The older man hesitated in his gatherings and looked at him. “You—you brought them home to me.”
Asher stepped forward and wrapped his arms around the older man. His father clung to him, taking long, deep breaths. When he pulled away, Asher said, “Why didn’t you tell me about them? About Agatha?”
“You were a little boy,” Seyton explained as he pulled a ham to the counter and began cutting it. “How cruel would it have been to make you carry that secret?”
“I wasn’t always a little boy,” Asher said, placing a hand on his father’s to make him stop working.
Seyton looked up. “They were gone. I didn’t want you to grieve them as I did.” His face brightened a little as if he were putting that pain away. “Will you slice that cheese?”
Asher sighed and took a knife to do as he’d been asked. For a few moments, the small kitchen was quiet and then his father said, “Felicity, eh?”
Asher tensed. “If you are going to tell me to remember my place, trust me that I do, father.”
“Your place,” Seyton repeated slowly.
Asher nodded. Seyton said nothing, but as his father passed him, he smiled. “You still remember how to do that so the slices are exactly even.”
Asher hesitated in the cutting, thinking back to how many times he’d helped in the kitchen, served in the dining hall, brought round the horses.
“I’m a servant at heart, I suppose,” he said softly. “The muscles remember.”
His father wiped his hands on a towel before he turned. “Asher, you have not been a servant for years.”
He pursed his lips. “I was born one. I raised myself up, yes, but what I am is what I am at my core.”
“Sothatis what you believe your place is,” Seyton said.
“It is what you told me my place was for years,” Asher retorted as he set the knife down next to his cutting board and leaned both hands on the counter. “Isn’t it?”
Seyton bent his head. “I was wrong, Asher.”
“I beg your pardon?” Asher said, truly surprised by that statement.
Seyton moved toward him, and Asher saw something he’d never seen in his father’s eyes before. Hope.
“For years I told myself that it was my fault Agatha died, that it was my fault that my daughters were taken…my fault because I didn’t keep my place.” Seyton was focused on him now. Not letting Asher break their gaze. “When I saw you begin to notice Felicity…Lady Barbridge…there was a terror in me that I couldn’t tamp down. I feared you would repeat my mistakes. That you would live the same life I had lived. I wanted to protect you.”
“Well, what if it is the same life?” Asher asked. “I love Felicity.” He caught his breath as he said that out loud for the first time. “I have loved her for so long, I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t. But wearefrom different worlds, aren’t we? What if that does stand between us? What if that does matter more than she wants to believe it will? What if she is shunned by those who matter to her?”
“You think her family, the one that is bound so tightly to your own family, would shun her for marrying you?” his father asked.
Asher shook his head. “Perhaps not her family, but her friends.”
Seyton shrugged. “They might.”
“Not comforting, Father,” Asher said, walking across the room and taking a heavy seat on the stool before the counter. “I’m only saying that there are many ways to put a wedge between people. What if she regrets it later?”
“I spent a lifetime telling myself that if my daughters knew me they would not want me. That we were all better off without the truth, without the love. But you brought them here today and I realize that my mistake was not forgetting my place. It was thinking that it mattered more than my heart.”
Asher wrinkled his brow. “How so?”
“I believed my daughters would better off with position than with love.” Seyton sighed. “And we all suffered for it. Oh, they are obviously in good places now.”
Asher nodded immediately. “Rosalinde and Celia have married good men. They are loved and taken care of and happy.”
Seyton almost sagged in relief. “But because of my loss, I laid out my own past at your feet, Asher. I forced you into a mold that wasn’t fair. I saw how Felicity sat near you tonight, how she comforted you. And if your story of how you discovered the truth about Celia and Rosalinde is accurate, then you have done the same for her. You say you love her, but you are willing to walk away because of some ‘place’ I put on you.”
“Father—”
