19 - The End
19
The End
Four days later, Clementine called at Mollybrook, hoping having come alone wouldn’t cause a stir. She could have brought a maid, but she had a mission, and she trusted that the friendship the two families used to enjoy would make her solo visit unremarkable.
“Miss Morgan, hello!” Miss Brown swept into the sitting room Clementine had been installed in and greeted her warmly, dipping a curtsy and smiling widely. “How wonderful to see you! I daresay it has been years. Is your family at Hill House for a while now?”
“Yes, I think so. I hope so. I was—”
She was coming to declare her love to Archie. But she could hardly say that. She hadn’t thought this through. She’d spent the last several days of planning and packing and traveling focused only on moving her body through space. Toward Archie.
She tried again. “I was hoping to pay the dowager countess a visit.” Archie aside, she found it was not untrue. She had fond memories of the countess, and it had been too long. She was ashamed, in fact, at how much the family had been suffering without her knowledge.
“That is very kind of you. I would be happy to take you to her. I wonder, though, if you are aware that she is not herself these days.”
“I . . . have heard something of that,” Clementine said carefully. “Perhaps my wanting to see her is ill-advised.” Perhaps it was selfish. Would her presence confuse the older woman? Upset her?
“Not at all. She enjoys visitors, for the most part. I merely wanted to prepare you for the fact that she will not recognize you. She doesn’t recognize anyone these days, not even her son.”
Clementine, of course, could not tell Miss Brown that she knew that. The knowing didn’t matter anyway; it didn’t make the hearing any less sad. “I understand.”
And so she was ushered through the house and into the garden. Lady Harcourt was seated at a small wrought iron table beneath the wide green canopy of a majestic beech. Clementine remembered this tree. Although she and Archie had spent more time in the wilds around Mollybrook than in its manicured gardens, she had nevertheless passed many an afternoon perched in this tree’s branches. And she remembered Lady Harcourt under this tree: this was where she had generally set up her lawn games.
“My lady, you have a visitor,” Miss Brown called as they approached.
The older woman turned in her chair, and in so doing, revealed her son, who had been seated across from her.
He gasped, and lurched to his feet.
Oh, Archie. Archie. She wanted to tell him to sit. That it was just her. That she was here. That she was home.
She loved him so very much. It was fantastical to think that mere days ago she had been protesting to her sister that she didn’t.
They were insects in amber again, staring at each other across the expanse of lawn. She watched surprise give way to something else, something like delight, but darker. He smiled, but there was something else yet again there, a kind of knowing that was new, that was—
“Well, Clementine Morgan, as I live and breathe!” Archie’s mother exclaimed.
Archie gasped again, but he wasn’t alone this time. So did Miss Brown. So, albeit on a bit of a delay, did Clementine. The shock of being recognized by Archie’s mother shattered her amber trance.
“Yes,” she said carefully, giving her attention to the old woman, who looked so much like Archie—Clementine hadn’t noticed when they were all younger, but she had Archie’s kind, multicolored eyes. “My lady.” Clementine dipped into a curtsy.
“Oh, none of that, my girl. You think you and my son can steal all the tarts from my kitchen one day and come in here the next with your curtsies and your my ladys and be forgiven?”
Clementine had no idea what to say. There had been a day, when Clementine was about eleven, when she and Archie had stumbled upon an empty kitchen featuring half a dozen lemon tarts left to cool, and . . .
Well, why not try for the truth?
“Your cook remains legend in my mind, my lady. I know I ought to rue my actions that day, but if I am truthful, I find I cannot.”
To her shock, Lady Harcourt laughed and gestured for her to sit. Clementine glanced at the still-standing Archie, for the chair she was being directed to had been his a moment ago. He gestured animatedly for her to sit, and retreated to stand a few feet away, next to the tree trunk. Clementine surmised that he wanted her to continue conversing with his mother, to try to extend this rare stretch of lucidity.
“How is your mother, my dear? I haven’t seen her for so long.”
