Chapter 25 #2
After calling a last brief thank you and farewell to Sir Charles and Lady Bath, he set off for home as fast as was realistic after such a generous meal.
* * *
“Where have you been?” Cecily demanded furiously, rushing out of the drawing room to catch him in the hallway as soon as he came bounding up the front steps.
“Where’s Lilian?” he answered, too focused on his main objective to properly hear her question. “I came back to hear her recital. Is she still in the music room?”
“It’s almost four o’clock, Nathaniel!” she shouted at him. “We waited for you until half past three. You said you would be here. I promised Lilian you would be here, and you disappointed us again!”
Her words struck him hard. He might have protested, but there was no arguing against this.
“I went to see some neighbors about two new white ponies for Lilian,” he tried to explain himself, conscious that he was still slightly befuddled with noontime sherry and wine. “Sir Charles and Lady Bath made me stay for luncheon, and well… I lost track of time.”
“Have you been drinking?” Cecily asked, sniffing the air and then stepping back with a disgusted expression. “You have been out drinking, haven’t you? Is that what was more important than your daughter’s recital?”
“I’ve just told you where I’ve been,” Nathaniel returned with great frustration. “I wanted to get the ponies for Lilian. I thought she’d like them and that she would be happy with the surprise.”
“Lilian doesn’t need more ponies,” Cecily snapped. “She needs her father!”
Her fine brown eyes were blazing, and her cheeks were pink.
To his surprise and chagrin, Nathaniel felt in the wrong, although he could not quite understand how any of it had happened.
He cursed himself for accepting so much drink that afternoon.
He did not normally drink to excess, and he disliked the way drunkenness blunted the mind, especially at this moment.
“Where is Lilian now?” he asked.
“She ran upstairs to her room and won’t come out. If there was still a key in the lock, she would have locked the door. I’ve been upstairs, but she says she doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”
“Should I leave her, then?”
Cecily exploded a second time. “Of course, you shouldn’t! You ought to go upstairs this minute and apologize. Perhaps she will forgive you, and perhaps she won’t.”
Nathaniel jogged up the stairs to the nursery wing, his stomach slightly sick but his heart sicker. Why did things keep going wrong?
“Lilian, it’s me,” he announced, knocking on his daughter’s door.
“Go away! I hate you!” her little voice shouted back at him, returning to an old song, familiar and unwelcome.
“Please, Lilian. Can I come in?”
“I hate you!”
Tempted to give up, he slowly opened the door and stepped inside. Lilian lay face down on her bed, refusing to even turn around or look at him.
“Lilian, I want to apologize. I really do want to hear you play your piece on the pianoforte, and I’m sorry I’m back so late. You see, I went to see our neighbor, Sir Charles Bath, about some white ponies—”
“Do you know what is worse? I knew you wouldn’t come,” Lilian interrupted him in a muffled voice, half of her face pressed into the bedclothes. “Cecily said you would come, and I waited and waited, but you didn’t.”
“I forgot the time while I was with Sir Charles and Lady Bath.”
“You always forget about me,” she said. “You always leave me. I thought it was going to be different now that you married Cecily, but it’s not. You’re just the same.”
Nathaniel sucked in a sharp breath, feeling like his heart would break. But then he realized his daughter was crying softly into the bedclothes.
“I thought you would like the white ponies, Lilian. There are two of them—a matching pair of Shetlands. Sir Charles will deliver them whenever you like.”
“I don’t care about the ponies, and I don’t want to listen to you!” she yelled at him and then stuck her fingers in her ears to shut him out.
Looking at her lying there like that suddenly took him back nearly thirty years. He pictured himself on a bed in another room at Greyhaven Park. It was his seventh birthday, and he had been expecting his parents to return all week. Instead, they had sent a note, which a servant had handed to him.
Nathaniel could not remember the exact words, but the message itself had been clear: his parents were having too much fun in London to return to Greyhaven Park for a while, and he was supposed to use the enclosed money to buy himself a new dog.
A postscript told him to ask Cook to bake him a cake on his birthday, but it mentioned the wrong day.
He had torn the letter into a hundred pieces and thrown it into the grate before throwing himself down on the bed and crying his eyes out, as Lilian had clearly done that afternoon.
After that, he had never expected anything from his parents again, and within a year or two, he barely thought of them at all.
Or perhaps only as much as they thought about him.
Tentatively, he touched Lilian’s back, but rather than being comforted, the child shrieked, jumped up, and ran from him, her fingers still stuck in her ears.
“Go away, go away, go away!” she yelled.
Seeing that there was nothing more to do for now, Nathaniel reluctantly retreated and found Cecily waiting for him on a nearby landing. He couldn’t bear the expectant expression on her face or the thought that she was bound to be disappointed in whatever he said next.
“How is Lilian?” she asked immediately. “Did she speak to you?”
He shook his head and saw the beginnings of the disappointment and disapproval he had anticipated.
“You can’t fix everything, Cecily,” he stated preemptively, his tongue still loosened by wine. “Some things simply are as they are. Maybe I’m just not cut out to be a good father or a good husband. All I do is keep failing everyone.”
The hurt on her face troubled him almost as much as Lilian’s attitude. He hated to see his wife and daughter look at him like that. It was not what he wanted.
But what did he want?
He wanted smiles, welcome, and something else he couldn’t quite name.
The hurt on Cecily’s face lasted for a few moments before her expression hardened. “Well then, we both know where we are, don’t we?” she said with stiff politeness, before walking away down the stairs without a backward glance.