Page 82 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
"By every law of the land, Your Grace, I am simply exercising my right to protect my own flesh and blood."
George Cluett stood by the fireplace of the cramped, low-ceilinged parlor of The White Hart Inn. The room smelled of stale ale, wet wool, and woodsmoke. George had taken rooms for the night there with Frederick, whom he had left sleeping in the room. It was a modest but clean establishment on the edge of the nearest market town.
George left the fireplace and walked over to sit across from them in the chair by the window. He folded his hands on his knees, his back straight. He had not been surprised to see them. Emily thought he had probably been expecting them.
Theodore had his hand at the small of her back even though they were seated. He had placed it there when they walked in and had not moved it. She found that she was glad of it, the steadiness of it, the reminder that she was not standing in this room alone.
"I mean no disrespect to your station," George continued. "But the boy is a Cluett. My son's son. He belongs among his kin, learning the trade that will sustain him, not being raised as a curious ornament in a house where he has no name."
Emily felt the heat rise in her cheeks, her gloved hands trembling where they were tucked into her muff. "He has a name," Emily countered, her voice ringing out in the small room. "He has a good home. Better than what you can offer him."
"He was a guest, Your Grace," George said, inclining his head toward her. "You must understand that blood cannot be ignored. I am his legal guardian. I have the papers, signed by the magistrate, confirming my right to his person."
"Papers can be challenged, Mr. Cluett," Theodore said. "You took a terrified child from his bed in the middle of the night with constables at your back. That does not look like the actions of a man concerned with a boy's welfare. It looks like the actions of a man seeking a prize."
"I want to know my grandson," George said. "Is that so difficult to understand, Your Grace? My son left when he was nineteen. I did not hear from him for years. He eloped. I did not know there was a boy." His jaw tightened. "I found out through rumors. Through people talking about a duchess taking in her sister's child. That is how I found out I had a grandson. From gossip."
Emily said nothing.
"I am not a wealthy man," George continued. "I am not a titled man. I cannot give him what you can give him. I understand that." He looked up. "But I am his family. His father's family. The only connection he has to Thomas. I came because I could not sit in my house knowing he existed and do nothing about it."
"What would doing something look like?" Theodore asked. "In your mind. When you imagined coming here and finding him, what did you see happening next?"
George opened his mouth. Then closed it.
He looked at his hands.
It was the first time since they had sat down that he appeared not to have a ready answer, and Emily watched him turn the question over.
"I wanted to know him," George said finally. "That is all I wanted."
"Then why the constables?" Theodore added.
George's jaw tightened. He looked at the fire. "Because I knew she would not simply hand him over." He glanced at Emily. "Forgive me, Your Grace. But I knew."
"You were right," Emily said simply.
George let out a sigh and then sat back, his posture collapsing until he looked every bit his age. The silence in the room stretched as he took his time to think.
"You know Thomas was a stubborn lad," George said quietly, his voice finally losing its defensive edge. "He had a laugh that could shake the rafters of the workshop. I can still see him standing there, his hands covered in sawdust, arguing with me about the grain of a piece of oak. He saw beauty where I saw utility. He wanted more than the shop, more than the life I’d built for him."
He let out a long, shuddering breath. "When he ran off with your sister, I told myself he was dead to me. I burned his letters. I told the neighbors I had no son. I let my pride choke the life out of my own heart for years." He looked up at Emily. "Then the news came. A notice of his passing. A cold piece of paper telling me my only child was in the ground."
He looked at his hands again, which were gnarled and trembling against the rough wood of the table. "The world just… stopped. Every room in my house became a grave. I spent nights sitting in his old workshop, surrounded by his half-finished projects, realizing that the silence I’d forced on our family was now permanent. I had spent years pretending he didn't exist so I wouldn't have to feel the sting of his leaving, but his death? His death shattered the very floor beneath my feet."
George took a jagged, shuddering breath, his eyes searching Emily’s as if looking for a trace of the sister who had taken his son away, or perhaps the son himself. "I heard about the boy through the rumors. I realized that while I’d been nursing mybitterness, a piece of my son was out there, breathing, growing, and I didn't even know the color of his eyes."
"I really did think that he would come back," George continued. "Thomas. After a month, after a year, I kept thinking he would come back and we would find some way to be in the same room again and say the things we had not said." He shook his head slowly. "He did not come back. I did not go after him. I told myself he was the one who left. That it was his place to return."
George sat up straighter. "So, please... try to understand. I am an old man, and my house is a tomb. Let me take him. Let me raise him in the trade of his father. It is the only way I have left to get my son back. It is the only way to make things right."
He looked at Theodore. "I am asking you, Your Grace. Man to man. Please."
Theodore looked at him.
Emily held her breath.