Clementine didn’t know what to say. She used the excuse of settling herself on the proffered chair to gather her thoughts. Something inside her rebelled at the notion of lying outright. Deciding to fall back again on the truth—though this was a more melancholy truth—she took one of Lady Harcourt’s hands in hers. The skin at the back of it seemed impossibly thin, like a bird’s newly laid egg held up to the light. “I am so sorry to have to tell you that my mother died.”
“Oh!” Tears gathered in the corners of eyes bracketed by fine lines. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“She contracted an infection of the lungs that lingered. She never fully recovered—she languished for years—and then one day she took a turn for the worse and she died about a fortnight later.” Clementine left out that Lady Harcourt had been to visit her mother’s bedside in those final days.
“Sometimes I am befogged about time,” Lady Harcourt said quietly, picking up what looked like a tattered blanket that had been resting on the chair beside her.
“It is all right, my lady. What does Shakespeare say? ‘We are all time’s subjects’?”
Clementine thought for a moment that she had lost Lady Harcourt, for the older woman’s eyes grew distant, as if she were turning inward, to a world Clementine couldn’t see. But then she surprised them again with another question. “Do you remember the time we all went to Lydd-on-Sea?”
“I do!” She hadn’t, until that moment, but sure enough the memory was there, waiting to be uncovered. Both families had made a trip to the seaside town. Traveling together wasn’t something they’d been in the habit of doing, and to Clementine’s memory, they’d never done it again. She had no sooner wondered why when Lady Harcourt supplied the answer. “We only went the one time because my husband doesn’t care for traveling with your family.”
“Oh!” Clementine pressed her lips together to suppress the laughter that was threatening and sought out Archie’s gaze. He was already looking at her, and though he clearly shared her amusement, he made that same urgent gesture that seemed to mean he wanted her to keep the conversation going.
She turned back to the mother, feeling the son’s gaze upon her. “I remember Archie and Olive and I nearly had our ears boxed on that trip because we wandered off and you and my mother feared we had drowned.”
“Yes.” Lady Harcourt tilted her head back and gazed at the leafy canopy above them. “How long ago was that?”
“Hmm. I was perhaps six or seven years of age, so that would have made it seventeen or eighteen years ago.”
“My goodness, you’re older than I thought! Time’s subjects indeed! Did you marry Archibald?”
“Did I marry Archie?” Clementine was tempted, so tempted, to look at Archie then, but she was afraid the web they seemed to be spinning might break if she withdrew her attention from the countess, even for a moment. “No.”
“Did you marry anyone else?”
She was struck again with twin urges: to laugh, and to look at Archie. She resisted both. “No, I remain unmarried.”
“Oh, good. Then you can still marry Archibald.”
Her face heated, despite the cool shade. Lady Harcourt had been insensible for who knew how long, but she had apparently chosen this moment to see with uncanny clarity. To see into Clementine’s very soul, even. “I beg your pardon?”
“Give me one good reason why you should not.” Lady Harcourt rotated her shoulders as she spoke, her tone peevish. She was growing agitated.
“I wonder if perhaps you ought to have this conversation with Archibald himself.”
“I would if he was here.”
“It happens he is.”
“He is? Where?” She looked around.
Clementine made eye contact with Archie and gave him a little nod. It seemed worth a try.
After a moment of indecision that probably no one but Clementine recognized as such, he stepped forward. He had no chair, having given up his to Clementine, but he squatted near his mother’s side.
“I’m here, Mother,” he said, his voice raspy.
Clementine waited on bated breath, feeling like a mother bird must when she pushes her baby out of the nest.
“Archibald, I’ve been waiting for years for you to marry Clementine Morgan.”
“Have you?” There were so many unshed tears in those two words.
“What on earth is taking you so long?”
Archie cleared his throat. “Well, I haven’t asked her, for one thing.”
“Oh, honestly. Well, that’s easily remedied.”
Archie’s hand floated, shaking like a leaf caught in an eddy, an inch or so above his mother’s arm. He was afraid to touch her. Clementine understood. It was the visual manifestation of that feeling she’d had earlier, of not wanting to break the delicate web connecting them—to each other and to this time and this place.
