“Ah, Newton.” Her father’s hand moved to the cat’s back, his fingers resting in the fur. “You brought the better company.”
“He would not have forgiven me had I left him behind.”
Her father’s eyes opened to slits. “Does Rebecca still despise him?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Good. That means he has better judgment than I did when I married her.”
Elinor pressed her lips together to keep the laugh from turning into a sob. She adjusted his pillows, smoothed the coverlet, and fetched the book that sat on his bedside table. A Guide to the Celestial Sphere, the same volume he had read to her as a child, its spine cracked, its pages soft with use.
“Shall I read to you?” she asked.
“From the beginning,” he murmured. “Start from the beginning. I want to hear it in your voice.”
She opened the book to the first page, and she read about the fixed stars and the wandering planets and the ancient observers who had looked up at the night sky and seen patterns that told them stories, and her father listened with his eyes closed and Newton purring at his side.
The afternoon light moved across the room, and Elinor read until her voice grew hoarse, and then she sat in silence, holding her father’s hand while he slept. She watched the rise and fall of his chest and counted his breaths the way she had counted Lucien’s in a small apartment above a tailor’s shop, measuring the distance between each one, willing the intervals to stay even.
She had left London without sending word to anyone. She had not written to Lucien, had not explained, had not told him what his words on the terrace had done for her, or that she had walkedaway not because she did not care but because she cared too much to stay.
She had simply gone, because her father needed her, and nothing else could come before that. Not the Season, not the ruse, not even the man she loved.
Her father stirred. His fingers tightened around hers.
“Stay,” he whispered.
“I’m not going anywhere, Papa.” She brought his hand to her cheek. “I’m right here.”
Newton purred. The light dimmed. Outside the window, the countryside stretched green and quiet and impossibly far from London, and Elinor held her father’s hand and stayed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“She has gone to the country, Your Grace. A family matter,” Lady Morland spoke with a smile that concealed more than it revealed.
She stood beside Belinda in Lady Telford’s drawing room, a glass of ratafia in her hand and not a trace of concern on her face for the stepdaughter.
Lucien kept his expression neutral. Beside him, Annabelle’s hand tightened on his arm.
“What sort of family matter?” he asked.
“Her father’s health has declined. She received word and departed at once.” Lady Morland paused, her gaze measuring him. “She asked that I not send word to anyone. I honored that request, but I confess I thought she ought to have informed you herself.”
The words landed in his chest and stayed. She had left. She had received news that her father was ill, and she had packed her things and taken Newton and gone, and she had not told him.
She had been gone for three days.
And she had left without telling him.
“How serious is his condition?” Annabelle asked, her voice carrying the genuine concern that Rebecca’s lacked.
“I couldn’t say. Elinor was abrupt in her departure.” Rebecca’s mouth thinned. “I offered to accompany her, of course, but she insisted on going alone. You know how she can be, Your Grace.”
Lucien did know. He knew that she had spent years protecting her father from the knowledge of her unhappiness, that she carried the weight of two lives, the one the ton saw and the one she built in secret, and that when something she loved was threatened, she moved toward it with the same quiet ferocity she brought to a schoolroom full of children who needed her.
She had not told him because she had not thought to. Because in the hierarchy of her heart, her father came first, and everything else, the Season, the ruse, and himself, fell away.
He understood it, but it still cut.
