Lord, I cannot bear this. I cannot lose her.He heaved.I cannot lose her too.
By the time he returned to Sowerby, dawn had already streaked the sky, and when he entered the study, a lamp still glowed beside the stack of letters.
Simon took the chair behind the desk and untied the ribbon. The papers were crisp and new, as if they had never been posted. The words baffled him, as he scanned the length of the first letter. The date was a mere fortnight after he ran away twelve years ago:
Dear Simon,
The weather is good. Nicholas has taken to attending cockfights, and though your mother protests, I have attended too many in my younger years to scold your brother terribly. The house is quiet without you. Hope you are well.
The next was written a month later.
Then another a month after that.
Tightness constricted Simon’s throat, as he devoured each letter with thorn-pricking pain. Why had Father never sent such letters?
He should have known Simon needed them.
That he’d waited for them.
Dear Simon,
Michaelmas was pleasant this year. The goose, your favorite I remember, was prepared with onion gravy and roast carrots. Nicholas was in bed for the feast. Everyone seems to be ill these days. Must be something in the air. Hope you are well.
Near the bottom of the stack, two of the letters seemed more hurried than the others, as if the hand that held the quill trembled.
Dear Simon,
Nicholas is still ill. I have never seen him so weak. I wish you were here to cheer him.
Dear Simon,
I would have written sooner had I the strength. Your brother passed last Tuesday. He is buried beside his great-grandparents in Worcestershire, one of his last requests. I have spent most of the days since his death in the turret room with your paintings. They seem to calm me. I wish I had looked at them all before when you were still here.
Moisture jumbled the words together. Simon blinked harder and finished the letters. He was not certain why Father had never posted them. Perhaps pride. Perhaps a vein of vulnerability he was too afraid to expose.
Whatever the case, it did not matter.
He had thought of Simon.
He had wanted him home.
Somehow that made up for losing Sowerby House, the years of silence, the lectures, the strict demands. It made up for everything.
Simon restacked the letters, tied the ribbon, and doused the lamp. He left the study, but before he shut the door, he slipped back in. He smelled Father, sensed Father, and the bitterness dissipated from the memory like pain fading from a healing wound.
“For what it is worth, Father,” he said to the empty chair behind the desk. “You were right about her all along.”
Simon could have been the happiest man in the world if he had only realized sooner.
The ship departed this morning.
Georgina sat with her chair scooted next to the bedchamber window, fingertips on the glass. Thunder vibrated the pane. She saw smokestacks, distant town houses, a sullen cobalt-blue sky and…
Simon.
She saw Simon, a faint and imagined reflection, real enough she stroked the window as if it was his cheek.
“Darling?” Mamma’s voice behind her, the thud of a door. “Oh, there you are, silly child. Do hurry and come downstairs. Mr. Oswald has come to visit again.”
