Chapter 41
Father didn’t speak. Jonathan couldn’t say if seconds, minutes, or hours passed as he became painfully aware of the dampness clinging to his collar, the tightness in his clasped hands, and the blood beating too furiously in his veins.
He shifted in his chair, then forced himself to still while every instinct urged him to fill the silence.
“Oh, my boy,” came the words at last, the tone filled with the warmth of a blazing hearth on a cold winter’s night, and a rare smile drew up the corner of Father’s mouth.
“These things happen, and there is no shame in asking for help, for we all require it from time to time. I wouldn’t have this company if not for Silas Byrnes, and I have come close to failure more times than you know. ”
The tightness that had held Jonathan rigid from the moment he crossed the threshold gave way by degrees, first in his shoulders, then in his hands, then somewhere deep beneath his ribs where the worst of his dread had lodged itself for far too long.
His fingers loosened in his lap, and the breath he drew reached places inside him that had atrophied of late.
The kindness of it struck so differently from the judgment Jonathan had braced himself to receive that, for a moment, he could only stare at his father as the words settled over him with unexpected brightness, as though the day were dawning after a long, fitful night.
“And though I wish you had come to me far sooner, I cannot blame you for it,” he added with a heavy sigh. “You have your father’s stubborn disposition. Even with your mother’s tender influence, I fear I am still too apt to soldier on in silence.”
Rising from his seat, Father came around to Jonathan’s side of the desk and sat at his son’s side.
“Do you give me your word that you will not hide from me again? And when troubles arise, will you come to me before they grow dire?” he asked, those bright eyes boring into Jonathan’s.
And though Jonathan felt as though he ought to say something of substance, he found he could only nod in response, for his heart was too full for anything else.
“Good.” Then settling his reading glasses into place, Father readied a pencil and paper as he studied his son, “We will find a way through this.”
***
No. 27 Berkeley Square had known quiet before.
Quiet mornings after late nights. Quiet afternoons when Mama was out, Papa at his office, Lionel occupied elsewhere, and the younger ones at school or lessons.
But those silences always contained hints of life: the muted clink of china from belowstairs, the distant sweep of a broom, the soft tread of maids moving carefully about their duties.
This silence had weight. A presence. It moved through the house like a specter risen from the grave, settling in corridors where servants ought to be working and gathering upon staircases where voices usually drifted from one floor to the next.
Perhaps somewhere the servants still performed their chores, but if they did, it was like mourners in a churchyard, moving quietly so as not to disturb the dead.
A few hours earlier, the house had been all motion and noise. Now the tumult had retreated behind closed doors, leaving only the terrible stillness of hollow hearts and broken spirits. And Nora paced the house, though there was no purpose to it. No destination. Only the need to move.
Afternoon light lay thinly across the stair runner as she moved upward, one hand caressing the banister without feeling the polished wood beneath her palm.
At the upper landing, the corridor stretched before her, familiar and altered all at once.
A shawl lay abandoned upon a side table, and she stared at it for several seconds before the sight lost meaning entirely.
Then her feet carried her onward again.
Noises came from Lionel’s bedchamber. Not voices.
Nothing so clear as that. Merely the dull scrape of something being shifted, followed by a thud too muted to be violent and too deliberate to be accidental.
The door to Lionel’s bedchamber stood open several inches, letting out a weak shaft of lamplight that was doing its best to fight back the gray afternoon.
Through the gap, she spied Lionel crossing from one side to the other, and objects lay about haphazardly: a coat draped across the armchair, drawers opened, piles of underthings upon the bed. Her mind registered each detail separately and failed to make sense of them.
“What do you want, Nora?” he asked, his voice low and hard.
“Nothing,” she whispered as her hand rested against the doorframe.
Lionel gave a short, humorless breath and turned back toward the room as though even looking at her required more patience than he possessed. “That makes a pleasant change.”
Nora remained at the threshold whilst he moved about the room with sharp, purposeful motions. A drawer closed too hard. Something struck against the bed. The whole room possessed too many angles, too much movement.
“I wasn’t the one who built our home on lies,” she whispered, though she straightened as she did so.
“No, you are just the one who has broadcast that fact to the entire world, thus destroying any chance my family has to survive.”
“And what would you have me do?” she demanded, though there was little heat in her words. That required more strength than Nora possessed at present. “Would you turn a blind eye?”
Heaving a heavy sigh, Lionel paused and sank onto the bed.
