Chapter 15 #3
No matter how ill-tempered he was, Mr. Williams didn’t seem prepared to contradict this openly. His response was a vague sound that could have been an assent or a harrumph.
Silas should have held his tongue, but he was feeling petty this evening. “I beg your pardon, sir, but what did you say? I think you were mumbling.”
Hannah shot him a furious look, which he returned with equal vigor. Why was she acting this way? Why didn’t she ever see fit to tell him her plans before he was in the middle of them?
The answer was obvious.
Because you aren’t her equal; you’re hired help. Silas had been so fixated on impressing Hannah that he’d forgotten what he was here for. Had he thought that learning to dance would turn him into a real suitor?
Mr. Williams opened his mouth—no doubt intending to issue a stern rebuke—but Eli Williams cut in before he could accomplish it.
“Has anyone been to Kew Gardens this season? I’ve heard the magnolias are in bloom.” Silas was too irritable by this point to be able to appreciate the attempt to help. It was only Williams doing what he always did, rescuing Silas from his own missteps.
Hannah, for her part, didn’t seem to appreciate the change in subject any more than he had. “What about after the wedding?” she persisted. Her gaze traveled between her parents, inviting her mother into the conversation. “What was it like in the first few years you were married?”
What on earth is she doing? The questions seemed designed to prompt some tender sentiments, but anyone could see that Mr. and Mrs. Williams had none.
Did Hannah think that she could paper over the tension in the room with a few forced memories?
It would have been better to stick to a neutral subject, as her brother had tried to do.
Mrs. Williams seemed to feel more obligation to keep up appearances than her husband, for she was the first to reply.
“I was very busy in those days learning to manage a household, just as you will be soon.” Her strained smile encompassed both Hannah and Silas.
The poor woman had no idea how wrong she was.
“Your grandmother Williams was still alive then and lived with us, of course.”
“Now she knew how to run a house,” Mr. Williams smiled wistfully. “We had the most wonderful cook when my mother was alive. What was her name, now? Ah, I can’t remember. She was a great, tall woman. Made the best fish soup you’d ever tasted.”
He finished off the last spoonful of his own fish soup here, and motioned impatiently for the maid to take it away.
Even when he was thinking of something he liked, he managed to slip in an insult.
Silas might almost have believed it to be unconscious, except that his barbs hit their targets too perfectly for it to be an accident.
His own father had been the same. There was always some small complaint to be tossed out, whether it was aimed at his children or his wife.
Each one was too insignificant on its own to warrant comment, but together they added up to an unending deluge.
I think I might hate this man nearly as much as his wife does.
“My mother passed in ’17, and our cook the next winter”—Mr. Williams continued reminiscing as he cut into a lamb chop—“and we never had a cook like her again. Who was that first one you hired, Mrs. Williams? That skinny woman from the next village. Miss Young, was it? Didn’t last a month.
I felt ill after every meal. I can’t imagine what you were thinking. ”
Silas clenched his hand around his fork until the metal bit into his palm. The desire to punch this man in the nose had grown overpowering.
“She was all I could find on such short notice.” As she replied to her husband in a tired voice, Mrs. Williams was a far cry from the imposing matriarch who’d harped on Silas’s manners these past few days. She seemed to have shrunk by half. “You will recall poor Cook passed very suddenly.”
Mr. Williams frowned, as if to cast doubt on this explanation. “None of the cooks you hired after were much good. It takes a firm hand to run a house properly, I’ve always said. You simply didn’t have the skill for it.”
This provoked a very awkward, very tense silence.
“Sir.” Eli Williams didn’t look his father in the eye as he spoke, his discomfort plain. “Surely you don’t mean that.” His voice was calm, but carried a nervous edge—half-warning, half-pleading.
“Why don’t we all go into the parlor before the dessert?
” Jane suggested briskly, rising to her feet so that the gentlemen, her father-in-law included, would all be forced to rise as well.
Nearly half their supper was still on their plates, but she must have judged the present mood to be more urgent than their meal.
“I have a lovely new game I’ve been meaning to show you all. ”
“Not more gambling.” Mr. Williams groaned. “You know how I feel about all that. I’ll not have my Hannah placing any wagers, even if you two have taken up with that sort of thing.”
