And there in the dim of the stairwell, leaning on his cane, with his one good eye and the black patch over the bad one and his white hair standing up where he had pushed his hat off, was Matthew Turner, the Viscount Greencliff.
He had taught Cassian to box and to take blows and to stand back up. He was, in every sense of the word, the only father Cassian had ever had.
“There you are,” he said. “You look dreadful. Are you going to offer me the chair, or am I to die on my feet like a soldier?”
Cassian stood aside.
Matthew came in, surveyed the studio—the easel under the sheet, the abandoned glass, the closed right fist of the man who had let him in—and lowered himself into the armchair with a grunt and the long sigh of old bones meeting upholstery.
“Well…” He propped his cane against the armrest. “I will ask you one question, then I will say my piece, and then you may throw me down the stairs if you wish. Though I would not advise it. I am heavier than I look, and I will take a banister with me.” He fixed his one good eye on Cassian. “Why did you let her go?”
Cassian stood by the cold easel. “I gave her the choice.”
“That is not what I asked. I am old, not deaf.” A pause. “I am, occasionally, deaf. This is not one of the occasions. I askedwhy.”
“Because she wants what I cannot give her.”
“Go on.”
“A family. Children. She told me so in the orangery with her whole heart on her face, and I told her I would give her no heirs. I meant it, Matthew. You of all men know why I meant it.” His voice did not rise. He had been trained too well to let it rise. Instead, it came out very flat and level which was worse. “I willnot sire a child for the purpose of making it into something. I had a father who did that. I will not be him. She deserves the children she wants, but I cannot be the man who gives them to her, so the only decent course was to let her go to a man who can.”
“I see.” Matthew folded his hands on the head of his cane. “She was the one for you, you know.”
“Don’t.”
“I knew it the evening of the card game at the house party. The two of you sat at my elbow and lied to my face and everyone else’s about how you had fallen in love. You told three different stories between you and could not keep them straight.
“And then she said her favorite thing about you was your scowl, and you, my boy, who have not smiled since you were fourteen years old, smiled. The corner of your mouth. I saw it. I have been waiting sixteen years to see it.”
The old man’s voice gentled. “A man does not smile like that at a woman who means nothing to him. I knew it then. I have known it ever since. I rather thought you knew it, too.”
Cassian said nothing.
“Let me ask you a soldier’s question,” Matthew said. “I am good at asking soldiers’ questions; it is the one thing the army taught me that the poets did not.” He leaned forward. “Picture it. Ayear from now. Two. Lady Alice is married to a steady, sensible gentleman. She is happy—let us grant her happy—and she is round with his child. Full of it. Glowing with it. Another man’s child, growing under the place where your pendant used to sit.” His good eye did not blink. “How does that picture make you feel, son? Be precise. I will know if you lie. I have been lied to by experts, and you are not one of them.”
Cassian’s right hand, the one holding the pendant, tightened until the small clasp bit into his palm.
“Like I would gouge my eyes out,” he gritted out, “sooner than see it.”
“Ah.”
“But if she is happy?—”
“Yes, yes, if she is happy. You are very noble. It is exhausting.” Matthew waved a dismissive hand. “I have a better question. Easier. Would you ever, for the rest of your life, be happy without her?”
“No,” Cassian said. It came out of him before the trained part could stop it. “No. But that is not the point. The point is what she needs, and what she needs is a family, and I?—”
“And you have decided, all by yourself in your tidy little head, that you cannot give her one.” The old man’s voice lost its dryness and found what had made a frightened boy of fourteenfollow him into a boxing ring and out the other side of his grief. “Listen to me, Cassian, because I am going to tell you the truth, and I will only say it once.
“You have spent your whole life so afraid of becoming your father that you have let him control you from the grave. He is dead. He has been dead for two years. And you are still living under his rules, painting in secret in your studio like a guilty boy, because somewhere inside you, the boy still believes that wanting is the same as being made to give up everything for it.”
He shook his white head slowly. “That girl will not be your father. Have you watched her with her younger sister? Have you watched her with the maid’s boy, whom she gathered up and rocked as if she had been born to it? She will not force a child to be anything. She will let them be terrible at painting and loud at dinner and themselves entirely. And you, you great fool, you will not be your father because the proof that you will not be him is that you have spent thirty years being terrified of it.
“He never once in his life was afraid of becoming cruel. You are. That is the whole difference, and it is the difference between a man and a monster, and it is everything.” He sat back. “Now, think about the future you could have. Properly. Do not flinch from it.Think.”
And, God help him, Cassian thought hard.
He had not, in two years of disciplined refusal, let himself build the picture even once. He built it now all at once, and it camewith a terrible clarity, like cold water after a thirst he had spent two years imposing on himself.