“No.” He paused and considered that, brushing lint from his knee. “Or I hope not.”
Lionel ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it, and with pleading eyes he asked, “But did you not think what this would do to us? Who will give me a position after this? What skills do I have to provide for my family? What will happen to my wife and children? With the business bankrupt, we have nothing.”
“I struggled with it. I promise I did. But what else could I do? Papa is the villain here, so why are you all determined to despise me for his actions?”
Rubbing at his face, Lionel rose to his feet. “There is a reason they warn people not to kill the messenger. The advice wouldn’t be needed if the impulse didn’t exist.”
Shoulders slumping, he gazed out at the disordered room, and his voice came low and rough.
“I know this is all his doing, but knowing where the fault truly lies does not make the wreckage easier to bear. At present, I am angry with him. Angry with you. Angry with myself. Angry with this house and every gilded inch of it for looking respectable whilst rotting beneath our feet.”
His mouth twisted, but there was no humor in his smile. “So yes, we ought not to blame the messenger. But when faced with penury, I find I have very little strength to do what I ‘ought.’”
Turning away, Lionel reached for a shirt upon the bed and placed it inside a leather portmanteau with more force than the garment deserved.
The motion brought the whole room into focus at last: the open drawers, the garments laid out in uneven piles, the traveling case yawning wide upon the coverlet.
Every scattered piece suddenly arranged itself into a meaning Nora’s mind had refused to see.
Her hand fell from the doorframe. “Are you packing?”
“Many of the servants have already deserted us, and those that remain have no interest in seeing to an extra task, so I am doing what I must,” he answered in a monotone.
“No…” Nora shifted forward, though she could not venture deeper into the room for there was nowhere to step. “Are you leaving us?”
“Leaving the family. Leaving the city. Leaving the country,” said Lionel without looking at her.
The simplicity of the answer struck strangely after all the shouting that had come before it, and she gaped at the evidence of that decision scattered around her.
“You are?”
“Yes.” He shut one drawer with a sharp push and crossed toward another. “I spoke with Camilla’s parents, and they have contacts in America that can help me find work there, somewhere far enough from the Eden name that my children might have a chance at a life free from this disaster.”
“America?” Nora whispered. “Lionel, you cannot mean—”
“I mean exactly that.” His hands paused against the edge of the open drawer, but his shoulders remained rigid.
“There is nothing for us here now. No position. No prospects. Do you think there is anyone in this country that will even consider giving me employment? The moment they hear my name, every door will slam shut.”
The words opened something beneath Nora’s feet.
She stared at the hard line of Lionel’s shoulders and the ruthless efficiency with which he placed one article after another into the case, and felt the fragments of her family slipping from her grasp.
Papa had been taken. Mama had retreated into grief.
Gretchen could scarcely look at her. And now Lionel was taking himself and his children to live across the sea.
“You are abandoning us,” she breathed.
Lionel stopped with a folded waistcoat in his hand. For a moment, he did not turn, but when he did, his expression was so devoid of feeling and sentiment that Nora wished he’d remained facing away.
“I am saving what I can,” he said, tossing the waistcoat in the case with the rest. “Camilla and the children are my family, Nora. Whatever else is left of this one will tear itself apart at the seams, and every gossip in London is sitting with knife and fork at the ready to feast on what spills out. If you possess any sense at all, you will stop moping and begin thinking about what is best for yourself.”
Nora’s throat worked uselessly as he crossed to her, forcing her to retreat to the corridor before he shut the door. Lionel’s words settled in the air like smoke, and something far more painful than Gretchen’s slap spread through her.
And the house was so terribly silent.
Nora’s hand drifted to her pocket without thought, her fingers closing around the small bit of paper tucked there. She drew the card out carefully, staring first at the printed name on one side before turning it over to the message written upon the back in Mr. Hatcher’s precise hand.
“I am proud of you.”
Those five small words blurred, and Nora pressed the card against her chest, bending around it as though it were the only solid thing left in the world.
Closing her eyes, she braced herself as the ache deepened, and all but the smallest part of her yearned to go to Mr. Hatcher.
To be held by the one person who looked at her actions and saw courage rather than betrayal.
To not be alone as the remnants of her family cut her from their hearts.
But that tiny, reasonable part of her knew that today was but the beginning of the pain to come, and Nora would not ruin Mr. Hatcher simply because she was too weak to stand on her own.