Epilogue #2
Which was why, a little over an hour and a half later, Drake was standing in the room that Alfie shared with Gareth, listening to Marple tell a thrilling story about a hunt for a man-eating tiger.
Having said his good nights, he would normally be downstairs himself, drinking port with the other men.
Or perhaps in his bedchamber, with Cilla, who had gone upstairs to bed.
She was with child again, and these early months always left her exhausted.
But if Marple was spending time with his son and nephew, Drake wanted to keep the man under his eye.
After the story was done and the boys were left to blow out their candles and whisper in the dark, Drake and Marple left the boys’ room.
Marple put a hand on Drake’s arm. “Will you spare me a moment, Mr. Sanderson? Come this way. There’s a room by the stairs where we might talk without disturbing the children.”
Drake followed him, wondering what the man was up to. “What are you about, Marple?” he asked, keeping his voice down in deference to the young potential audience.
Marple stopped to light a candle at the hall table on the landing, and then led the way into the little parlor. Drake closed the door behind them. “Well?” His single word contained all his frustration.
“Words are cheap,” Marple said with no delay. “I can tell you I have changed, but why should you believe it? What I attempted to do to my cousins—it was wrong. I knew it at the time, but I ignored my conscience. It has bothered me, though.”
Play the violins. Poor, poor Marple. The sulky boy had not changed his ways at all. Just got better at hiding them.
Perhaps Marple read Drake’s thoughts in his face for he made an impatient cutting gesture with one hand. “It is not about me. I know that. For you, it is about Cilla. For me, Mary. I don’t want to see her hurt, in any way. She has been so excited about meeting you all.”
“Does she know what you did?” Drake demanded.
Marple hung his head. “Yes. I told her.” He shuddered as if reliving the occasion and a flush crept up his cheeks.
“Up until then, I really had not considered what it must have been like for my cousins. Mary was good enough to explain it to me.” The shake of Marple’s head expressed a wistful awe. “My wife can be… formidable.”
Good. Marple deserved to suffer.
“It was six months before my wife forgave me enough to let me back in her bed. She is a saint, my wife. I don’t deserve, nor do I ask, for your forgiveness, Sanderson, nor Cilla’s.
All I do ask is that you do not spoil this homecoming for my wife.
Please, I beg you, try not to glower at me whenever you must be in my company.
I shall avoid you and your wife as much as I can, consistent with hospitality. ”
Had he done that on purpose? Brought in the fact that Drake was staying under Marple’s roof? As if it mattered. Marple Hall would have been sold long ago if Papa Wintergreen had not saved it.
That said, Drake would enjoy watching Mary Marple keep her husband in line. “I shall try not to glower,” he said.
With a nod, Marple left him to go downstairs. As for Drake, he had a different destination in mind. His wife was in their bedchamber, and Drake could do with a hug.
*
Bane
“My nephew seems to have grown up,” Pa Wintergreen commented to Drake, Bane, and his daughters a few days later.
Since Marple was currently involved in riding an old tin tray down a grassy slope with one of his nephews between his knees, the remark seemed out of place, but Bane knew what his father-in-law meant.
The Viscount Marple of yesteryear would not have been seen dead joining in with the play of children, let alone behaving like a great overgrown boy for their entertainment.
Drake made a disbelieving grunt. He was going to take quite a bit more convincing, and Bane sympathized.
Marple had threatened, kidnapped, and manhandled Cilla.
Bane didn’t think he would ever forget the horror of those moments when he feared they would be too late to save Livy.
Cilla gave his arm a sympathetic squeeze.
“Can a leopard change his spots?” Drake asked.
“He will make a good viscount,” Wintergreen commented.
“He needs to learn more about English farming, but he understands bookkeeping and how to manage servants.” Wintergreen had spent hours over the past days closeted with Marple in the book room, or riding out with Marple and the steward over the estate.
“I do not trust him,” Drake growled.
“He does seem to have changed,” Cilla said. “Mary loves him, and she is no fool, that woman. I like her.”
“He was a weak boy who did a terrible thing, and would have done worse if you had not stopped him,” Wintergreen commented.
“In the past decade, Drake, he has paid for those sins. Not as the Curstons did. As you know, they gambled with and lost the money the four of them had on the ship that took them to India. When they could not live off their names and rank, they gambled again, this time with theft and robbery. Their deaths wiped that slate clean.”
“Not clean, no.” Bane did not agree. “If there is justice after death, they are both in hell.”
Drake nodded.
“Be that as it may,” Livy said, “They are gone, and by their own misdeeds, furthermore. They are out of our lives forever.”
“As for Aunt Ginny,” said Cilla, “we shall not see her again. Mary says that she became a sword wife of the Maharajah Amarsinha, and is not permitted out of the seraglio. Sword wife is a lesser form of marriage, Mary says. In India, those who are wealthy and titled might have several principal wives and any number of lesser wives, as well as concubines. It is very interesting.”
Bane had become used to his sister-in-law’s fascination with other times and cultures. He exchanged a smile with his best beloved. Livy’s approach to life was far more practical, just as he preferred it.
Cilla hadn’t finished. “Once Jasper married, Mary—as Aunt Ginny’s daughter-in-law—was allowed to visit her.
That was several years after she entered the seraglio, of course.
Apparently, at the time Lord Curston died, she was advising one of the principal wives on European fashion and customs. The queen asked her husband to marry Aunt Ginny, to protect her and give her a home. ”
“Was it the maharajah who found Jasper a position?” Bane wondered.
