Epilogue
FOUR MONTHS LATER
The fair had taken over the meadow behind Chelsea for the week, and by three in the afternoon, on a Saturday in late October, it had taken over a considerable portion of the good sense of London.
A brass band was playing somewhere behind the rope swings with more enthusiasm than precision. A man stood near a dancing bear. The bear, looking rather less enthusiastic about the dancing than its owner, was attracting a horde of children.
A fortune-teller in a striped tent had hung out a sign that read in lettering of uncertain authority: MADAME ZUNEGA, FORMERLY OF THE COURTS OF EUROPE. She was doing a brisk trade in the exposing of matrimonial futures to young women who had every appearance of already knowing them.
The leaves on the trees along the river had turned a pleasant copper. The air smelled of roasted chestnuts, cut hay, and the horse that was tethered objectionably near the lemonade stall.
“I should like,” Celia announced, planting herself in the middle of the path with her hands on her hips, “one of everything.”
“Celia.”
“Anne, I have considered the matter at length. One of everything. I cannot decide otherwise.”
“Darling, you have eightpence in the world, and there are easily forty kinds of everything.”
“Then I should like,” Celia said, reconsidering with great gravity, “one of the best things.”
“That seems more sensible.”
“Uncle Rafe will know which are the best things.”
“Uncle Rafe,” William spoke up from Anne’s other side, “is not a reliable authority on the best of anything, in my experience.”
“He is a reliable authority on sweets, Papa,” Felicity declared, quite firmly. “Celia is correct. Uncle Rafe is our man.”
“I withdraw my objection,” William said. “Lead on.”
They had come as a party of six, in point of fact, not five. Rafe had arrived at Dawnhurst House that morning with a companion on his arm. A Miss Harriet Longmore, of Bath, of whom he had been speaking in recent weeks.
Miss Longmore was a tall, lively, brown-eyed woman of twenty-six, with a laugh that began deep in her chest and escaped without hesitation. She had taken Anne’s hand on arrival with the frank interest of a woman who had been hearing about her for some time.
She had said conspiratorially, “Your Grace, I have been longing to meet you. My companion has described you as formidable. I took that as a recommendation, of course.”
“Formidable,” Anne had repeated.
“His word, not mine. Though having met you, I can see it was not ill-chosen.”
“Miss Longmore,” Rafe had tsked from behind her, “I was under the impression that you had given me your word that you would behave yourself.”
“I have been behaving,” Miss Longmore had said serenely. “This is behaving.”
“God save us all,” Rafe had muttered.
In due course, they had proceeded through the fair. Celia had by now secured Rafe’s left hand and Miss Longmore’s right. She was marching them both at a pace somewhat above the adult cruising speed toward a stall advertising in capital letters, GINGERbrEAD MEN OF GREAT DISTINCTION.
Felicity walked a few paces ahead in the combination of dignity and near-skipping she had lately perfected. As the weather turned, she had put on an air of being eleven-almost-twelve. It was now beginning to falter at the sight of a puppet theatre.
“You may go and watch the puppets,” William said from behind her, “if you are capable of doing so without pretending you are too old for them.”
Felicity turned with the instant gratitude of a child reprieved. “Thank you, Papa.”
“Go watch the puppets, poppet.”
William took Anne’s arm, and they walked on more slowly.
The sun, lowish now, was striking through the yellow leaves. It caught warm on the side of his face.
Anne looked up at him. Over the summer and autumn, he had grown more at ease with himself in a way she could sometimes still hardly believe.
This afternoon, he simply looked like a man out with his wife at a fair. Nothing more. Nothing less. No coat of dignity thrown over him. No ducal weight at the corners of his mouth.
“What?” he asked, catching her staring. “Is there something on my face? Besides the scar, of course.” He laughed.
“Nothing at all.”
“Anne.”
“I was only looking at you.”
“Ah.”
“It is permitted, I believe, to look at one’s husband occasionally.”
“It is permitted,” he agreed. “But if done too often, it becomes unseemly.”
“Then I shall always be unseemly. You are stunning, and I cannot control myself.”
“I see.”
“I have been unseemly for some months, William. You must get used to it soon.”
He smiled. It was the smile—all slow, private, and for her alone—that she had thought to organize the remainder of her life around. Little else warmed her heart as much as that smile.
Ahead of them, at the gingerbread stall, Celia had found herself in a crisis. Miss Longmore was being called upon to adjudicate between two gingerbread men of roughly equivalent distinction.
“Miss Longmore,” Celia asked, “which do you consider the more noble of the pair?”
“The one on the left,” Miss Longmore answered promptly.
