Epilogue #2
Jamie’s arms remained looped around both of them for a moment longer before she finally pulled back, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand in a way that tried very hard to look practical rather than emotional.
“I am nae cryin’,” she announced.
“Aye,” Caitlin said from the blanket behind them, with all the dignity of a woman who had herself grown suspiciously bright-eyed. “And I am nae listening.”
Jamie frowned at her grandmother, then turned at once toward Frederick and Iona as though daring either of them to disagree.
Iona only smiled and brushed a hand over her daughter’s hair.
The moment softened after that. Maxwell took the babe from Ariella so she could sit more comfortably.
Lennox finally surrendered to whatever conspiracy Caitlin had been building in whispers and helped spread another blanket farther toward the shade.
Erin, done blessing the edges of the land or perhaps only pausing in it, returned with the look of a woman satisfied that the ground had heard her properly.
For a little while, the afternoon became simple again.
They ate. Jamie asked whether a future house built here might have room for three dogs, a pony, and perhaps a swing if one argued convincingly enough.
Ariella laughed when the babe in Maxwell’s arms yawned so widely it seemed impossible the child’s face might recover from it.
Lennox claimed he would rather sleep in a ditch than in a village overrun with children.
Caitlin informed him no one had suggested he be invited at all.
Iona sat within it all and felt, with that same quiet astonishment that had followed her for weeks now, how settled happiness could be when no one snatched at it.
Frederick had been quieter than the others, though not withdrawn.
There was a difference to him when he was planning something.
She knew it now. A deeper stillness. A look in his eyes that meant his thoughts were measuring farther ahead than anyone else had yet realized.
She had noticed it while Jamie spoke. While Ariella teased.
While Caitlin corrected the arrangement of cups on the blanket for no reason other than habit.
Now she caught it again.
He rose slowly from where he had been seated and brushed the grass from his hands.
“Ye have that look,” Iona said.
Frederick glanced at her. “What look?”
“The one that means ye have been planning something without telling the rest of us.”
Lennox let out a short breath that might have been a laugh. “That narrows it down not at all.”
Frederick ignored him and instead looked toward the stretch of open ground between the rise and the loch. For a moment, his attention remained there, and when he spoke again, it was not only to her.
“I have decided what is to be done with this land,” he said.
Caitlin’s brows lifted. “Have ye now?”
“Aye.”
Jamie sat up straighter at once. “Is it a swing?”
“Nay.”
Her face fell in exaggerated disappointment.
Frederick’s mouth shifted, though only slightly. “It will be a village.”
The words settled over the blankets with surprising force.
Even Lennox stopped pretending boredom.
“A village?” Ariella repeated.
Frederick nodded once. “For the women and children who had nowhere to return after what was done to them. For those Iona once helped. For those who have since been found and freed. For any among them who wish for a place where they may live without fear of being driven off, claimed, traded, or hidden away again.”
Iona felt the breath leave her. She looked at him, certain she must have misheard some part of it, that perhaps she had let hope grow too quickly from a simple sentence.
But he was looking only at her now.
“I have written to them,” he said.
Her throat tightened at once.
Frederick reached inside his coat and drew out a packet of letters, tied with dark ribbon and already worn faintly soft at the edges from travel and handling. He crossed the short space between them and placed them carefully in her lap as though they were breakable.
“All of them answered,” he said.
Iona stared down at the bundle.
For a moment, she could do nothing else.
The letters were real. She could feel the shape of them through the paper. Different hands. Different folds. Different weights of ink and silence and years now somehow gathered into one place before her.
“Ye found them?” she said quietly.
“Aye.”
“How?”
“At first,” Frederick said, “with more coin than I liked spending and more patience than Lennox liked watching.”
“I object to that description,” Lennox muttered.
“Nay, ye daenae,” Caitlin said.
Frederick continued as though neither had spoken. “After that, by asking the right people in the right order. Some had remarried. Some had found kin. Some had none at all. A few had gone farther than I expected, but not so far that letters couldnae reach them eventually.”
