Chapter 19 #2
Lady Winthrop’s silence answered the question before her words could. “He has not spoken since we brought him home,” she added. “But, Anna, don’t—”
Anna was already gone by the time her name was spoken.
Rosalie, who had been mostly silent up until then, gathered her mother’s hands in her own and led her into the drawing room.
She had no idea what to say or feel. She had consoled so many friends through hardship and losses.
But it was different when it was her own mother, and her own father whose life lay on the line.
“Now you’re crying too,” Lady Winthrop said, caressing Rosalie’s cheek with the back of her hand. “You need not stay with me. Go with Anna. Go and see your father; you must see him eventually, Rosie.”
Nodding, Rosalie left and went up the stairs. The door to her father’s room was open, and soft but steady voices emanated from inside. She paused in the doorway and watched. The physician bent over the bed and talked with Anna, who knelt at her father’s bedside, clutching his hand.
When she could bring herself to look at her father, Rosalie gasped.
He lay still against the pillows. His color was waxen where it should have been ruddy, his breathing shallow and audible, filling the whole small room.
His stomach, rounded from years of over-indulgence, rose slowly beneath the covers.
His eyes were closed, and he did not open them when Rosalie entered and spoke to him.
“Oh, Father...” She reached for his arm and felt Anna lean her head against her hip. “We are here. Oh, please... Oh...”
She wanted to wish him to wake up but held back. Doctor Brown worked on the other side of the bed, sighing as he mixed something into a glass of water, and the mixture turned cloudy.
“He is doing better than when he arrived,” he said softly, sending a sad smile at Rosalie over her father.
“Is that not a sign that death is fast approaching?” Anna said, rising to her feet. Now that Rosalie could see her face, she could tell that Anna had finally allowed herself to cry. “If he wakes up too soon and seems too healthy, then he will die. I know it. It’s better if he stays like this.”
A shot of pain went through Rosalie. “Why do you talk like that?” she asked, frowning. “It’s not right. Father can hear you.”
“Father would not want me to lie to you.”
“You don’t know anything,” Rosalie cried, tired of her sister’s confidence in everything, especially the bad things.
Father will die. Mother will be broken. It is going to rain.
You cannot make the duke love you without my help.
“You always think you know exactly what will happen, but you don’t.
You are not as clever as you think you are, and you are not nearly as kind as you ought to be. ”
She felt Anna’s hand go out to grab her arm, but Rosalie stormed out of the room.
Racing to her bedchamber, she slammed the door shut and threw herself on the bed, grabbing a pillow to muffle the sound of her crying, as her sobs wracked her body.
Her chest ached as she prayed for her father, for everything to go back to the way it had been.
Rosalie did not know how long she had been there, alone, when someone knocked on the door and entered without waiting for permission.
“Rosalie, oh dear, oh no...” It was Emily, still dressed in her coat and hat. She flung her arms around Rosalie and kissed her. “I came the moment I heard. My mother is downstairs with Lady Winthrop... I am so sorry.”
“What if he does not recover?”
“You cannot think that way.”
Rosalie pulled back far enough to look at her friend. “If he dies... everything changes. Mother will have no one. I will have no one, and I will have wasted the last weeks of his life playing at courtships and believing that things might finally be possible between me and—”
She stopped herself, horror rising in her chest. Her preemptive grief was not just for her father.
It was for the life she had never lived.
The family of her own she still did not have.
The security of a husband. The love of a man she could never have.
The knowledge that her father could pass in peace because both his daughters were settled.
Rosalie thought about Mr. Sinclair, of the games she had been playing with him while chasing Gabriel at his house party, making a fool of herself in more ways than one.
“I need to see Mr. Sinclair,” she whispered, untangling herself from Emily’s embrace. “I need to tell him... He must know...”
“Stop.” Emily’s expression sharpened with concern.
“Rosalie, you are not thinking clearly. Grief is not the moment to go making decisions you cannot take back. Whatever it is you feel you must say to him, it will still be true tomorrow, or the day after, once you have slept, and once we know more about your father’s condition. Do not forget the duke—”
Rosalie stood and wiped her face with the back of her hands. “I must forget him. I have waited and waited, and now it may be too late. Do you not see?” She gestured at the door. “Time will not stop for any of us, least of all for women who do not seize their lives in their hands.”
Emily shook her head. Around her neck was the string of diamonds she had received after her engagement. “Promise me you will wait a few days before doing anything rash. Promise me, Rosalie.”
Maybe Emily had been fortunate. She had lived a love like in the stories and won. But it would not be like that for Rosalie. Time was running out for stories and true love, and promises that could be made and kept.