Page 51 of Too Wanton to Wed
“I suppose you have a solution?” he asked, unable to keep the uncharitable edge from his voice.
“I do.”
“Well?”
He heard her inhale deeply. Whatever she was about to suggest must be shocking indeed, if she needed to inhale that much of the dank catacomb air.
“Art comes in part from experience,” she said slowly. “But life, on the other hand, is one hundred percent experience. And Lily has experienced nothing.”
“I fail to hear a suggestion.”
“She needs to see the world. Even if for her, ‘the world’ is only her own back garden by the light of the moon.”
He took an involuntary step backward and nearly cracked his head against the crumbling wall of the tunnel. “No.”
“Let’s take her outside. After dusk, when it will be safe.”
“No.”
“Just once,” she said softly, cajolingly, as if he wasn’t well aware that “just once” was all it would take to lose his daughter forever. “Please. Just for a few moments.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why not?” she burst out, angrily.
“Given an inch, Lily will run away. She’s done it before, and she’ll do it again. The next time, she could die.” And with that letter he’d received… Alistair’s voice hardened. “The answer is no.”
For a long moment, the silence was so absolute that he began to imagine himself alone in the catacombs, raving like a madman to the corpses sequestered within its walls. And then she spoke.
“With all due respect,” she began, in a tone of such unveiled frustration that even he wasn’t fanciful enough to imagine any respect. “You are keeping your daughter from a potential source of happiness.”
“No,” he returned, his voice carefully modulated. “I am keeping her alive.”
“It’s not mutually exclusive,” she snapped. “Overprotection is counterproductive.”
“Is it?” His fingers shook.Shehad not been the one to fetch a screaming five-year-old from a patch of sunlight.Shehad not been the one to soothe patches of blistered skin until the welts faded to angry scars. “What do you know about it? You haven’t stood in my shoes. You’re not her mother. You’re not anybody’s mother. Until you have a child of your own, you can’t tell me how to raise mine.”
She sucked in a breath. He didn’t need a candle to realize his words had wounded far too deeply. When she spoke, her voice was uneven. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about mothers at all.”
Alistair’s hands curled into fists of frustration. Punching a hole in the catacomb wall would likely bring the whole structure down upon them. Not to mention the likelihood of God striking him down for his sacrilege. He forced his white-knuckled fingers to release their tension.
“I don’t think you understand,” he began, as calmly as he could.
“I don’t thinkyouunderstand,” she interrupted, her voice tight. “It’s not for you. It’s not for me. It’s for Lily.”
“Miss Smythe—”
“I’ll be with your daughter at every moment. We’llbothbe with her. And we’ll never let her out of our sight.”
He let his humorless chuckle echo along the packed soil and crumbling saints. “What makes you think mere sight can control her? Look what Lily did to the paintings you worked so hard on. Look what she did to her own painting thatshehad worked so hard on. We were both right next to her, keeping her in our sight, when she lashed out and committed irreparable damage before either of us could react. Think again, Miss Smythe. How can anyone control Lily if she can’t even control herself?”
A swish, as if Miss Smythe had turned from him in the darkness, followed by the muffled click of boot heels against the ancient dirt floor. She was walking away from him without a word? Cutting him, as it were?
He squinted into the darkness. “Are we done discussing?”
Her footsteps did not slow. “Lily is a child. Children act out. She—”
“She’s notachild. She’smychild.” He pursued the retreating footsteps into the blackness. “It’s my responsibility to ensure she not act out in a way that could cause her harm, much less kill her.”
