EPILOGUE
Benham Hall, Twelve Months Later
Caroline set down her flannel on the washstand and took a quick glance in the mirror at her flushed face and untidy hair. She had her maenad’s face on and was entirely naked but did not worry about that in the privacy of their large and comfortable bedroom.
Glancing toward the adjoining dressing room, she saw the Remus had curled up on top of her black silk mourning cape, while Romulus was stalking over the top of a chest of drawers, picking his way through the hat stands.
As they both looked happily occupied, she left them to it and started toward her dressing table to tidy herself, but Gervaise extended an arm to her from the bed. “You’re taking too long,” he complained. “Come and sooth me, lest I complain I have been ridden hard and put away wet.”
Caroline laughed and changed direction. “I would never treat a beast in my stables in such a fashion,” she tutted, walking over to him and catching hold of his hand, which he used to tug her toward him.
Instead of smiling at her playful words, he frowned. “What is it?” Caroline asked, climbing into the bed, and pulling his head into her lap. “What did I say? I was merely extending your equestrian metaphor,” she said, brushing the hair out of his face.
“Yes, I know, but I did not like the idea I might be part of a stable.”
She gazed down at him. “I don’t think I—?”
“One of many horses,” he explained, avoiding her eye.
“Oh! I did not mean to infer that. You would, of course, be my one and only prized stallion.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “Your one and only,” he echoed lightly, when she had fully expected him to fasten on the “stallion” epithet.
“My one and only,” she confirmed. He tipped his head up and she read his invitation quite clearly, leaning down to place a firm kiss upon his mouth.
She felt suddenly touched that he should feel insecure about such a ridiculous thing.
“Silly boy,” she murmured, caressing his face.
“Why would I want for another, when I have you?”
She kissed him again, lingeringly this time, and he reached up to catch the back of her neck, holding her firmly in place. They kissed slowly and sweetly for a good while, Caroline relaxing against him and making happy noises in her throat.
“Fuck,” he whispered against her lips. “You know how it affects me when you do that.”
“When I do what?” she asked lightly, fondling his ears.
“You know full well.”
She laughed. “You may as well admit you liked being fussed and fawned on.”
“I do not!” He sounded so indignant, she had to muffle her laughter.
“Yes, you do. I don’t think you had enough maiden aunts to coo over you as a baby.”
“God, Caroline, that sounds revolting! Are you trying to put me off?”
“Does it? But you like it so much when I treat you like a good boy,” she pointed out, peppering noisy kisses over his brow.
“I don’t want to be fawned on like a…like a pet pug!” he objected, but she noticed he turned in to her attentions rather than away from them.
“I think you do,” she teased. “I think that is your deepest, darkest, secret desire, Gervaise.”
He was quiet for a couple of heartbeats. “How utterly ridiculous,” he objected strenuously. A bit too strenuously considering he was lying there so passively in her embrace.
“I think you like being my good boy,” she whispered. “I think you like it just as much when I scold you for being bad.” He looked rather stunned, and Caroline gentled her hand as she ran it through his hair.
He cleared his throat. “Caroline, I do not know how it is that you keep exposing things from the depths of my soul, so deep that even I am unaware of them, but you do.
“You mean like your penchant for stern instructresses?”
“Yes,” he agreed fervently.
She laughed. “I don’t know why you are so shocked by it. It is just the other side of the same coin after all.” He settled more comfortably against her, and she rubbed his chest in circles the way he liked it.
Since he had given up smoking, Gervaise was a good deal more demanding post-coitally, but Caroline found she did not mind it.
“I think you need to be a little less acerbic in your dealings with the vicar,” she said tentatively.
“Reverend Ryland looked like he was going to burst into tears when you joined us in the drawing room after dinner.”
He gave a murmur of disagreement. “I have already forgiven the Tavistocks and the Pebmarshes at your insistence,” he pointed out. “Therefore, you must allow me to mete out punishment to the Rylands for at least another twelve months.”
“Twelve months?” she echoed. “It has already been a full year since Mama died.”
“It has,” he agreed. “But need I remind you they made your life a misery for twenty-six years, Caroline? Reverend Ryland should be grateful I do not demand Jeremy replace him with our own Canon Petrie, who is superior in every way.”
