Epilogue
"My wife has read more on the Athenian assembly than most fellows I have known at Cambridge," Sebastian said, to a small cluster of gentlemen near the card room, his hand resting easily at the small of her back, no trace of the old guardedness in it at all.
"You would do well to ask her opinion on the ostracism procedure before offering your own.
She will find the flaw in it far faster than any of us managed. "
Amelia felt the warmth of it settle somewhere deep in her chest, watching the gentlemen turn toward her with genuine curiosity rather than the polite, dismissive tolerance she had grown accustomed to receiving.
He is not simply permitting me to speak.
He is actively steering the room toward listening.
"I confess I would be glad of the challenge," she said, and found herself drawn into a proper debate, Sebastian standing at her side rather than across from her, adding his own thoughts only when she invited them, content, it seemed, simply to watch her hold her ground.
This is not the man who once argued, at a ball, that women lack the discipline for scholarship.
She caught his eye across the small circle of debate and saw him smiling, openly, proudly, without the guarded composure he had once carried into every room.
He laughed at something Lord Aldridge said, easily, and when Lady Ashbourne drifted near, clearly intent on some fresh unkindness, he simply drew Amelia closer to his side, a small, wordless declaration that appeared to make whatever Lady Ashbourne had intended to say no longer worth saying.
Sebastian stepped to the refreshment table, drawn away in conversation with Julian but his eyes remained on her.
"Your Grace." Lord Pembrose bowed over her hand with rather more genuine warmth than she had expected from a man she'd met perhaps twice. "The Duke tells me I simply must ask you about the Sappho piece before I embarrass myself pretending I've formed an opinion of my own."
"He told you that." She glanced across the crowded drawing room to find Sebastian watching her, unmistakably pleased with himself. She blushed, dragging her attention back to the person in front of her. and
"Insisted upon it, rather. Practically frog-marched me across the room.
" Pembrose's eyes crinkled with real amusement.
"Said I'd regret it all evening if I spent the whole ball discussing hunting dogs with men who bore me when there was a considerably better conversation available on the other side of the room. "
Amelia laughed before she could stop herself.
He is enjoying this. The thought arrived with something like wonder, watching him incline his head to Lady Ashworth, watching him laugh, , at something Tristan had said just behind him.
Once, he stood in a room exactly like this one and could not wait to leave it.
"Forgive me," she said to Pembrose, "I find myself distracted. Please, do ask your question. I promise I will not embarrass you for having formed it."
She spent the better part of an hour deep in conversation with three separate guests Sebastian had steered, one by one and with considerable subtlety, into her orbit, each of them arriving with some variation of the same phrase—my husband insists I must hear your thoughts on this, the Duke tells me you have rather more sense on the matter than most of London—until she began to suspect, watching him work the room with the same quiet, deliberate care he had once reserved entirely for scholarship, that he had made a project of it.
She found him near the terrace doors when the crowd finally thinned enough to allow it, and slipped her arm through his without ceremony, feeling him draw her in easily, as though the gesture required no thought at all anymore.
They found a quiet corner near the terrace doors later that evening, the noise of the gathering softened to a pleasant hum behind them, and Sebastian drew her against him, his arms circling her waist from behind as they looked out over the darkened garden.
"You have been introducing me to half the room."
"I have been introducing the room to you, which I consider a rather more accurate description.
" He looked down at her, something warm and unguarded in his face that she still, had not entirely grown used to receiving so plainly.
"I spent yearswatching men decide what a woman was worth before she had spoken a single sentence in her own defense.
I find I have developed rather less patience for it than I once had. "
"You did not simply have less patience for it. You engineered an entire evening around correcting it."
"I had an excellent teacher." He caught her hand, turning it over, his thumb tracing absently along her knuckles. "Do you remember the first ball? .The one where you refused to give me your name."
"Vividly. You were considerably less charming than you believe yourself to have been."
"You were magnificent tonight." He murmured, against her hair.
"You were rather magnificent yourself. I do not believe I have ever watched you enjoy a ballroom before."
"I do not believe I ever have until tonight.
" His mouth found the curve of her neck, slow, unhurried, and Amelia felt her eyes nearly roll back at the sensation, a soft, helpless sound escaping her before she could catch it.
"I spent years treating every gathering like this as an obligation to endure.
Tonight I found myself actually looking forward to watching you dismantle Lord Aldridge's opinions on the ostracism procedure. "
"I did not dismantle him entirely." She struggled to keep her voice steady.
"You dismantled him thoroughly, and I confess I have never found anything quite so appealing as watching you do it." He kissed her neck again, lower this time, and she had to bite back another sound entirely unsuited to a crowded ballroom just beyond the terrace doors.
"Sebastian. We are in public."
"We are in a dark corner of a terrace, considerably more private than you are giving us credit for.
" His arms tightened around her, and she felt him smile against her skin.
"I find I no longer have any interest in hiding how thoroughly I adore my own wife, in public or otherwise.
I have spent enough years hiding everything that mattered.
I do not intend to spend the rest of my life practicing the habit. "
She turned in his arms to face him properly, the garden dark and quiet beyond them, the ballroom's warm light spilling out across the terrace stones, and felt, looking up at him, the full weight of how far they had traveled since a ballroom argument over women's education had first thrown them together.
"We have changed a great deal," she said, "in such a short time."
"We have. I was a man who believed control was the only safety worth having, and you were a woman determined never to be silenced simply for being right.
" He brushed a stray curl back from her face tenderly.
"I do not know that either of us has fully stopped being those people.
I simply think we have both learned, rather thoroughly, that neither quality need come at the cost of the other, so long as we are willing to meet each other honestly in between. "
"That is rather a fine way of admitting you still enjoy winning arguments."
"I enjoy winning arguments considerably less than I enjoy losing them to you.
" He kissed her again, soft, unhurried, and Amelia let herself sink into it, into him, into the whole improbable, hard-won shape of the marriage they had built out of scandal and stubbornness and, somewhere along the way, real and lasting love.
"Come. Dance with me properly this time, where the whole room can see exactly how thoroughly I have lost."