“And if you’re worried about your father, you needn’t be.” Lady Harcourt rolled her eyes. “I can handle him.”
“I have come to understand,” Archie started slowly, “that trying to gain Father’s approval has always been a futile endeavor.” He let the hand float down and rest on her arm. “I’m more concerned about you. That you approve. For I love you so tremendously, Mother.”
“And I love you, my boy. You have always been my greatest joy.”
Archie made a kind of indistinct noise then and let his head fall to his mother’s lap. Lady Harcourt’s eyes grew startled, then confused. They were losing her. Clementine had to get her back.
“I think your mother is right, Archie. She always is. We should marry.”
Archie’s head whipped up.
“I can’t imagine why we’ve waited so long, what with . . .”
Clementine had been trying to recapture the light, almost glib tone she’d used before, the one that seemed to have amused Lady Harcourt—to have reached her—but she found she could not continue in that vein. A lump rose in her throat, and she finished her sentence in a whisper, “. . . all that has passed between us.”
He was studying her so intensely, it almost felt as if they were back in his bedchamber at Quintrell Castle.
“Young man,” Lady Harcourt said sharply, drawing both their attention, “I believe this young lady is about to propose to you! How extraordinary.” She narrowed her eyes at Archie. “What is your name, young man?”
Clementine’s heart sank.
“Archie,” Archie said.
“What is your surname? Who are your people?”
“I’m Archibald Fielding-Burton, Earl of Harcourt.” He waited for recognition. There was none.
“Well, Archibald Fielding-Burton, Earl of Harcourt,” Lady Harcourt said, “in my day . . .” She trailed off and looked around, the agitation from before reappearing. “In my day, we . . .” She picked up her teacup, looked at it in dismay, and let it clatter to its saucer. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. “I think I need to repose.” She looked around, as the tears began to fall. “Is my mother here?”
Miss Brown, about whom Clementine had entirely forgotten, appeared out of nowhere, murmuring soothing words and giving Lady Harcourt her arm. Archie leapt to his feet and made to escort the women back to the house, but Miss Brown shook her head at him—not unkindly, but firmly. “You’ve had quite an exciting afternoon, Lady Harcourt, perhaps you would care to lie down?” She spoke resolutely, articulating the question as if it were not a question at all but a foregone conclusion. Lady Harcourt seemed to accept it as such, and allowed herself to be led away. When the women were halfway back to the house, Miss Brown called over her shoulder, “I find myself rather tired, my lord, and if you will excuse me, I think I shall rest in a chair by your mother while she sleeps.”
And suddenly Clementine had what she had wanted for so long: a private audience with Archie.
Too bad she had no earthly idea what to say.
* * *
Archie was not the kind of person who believed in fate. He had not, after all, done anything to deserve the good fortune of being born heir to an earldom. Neither had he done anything to deserve the ill fortune of being born to a father who didn’t respect him, or even love him, probably. It was all an accident, the result of a roll of the dice of the fates. If Archie believed in anything, it was honest work and good friends. Loyalty.
But at this moment, it did not feel like an accident that Clementine Morgan was standing before him in his garden, that they were alone together at last. That she had, for one brief, glorious moment, reached his mother.
He burst out laughing.
Which was entirely the wrong thing to do, judging by the war that broke out between confusion and hurt on Clementine’s face.
He grabbed her hand and started towing her out of the garden. “I’m laughing because you’re here.”
No, that wasn’t right, either.
“I’m laughing because if you knew the inane plot I’d cooked up to try to get you alone in London so I could talk to you, you would laugh, too. At the plot, and at how absurdly simple my goal turned out to be in the end. You simply appeared in my garden.”
Her lovely, high laughter rang out across the blue afternoon. “It wasn’t that simple. There was, in fact, a great deal of inane plotting required on my end.”
“Well, then I should thank you.” They had reached the edge of the manicured gardens. He kept going, steering them onto a gravel path that would shortly give way to dirt as it entered the forest. “For your plotting, and for what you did back there. For giving me my mother back.”
“I think she gave herself back.”
“Whatever the source of that interlude of lucidity, it was a gift.”
