February 15, 1921: The Ritz-Carlton
Nucky opens his daughter's door without knocking. He watches her sitting on her bed with her back to him sorting papers. Dressed in a ridiculous cardigan and skirt, with her hair hanging down unpinned she looks like the schoolgirl that, to him, she was just yesterday. Fresh fury rises up in him at the thought of Clara sitting on the sofa surrounded by State Patrol Officers while he was put in handcuffs and led away. When she turns and smiles at him her expression looks so much like Mabel's that it takes his breath away.
Clara gets off the bed and awkwardly hugs her father. Usually when Clara comes in late no one notices, but early this morning when Richard dropped her off Eddie was awake and trying to get the suite put back together. He said nothing of the late hour (nor anything of the fact that her face was pink from beard burn), but told her Nucky was fine and at Margaret's. It's reassuring to see her father in the flesh.
"Are you all right?" Clara asks.
Nucky nods. "Are you?"
Clara smiles and gestures around the wreck of her room. "I fared better than my room did, I fear."
"Where did you go?" Nucky asks, expecting her to say to Jimmy, where she always runs when in trouble. He should have never let that fucking relationship develop, but who would have dreamed that at almost twenty-three that they would still be clinging to the fiction they were siblings? Who would have foreseen James's perfidy?
"I hid, and then I went down to D.C. I just wanted to be out of the way because the officers asked me so many questions before they let me leave."
"What did you tell them?" Nucky said, so distracted by the idea of Clara being questioned he doesn't pursue the idea of where she hid.
Clara shrugs. "Don't worry, I acted like a foolish little rich girl who hasn't a single clue what goes on around her, and," she gestures to the suite, "that's what they saw so they believed it."
"Come breakfast with me."
The first course, broiled grapefruit, is already laid out. Clara feels like she's looking at everything for the first time. It's the same sense of discombobulation she had when she came back after working in New York and D.C. It was all too much, and yet at the same time comfortingly familiar. When she looked at the grapefruit on its rimmed china plate, the sterling silver serrated spoon laid next to it, and the empty crystal glasses at the ready she couldn't help but compare it to the bacon roll and potato pancake she ate out of a paper box yesterday.
She picks up the spoon.
"You know who did this?" Nucky asks.
Clara considers making a joke about Eddie ordering breakfast but instead sets the spoon back down.
"Yes," she carefully picks her words. "It's the Commodore's plan to overthrow you."
"Don't obfuscate the truth out of sentimentality, Clara. This is all James."
Clara looks up. She unconsciously presses back against her chair when she sees the fury in her father's eyes. "No, he bears responsibility but this is the Commodore."
"They are all in it. All of them. Do you know who is involved?"
"Uncle Eli," she says quietly.
Nucky leans back and regards his daughter seriously. "How do you know?"
"Father, really? You spent all of last year-maybe all of our lives-moving us around like pieces on a chess board with not a care for what our plans for our lives were. Uncle Eli was beyond angry and hurt about the shenanigans with the sheriff's office. I hated Darcy Blaine and you didn't even notice in your haste to marry me off to him to score yourself a political advantage. And Jimmy? Can you imagine what he went through in the trenches, and then he comes back and we all want the Jimmy who left-"
"Clara, I do not have time-"
"No, please! He's different, certainly, and the boy we loved is gone. But he's still Jimmy, he just needed our support, our patience, and I think every one of us failed him. You, me...Gillian. And Gillian," Clara looks down, "She uses Jimmy to further her own agenda. She always has. She always will. And when she told him everything about how she came to be with the Commodore, he came to you. He was angry and he needed you to acknowledge what happened, but mostly he needed to know that you loved him, that everything you did for him wasn't out of guilt or obligation ..."
Nucky stood up and started to stride out of the room. Clara grabbed his arm as he walked past.
"Father, please, it's not too late..."
"Perhaps you are the foolish girl the state patrol took you for, Clara," Nucky said as he shook her off and left the room.