I couldn’t reply, my mouth too filled with the bitter taste of bile. Finally, I forced a shake of my head.
He glanced back to the door, then back at me, his hand half-covering his mouth. “Were—were you at my door just now?”
“No,” I whispered, as much as I could manage under my suffocating breathlessness. And how dare he ask if I’d been at his door when neither of us could bear the honest answer? Even if Papa didn’t know what I’d seen, he knew what he’d done.
He ought to have been downstairs with us, reacquainting himself with the little daughter who still didn’t remember him. He ought to have been sipping cider with the young man who fancied me, giving his permission to court. He ought to have been doing a hundred other things. Instead, he was preying upon my dead mother’s enslaved half-sister—and the wrongness of it filled my voice with a defiant rage.
“No, I wasn’t at your door.” I held his gaze, letting him see what he would.
My father paused on the precipice, clearing his throat, absently smearing the corner of his lips with one thumb. “Well—well . . . did you need something?”
As if my needs were at the forefront of his thoughts.
My fingers curled into fists as a lie came to me suddenly, and sullenly. “I was coming up to fetch my prayer book.” Surely he knew it was a lie, but I didn’t care. If he challenged me, I’d lie again, without even the decency of dropping my eyes. I’d lie because between a father and a daughter, what I’d witnessed was unspeakable. And I’d learned from the man who responded with silence to my letters about politics or adultery or the liberation of slaves. . . .
Papa never spoke on any subject he didn’t want to.
Neither would I.
“Are you certain you weren’t hurt,” Papa finally murmured, “. . . on the stairs?”
Rage burned inside me so hotly I thought it possible that my handprint might be seared upon the railing. I bobbed my head, grasped my skirt, and took two steps down before my father called to me again.
“Patsy?”
I couldn’t face him, so I merely stopped, my chest heaving with the effort to restrain myself from taking flight. “What?”
A heavy silence descended. One filled with pregnant emotion. I feared he might be so unwise as to attempt to explain himself, to justify or confess his villainous lapse in judgment, but when he finally spoke, it was only to ask, “What of your prayer book?”
Swallowing hard, I forced words out despite the pain. “I’ve reconsidered my need of it. I’m not as apt as some people to forget what it says.”
MY HEART STILL IN TURMOIL, I drifted mindlessly back to the parlor, where Polly sipped at her cider, dollies by her feet on the floor. I wanted nothing so much in that moment as to escape my father and his house. To spirit away to the convent and take my little sister with me. But how would I explain myself to Mr. Short?
“Is your father of a mind to join us?” he asked, rising from his chair expectantly, his eyes still dancing with merriment from our games in the snow.
For me, those games now seemed a lifetime ago, our perfect moment sullied. “Papa won’t be joining us.”
“More cider for us, I suppose,” Mr. Short mused, tilting his cup to hide his disappointment.
“Didn’t you get Sally?” Polly asked, abandoning her dollies. “I’ll fetch her.”
“No,” I said, harshly, grabbing her arm to stop her.
I’d never spoken a harsh word to Polly, much less grabbed her with force. She blinked at me with surprise. “Why not?”
“Papa has need of her.” How I nearly choked on those words.
Perhaps Mr. Short heard the catch in my throat, or saw inside me to where a noxious stew of dark and unworthy emotions still boiled. For the merriment in his eyes melted away to concern. “Polly, do you know that Jimmy is working on a wondrous new confection made of egg whites and custard and wine? They’re called snow eggs. Why don’t you help him whip them up?” Polly’s eyes widened with delight, so I let her skip away to the kitchen before I thought better of it. And the moment she was gone, Mr. Short latched on to me with his singular characteristic of prying into facts. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Nothing. I’ve grown tired and wish to return to the convent.”
His brows shot up. “Before the end of Christmastide? Your father hadn’t planned for you to return until after the religious observances were at a close. . . .”
It was his way of reminding me of Papa’s antipathy for Catholicism and contempt for Catholic mass and saints’ days. Though it was still many years before my father would use a razor to construct his own Bible, cutting out all mentions of miracles and divinity, I already suspected my father observed the holy days only as a matter of form. And the reminder fueled my outrage, making me all the more determined to defy him. “Papa’s well contented with his servants. He doesn’t need me here. And in matters of faith, mustn’t we all follow our own conscience?”