Iona lifted the first one with fingers that had begun to tremble.
She recognized the handwriting before she unfolded it.
The red-haired woman. The one from the dungeon. The one she had seen again in the hunting lodge, older and scarred and still somehow alive enough to weep when the bonds came away.
Iona read the first lines and had to stop because her eyes blurred too quickly to continue.
“What does it say?” Jamie asked, her voice hushed now as though she already knew this was something sacred.
Iona swallowed and tried again.
It took effort to make the words sound aloud.
It was thanks, first. Gratitude written in a handmade clumsy by old injury and disuse.
Then, more than thanks. The woman wrote that she would come if the land was truly meant for women such as them.
That if Iona Pearson was to be the lady of such a place, then she could think of nowhere safer.
That safety, once imagined impossible, had begun to sound like something one might perhaps deserve.
Iona’s lips parted, but no more words came.
She pressed the letter briefly to her chest and looked at Frederick through tears she could not stop now, even if she had wished to.
He did not appear embarrassed by them. Only steady. Certain. As though he had hoped for this and would not shame her for meeting it honestly.
“Read another,” Ariella said softly.
So Iona did.
One letter spoke of a widow with two small sons who had never had a roof that belonged properly to her and would come if the offer remained.
Another came from a woman who had taken work in a distant town and had thought herself as safe there as she might ever be, yet confessed that the idea of a place built not merely to hide women but to honor their survival had made her cry in the street when she first read Frederick’s hand.
Another wrote simply that if Iona had survived and if Iona were there, then she would come too.
By the third letter, Iona was no longer pretending at composure.
She laughed once through tears and covered her mouth at once as though that might somehow restore dignity. It did not. Jamie crawled nearer and leaned against her side, reading what she could not yet understand from her mother’s face alone.
“They want to come,” Jamie whispered.
“Aye,” Iona said.
“Because of ye.”
The words undid her all over again.
Frederick crouched before her then, taking the letters gently from where they had begun to slip in her lap and setting them aside so his hands could close around hers instead.
“Because of what ye did,” he corrected softly. “Because one frightened maid saw what decent people would rather not look at and chose to act anyway. Because ye gave them a chance to live.”
Iona shook her head once, overwhelmed beyond speech.
Jamie, however, had no such difficulty.
“Me ma is very brave,” she said with complete certainty. “And so is me da.”
Lennox looked at the sky as if asking it for patience. Caitlin dabbed discreetly at one eye and pretended she had only been troubled by the wind. Erin let out a low Gaelic murmur that sounded suspiciously like approval.
Frederick’s thumb moved lightly over Iona’s knuckles. “If ye want it,” he said, “this land will be theirs. And yers. Houses. Gardens. A school if enough bairns gather to make one necessary. A place where nay woman needs to explain too much before being believed.”
Iona looked beyond him then, over the open ground and the loch and the trees and the broad, waiting quiet of it all.
She could see it suddenly, not as empty land but as it might become.
Smoke rising from several hearths. Women walking paths with baskets on their arms and no fear at their backs.
Children running where Jamie now ran, careless and loud and safe enough to be both. Not a hiding place. A beginning.
When she looked back at Frederick, she could not seem to fit all she felt into words. So she kissed him.
It was not a grand kiss. But it held within it the sense of being seen not only for what had been done to her, but for what she had done in return. Frederick kissed her back with the same quiet certainty that had steadied her since the worst night of her life finally ended.
When they parted, Jamie sighed happily beside them. “That looked like a pleased kiss,” she said.
Ariella laughed aloud. Maxwell, holding the babe against his shoulder, shook his head as though the entire family had become impossible at once. Even Lennox smiled, though briefly and as if by accident.
Iona wiped at her face and laughed through the last of her tears.
And when she looked once more over the land that would soon become something living and safe and full of women who had thought themselves lost, she understood that what remained now was building the life that was finally worth staying for.
The End?