This provoked a very awkward, very tense silence.
“Sir.” Eli Williams didn’t look his father in the eye as he spoke, his discomfort plain. “Surely you don’t mean that.” His voice was calm, but carried a nervous edge—half-warning, half-pleading.
“Why don’t we all go into the parlor before the dessert?” Jane suggested briskly, rising to her feet so that the gentlemen, her father-in-law included, would all be forced to rise as well. Nearly half their supper was still on their plates, but she must have judged the present mood to be more urgent than their meal. “I have a lovely new game I’ve been meaning to show you all.”
“Not more gambling.” Mr. Williams groaned. “You know how I feel about all that. I’ll not have my Hannah placing any wagers, even if you two have taken up with that sort of thing.”
At the wordsyou two, he tipped his chin toward Jane, not Eli.
She bristled at his tone. “I was only going to suggest aparlorgame, Mr. Williams.”
“Oh.” This mollified him somewhat. “Well, how was I to know?”
“You might try listening.” Silas hadn’t intended to speak. The voice that came out of him was sharp as a whip crack, so sudden that he almost thought the words came from someone else. “Maybe if you stopped criticizing everyone at this table, they’d be able to get a few words in.”
It was the first time in Silas’s life that he’d ever heard a collective gasp.
No one was quite so shocked as Mr. Williams, who gawked atSilas for a very satisfying four seconds, his face turning purple before he found the wherewithal to respond. “How dare you speak to me that way! You are a guest in this house.”
“So are you,” Silas returned. “Though you don’t seem overly concerned by that.”
Mr. Williams hesitated for only a second before he sputtered, “You came here seekingmyblessing.” Of course he would scramble for a way to keep the upper hand. Men like him always needed some authority from which to punish others. But it didn’t intimidate Silas the way it had when he was a small child, struggling to find the right words to prove himself to his father, too young to realize there were no right words. All he saw when he looked at Mr. Williams was a puffed-up old fraud.
Silas wrapped his tongue around each syllable with deliberate care. “That was before I realized you were an ass.”
It was the second time in his life that he heard a collective gasp. Probably a sign he should stop talking, but Silas was too furious to heed it. The man badly needed a dressing-down. There was probably no one else in his life who would dare to speak the truth to his face.
“Mr. Corbyn!” It was Hannah’s voice that cut through the others to reach his ear. “You will apologize to my father.”
Her eyes, like her voice, were full of awful emotions: anger, shock, hurt, betrayal. She looked at Silas as though he’d hurled the insult at a different sort of man entirely—one who’d done nothing to deserve his scorn.
She looked as though he’d hurled the insult at her.
Silas ground his teeth, guilt warring with righteous fury. Some part of him had assumed that Hannah would be on his side, as she always was, no matter how unlikely.
He should have known better.
“I will not.”
“You have no right to speak to him that way!”
“He earned every word of it.” Had they been sitting at the same table? Couldn’t she see what was right in front of her?
“Get out,” Mr. Williams snarled. “I’ve never met a more ungrateful wretch in my life. You’ll never marry my Hannah. You don’t deserve her.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” Silas snapped. “But people rarely get what they deserve in life. I daresay your wife doesn’t deserve to be trapped withyou.”
Mr. Williams lurched toward him, fists half-raised, but his son got between them first.
“I’ll see you out,” Eli said, his firm grip on Silas’s elbow leaving no room for dispute.
Silas went along willingly, ushered from the room before the row could turn dangerous. Though his heart was hammering, he felt an odd sense of calm. As if all his anger had frozen the minute Hannah demanded an apology.
This couldn’t have been what she’d imagined when she’d asked him to behave so badly that she would have to release him.
Is it done, then? Have I broken our engagement?
Mr. Williams would never consent to the match now. And to think, Silas had been reluctant to sabotage their engagement. In the end, his temper had done the job for him.
