what Montforts did in the event of a death was a ritual predating all collective recollection, whose guiding principles were long since lost to history but whose specific details were honored as unquestioningly and automatically as the selection of the flowers (whatever was in season in the gardens at Montfort House), the music (the hymn of the day, the Montfort aria, and a short piece of classical music chosen by the officiant), the coffin (dark walnut embossed with the Montfort crest) and, of course, the burial site in the Montfort family cemetery at the base of the hill on the northern side of the estate....