Chapter Twenty-One

“Thank you for coming to collect me,” Eleanor said flatly.

It felt like the least she could do.

The note had barely arrived, delivered by a breathless clerk – one of Mr. Spencer’s, if she wasn’t mistaken – when Henry arrived shortly afterward, grim-faced in her father’s carriage. She was grateful for the lift, at the very least.

He told her what the note had already said – that Charles had taken a turn , that it was serious, that he had gone to Jonathan’s and was being treated there.

She was trying not to panic. Charles had had a turn coming for a while, and surely it wasn’t too bad. He was probably just tired, or hungry, or else hadn’t drunk enough.

There were all manner of safe, logical explanations for why he’d taken ill, but none of them would stick in Eleanor’s mind. She recalled every incident where he’d been ill enough to go to bed early, too ill to eat much, too cold despite a burning fire, and so on and so on.

Had there been more signs she’d missed? Would a more dutiful, observant daughter have prevented this tragedy? What had she missed ?

Nothing else came to mind. She shifted and shifted in the carriage seat, trying to find a comfortable position.

Nothing worked. She wouldn’t be comfortable until she saw her father. The streets crawled by so painfully slowly she wanted to scream, wanted to fling open the door, fall out, and run to Jonathan and Louisa’s.

“I’m sure he’s in good hands,” Henry said, after a while.

“Jonathan is an excellent doctor,” Eleanor responded absently, almost without thinking. “How did Papa seem when you left him?”

“Tired and weak, but he was speaking, at the very least. I was able to get him down from Mr. Spencer’s office into the carriage, which I suppose is a good sign.”

Eleanor bit her lower lip until she tasted copper. When the carriage turned, painfully slow, into the street, she flung open the door before the vehicle had even stopped entirely. She waved aside the footman, coming to let down the steps, staring at her flabbergasted as she raced past him.

She was vaguely aware of Henry, climbing sedately out of the carriage and coming up the steps behind her, but it didn’t seem very important.

Up the steps, along the hall – past the butler, who was saying something to her, but she couldn’t stop to listen to it – and up the velvet-carpeted steps to the first floor. The parlour was up here, and the patients’ rooms were at the end, and Charles would be…

She nearly ran straight into Louisa, darting out of the open parlour door to intercept her.

“Louisa!” Eleanor gasped. “I heard that Papa… he’s ill? Have you been to see him? I must see him right away.”

“Not right now,” Louisa said, with a determined firmness.

“But…”

“Come in and sit down, won’t you?”

Louisa would not be argued with. She never would, of course.

Eleanor was drawn firmly into the parlour and guided to an overstuffed sofa. She noticed that a tray of tea was all ready to go, and Louisa was even now pouring out a fresh cup for Eleanor.

“You were expecting me, I see,” she murmured. “Louisa, what is wrong with Papa?”

“How should I know?” Louisa responded, a little too quickly, a little too defensively.

“Why won’t you let me see him?”

“Just wait, won’t you! Oh, this is all that wretched Lord Henry’s fault.”

“Lord Henry ? What has he to do with it?”

Louisa pursed her lips, splashing a little tea over the rim of the cup.

“Well, he was there at the time. He wouldn’t listen . He kept saying that you needed to know. He… he just kept saying the same thing, and insisted on telling you everything there was to know, even though Jonathan tried to make him promise…” she trailed off, glancing up guiltily, sensing she’d said too much.

Well, she had .

“The whole thing?” Eleanor repeated slowly. “I don’t understand. Louisa, what aren’t you telling me?”

“Let’s wait for Jonathan to come here,” her sister answered shortly. “He’ll explain it better than I can. Oh, what a mess this all is. The thing is, Papa made us promise, Jonathan and me. A solemn promise, you see? What was I meant to do?”

“Louisa, you’re scaring me. What is so serious you can’t tell me? Do you have any idea how worried I am? This isn’t fair. You always treated me like a baby.”

“Don’t act like one, then.”

There was an unfriendly pause after that, while both sisters angrily sipped tea looking at each other.

It’s ridiculous. Fancy sitting here, drinking here, while Papa is ill in the next room, and Louisa won’t let me see him.

The familiar, infuriating feeling of helplessness trickled through her, turning into misery. Eleanor wanted to scream or throw her teacup across the room. At Louisa, ideally, but she knew her sister well enough to know that a teacup would simply be hurled right back.

