Heaven forgive him, but he could not back down now. Not again. Not on this. “I must have my word, Father, and you must listen to me.”
“I must do nothing. We have quite said everything there is to be said.”
“Youhave said as much. Not I.” Simon descended three stairs, clenched the oiled banister in a death grip. “I do not wish to dishonor you.”
“Then stop playing the fool and listen to reason, for once in your life. Can you not see that I am only trying to assist you? Responsibilities must be met. You can no more run from yours than I can run from mine—”
“I wish to run from nothing.”
“Then why must you always plague me this way? Pray, what do you want? What is it, in your strange and ridiculous mind, that you fathom life must give you?”
“Something more.” Another step. He told himself to hold back, to bite his tongue, but the words rushed out anyway. “I wish to do something more than read sermons from behind a pulpit and play battledore in the lawn and drink tea in the afternoons. I could not bear it. No more than I could bear marrying Miss Whitmore.”
“She is a handsome, prosperous girl.”
“Who is shallow and absurd.”
“You do not know her well enough to accuse her of anything. One would think her beauty would be enough to—”
“Beauty is the mind, not the face.” Another step lower, then another, until he reached the bottom. He stood facing Father, hot blood rushing to his face. “I know you cannot understand this. Indeed, I scarcely understand it myself. But I cannot go on like this. I do not know where I must go, but I must go somewhere and I must dosomething.” He looked down at his hands, stretched his fingers. “Something I can touch…that has purpose. Something I can build or tear down or…” The sentence lingered because he had no more words for what pulsed in the depths of his soul.
The depths he had never unearthed to anyone.
Until now.
Father’s brows came together again. The way they always did when he was baffled, yet this time it was more. Not anger. Not even disapproval. Mayhap hurt. “You are your own man, Simon.” He looked away, scratched his cheek, opened his mouth as if he wished to say more.
Instead, he started away.
“Father—”
“I hope you find whatever it is you seek, Son.” At the doorway to the anteroom, he glanced back with moisture in his expression. “But I shall be here when you do not.”
He would not say goodbye. Perhaps that was the coward within him. Perhaps a call of wisdom. Whatever the case, he knew what they would say.
Mother would look aghast and call him a nonsensical child.
Nicholas, his elder brother, would laugh.
Father would say again what he’d already said.
And his future wife…
Stuffing another shirtsleeves into his knapsack, he breathed in the warm night air rushing from the window. He latched the bag shut. He did not have qualms about leaving anything or anyone. After all, had he not been on the outcrops of them all since he was a child?
While they had danced and made merry, he had taken to himself here in his bedchamber. With his empty canvases and paints, he had put into picture what he could not put into words.
He glanced at them now.
A reflection of his life stared back at him from the endless framed paintings on the walls. A small boy, dejected within the shadows, hiding behind a window drapery in a thronged ballroom. A musty stable room, with contented horseflesh and gleaming leather, objects of interest to a peeking child. The tree outside Sowerby House courtyard. The gold-colored pony. The pristine banisters he was forbidden to slide down.
All memories that drew him back into an existence that lacked significance and purpose.
Shrugging on his coat, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, he marched for the door. He paused, however, as a sound from the window called to him.
Mother’s musicale must be over. Only now did he notice the absence of echoing sonatas.
Leaning to the open window, he glanced down to the courtyard below. Moonlight cast the world into shades of silvery blue. Horses shifted, carriage doors opened and closed, footmen climbed to their drivers’ perches and secured their reins.
