Page 60 of The Duke's Last Dance
Five letters he had sent. None had he got.
What could have kept Catherine from keeping her promise? She had been so tearful the day he had left to see his father here. It did not make sense that she would not write. Had she been given the wrong address? If so, why had she not responded to his first letter and told him as much?
He took in a deep breath.
Worrying about why Lady Catherine had not written him was not going to get him any closer to having an answer that would satisfy his curiosity. And returning to Town was not yet an option; his father’s health had indeed declined, but he was doing better here than he had been in Town.
“Nicolas!” A voice caught his attention, and he turned away from the large window in his room that he had been looking out of.
This was the only window in Gracemere that had a glance towards the part of Town where Camberton lay. They were too far to see the manor, but he knew it was there. And he wanted to return as soon as he could to straighten out whatever mess had happened.
“Yes, Mother?” He looked at his mother, who had entered the room.
She looked panicked, and he could only imagine this was not good.
“Your father wishes to see you.” She managed to say something, but she was frantic in voice.
“Easy, Mother.” He walked towards her. “Is everything all right?”
“Your father wants to see you,” she repeated. “Go. Go see him. Go. Go.”
He looked his mother in the eyes, and then noticed that this was a type of distress that only came when one was close to losing someone. His father was dying. This was… this was the end of his father’s life…
He only nodded, and then walked towards the bedchamber they had settled his father in.
The one bright side to having been here for so long was that he had not heard one bit about what Miss Alexia had been doing or had even heard her name brought up. It was the only reprieve he would get at this rate.
When he entered the bedchamber, he was shocked by what he saw on the bed. His father had wasted away. The still limber, sturdy frame they had helped into the bed had wasted into something frail and weak. His hands were skinny, slender, as if someone had cut him open and taken all the fat out but left all the skin to flap around.
His father attempted to sit up, but he could not find the strength to do so.
“Easy, Father, easy,” Nicolas said as he helped his father. He propped a few more pillows behind him. “Easy… there you go. Don’t overdo it.” He did not want to see his father hurt himself even further in this state by trying to reach for something or exert too much of his strength.
“Nicolas…” His father motioned to one of the seats nearby. “Please, sit.”
Nicolas sat down. This was not unusual. His father often invited him to sit when they talked, but he was more curious about the papers on the nightstand on the other side of the bed. They were closer to his father, but it looked as though his father was going to show him these papers.
“What did you want, Father?” He measured his words carefully. This was either going to be the moment he was told that his father had picked out a ring for him to give to Miss Alexia, in which case his life was going to be over sooner than he had planned, or he was going to tell him something else. He could not imagine what else his father would have to say to him other than telling him that it was time for him to propose to Miss Alexia.
“I have done something… something I am not proud of.” His father reached towards the papers on the nightstand.
“And what is that, Father?” Nicolas was now intrigued.
In all his life, he had never known his father to apologize or admit when he had done something wrong. He would stubbornly hold onto what he had done, proclaiming that there was some justification – no matter how slim – for his actions.
“I instructed your mother to hide these,” he said as he handed the papers to Nicolas.
Nicolas took them, and then blinked. Lady Catherine’s handwriting stared up at him on the first piece, and it was dated the week he had arrived here at Gracemere. He started to flip through the papers, and he found that they were all letters. Either letters that he had written to Catherine, or that Catherine had written to him.
“Father…” He did not know what to say.
On the one hand, he was angry with his father. How dare he stop these letters from reaching him? On the other, this was exactly the kind of petty power play that he had begun to expect from his father in his dying days.
“I know, ‘twas wrong of me to hide them from you. ‘Twas wrong of me to assume that I could tell you who to love. And wrong of me to hold you back from marrying the woman you truly love in favor of a woman that you cannot stand,” his father said.
Nicolas looked up from the letters. The look in his father’s eyes was one of complete remorse and something else. Something not quite love, but in that family.
His father took his hand tightly. Well, as tightly as he could muster.