“Why?”
“If you look carefully, he has a more philosophical expression about the currants. Do not you agree?”
“Oh, yes. I see it now.”
“A man of deep reflection.”
“Then I shall have him.”
“A sound choice, Miss Celia.”
Rafe, who had been watching this exchange with an expression of unguarded delight, caught William’s eye over Miss Longmore’s head.
He did not say anything. He did not need to.
The look was, Anne thought, that of a man quite helplessly in love and pleased about it, and not at all in any hurry to pretend otherwise.
Anne looked forward to seeing her husband’s oldest friend happy and settled.
William returned the look with something almost imperceptible. It was in the small quirk of an eyebrow, the ghost of a smile.
“Papa!” Felicity came running back, her dignity entirely lost now. “Papa, the puppet show is about a pirate who becomes a magistrate. It is extraordinary! Anne, you must come, truly!”
“Then we shall come, darling.”
They went.
They watched the pirate become a magistrate.
The pirate, having become a magistrate, was then required, in the final act, to pass sentence on his own former crew.
He did so with great reluctance and a surprising amount of Shakespeare peppered in.
The audience, Celia very much included, cheered lustily as the curtain fell.
“He should not have convicted them,” Celia declared, emerging. “They were his friends!”
“He had taken an oath, Celia.”
“Oaths, Felicity, are sometimes foolish.”
“They are not.”
“Uncle Rafe, are oaths sometimes foolish?”
“Some oaths,” Rafe said with great solemnity, “are entirely foolish. For example, I once swore at Eton that I would never eat a baked apple again. I was nine. I had lost my head over a bad apple. It was a ridiculous oath, and I have broken it thousands of times since, with enormous satisfaction.”
“There,” Celia said to Felicity. “You see.”
“That is not at all the same thing,” Felicity protested.
“It is a little bit the same thing.”
“Celia!”
“Children,” Anne said serenely, “there are chestnuts being roasted over there that require our immediate attention. Shall we settle the matter of oaths at a later date?”
“Yes, Anne.”
“Yes, Anne.”
They bought chestnuts. They bought lemonade. Miss Longmore, turned out, had a talent for the ring-toss. Over a period of twenty minutes or so, she won a number of small china ornaments, which she distributed generously among the children.
Rafe stood beside her with his hands in his pockets and watched her throw and did not, so far as Anne observed, take his eyes off her the entire time.
“You are staring, Lord Woodworth,” Miss Longmore teased, without looking. “You are going to make me blush.”
“I am.”
“It is, I am told, unseemly,” Anne laughed.
“Entirely,” William chimed in.
“Continue, then,” Miss Longmore said with a small wink.
“I intend to,” Rafe quipped back.
The light went slant and gold. The brass band packed up. The fortune teller’s tent grew quiet.
They walked back to the carriages along the river in the blue beginning of the evening, Celia asleep on Rafe’s shoulder and Felicity carrying Miss Longmore’s collection of china cats.
At the carriages, they parted. Rafe handed Miss Longmore in first, then he kissed Anne’s hand and shook William’s. He lifted a yawning Celia from his shoulder and passed her with immense care into Anne’s arms.
He stepped back. “Well done, the pair of you,” he said very quietly to William and Anne.
“For what?” William asked.
“For all of it. For… You know what for. For that.” He gestured vaguely to Felicity in the doorway of the carriage, at Celia small and warm against Anne’s shoulder, at the whole afternoon behind them. “All of that. Well done.”
“Rafe…”
“I am going to marry her, you know.”
“Miss Longmore?”
“Yes.”
“I suspected.”
“I have not yet asked her.”
“No.”
“I am going to. Next week.”
“Will she have you?”
“God knows. Probably. Hopefully. She is an astonishingly foolish woman in some respects. It is one of the things I love about her.”
“Rafe.”
“Yes?”
“I am glad for you.”
“I know you are.” Rafe briefly clapped him on the shoulder. “I am learning it, Will. This. What you’ve done. I am learning it rather late, but I am learning it.”
He stepped back and climbed into his carriage beside Miss Longmore. The door closed, and they drove off.
William stood for a moment at the open door of his own carriage, his hand resting on the edge.
“Come on, my love,” Anne said softly from inside. “Let’s go home.”
He had not told her what he was about. Later that evening, she came down to the small drawing room at eight, as he had asked, in the pale green wool dress she liked for quiet evenings.
She had expected at most a fire, a book, and a glass of sherry, and possibly, if he was in a mood, his hand on her knee, with the book entirely ignored. She had not expected to see the footman waiting with her cloak.
“William?”