At long, long last, the door creaked open. It was Jonathan, looking even more tired than usual. He met Louisa’s eye, and they exchanged a long, meaningful look. A feeling of foreboding curled in her gut.

“Jonathan? Louisa? Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

Jonathan slowly and painfully lowered himself onto the sofa beside Louisa. His wife sat prim and upright, hands neatly folded on her lap, for all the world like a pair of parents preparing to speak to a particularly difficult child.

Eleanor curled her fingers into fists. She forced herself to wait.

“Just over a year ago,” Jonathan said, slowly and woodenly, “Charles came to me for a visit. He’d had rather a tight chest of late and kept feeling dizzy and so on. I never thought much about it, assuming it would all clear itself up.”

Eleanor blinked. “Papa never told me.”

“He didn’t want to worry you. The fact is, Eleanor, Charles is dying.”

The room swam before her eyes .

“Dying?” Eleanor managed faintly, and that was all she managed before blackness crept in at the edges of her vision, and she lost consciousness altogether.

***

Eleanor woke up lying on the chaise longue in Louisa’s parlour, the one Louisa liked to lounge on and be dramatic. There was an awful smell in her nose, and Jonathan was waving a bottle of smelling salts under her nose.

There was a cold compress on her forehead, and her legs had been propped up on cushions to elevate them.

For a delightful minute, Eleanor thought that she’d just passed out for no good reason, here in her sister’s house. And then she remembered it all.

“Papa’s dying,” Eleanor repeated, and burst into noisy tears.

Louisa pulled her into a tight hug, hanging on until Eleanor had gotten through the worst of her tears. Jonathan sank down onto the chair Eleanor had vacated, elbows on his knees and a blank look on his face.

“It’s alright, darling,” Louisa murmured into Eleanor’s hair. “I know it’s awful. I couldn’t bear it, either. But I’ve had time to come to terms with it, and I suppose you haven’t.”

“It can’t be true.”

“It’s a heart complaint,” Jonathan said quietly. “It’s hard to say exactly how long Charles has left, but my estimate is a year or two. Perhaps more, perhaps less. He accepted his fate with great equanimity, and I am quite impressed by him. He was very keen for you not to find out.”

Eleanor dragged herself into a sitting position, dragging a hand across her eyes. The tears had dried up, followed by a hot feeling of anger and injustice .

Who was she even angry at? Not her father. She couldn’t even summon up anger at Louisa and Jonathan, who’d worked to deceive her.

No, deceive was too harsh a word.

Who could she even be angry at? Nobody. The feelings rounded her thoughts, heavy emotions with nowhere to go.

It wasn’t fair .

“I want to talk to Papa.”

“Not just yet,” Jonathan said quietly. “He’s resting. You’ll have questions, and I don’t want him to be distressed. He needs to gather his strength.”

“It’s not just his health he didn’t want you to know about,” Louisa burst out.

“Louisa,” Jonathan said warningly. His wife ignored him.

“There were a few other things,” Louisa continued, ploughing on. “But… but maybe you should talk to Papa yourself. It was all for your own good, Eleanor.”

“I hear that a lot, actually,” Eleanor snapped, levering herself to her feet. “People are doing things for my own good without bothering to ask me about it.”

Louisa flushed. “I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Perhaps,” Eleanor looked away. “How long until I can see him?”

Before either of them could answer, there was a tap on the door and the butler stepped in.

“Madam, what should be done with Lord Henry Willenshire? He is still downstairs in the hall.”

Louisa gave a yelp. “Oh, lord, Lord Henry! I forgot about him. He came in, did he? Better fetch him some tea or something. I’m not at all in a state to go down and greet him. Jonathan…”

“I’ll go,” Eleanor heard herself say. Jonathan and Louisa exchanged a look.

“If you like,” Louisa said neutrally.

Eleanor hurried out of the room, suddenly keen to get some fresh air. Or at least, air that wasn’t circulating around Louisa’s parlour, at the very least.

There wasn’t much in Jonathan and Louisa’s hallway. It was just a narrow corridor, doors opening off it to the kitchen and servants’ quarters, the stairs snaking upstairs to the family floors and Jonathan’s office.

In the hallway, there was a coat rack, an umbrella stand, and a little velvet-cushioned chair.

