Washington and ask your father’s permission to marry.”
“What?” she screeched. A squirrel startled, scrambling for cover as her shout echoed off the mountainside. “He’ll never agree. Never!”
The idea of Luke walking up to her father, hat in hand, and obediently asking for her hand in marriage was absurd.
As if he sensed her confusion, he rubbed his hands up and down her arms, squeezing gently. “Despite my long and colorful history of breaking the rules, I’m trying to be a better man. A better Christian. And one of the few direct commands ordained by God is to honor your mother and your father. It’s right there as the fifth commandment. There’s no other way to read that one. I wish there was.”
She drifted a few steps away to plop down on a boulder. “In that case, we’ll never get married. It will never happen.”
Luke hunkered down beside her and reached for her hand. “We have to at least ask,” he said passionately. “The commandment doesn’t order us to mindlessly obey your parents, it orders us to honor them. Which means no running away to San Francisco or getting married behind their backs. We will give them the respect they are owed.” He swallowed hard, as if bracing for the battle ahead. “That means I’m going to approach Clyde in a civil manner and humbly ask permission to join his family. He may call down fire and brimstone on my head. The last time we saw each other, he punched me in the face and threw me off his property, but I’ll do my best to forge a truce.”
Her gaze trailed into the distance, seeing nothing but problems ahead. She had already consigned herself to walking away from her family and living like Aunt Stella with a new family created from scratch. After all, it would be Clyde, not she, who made it impossible to remain in the family.
But she was the one who bought the ticket out west. She was the one who ran away rather than confront the challenging tangle of family drama at home. The fact that she doubted they could have made much progress was no excuse for not giving her parents the opportunity. Even now, she was certain Luke was heading straight toward a buzz saw in asking Clyde’s permission, but Luke was right.
As was Uncle Joseph, who preached that a life guided by the Christian virtues of love, humility, charity, and forgiveness would be more successful than her intemperate actions of the past. They needed to make this final overture to her parents, even though Marianne feared it was going to be hopeless.
Thirty-Five
It was going to take four days to travel by train to Washington, and Luke spent most of that time sweating bullets. Despite the confident air he tried to project, he was terrified of showing up at the Magruder household on bended knee, but he was going to do it. Marianne would carry a lifelong scar if she turned her back on her parents, and that meant Luke had to reconcile with them.
The long train ride gave them plenty of time to discuss what had happened over the past month. As anticipated, the reviews for Don Quixote were savage. Up until the date of publication, Luke had harbored a tiny hope it would be hailed as a masterpiece, but reality came crashing in with the first review.
He showed it to Marianne the morning after they’d settled in to their private compartment on the train heading back east. He watched as her eyes traveled over the review that called his translation an abuse of the English language that layered emotion on with a smothering trowel of overblown sentiment.
She scowled as she read, finally dropping the magazine onto her lap. “This is nonsense. Whoever wrote this was probably a fusty college professor who doesn’t have warm blood in his veins. I loved your translation! You should submit a rebuttal to the magazine. Defend yourself. Fight for the quality of what you produced.”
She continued ranting, but he no longer cared what highbrow professors thought of him. Uptight college academics had a right to their opinions, and people who liked a more passionate style were equally entitled to their view. They were both right, and the novel was selling amazingly well among ordinary people despite the reviews. Besides, he had bigger battles on the horizon.
Like winning Clyde’s consent to their marriage.
He clenched his hands and folded his arms, instinctively bracing himself for the coming implosion.
Marianne noticed and misinterpreted