Jonas shook his head and found a candle on the hob and managed to light it. That scant wash of light—shifting over a wasteland of discarded metal—only made him shake his head in dismay. Nothing to do but wash his hands and prepare his father’s dinner.
He still hadn’t figured out what to say—what to do—by the time he ascended the stairs. He’d had a dozen conversations with his father in his mind already, and none had ended particularly well. But even those didn’t prepare him for what he saw coming up the staircase. His father was seated on his bed, his arms crossed, and he glared in Jonas’s direction.
“You’re late,” was what he said.
“Forgive me.” The words came out sarcastic and hard. “I was unavoidably detained, treating the injury caused by your carelessness.”
“My carelessness! If Henry had not been so clumsy—”
Jonas set the tray down in front of his father. “Do not talk of Henry to me at this moment. What am I to do with you? I can’t ask anyone else to come into this house to look after you. It is downright hazardous.”
“Hazardous? To those who are unable to walk in a straight line, perhaps, but—”
“I would call it a pigsty, but the greatest danger a sty presents is the possibility of mud. This place is a death trap, and I should have done something about it sooner. The only way you could make it more of a menace is if you installed spring-guns and man-traps.”
Lucas Grantham squared his shoulders as best he could. “You should have done something?” he echoed, his voice arctic. “It is my home, my responsibility. Did I raise you to talk to me in that tone of voice? Tell me, did I?”
Jonas set a bowl of soup and a piece of bread in front of his father. “You didn’t raise me to mince words in the face of stupidity.”
“I raised you to respect your elders,” his father spat. “To respect their wisdom and experience. To treat them with the courtesy that they deserve.”
He had. His father had taught him to respect the old. If Jonas did that, though, he’d be prescribing prussic acid and traipsing merrily from autopsy to examination of infants. The elderly were as much a repository of hoary myths as they were keepers of wisdom. They’d just learned to voice their superstitions with greater authority.
And what did respect for his father even mean under these circumstances? Did it mean doing as he was told, keeping his mouth shut and his hands behind his back, no matter what the consequences?
“You also taught me to do what I believe to be right.” He laid out a spoon. “I’m having a crew in tomorrow,” he bit out. “And they are going to clean this place out.”
His father almost choked. “I’ll—I’ll have the constable in again, I will. Thief—that’s what you are, no better than a thief!” His face turned florid and blotchy, and he raised a fist in the air, shaking it. “You just want me to be dependent on you, to have nothing of my own. What kind of son are you?”
“Calm yourself.” Jonas took hold of his father’s wrist in some alarm. The pulse was hard and irregular, racing at a worrisome rate. He’d had one heart attack once, and that had left him in his current weakened condition. Another one…
“Calm myself! How can I calm myself when my only son is threatening to remove my livelihood?”
Once, Lucas Grantham would have shouted those words. Now, he could scarcely draw breath to speak them loudly. But his face reflected his fury, red and mottled.
He reacted this way any time Jonas suggested taking anything away. It was beyond rational explanation. He’d simply become fixed upon his scrap metal. The person he had been in his life was still there, but he’d hardened and solidified around this irrational core. Even if Jonas did hire a work crew—even if the constables allowed it to happen—he suspected that his father would work himself into an injury just watching. How could he do that to him?
But the alternatives—to let it go undone, or worse, to rob his father of all his dignity and to actually etherize him, as if cleaning his house were an act of mental surgery—were equally unpalatable. There was no good way out of this situation.
“No, no,” he said soothingly. “You misunderstand me. I won’t be removing anything from the premises.” It wasn’t lying, what he said. Just a change of mind, a change of tactics. “I just…”
He sighed, and thought of Lydia. He wasn’t sure how his project was going. She’d talked to him today. He didn’t think he’d shocked her too badly.
“There is a young lady I would like to bring to see you,” he finally said. “Her name is Miss Lydia Charingford, and she is very dear to me.”
His father lowered his fist. His breathing slowed. “A young lady?” he echoed. “That’s good, Jonas. Is she pretty?”
“Very pretty.”
Pretty didn’t even begin to describe Lydia.