Extended Epilogue
“Will you push me on the swing, Father?” asked the blond-haired young boy with steady blue eyes. “I want to go very high, right up into the branches. Camilla can’t push me that high and Mrs. Craddock won’t do it.”
He gestured back towards the tree in the Walden Towers garden where the swings were hung and a small treehouse and ladder also arranged in the lower branches.
“If you push Anthony, you must push me too,” insisted a little girl beside him fiercely, not as tall as her brother but apparently equal to him in determination and daring. “Otherwise it is not fair. We are twins and must have the same or it’s all wrong.”
Little Anthony wore a light summer suit in pale blue, exactly the same shade as the sash around the waist of his sister’s white summer dress.
“Well, I suppose we do have two big swings, and you are both seven years old, which I suppose is old enough to go very high,” mused Maxwell Crawford, Duke of Walden, with a twinkle in his eyes. “And I suppose I also have two arms and equal affection for all my children.”
“Does that mean yes?” demanded the little girl impatiently with her hands on her hips, and then turned to her laughing mother in the garden chair, buttoning the cuffs on the shirt of another, smaller boy. “Does Father mean yes? He said too many words, Mother. Why doesn’t he just say what he means like Aunt Victoria?”
Penelope, Duchess of Walden, nodded and laughed. She must tell Victoria that her niece admired her forthright speech even though many grown men around the ton did not.
“Yes, Camilla, he does mean yes.”
Camilla and Anthony bounced up and down together on the lawn triumphantly. They then each seized one of their father’s hands to drag him away towards the nearby tree where the swings were hung.
“I want to swing too!” pouted the youngest child present, a boy of around four with golden-brown hair and green eyes in a delicate elfin face.
“You’re too little to go high though, Edward,” Anthony called back over his shoulder. “You have to go on the baby swing. Anyway, Father has two hands, not three, so you have to wait.”
“Mother!” little Edward protested tearfully at this unwelcome news. “I don’t want to go on the baby swing. I’m big now. I want Father to push me as high as Anthony.”
With some effort, given her large pregnant belly, Duchess Penelope pulled her presently youngest child onto her lap and stroked his hair.
“Your swing will grow with you, Edward,” she promised. “Now it is low, but when you are taller, it will be higher and then Father can push you just as high as Anthony and Camilla. I had a swing like that when I was small, and I can still swing on it now because it grew with me. When they come back, you shall have your turn.”
“But I don’t like waiting!” the boy wailed, bursting into frustrated tears. “I want to swing now. It’s not fair!”
Penelope swallowed her laughter as she stroked the boy’s soft hair. Four was a difficult age, and Edward was so much more sensitive than the confident and assertive twins. She was glad that Maxwell seemed to see this, too, and treated their youngest child with more care than their rough-and-tumble oldest two and equal love.
“This sounds like a good time for an uncle to make an appearance,” said Frederick cheerfully, strolling out to the garden table and chairs where Penelope and Edward were sitting.
He bent to kiss them both and ruffled Edward’s hair.
“Mother sends her love,” he said. "She is hosting a far too serious musical afternoon with my wife today but I thought I’d rather come here and play on the swings if I’m allowed."
“It’s always a good time for you to make an appearance,” Penelope told him, laughing. “But today you have timed it particularly well, I must admit.”
“Come along then, young Edward, I believe that you want to swing with your brother and sister. Or did I mishear?”
“Yes! Yes, Uncle Frederick!” the little boy said eagerly, wriggling down from his mother’s lap, the tears of two minutes earlier now entirely forgotten. “I do want to swing. I do.”
“While the children are occupied, I also wanted to show you and Maxwell this,” Frederick said quietly, extracting a folded piece of newspaper from his pocket and passing it to Penelope before he took Edward’s hand. “A man at my club passed it on. Terrible business but at least it’s all over now. Not a story for the consumption of young eyes and ears, if you know what I mean.”
Penelope wondered what Frederick could possibly mean and opened the well-read newspaper piece with curiosity. The air around her soon filled with the sound of three laughing children on their swings.
The newspaper was in French, which she, Frederick and Maxwell all spoke well, and the title of the piece alone was enough to strike dread into her heart as she saw the name “Lord Silverbrook” in broad, clear type. Then she caught her breath as she read that title again in full, translating it in her head: “Deviant English aristocrat hung for convent murder outrage.”
