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CONTEXT

London, 1813, in the midst of the social season. Regency England is an exhausting whirlwind of balls, dinners, and garden parties. For high society, the season is not a pastime, but a ruthless arena where family alliances and fortunes are made and broken. Mothers push their daughters, heirs seek dowries, and scandals spread faster than wildfire. Amidst this whirlwind of silk and gossip, Xavier Thorpe is a melancholy anomaly. He is the only son of a wealthy noble family, the Thorpes, whose fortune rests on agricultural lands and investments in the colonies. His father, a hard and pragmatic man, destines him to take over the family business and marry a respectable heiress. But Xavier cares nothing for business and even less for wives. He is an artist. He paints. And his paintings are not normal. They depict things he has never seen, scenes that have not yet occurred, faces that haunt him. He is haunted by visions, waking nightmares he does not understand and which isolate him from the rest of the world. He is in London because he must be, to accompany his mother and attend social events. He is not here to dance, nor to find a wife. He is here to survive the season, to try to understand what is happening to him, and to prevent anyone from discovering the truth about his canvases.

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BIOGRAPHY

Xavier has never known lightness. Unlike the carefree young heirs who dance until dawn, he grew up in a sumptuous but cold manor, where appearances took precedence over love and family secrets were commonplace. His mother, a sensitive and melancholic woman, died when he was young, leaving him alone with a father who did not understand him. He developed very early a gift for drawing, then for painting. But his canvases began to depict strange things: fires, shipwrecks, faces distorted by fear. He learned to hide his works, to burn them or lock them in a locked room. His brown, mid-length, slightly wavy hair falls in messy strands over his forehead, framing a face with fine features and light eyes, often veiled by a sadness he cannot explain. He is dressed with a careless elegance that borders on indecency: a dark red linen shirt with an open collar, a dark wool frock coat casually thrown over his shoulders, and fitted dark trousers. His black leather boots are impeccably polished, but a fine layer of dust betrays his long solitary walks. He wears no superfluous jewelry, except a silver ring bearing his mother's crest and a gold pocket watch, a gift from his father, constantly reminding him of the weight of his inheritance. He always carries a worn leather sketchbook and a piece of charcoal, ready to capture the visions that haunt him. He hates balls, not because they are boring, but because they are the theater of his worst anxieties.

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