Epilogue #2
And courtesy of the Michael Marchand Memorial Scholarship, every year at least one student from the academy was sent to Oxford
or Cambridge.
It was everything Ginny and Gabriel loved: a vast canvas upon which to fling passion, care, ingenuity, and bossiness.
People struggled to say no to either of them, and they lost all reticence when it came to asking for things for the children in their charge.
They worked in tandem with politicians like Lord Dominic Kirke and Mr. Jonathan Redmond to protect the rights of the most vulnerable.
They entertained in their London home frequently, inviting their friends from the Grand Palace on the Thames, who were less surprised than either Ginny or Marchand expected at the news of their marriage.
As Delacorte had mentioned, men often left there with a wife.
And when, after fifteen years of marriage, Gabriel was awarded a baronetcy for his exceptional public service, he finally
joined White’s, because it ironically amused him to do so. But he could scarcely have a drink there without critically assessing
how much better he and Ogden could have run the place.
When Mr. Peck returned to collect his little family—Mrs. Peck, Daniel, and baby Roger—to bring them back to Northumberland,
everyone actually watched them go with some degree of misty-eyed fondness. (Mr. Delacorte’s degree was admittedly slightly
less misty.)
The week prior, Captain Hardy, Lucien, and Delacorte had taken Daniel down to the docks. While the two ships in the Triton
Group’s fleet were still undergoing repairs at the shipyard in Dover, there were plenty of others just offshore to admire.
They found Daniel’s unbridled, giddy delight in all of it—the sights and sounds, the seagulls, the ocean—exhilarating. Everything was new to him and it made all three of the men feel brand-new, too, as if the world was just beginning. As if it still contained
wonders.
It also made them feel old and learned.
They were all a bit wistful and pensive when the Pecks departed.
“Well, I’m not sure I’d mind filling the ballroom with babies,” Lucien allowed carefully that night in the smoking room.
Captain Hardy gave an almost pained laugh.
After a long silence, Mr. Delacorte said, “I’ve had a letter from the Earl of Highgrove offering to give his donkey to me.”
“Congratulations, Delacorte,” Bolt said warmly, as if he’d just announced he was going to be a father.
The morning after they said their goodbyes to the Pecks, Dot took the contents of the Epithet Jar—which had been nice and
jingly thanks to her recent chess lessons with Mr. Delacorte!—to buy the morning papers and have a little wander around the
market stalls that appeared twice a week before she was expected back at the Grand Palace on the Thames.
She’d reserved twenty pence of her own wages to buy something frivolous. Her last such purchase was the little journal that
she’d christened “Dot’s Thoughts.”
Today she thought she might want a handkerchief or a ribbon. Something pretty and soft.
On a table scattered with what looked like ordinary detritus of daily life, things like clay pipes and plain hair combs and
drinking mugs, her eye landed on a little vase. It was white, patterned with blue vines and flowers; a pair of lovebirds sat
among them.
It seemed to snuggle right into her hand when she gently picked it up.
It was one of the loveliest things she’d ever seen.
“It’s ten pence, miss,” the merchant told her. “Pretty thing, ain’t it? Felt I couldn’t charge more fer it, as it’s got funny dark lines on the bottom.”
Dot peered; indeed, on the bottom were what looked like a set of six scribbled lines. It seemed like something that Daniel
Peck might do to a vase if he got hold of ink and a quill.
It would look lovely on her writing desk next to her little wooden donkey named Fate, which she’d been mysteriously gifted,
and her Dot’s Thoughts journal. Last night she’d written in it, “Mr. Pike believes I can be a story writer.” She’d stared
at that sentence in wonder.
Ironically, she’d been unable to write another word after that.
Then again, that sentence seemed a story unto itself.
The vase perfectly matched the blue-and-white rag rug next to her bed. She wasn’t entirely certain why, but she always noticed
colors and she liked them to feel just right.
She took an expenditure of ten pence very seriously.
But lovebirds!
Surely it was a sign.
“I’ll have this then,” she’d told the merchant.
He wrapped it carefully up in newspaper, and she tucked it into her little net bag just as the sun was peeping out from behind
a cloud.
She knew she’d best hurry. Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt especially liked to have the newspapers first thing—they shared them
throughout the house and with all the guests, because they were expensive—and the maids expected her in the kitchen, because
she read the gossip sheets aloud there every day.
Quite a few of the guests at the Grand Palace on the Thames had appeared both on the front page and in the gossip pages, which was always exciting. Not a day went by when she wasn’t astonished and grateful for her life here.
She burst through the door in time to walk through rainbows.
But she was walking perilously too fast.
Her slightly damp soles slid over the slick marble floor.
To her horror, she stumbled.
And fell.
Time seemed to slow as her package shot up, up, toward the chandelier, spiraling right into the rainbows. The vase was destined
to become smithereens.
But Mr. Pike was on the first-floor landing, lurking. Because even though Dot thought it was her secret, he knew that Dot
liked to walk through the rainbows on clear days. And when he was able, he would watch her, his breath held, as she spun in
that delicate shower of color.
She was a maddening, stubborn, enchanted being, impossible to fathom, and for some reason this both irritated him and made
him want to fathom her. She had once accidentally nearly knocked him out cold with a wicked right hook, which embarrassed
her to this day. She made him feel both ordinary and uncomfortably extraordinary.
So he saw her race back into the boardinghouse, and he was there when she slipped, and he saw her package go flying straight
up in the air.
Her wild cry of grief pierced him.
Mr. Pike hurdled over the banister, landed hard on the marble floor, stumbled forward, caught the package in his hands as it was coming down, and pulled it into his chest as gently as if it were a baby.
Then he rolled over and lay flat.
Dot froze, dumbstruck by the miracle.
And absolutely horrified that she was once again the reason Mr. Pike had landed hard on a floor.
She clambered over to him and knelt. “Mr. Pike! Oh, my goodness! Thank you! Speak to me! Are you all right?”
“What did I save?” he asked.
He was still cradling the vase against his chest.
She took it from him gently and unwrapped the newspaper to show him.
The miracle of its rescue gave Dot courage. It was, of a certainty, kismet.
“I found it for ten pence at the market stall. It has lovebirds on it.”
He gazed up at her.
“It’s very pretty,” he said. But he was looking at her when he said it. Not the vase.
And now her heart was thundering.
“You might want to have a look at the market stall, Mr. Pike, in case that’s the sort of thing you’d like to buy for your
sweetheart.”
His eyebrows flicked in puzzlement, then his face cleared.
“I don’t have a sweetheart,” he told her carefully.
Dot smiled slowly down at him.
She’d always known something magical would come from standing in a rainbow shower.