“What do we owe you?” Phin asked, getting up and reaching into his pocket for the money to pay the young man.
Lenore barely listened to the exchange as she opened the telegram. “Sorry, but you need to come back,” it read. “Swan claiming all over London you’re his wife. Social chaos. Only you can quell rumors.” It was signed, “Freddy.”
Lenore let out a heavy breath and tossed the telegram onto the table. She glanced to Mr. Mercer, wishing he could give her some sort of fatherly advice, then leaned her elbows gracelessly on the table and planted her face in her hands. She should have known that running away to Yorkshire wouldn’t do a lick of good. She should have known that a continent and an ocean weren’t enough distance to put between her and Bart, that he would find her in the end. She could only imagine what he wanted from her now. Probably to finish what he’d started.
She heard Phin return to the table and pick up the telegram, even though she didn’t lift her face from her hands. She was too tired to do more than listen as he sucked in a breath, then dropped the telegram on the table again.
“I suppose we’d better pack our things, then,” he said in an unreadable voice.
“You’re leaving so soon?” Amaryllis asked, crossing to Lenore’s side from the counter, where she and Gladys were unloading the morning’s eggs.
Lenore lifted her head from her hands, but it was Phin who answered with, “We’ve been called back to London. Mr. Swan is making a nuisance of himself.”
Hazel nodded in understanding, but Gladys and Amaryllis both looked stricken.
“You can’t go,” Gladys said. “We’re only just getting to know you.”
“I’m afraid I must,” Lenore sighed and stood. “I’ve made a mess, and it’s about time I stop running from it and face it.” Her words were meant more for Phin than the girls.
“But—”
Lenore stopped Amaryllis’s protest with a kiss to her forehead. “I promise you,” she said, straightening, “when and if I’m able to sort this mess out, I’ll come back and spend more time with you.”
“Can Lionel come next time too?” Amaryllis asked. “I miss him so.”
“Perhaps,” Phin said, moving so that he could ruffle Amaryllis’s hair. “But right now, haste is of the essence.” He directed that last thought to Lenore.
Lenore didn’t need to be told twice. She nodded, then promptly left the kitchen and headed up to Gladys’s room to pack her things.
She wished she could make the task of packing her things last for hours. She wished she could stay in Yorkshire instead of facing what she knew she had to face. But with only one small traveling bag and a limited amount of clothing to pack, she was finished with the task in less than twenty minutes. Even then, she loitered in Gladys’s room, looking at her dolls and reading the titles of the books she had stacked on a small shelf beside one window. She couldn’t delay her departure forever, though, and all too soon, she carried her bag downstairs.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs when she heard Phin’s voice coming from the parlor.
“…not entirely certain what to do, Father,” he said. “It’s not the sort of situation one finds oneself in every day. The trouble is, I’m in love.”
Lenore’s heart leapt in her chest, even as a sheepish sort of heat filled her face. She tiptoed down the last few stairs and over to the parlor doorway, making certain she remained hidden from Phin’s view. He must have transferred his father back to the parlor after breakfast. She caught sight of him sitting on a chair he’d pulled up close to the one where his father sat, tucked in blankets and staring into nothing near the fireplace.
“I’m sure you would tell me to stop being such a prat and to help her,” Phin went on with a weak smile, holding his father’s limp hand. “She’s a woman in need, and when it comes to the fairer sex, it doesn’t matter what sins they’re guilty of, we love them all the same. I just wish she would have told me sooner.”
A guilty lump formed in Lenore’s throat. She wished she’d told him sooner too.
His father made the slightest grunting sound.
“I know,” Phin said, as though he’d interpreted an entire speech from the small sound. “Love gets all of us in trouble eventually. I never thought I’d actually fall for it,” he added with a smirk. “I know that I have never been able to keep my wicked ways from you entirely. How you managed to raise five such irascible children is beyond me.”
His father made another grunting sound.
“Oh, so you’re taking credit for all of our wickedness then?” Phin’s face brightened slightly, and he closed his other hand around his first as it held his father’s hand. “Just one hedonist raising a gaggle of others? Well, if you insist, Father.” He laughed gently, then sighed. “I just wish I didn’t feel so hurt. It seems ungentlemanly, somehow, to feel as though I’ve been betrayed when Lenore is in danger. But I have feelings too, pitiful as I feel for admitting it. We all do, when it comes down to it. And perhaps what I’m feeling most is disappointment that the lovely future I painted for myself won’t be able to happen the way I envisioned it.”
Lenore pressed a hand to her stomach, tears stinging at her eyes and guilt gnawing at her insides.
Phin’s father made another, small sound.
“I know, I know,” Phin sighed. “The future never turns out the way we plan it. But perhaps it will turn into something even better, right? Isn’t that what Mama always said?”
The pathos in Phin’s voice as he mentioned his mother—someone Lenore had never heard him talk about before, but who she could see had had a profound effect on Phin’s life—was too much for her to bear. She turned away, but in
