Epilogue
“No, you cannot go that way,” Lady Grace said. Her wide, cornflower-blue eyes held fear.“Whyever not?” Lady Margaret asked her younger sister.
They were on their ponies, riding through Pemberley’s park on a lovely spring day when absolutely nothing sinister could possibly be about. It was no more than Grace's overactive imagination. Again.
“I heard Papa hanged a witch from the silver ash out on the Blood Pond. That's why it is called that, you know. Papa left her to dangle there until the animals had their fill and then she was thrown into the pond for the fish to devour.”
“Grace, that is ghastly! I am going to tell Mama.”
“But, Margaret, it is the truth!”
“Not a remotely gorgeous one, if you ask me.”
“I did not ask you!” Grace huffed.
They glared at each other for a moment, then Lady Grace clicked her tongue at the pony to turn it around. She preferred not to see the Blood Pond. Too many people had whispered eerie things about the place.
Margaret went on without her, and she would more than likely be punished for this later.
Their papa always complained that Margaret was as stubborn as her mother, but Grace had to admit that Margaret's will had a closer resemblance to Papa's.
She returned to the stable and left her pony in the care of her favourite stable hand.
In the house, Grace wandered about, first going to see Grandfather, whom others called Sir Thomas, who was in the library as he was every day. He grinned when he saw her.
“How is my Gracey today?” Her grandfather was bright and cheerful, although she had heard tell that he had not always been as such. Apparently, a woman called Gloriana had helped him, but she was not sure how.
“Fine, Grandfather. I am presently in search of a diversion.”
He read to her for a while, until she got impatient and wandered away, finally settling on the atrium.
Her mother was within, as she had been almost every day since Grace's birth eleven years before.
Her brow was creased because she was heavy in thought while she stared at the canvas before her, but it lightened when her gaze landed upon her youngest daughter.
“Hello, love. How are you?”
“Fine, Mama. I just returned from a ride.” She did not mention her grandfather because she liked to keep story time her own little secret.
“And how was that?” She made sweep of the surface before her with a stick of charcoal.
“Margaret is still out riding, but I was frightened so I returned.”
“You have been listening to stories about Blood Pond again, have you?”
Grace's small face wrinkled with guilt.
“Oh, my precious girl, what am I to do with you?”
“What must we do with her now?” A low, amused voice asked.
They both looked towards the door.
“Papa!”
“Hello, Grace,” He closed the distance between the door and her mama and lifted her into the air. She giggled. “Hello, my Elizabeth.”
“Hello, my William.”
Grace wrinkled her nose at the tenderness between her parents.
She pretended their affection was abhorrent behaviour, but secretly, she would say to herself that this inimitable regard was magnificent.
Her nurse, an ancient woman called Hill, had told her stories about her parents' struggle to find each other.
Grace loved stories of any kind, but she especially loved fairy stories, and her parents' courtship sounded very much like a fairy story with magic and adventure and romance.
Grace, who had been returned to the floor, paid attention as her mother and father, the Crown Prince and Princess of Pemberley, lost themselves in each other. They had since she was born, last, mind you, after Noel and Thomas and Margaret. She smiled.
As she picked up one of her mother’s charcoals, Grace’s head tilted in thought while her parents strolled away, hands clasped. The inspiration was enough, and she started to sketch.
Said she, “And they lived happily ever after.”