Wintergreen shook his head. “He had the position before the Curstons died. He says he had cut ties with them, and was slowly working his way up in the office of an American shipping company. As you know, he had become their chief agent in Bombay before his return to England.”
“And Marple did not think to bring his mother home with him?” Livy enquired, with a touch of disdain. She hated injustice to women, even a woman like her aunt.
“Even if the maharajah would have permitted it,” said Mary, who had approached with none of them noticing, “what is there for her here in England? Would an English woman who left under a cloud of scandal and became the divorced lesser wife of an Indian Maharajah be welcomed back into English Society?”
She raised her eyebrows in question, and Livy was quick to shake her head. “I see your point.”
“It was your aunt’s point,” Mary explained.
“When we decided to leave India, Jasper sent me to see if she wanted him to petition the Maharajah for her release from the seraglio so that she could come home with us, and she refused. It is a cage, the seraglio—luxurious and gilded, but still a cage. But Mother Marple likes better to be one of the lesser lights around whom the place turns, than to be a mere dowager viscount, and one with a stain on her character.”
“It is justice,” Livy decided. “She is in a prison, of sorts. And in her own way, when her own interests were not affected, she was kind to us.”
“You have been kind to Jasper,” Mary blurted.
“I know his offenses against you. Especially you, Livy and Cilla. But you have welcomed him home and given him back his patrimony. I want you to know I am grateful, and I shall make sure that he is worthy of the trust you have placed in him.” She then blushed scarlet and hurried away across the lawn to join the whooping laughing crowd at the bottom of the slope.
Alfie and Gareth broke free of the group to race toward their parents and grandfather. “Pa,” Gareth screeched. “Did you see me coming down the hill on the tray? Grandpa, I was the fastest.”
“Not as fast as me.” Alfie gave him a friendly shove, which Gareth returned, saying, amiably, “You were faster. Grandpa, Alfie and I were fastest.”
Bane ruffled his son’s hair. He’d do his best to make sure the boy never got into bad company, but if he failed, he hoped someone would give Gareth a second chance. Perhaps, after all, Marple had changed.
*
Livy
Livy was glad to be back in London, after a week at Marplehurst and another few days at Barlow Hall. Gareth put it best, when he leapt out of the carriage that carried the older children, not waiting for the steps to be lowered.
“Home!” he yelled, with his usual exuberance.
Bane turned back from the front door to smile at his son. “I thought you enjoyed spending time with all of your cousins, my son.”
“I did, Papa. I really did. But this is my own place, and all the most important people in my world live here. And at Cowcroft Court, of course. All our things are here, mine and Alfie’s.
And our cats, our dog, our other pets. I wonder if the rats have had babies while we were away.
Come on Alfie, let’s go and see! Hello, Wilson.
” With a wave to the butler, he was off up the steps and in through the front door, Alfie keeping pace behind him.
Livy shuddered. She had still not quite reconciled herself to the pet rats her son and Alfie shared, though she had to admit that they were clean and tame, and that the babies, once their pelts were grown, were quite sweet.
“How did you and I have such a loud and boisterous son?” Bane asked Livy.
“Do you think he and Alfie got swapped at birth?” It was a constant joke between the four of them, that Bane’s outgoing eldest son had somehow become confused in the nursery with Drake’s much quieter, more reserved child, who had been born four weeks later.
Never mind that it was impossible, since they had been easily distinguishable from birth, each taking after his father in size and coloring, even Gareth’s eyes—by the time he was six months old—showing one brown and one green, while Drake’s and Alfie’s were blue.
None of the other births had been quite as close. Cilla had another son eighteen months after Alfie, and Livy produced a daughter a year after that, and there was also a year’s gap between Cilla’s daughter and Livy’s younger son, who was still an infant.
“Are you going to stand on the steps trying to pass your son off as my own?” Drake teased them. “Or are you going inside? I need to take my wife to our rooms for a rest.”
“A rest, you say?” Bane asked. He grinned at Livy. “Darling, do you need a rest after that long, tiring carriage ride?”
“I should see the children settled,” Livy said. But when she looked back at the carriages, the last of the nursemaids was just disappearing through the front door to the other townhouse, leading her smallest son.
“Wife,” Bane said, “the children are pleased to be home and can safely be left to settle in. Come and lie down with me. I am so tired.”
“Me, too,” Drake claimed, gifting his wife with a leer that left no doubt what kind of a rest he had in mind. Cilla giggled, and—since Livy and Bane still stood on the top step—led her husband by the hand down the steps and along the pavement to their own entry.
“If you are tired,” Livy said, “what use will you be to me, Bane?”
“Come along, wife,” Bane told her, “and I shall show you.”
She followed beside him. “I was thinking,” she started.
“Uh oh,” he answered, giving her a sideways grin. “You know what they say about a lady who thinks.”
She gave him a glare. As he expected. “Of how this all started. When I was the Lady of Misrule.”
“Oh?” Her husband’s grin grew into a smile.
“I should like to relive that role. The one where I am in charge of the proceedings.” She gave him as coy a look as she could manage.
Her husband blinked and grabbed her hand.
“You know, my lady, that I will do whatever it takes to please you.” He sped up his steps as they walked, and because she was tall, she easily kept up with him.
“I bought some cotton rope,” he confided.
“It is softer than the jute we used last time. Shall we use the mask?” Livy grinned.
“Wait and see,” she advised. Which was part of the game, of course.
In truth, whatever they did, they would decide it together.
Whoever played the one in charge, it was always about them both.
Both in bed and out of it, she was his and he was hers.
And to think it all began with a thrice-blessed mistake.