Scarcely drawing a full breath, Penelope read the full article, dated six months earlier. It seemed that Henry Atwood had been up to his old tricks in France for some time but evaded any reckoning until he assaulted a young novice at a convent, reportedly strangling the girl by mistake as he attempted to prevent her from screaming.
Discovered by the convent’s gardener before he could escape, and identified by a handyman who had seen him loitering around the novice accommodation a week earlier, Lord Silverbrook had been tried by a post-revolutionary magistrate unimpressed by rank or fortune. A number of earlier assaults were also taken into consideration, and after a brief trial, he was guillotined like a common criminal and buried in a pauper’s grave.
“Good Lord!” Penelope said aloud and dropped the newspaper back onto the table just as Maxwell returned to join her.
He glanced at the table and looked askance at the expression on Penelope’s face.
“Frederick is playing tag with the children now. An uncle is even more fun than a father, it seems. What’s that? Is everything well?”
“Frederick brought it. He thought we should know.”
Maxwell reached out and picked up the newspaper while Penelope said nothing more, judging it better to let him read for himself. His face darkened as he took in the dreadful events in France, and then he folded it back up.
“Poor girl, whomever she was. But he deserved the end he got. I’ll waste no sorrow on the death of Henry Atwood.”
“Do you think his mother knows?” Penelope asked and Maxwell nodded with a heavy expression.
“Yes, I think Lady Silverbrook did know. She’s been dead for six months too. Do you not remember the notice in the paper at the time? It was reported as an accidental overdose of her sleeping draught but this puts a different complexion on the matter doesn’t it? I must send this on to Adam too. He will want to know.”
Penelope nodded and sighed, recalling that small forgotten death notice for Lady Silverbrook. She now understood it as the coda to the whole grim tale. Yes, Adam Finch, now head of his own legal firm, would want to know how the sorry saga had ended.
“There is some justice in the world it seems, but it works too slowly. It sometimes catches the bystanders like Lady Silverbrook too,” she commented. “Although I shall never understand her motives in abetting Henry.”
“I doubt she understood herself. Remember what the physicians told me about her mental condition? They believed that she received many blows to the head from her former husband and that had affected her mental capacity and sanity.”
“Regardless of his defects and crimes, Lady Silverbrook always loved her son,” Penelope said with a shiver, drawing her wrap around her shoulders.
Maxwell sat beside his wife and put the article in his pocket.
“Let us not spend a minute of our glorious summer day on Henry Atwood,” he urged, reaching out to stroke Penelope’s hair. “He deserves it no more in death than he did in life. I’m not needed in the Lords until tomorrow and I want to spend this time with you and the children before the next one arrives. It can’t be very long now.”
Penelope patted her stomach with a smile at this reference to their imminent new arrival.
“The physician and midwife both think it could be any day,” she said. “But everything is prepared.”
“Mrs. Craddock told me she was looking forward to one more in the nursery,” laughed Maxwell, in reference to the formidably efficient nursemaid Mrs. Kenton had recruited for them after the birth of Camilla and Anthony.
“I fear it may be two more,” Penelope said rather ruefully a few seconds later. “I do feel much bigger than I did with Edward and I’m sure that a single child could not kick so much as this. I wondered earlier on in the pregnancy but by now, I’m actually convinced.”
“Two more?” exclaimed Maxwell. “What a thought. You’re going to make me a father of five before I’m even forty!”
“I rather fear I will,” Penelope said. “Although you’re the one who keeps getting me doubly with child and must accept at least half of the responsibility.”
“Granted,” Maxwell agreed, lovingly kissing her cheek and then her lips. “Maybe it’s because I love you twice as much as other men love their wives. Do you think that could explain it?”
“Maybe it’s because I love your body twice as much as other wives love those of their husbands,” Penelope countered with a teasing smile that drew an expression of naked desire from Maxwell in response.
“Either way, we are twice as lucky,” he suggested, taking her hand in his.
“Twice as lucky in love,” Penelope confirmed.
They both smiled happily as three young children raced towards them with handfuls of wildflowers.
The End