Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
“My lady. A letter has arrived for you. Urgent. The rider waited.”
Natalie stood in the doorway of Elinor’s chamber, her face drawn. The letter in her hand bore her father’s seal, but the handwriting on the front was not his. It belonged to Mr. Thorne, his steward at Morland Hall, and that alone was enough to make Elinor’s stomach drop before she broke the wax.
She read it standing. Her fingers whitened on the paper.
My lady, I write with great reluctance to inform you that your father, Lord Morland, has taken a serious turn. The physician has attended him twice this week. His Lordship asked me not to trouble you, but I feel it is my duty to disregard that instruction. Please come at your earliest opportunity.
Elinor read it again. The words did not change.
She set the letter on her desk and began packing before her hands had stopped shaking.
Natalie helped without being asked, pulling a traveling case from beneath the wardrobe, folding chemises and stockings while Elinor gathered what mattered: her father’s last letter, the celestial atlas, a change of dress.
She did not think about what she was leaving behind. She did not think about Lucien, or the terrace, or the conversation they had agreed to have before they ran out of time.
She thought about her father’s face the last time she had seen him, thinner than she remembered, his smile still reaching his eyes when he spoke about the night sky.
Newton watched the packing from the bed with his ears pricked, his tail flicking. When Elinor lifted him into the traveling case she used for his visits to Lyra House, he went without protest, as though he understood.
She found Rebecca in the morning room, seated with Belinda over a tray of correspondence.
“My father is ill.” Elinor’s voice came out flat and strange. “I am leaving for Morland Hall within the hour.”
Rebecca looked up. Her expression moved through several calculations before settling on concern, the brand she assembled when the situation required it.
“Your father has been ill for some time, Elinor,” she said. “More importantly, the Season is not yet concluded, and I cannot have the entire household disrupted. Belinda and Joanna have engagements this week.”
“I’m not asking the household to come. I’m telling you that I am going.”
Rebecca’s face shifted at the tone. Elinor had never spoken to her like this, direct and unyielding, without the usual careful softening. Belinda’s eyes widened over the rim of her teacup.
“You will go alone?” Rebecca asked.
“With Natalie. And Newton.”
“The cat.” Rebecca’s mouth pressed thin. “Very well. I will send word to His Grace that you have been called away on family matters and will return within the week.”
“Do not.” The words left Elinor’s mouth before she could weigh them. “Do not send word to anyone. I will write when I know more.”
She did not wait for a response. She turned, walked through the hallway she had crept down on so many nights, passed the staircase she had descended in the dark to meet Lucien’s carriage, and climbed into the coach that Natalie had arranged.
Newton settled on her lap. His weight was warm and grounding, and Elinor pressed her hand to his back and watched London fall away through the window.
She held the steward’s letter in one hand and Newton’s fur in the other and stared at the passing countryside and told herself that her father was strong, that he had survived this long, that she would arrive and find him sitting up in bed with a book on his lap and a gentle scolding for her worry.
She told herself that for the entire six-hour journey, and by the time the carriage turned onto the long drive toward Morland Hall, she had almost believed it.
“My girl! Oh, I told Mr. Thorne not to send word. I shall have a word with him promptly.” Her father’s voice was a thread.
It reached her from the bed as she pushed open the door to his chamber, and the sound of it cracked something in her chest that she had been holding together since London.
William Caverleigh, the Marquess of Morland, lay propped against pillows that seemed to swallow him.
He had lost weight since her last visit.
His face was gaunt, his color poor, the veins at his temples visible in a way they had not been before.
His hands rested on the coverlet, and she could see the tremor in them even from the doorway.
But his eyes … his eyes were the same. Warm and sharp and full of a light that had always made Elinor feel as though she were the most interesting person in any room.
“Papa.” She crossed the room and took his hand.
It was cool in hers. She pressed it between both of her palms and sat on the edge of the bed. The tears she had refused on the journey rose now, hot and sudden, blurring his face.
“Well now. None of that,” he said. His fingers curled around hers with a strength that surprised her. “Let me look at you, my dear.”
She blinked the tears back and let him look. He studied her face the way he had always studied her, both quietly and with subtle awe.
“You look different,” he said. “Something has changed.”
“Nothing has changed, Papa.”
“Liar.” He smiled, and the smile cost him. She saw the effort it took, and the way his breath shortened. “Do you truly think you can fool your old man? I don’t think so. Now, how about you tell me about this duke you’re to marry?”
Elinor opened her mouth to deny it and found that she could not. Not here, not to him. He had always seen through her like the way telescopes saw through the darkness by finding light where others saw nothing.
“We can talk about that later,” she said. “Right now, I am going to sit with you, and you are going to rest.”
“What an authoritative child.”
“I learned from you.”
He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough that shook his frame. Elinor held his hand through it, her own grip tightening, willing her steadiness into him. When the coughing passed, he settled back against the pillows and closed his eyes.
Newton, who had padded into the room behind her, leaped onto the bed with the careful precision of a cat who understood that this human required gentleness.
He circled once, twice, and settled against her father’s hip, his body warm, his purring filling the room with a low, constant sound that seemed to ease the tightness in her father’s breathing.
“Ah, Newton.” Her father’s hand moved to the cat’s back, his fingers resting in the fur. “You brought the better company.”
“He would not have forgiven me had I left him behind.”
Her father’s eyes opened to slits. “Does Rebecca still despise him?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Good. That means he has better judgment than I did when I married her.”
Elinor pressed her lips together to keep the laugh from turning into a sob.
She adjusted his pillows, smoothed the coverlet, and fetched the book that sat on his bedside table.
A Guide to the Celestial Sphere, the same volume he had read to her as a child, its spine cracked, its pages soft with use.
“Shall I read to you?” she asked.
“From the beginning,” he murmured. “Start from the beginning. I want to hear it in your voice.”
She opened the book to the first page, and she read about the fixed stars and the wandering planets and the ancient observers who had looked up at the night sky and seen patterns that told them stories, and her father listened with his eyes closed and Newton purring at his side.
The afternoon light moved across the room, and Elinor read until her voice grew hoarse, and then she sat in silence, holding her father’s hand while he slept.
She watched the rise and fall of his chest and counted his breaths the way she had counted Lucien’s in a small apartment above a tailor’s shop, measuring the distance between each one, willing the intervals to stay even.
She had left London without sending word to anyone. She had not written to Lucien, had not explained, had not told him what his words on the terrace had done for her, or that she had walked away not because she did not care but because she cared too much to stay.
She had simply gone, because her father needed her, and nothing else could come before that. Not the Season, not the ruse, not even the man she loved.
Her father stirred. His fingers tightened around hers.
“Stay,” he whispered.
“I’m not going anywhere, Papa.” She brought his hand to her cheek. “I’m right here.”
Newton purred. The light dimmed. Outside the window, the countryside stretched green and quiet and impossibly far from London, and Elinor held her father’s hand and stayed.