He wondered if she would ever forgive him for that. He wondered whether she would ever come back home.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Celine sat in her father’s morning room, watching a pair of sparrows fight over the cracked edge of the sundial, neither of them winning, both of them too stubborn to quit.
She had not set foot beyond this room all morning. It was easier to sit in her old wingback, embroidery pooled in her lap, and let the hours pass in silence.
The creak of the door was all the warning she got before her father entered.
Edmund Huntington wore the same battered morning coat and lopsided cravat he had favored since Celine’s infancy. The years had stolen most of the color from his hair, but not from his eyes, which surveyed her now with a precision that missed nothing and forgave little.
He did not bother with the usual pleasantries. “My dear, would you like to explain why the butler has had to refuse entry to the Duke of Wylds four times in as many days?”
Celine kept her gaze on the garden. “I suppose he is persistent,” she said, looping her thread through a stem of satin-stitched yarrow.
Her father crossed the carpet, tugged at the edge of his spectacles, and sat in the high-back chair opposite hers. “Persistence is one thing. Standing in the rain for an hour and a half, arguing with the footman about whether or not the Duchess wishes to be disturbed, is quite another.”
She braced her thumb against the embroidery hoop, careful not to let the linen quiver. “I have nothing to say to him.”
Her father made a show of considering this, his lips pressed into a thin line. “It’s unusual for a newlywed to decamp to her father’s house before the ink on the marriage license has dried.” He squinted, as if the right angle might reveal her secret. “Is there a particular reason you’ve chosen to ignore your husband’s requests to see you?”
She jabbed the needle through the fabric. “I doubt he wants anything more than to congratulate himself on his cleverness.”
Her father’s brow rose. “You suspect a trick, then.”
“I know a trick when I see one.”
He sat back, folding his hands over his waistcoat. “Celine, your mother and I had our share of quarrels. You recall, I’m sure.”
She did recall—the way her mother’s voice could cut through stone, the weeks of glacial silence, the sudden thaws that came in the form of rare, impromptu picnics in the rain.
She remembered her father’s hollow-eyed retreat to his books, his desperate, fumbling apologies delivered in the language of ancient philosophers. She’d learned to read Greek not from tutors, but from the margin notes he’d scribbled in every volume.
“Of course I remember,” she said.
He steepled his fingers. “What you may not remember is that we never went a day without talking to one another. Even at our lowest, we never gave up on the conversation.” His voice softened, thickening at the edges. “A marriage can survive almost anything, Celine, except silence.”
She stared at the garden, the sparrows now circling each other in a sullen, feathery orbit.
“I’m not interested in salvaging what isn’t there,” she said, the words spilling out like acid.
Her father leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You were always the cleverest girl in the house, but cleverness can be ashield as well as a sword.” He let the words sink in, searching her face for signs of surrender.
She refused to give him the satisfaction. “And what would you advise, Father? That I sit across from him at dinner and pretend nothing has happened? That I smile and nod and let him continue his little war with his dead father’s memory, using me as his proxy?”
His mouth opened as if to object, but he closed it with a click. He shifted in his chair, fidgeted with his watch chain—a sure sign of distress.
“I am only saying that the longer you go without speaking, the harder it becomes to start again,” he said, staring at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger. “Your mother was the most infuriating, glorious woman I’ve ever known, but even she understood the value of a well-timed word.”
Celine’s fingers tangled in the embroidery floss, her own words locked behind the ice around her heart.
Her father blinked rapidly, the old pain flaring behind his spectacles.
“I miss her every day.” He coughed, then straightened, his voice tightening back to the familiar academic drone. “Which is why I am so determined not to see you follow the same path. You are not your mother, Celine, and Wylds is not me. Whatever his flaws, he clearly cares enough to stand in the rain and risk pneumonia for a five-minute audience.”
She nearly laughed at that. “He’s not in love with me, Father. He’s in love with being contrary. With proving that he can outlast the world.”
Her father snorted. “That may be. But it seems to me that two people who pride themselves on never giving in might spend their lives circling the same patch of ground, too stubborn to move closer, too frightened to break away.”