They were under the cover of the trees now. This was, therefore, as good a place as any.
He brought her round to face him and took her other hand in his, his heart thudding. He hadn’t practiced this, so focused had he been on the aforementioned inane planning. He’d written Effie and Simon with their roles in it—he’d been going to throw a party himself, at the London house, which he reasoned Sir Albert would not be able to refuse to attend, and Simon and Effie were to mount a distraction involving a broken heirloom soup tureen that they were meant to spill over Sir Albert, while Archie stole away with Clementine.
But here she was.
Here he was, tongue-tied.
Well, what course did he have but to come out with it? “I think we should marry.”
There was an echo. He hadn’t noticed that about this spot in the trees before.
Oh. Wait. That wasn’t an echo; that was Clementine, saying the exact same thing: “I think we should marry.”
Was it to be that easy? “All right,” he agreed, as his heart soared.
“Wait.”
Ah. Apparently it wasn’t to be that easy. Clementine’s brow furrowed—deeply. “What is the matter, my dearest?”
“I won’t be tamed. I can’t be. I tried that. It didn’t work out.”
“I don’t want to tame you. I want to love you.”
Clementine burst into tears, suddenly and utterly, like Olive tended to do.
“I do love you,” Archie clarified. “That is an unchangeable fact. What I want, I suppose, is to be able to do it publicly.” He grinned. “And privately, too. Repeatedly.”
She cried harder.
So he tried harder. “Not only do I not want to tame you, I want to be wild with you.”
More tears. Well, in for a pound . . .
“I want to have wild children with you. I want them to be christened in the pond at Mollybrook and for them to grow up in the forest. I want to feed them nuts and berries and walk through mud puddles with them, and I want them to know every day how much they are loved.
“They will have an aunt, a loving grandfather, and two honorary uncles. They’ll take their grandmother on picnics by the pond, and perhaps she will feel their love. Even if she doesn’t know them, perhaps she will know, somehow, that they are hers.
“At night, we will look at the stars together and make up our own stories about them. We’ll fall asleep outside, and I’ll carry the children into the house and kiss their foreheads. And that . . .”
Those were all the words he had. The contents of his heart, articulated as best he could. “That is all I have to give you.” He paused. “Well, there is the earldom, I suppose. You’d be a countess. But I rather fear that is not a mark in my favor.”
She laughed.
That was a good sign—he hoped. It seemed better than tears, anyway.
“What do you say, Clem?”
“I say yes,” she said quietly.
“Truly? You have abandoned your opposition to the notion of marrying?”
“I seem to have done,” she said in wonderment. “I think perhaps I wasn’t able to imagine being happily wed because I’d never considered marrying you.” She shook her head as wonderment turned to bewilderment. “Though now I can’t imagine why. It seems, in retrospect, obvious that we are well suited.”
“We have both been rather dimwitted on the subject.”
“Indeed.”
“Of course, dimwitted goes without saying for me, but honestly, I expected better from you, Clem,” he teased.
She tried to pull a face, but she was laughing—that high, lilting laughter he so loved winding around him like a warm quilt. “We’re getting married!” he exclaimed.
“We’re getting married!” she agreed, and he whooped and picked her up and twirled her around. As he set her down, he said, “Do you remember when you used to read novels in trees?”
“I do indeed. In fact, I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about those novels.”
“In what way?”
“Well, I’d been thinking how real life is generally very unlike novels, but now I may have to revise that opinion.”
“How so?”
“Well, I don’t want to seem overconfident, but I believe I am about to marry an earl and live happily ever after?”
“You are indeed.”
“Not that I care about the earl part, so perhaps it’s better said that I am about to marry the person I love and admire most in the world and live happily ever after.”
Oh, his heart. It was possible he wasn’t going to survive this day. Well, at least he would die perfectly happy, sure of the love of both his mother and his . . . Clem.
He swallowed a lump in his throat. “I think we ought to go find a tree and climb up it. What do you say?”
She smiled, but very wickedly. “I say yes, but only if we may anticipate our marriage vows at the base of it first.”