Cadence

Twenty

 

Twenty

“You did what?”

Curtis cast a nervous glance toward the open study door. “Will you keep your voice down?” he implored his father. Robert Langston had taken the news of his son’s recent nuptials about as well as Curtis had expected, which unfortunately was not well at all, and Curtis was attempting to keep the impending tirade from reaching his wife’s ears.

“Do ye ever stop ta think, lad?” The telltale thickening of his father’s Scottish burr never failed to make him feel the recalcitrant child.

“Think about what?”

“About the consequences of yer actions, Curtis. You traipse about the world on a ship for months on end without a thought to yer family! By the by, we have no idea if you’re alive or dead, or even if we should worry over you.” Robert stopped and ran a hand through his graying locks. “Fer three years we thought you were dead, three years during the war we grieved for you.”

“Oh, God,” Curtis spat, “don’t tell me you’re going to bring that up again.”

“You never sent any word, and apparently none of your abounding life’s lessons have taught you any sort of responsibility.”

“Goddamn it all,” he muttered in exasperation, why were they rehashing this same old argument? “I did write. I wrote almost every month, and I will tell you again as I have told you one hundred times that I don’t know why none of the letters made it home. The Confederate postal system wasn’t exactly reliable.” Did his father really believe him so negligent, so reckless? Probably. “But that is hardly the point, and it is hardly what I am here to discuss with you now.”

Robert wagged a finger toward his son. “Was it really any surprise to me that ye shirked a soldier’s life for that of a pillaging pirate nigh a year into the war?”

It was all Curtis could do not to blanch at the words of his sire but he’d determined years ago to show no further distress at the constant reminder of being a disappointment, of being the disappointment. “I was not a damned pirate! I followed the rules of war to the letter, the letter.”

“You have been the bane of my existence for years!” Robert roared near the brink of his control.

The bane of my existence… Being the bane of someone’s existence seemed to be a recurring theme in his life… The bane of his father—being the third son of four children it had been a fight for his widowed father’s attention and the pranks had never failed to bring Robert running. The bane of his teachers—pranks at school had proved equally beneficial in distracting the schoolmarms from how he struggled with his studies. The bane of the Yankees—well it would suffice to say he was more than a little proud to have been called the bane of the Yankees.

“And now,” Robert’s voice yanked Curtis from his dark thoughts, “you’ve come home and announced that you ran away with a woman accused of murder and married her.”

Curtis could have breathed fire in that moment. “It isn’t like that!”

“Then what is it like? She is a Jamison,” as if that said it all. Bad blood flowed hot and boiling between the Langstons and the Jamisons. While Curtis had never put much stock in other people’s bad blood he’d known his father would not take his marrying Cadence in a positive light.

“Cadence is not a Jamison anymore,” Curtis growled, “and I would suggest you get used to the fact that she now holds the name of Langston.”