“I will be along shortly,” Giles said, his voice hoarse.
It was the only way he could think of to put his father off. Miraculously, it worked.
“See that you do not dawdle,” his father said, then turned to leave the room.
Giles debated his next steps carefully, then decided his sisters would be safer in their own rooms, or perhaps all together in one room.
“Come along,” he said, stepping away from the table and taking Constance’s hand, since she was on the same side of the table as him.
Eliza rushed to grasp his other hand, and Rebecca formed a cluster with them as they made their way up the stairs.
“In here,” Rebecca whispered once they’d made it to the top of the stairs. She pushed open the first doorway on the left.
Giles found himself in a plain bedchamber with simple furnishings and no embellishments. For all the claims their father had made of being wealthy now, Rebecca’s room was still as barren as it had been when Giles had left.
“What is Father going to do to you?” Eliza asked in a wavering voice as Giles ushered his younger sisters into the room.
“Nothing at all,” Giles said as Rebecca locked the door behind them, then moved a chair from the corner of the room to wedge up against the door. “Has he done anything to the lot of you?” he asked as they all made their way to the bed.
“No,” Rebecca said, climbing onto the bed. “He only ever…did that to you.”
A thousand bitter emotions swirled through Giles. “I am so sorry that I left you all behind,” he said, gathering Constance and Eliza into his arms and trying to hug everyone at once. “I never should have gone.”
“You had to go,” Constance said. “He was…I…you had to.”
Giles was beyond glad that his younger sister did not have the words to describe why flight had been necessary.
“Where have you been these last two years?” Eliza asked, gazing up at him with adoring eyes as she clung to him.
Giles laughed in spite of the absurd tension of the moment. “I’ve been in Perdition,” he said.
All three of his sisters gasped, their eyes going round.
Giles grinned. “It’s not so bad as all that.”
He’d promised them a bedtime story, so he proceeded to tell them all about where he had been and what he had been up to for the past two years—which proved exceedingly difficult to do without damaging the innocence of their ears. He related the story of Perdition as if he’d been hired as a footman at the club, and as if the worst of the vices that Perdition was guilty of was illicit card games. Rebecca seemed to grasp what he was truly saying, but the younger two believed every carefully chosen word out of Giles’s lips.
An hour or so after they’d taken shelter together, there was a knock on the door.
“Giles, come away from there. Leave the girls alone. It is time for bed,” their father’s voice called from the hall.
“No,” Giles called back. “I have not seen my sisters for years. We will spend the night together. Without you.”
“This is absurd,” his father argued. “They are just girls. I order you to let them be and come to bed.”
“I will not,” Giles insisted. “Go to bed yourself.”
“Insolent brat!” His father tried the handle of Rebecca’s door. When he found it locked, he let out an oath, then pounded the door. “Let me in at once.”
“No,” Giles called back, leaving it at that.
“I demand you let me in!”
Their father proceeded to pound on the door, try the handle, then pound again. He went away for a while, found a key, and came back to unlock the door. By that point, Giles and Rebecca had wedged themselves against the door along with the chair, and despite all their father’s efforts, he could not make the door budge.
That didn’t stop him from pounding and cursing and even kicking the door at one point. He carried on for a good hour, until Rebecca’s few candles had burned down and the four of them were left in near darkness. Even after their father stopped trying to get through the door, Giles could hear him breathing just on the other side.
Still, they waited. The two younger girls fell asleep on Rebecca’s bed, but Rebecca and Giles remained vigilant, ears to the door, listening.