At the words you two, he tipped his chin toward Jane, not Eli.
She bristled at his tone. “I was only going to suggest a parlor game, Mr. Williams.”
“Oh.” This mollified him somewhat. “Well, how was I to know?”
“You might try listening.” Silas hadn’t intended to speak. The voice that came out of him was sharp as a whip crack, so sudden that he almost thought the words came from someone else. “Maybe if you stopped criticizing everyone at this table, they’d be able to get a few words in.”
It was the first time in Silas’s life that he’d ever heard a collective gasp.
No one was quite so shocked as Mr. Williams, who gawked at Silas for a very satisfying four seconds, his face turning purple before he found the wherewithal to respond. “How dare you speak to me that way! You are a guest in this house.”
“So are you,” Silas returned. “Though you don’t seem overly concerned by that.”
Mr. Williams hesitated for only a second before he sputtered, “You came here seeking my blessing.” Of course he would scramble for a way to keep the upper hand.
Men like him always needed some authority from which to punish others.
But it didn’t intimidate Silas the way it had when he was a small child, struggling to find the right words to prove himself to his father, too young to realize there were no right words.
All he saw when he looked at Mr. Williams was a puffed-up old fraud.
Silas wrapped his tongue around each syllable with deliberate care. “That was before I realized you were an ass.”
It was the second time in his life that he heard a collective gasp. Probably a sign he should stop talking, but Silas was too furious to heed it. The man badly needed a dressing-down. There was probably no one else in his life who would dare to speak the truth to his face.
“Mr. Corbyn!” It was Hannah’s voice that cut through the others to reach his ear. “You will apologize to my father.”
Her eyes, like her voice, were full of awful emotions: anger, shock, hurt, betrayal. She looked at Silas as though he’d hurled the insult at a different sort of man entirely—one who’d done nothing to deserve his scorn.
She looked as though he’d hurled the insult at her.
Silas ground his teeth, guilt warring with righteous fury. Some part of him had assumed that Hannah would be on his side, as she always was, no matter how unlikely.
He should have known better.
“I will not.”
“You have no right to speak to him that way!”
“He earned every word of it.” Had they been sitting at the same table? Couldn’t she see what was right in front of her?
“Get out,” Mr. Williams snarled. “I’ve never met a more ungrateful wretch in my life. You’ll never marry my Hannah. You don’t deserve her.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” Silas snapped. “But people rarely get what they deserve in life. I daresay your wife doesn’t deserve to be trapped with you.”
Mr. Williams lurched toward him, fists half-raised, but his son got between them first.
“I’ll see you out,” Eli said, his firm grip on Silas’s elbow leaving no room for dispute.
Silas went along willingly, ushered from the room before the row could turn dangerous. Though his heart was hammering, he felt an odd sense of calm. As if all his anger had frozen the minute Hannah demanded an apology.
This couldn’t have been what she’d imagined when she’d asked him to behave so badly that she would have to release him.
Is it done, then? Have I broken our engagement?
Mr. Williams would never consent to the match now. And to think, Silas had been reluctant to sabotage their engagement. In the end, his temper had done the job for him.
Eli waited until they were in the foyer before he spoke. When he did, his voice was strained, but calmer than Silas had expected.
“I know my father isn’t an easy man to get along with,” he began. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
He had a gift for understatement, but never mind. At least he understood what had prompted Silas’s outburst.
Unlike Hannah.
“I’m sorry I ruined the evening.” The apology that had been impossible earlier found its way to Silas’s lips five minutes too late.
Eli released a frustrated sigh. “You didn’t ruin it. Or at least, not alone. But why couldn’t you have just held your tongue? For Hannah’s sake, if not for his.”
It was a question Silas must have asked himself a hundred times since the navy threw him out.
Why couldn’t he just look the other way?
Why did he have to speak up when it only brought him ruin, and probably made no lasting difference to anything?
He’d saved one girl from O’Brien, but his former captain walked free, able to hurt whomever he wanted.
He’d set down Mr. Williams, but the man would likely keep on bullying his family for the rest of his life.
It made no difference what Silas did.
“Let me ask you something. Has holding your tongue made things easier for all the people near your father, or only for him?”