“Canon Petrie is retired and very happy living in his nephew’s household,” she reminded him. “They even let him adopt a cat, a very fat ginger one that dozes with him in his favorite armchair.”
“I know. It saw its hairs all over his trousers last time we went for lunch.”
“In any case, Mrs. Ryland was more Mama’s dupe than her husband,” Caroline persisted. “You may punish Mrs. Ryland for another six months, but I want you to relent now where the vicar is concerned. He gave me a very heartfelt apology last summer at the squire’s picnic party and I accepted it.”
“I require another six months for the vicar,” he answered swiftly. “And another full year for Mrs. Ryland.” He lifted his neck to meet her gaze full on. “I feel strongly on the matter. Give me this.”
“Oh, very well,” she conceded. “But I am going to start being terribly sweet to him.”
“You may do that,” he said generously. “But only because it will add to his suffering.”
“And you think I am the stern one,” she marveled.
He caught hold of her hand and pressed it to his lips. “I cannot wait to see you in your new clothes,” he confessed in a swift change of subject. “We must have lots of garden parties this summer to show them all off.”
Now an official twelve months of mourning had passed, a whole new wardrobe had been carefully selected for Caroline and ordered in a wide range of pretty colors and delicate fabrics. The pergola had been pulled down and replaced with intricately planted flower beds.
Sophy had been laid to rest in her native Shropshire, at her parents’ local church. Her younger brother Charlie had started an apprenticeship at a draper’s which Caroline had paid for, along with a commemorative gravestone and plaque.
It turned out that poor Mr. Penrose the fishmonger had been Sophy’s reason for loitering in the garden that day.
They had been used to meeting there when he made deliveries to the house.
He had actually seen Sophy’s body that day and fled, terrified that he would be suspected of her murder.
He only broke down later and told this to the squire, who had to support him when reporting this to the authorities.
Goring had confessed all, once she had learned her mistress’s grisly fate.
She had not seemed to care about any consequences for herself or her cousin in its wake.
Sidney Price had caught a raging infection in the hospital and had never recovered from it.
As for Goring, she had refused to eat or drink in custody and had not survived long enough to go to trial.
Their swift ends had meant the scandal was not so very severe as Caroline had feared.
Not that it would have mattered. Lady Sharpe had taken up her cause so enthusiastically that Caroline had been fully vindicated and her survival celebrated in both Penarth and London.
Gervaise had been quite right, they were inundated with invitations these days from all quarters.
“I think I will almost miss my black silk gowns,” Caroline mused. “Blanche Ingram confessed to me that she almost wished she had a bereavement to commemorate. She said I always look so romantic and tragic in mine and she quite envies me.”
“Mmmm, you do look good in them,” Gervaise reflected proudly for he had specified every flounce and pleat.
“But you will look just as good your new wardrobe, if not better. I have ordered you several gowns in a new type of shot silk. They call it glacé silk and the color shifts under the lights. You will look spectacular.”
“I will confess, I won’t miss always being draped head to toe in black and all the children pointing me out in church like I am some personage of great notoriety.”
“They will still point you out, my maenad.”
“Why? You think they will still recognize me out of my mourning?”
“They will recognize you as the most beautiful woman in the country. Just as they will know you for the most beautiful woman in Europe when we finally visit my mother next year.”
She smiled absently. She had long since learned that protesting Gervaise’s ridiculous bias was a waste of breath. “She wrote again to me last week of another set of friends who will wish to meet us when we are next in London.”
“No doubt. Did you read Uncle’s letter yet? I don’t know why he bothered to address it to me for it was patently full of items for you. He even included a press clipping about some new opera house he wants to take you to when we are next in town.”
“The dear sweet man,” Caroline murmured. As predicted, she had grown extremely fond of Uncle George. “He spoils me.”
“I know,” Gervaise answered sourly. “And that is my favorite pursuit.”
“I do hope he comes for a good long stay in the summer and brings Macey with him.”
“He’s threatening to in the postscript.”
“Good! We must take him to dinner at Vance Park again. Teddy adored him. He’s the only person who believes that story about them having part of the Colossus of Rhodes in their library.”
“That’s because Uncle is na?ve,” Gervaise said dampeningly. “And Teddy likes him because they’re like two schoolboys together.”