Of course, Henry was not sitting on the chair. He was pacing, up and down, up and down, arms behind his back and head down .

She got halfway down the stairs before Henry noticed she was there. He paused in his pacing, looking up at her.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” she responded. “How long have you been here? How long have I been here? I sort of… sort of fainted.”

“Oh. How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Faint, I suppose.”

He nodded. She ventured down a few more stairs.

“You’ve been here for around an hour, I think,” Henry answered.

“An hour ?” she let out a breath. “They haven’t let me see Papa.”

Henry frowned. He came to the foot of the stairs, hands still laced behind his back. He didn’t venture any further up, and she didn’t venture any further down. There were about three stairs between them. Not very far at all, but suddenly it felt like a thousand miles. Further, even.

“How is he?” Henry asked, voice hushed.

A scream was bubbling up inside Eleanor, clawing its way up her throat and fighting to get out of her mouth. If she started screaming, though, she was fairly sure she would never stop, so she clenched her back teeth and hoped for the best.

“Eleanor?” Henry prompted, voice barely louder than a whisper.

What was it about his face that enthralled her the way he did? He had an ordinary sort of face, handsome in the way the Willenshire family were, but lately it seemed to her that when he was in the room, she couldn’t see anyone else. She didn’t want to see anyone else.

“My father is dying,” Eleanor said, short and blunt, and it made it real in that moment. As if she might have undone the truth, if she’d only kept her mouth shut.

Henry sucked in a breath. She heard it hitch in his throat, and he took a step backwards.

“Oh. Oh, Eleanor, I’m so sorry. I… I can’t imagine how you feel.”

The tears were coming back. She could feel them, tracing red-hot paths down her numb cheeks. Eleanor wiped angrily at her face with the back of her hand, again and again until she realized that the tears were going to keep coming and just gave up, letting them fall.

“He’s dying, he’s been dying for… for a year , it seems. He’s been so very ill, and none of them told me. They kept it from me. Apparently, they would have continued to keep it from me, if it hadn’t’ been for you insisting on telling me.”

He bit his lip, looking away. “I’m sorry. I feel as though I’ve brought this all on your head.”

“No, no. It was already coming. There was nothing I could do about it; I was just stupid and oblivious. Stupid, stupid, stupid !”

She dropped down into a sitting position on the stairs, knees up, head in her hands. A headache had descended on her, like a brick dropped from a height onto her skull, and it was pounding away angrily.

“Eleanor… Eleanor, please. Look at me.”

She dragged her gaze out of her hands and did just that. He had come forward, one knee down on one of the stairs, putting them more or less at eye level.

She felt as though her breath was caught in her throat. Hazel green eyes, the Willenshire eyes, glittered in his face. Maybe the poets were right when they said you could get lost in the eyes of somebody you loved.

Love! How can I think of love, or of Henry Willenshire, or about anything beyond the fact my father is dying upstairs. He’s dying, and nobody told me. He’s dying , and nobody is letting me see him. He’s dying, and I’m sitting here on the stairs, talking to a man I’m falling in love with, when I should be with him.

What sort of daughter am I?

“You need to leave,” Eleanor choked out abruptly, staggering to her feet. Henry flinched, eyes wide. Those lovely, lovely eyes that Eleanor didn’t dare look at in case she lost her head again.

“I… what? Eleanor, what have I done? I don’t understand. If you wish I hadn’t told you, then… well, I only tried to do what was best for you.”

Her head shot up again.

“What’s best for me?”

He realized his mistake too late.

“I didn’t mean that,” Henry tried, backing away, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “I only meant to say… ”

“I don’t care what you meant. You don’t know what’s good for me. How could you? How dare you say that you know what’s best for me? You don’t understand and you never will.”

“I’m sorry, Eleanor, truly I am. I know I’ve upset you, I can see that, but I only meant… I mean, what I’m trying to say is…”

“Stop it. Stop it ! Get out.”

“Eleanor…”

She shook her head vigorously, making the headache worse, making the room spin.

“Get out. Get out, Henry! Out, out, out !”

The last word rose to a scream, echoing around the hallway. They must have heard it upstairs.

Henry stood there in silence, arms hanging by his side.

“Very well,” he said quietly. “As you wish.”

And just like that, he walked out of the door, closing it behind him, and she was left alone.

Eleanor crumpled down onto the stairs and burst into tears.