Chapter 16 #3
"The same man found the problem," Eleanor said, "and arrived the following morning with the solution already prepared.
" She paused. "I do not say Cornwall wishes us ill, Charles.
I have known him too long to believe that.
But there is a difference between a man who is your friend and a man who holds something over you.
Before yesterday, Cornwall had your business interests and your goodwill.
Now he has considerably more than that. He has the power to release a story that would destroy our daughter, or to bury it.
He has the future of this family in his hands.
" She looked at her husband steadily. "Not as a partner. As a creditor."
The Earl said nothing. She could see, from his face, that he had thought some of this already and had not wanted to finish thinking it.
"I do not know what else I was to do," he said at last. "He offered a way through. I took it."
"I know you did. And perhaps there was no better path — I am not saying there was." Eleanor rose from the table. "But before anything is announced, before a single word appears in any newspaper, I want you to promise me one thing. Nothing is final until you and I have spoken again. Give me that."
He looked at her.
"I give you my word," he said.
"Good." She moved toward the door, then paused. "I am going to sit with Catherine now."
She found her daughter at the window of her room, dry-eyed now, which was somehow worse than tears. Eleanor sat beside her and did not immediately speak. Outside, the street went about its business with complete indifference.
"How are you feeling?" Eleanor asked at last.
"Angry," Catherine said. Simply, without apology.
"Yes." Eleanor was quiet a moment. "I know you went further than you should have.
I am not here to pretend otherwise." She chose her next words with care.
"But I will say this, and I will say it only once.
A man who is truly your father's friend buries a story like this.
He comes quietly, he warns, he helps. He does not arrive with the problem in one hand and his son in the other and call it rescue.
" She paused. "Nothing is decided yet. Your father has given me his word. "
Catherine turned to look at her mother, and Eleanor saw in her face something very old and very tired for a woman of twenty-four.
"Try to sleep," Eleanor said. She pressed Catherine's hand once, briefly. "Things look different in the morning. They are not always better, but they look different."
She kissed her daughter's forehead, and left her, and closed the door gently behind her.
◆◆◆
Catherine sat at her writing desk for a long time before she touched the pen.
The house had gone quiet around her. She could hear, distantly, the sounds of the street below — a cart, a vendor's call, the ordinary machinery of a city that did not know or care what had happened in this room that morning.
She found the indifference almost comforting.
The world outside the window had not changed. Only the dimensions of this room had.
She picked up the pen. She set it down. She picked it up again.
Alexander,
I am writing a letter I cannot send yet. I am aware of the absurdity of this. I am doing it anyway, because there are things I need to say to someone, and you are the only person I know who would understand why they need to be said at all.
My father announced this morning that I am to be married.
Not to you. I will not write his name. You will know it when the time comes, and I am sorry for that — sorry that you will have to read it in a newspaper, or hear it from Anthony, or discover it in some other way that I cannot control from this room.
I want to tell you what I said to my father this morning, or rather what I could not say.
He told me I should be ashamed. And I looked at him — this man I love, this man who taught me to read and think and see the world honestly — and I understood that I am not.
I have turned that word over all morning, looking for the feeling it is supposed to describe, and it is not there.
What is there instead is something I have no clean name for.
Not pride. Not defiance. Something quieter than either.
A certainty that what I chose was worth choosing, even now. Even here.
I know what it has cost. I am not pretending it has cost nothing. My father's face this morning cost me a great deal. But I find I cannot regret the thing itself. Only the consequences of it, and only for the people I love.
I love you. I am writing it here because I have never written it anywhere, and I wanted it to exist somewhere, even on paper I will probably burn before morning.
I love you, and I am locked in my room, and somewhere in this city you do not yet know what they are planning to do, and I cannot reach you to tell you.
I trust that you will find a way. I do not know what it is. I only know that you will look for one, because that is who you are, and because you told me once that you carry the weight of it by not carrying it alone.
I am not alone either. Not really. Even in this room.
I cannot send this letter. But I wrote it, and that is something.
Yours, Catherine
She folded the paper once, and held it in her hands for a moment, and then she crossed to the fireplace and held the corner of it to the flame. She watched it catch and curl and darken, and she did not look away until there was nothing left.
Then she returned to the window, and sat, and watched the street below go about its ordinary business, and waited for whatever came next.