Epilogue
The great house breathed cinnamon and evergreen. Footmen in dark livery threaded like chess pieces among garlands, children tore past in a comet tail of shrieks, and somewhere far off a choir of carolers attempted harmonies with more zeal than accuracy.
Vicky paused at the threshold of the ballroom-turned-parlor and laughed under her breath. It was mayhem, of the best and most expensive sort. A Christmas palisaded with holly and good intentions.
“Hold still,” Bea said, swooping like a benevolent hawk to tug a sprig of mistletoe through the ribbon at Vicky’s shoulder. “There. Festive. Also strategic.”
“Strategic?” Vicky echoed, even as her mouth went traitorously warm. “I have done nothing to deserve strategy before breakfast.”
“Darling, you breathed.” Bea’s eyes danced. “And besides—today you deserve everything.”
Before Vicky could pry another hint free, Nathan mounted the step before the immense tree and lifted his glass. He did not even clear his throat; His Grace carried silence the way other men carried swords.
“Family,” he said, and the clatter stilled, the Petworth baby ceased to howl, even the candles looked attentive. “And friends who are dearer than law allows—thank you for coming home. We have two announcements, as is our way. First: the bell at Abbott Gracie, opposite, inclined her head with bishops’ gravity.
“Second,” Nathan went on, and his eyes found Vicky like a blessing, “Miss Victoria Abbott has suffered the attentions of a certain stationer long enough. Mr. Hubert Stouts has done the sensible thing at last, and asked for her hand.” His mouth softened.
“She has done the sensible thing at last, and said yes.”
The applause detonated. Elise clapped with the fervor of a small orchestra; Annie shrieked; Lucas tried to look dignified and failed entirely; the children exploded into questions about rings and cake.
Bea kissed Vicky’s cheek in a flurry of silk and pride.
Gracie, having no truck with sentiment, lifted her teacup toward the ceiling and intoned, “To the straightening of ribbons and the unstraightening of a certain gentleman.”
“Gracie,” Vicky hissed, mortified and dangerously close to giddy.
Across the room, Hubert stood very tall and very still, but the line of his mouth had lost its soldierly endurance.
He looked—in a way he never permitted himself—young.
When he bowed to the assembly, Nathan clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to kill a lesser man, and Bea, who hugged like a general, hauled him into an embrace in which even dukes rarely found themselves.
He bore it, and when his gaze returned to Vicky, there was a little helplessness there that undid her entirely.
Then the mistletoe campaign began.
It was everywhere. It had been everywhere before, as befitted tradition, but now it bred like cheerful, leafy rabbits. Every arch sported a sprig. Every doorway harbored a trap. Every child played border guard to one more unexpected ambush.
The first time, it was pure accident. Or so Bea claimed, her eyes filled with the sort of innocence one saw only on Christmas cards and criminals.
Vicky stepped through the breakfast-room door and found herself abruptly stationed under green and white, with seventy-three cousins chanting, “Kiss, kiss, kiss,” as if summoning a rainstorm.
Hubert approached as if the floor might open and swallow him if he stepped too quickly. He stopped before her, those ridiculous eyes searching her face as if to make sure she was laughing. She was. She always would be, she suspected, where he was concerned.
“Tradition,” she murmured.
“Duty,” he returned, deadpan, and leaned down.
The kiss was brief, chaste enough to pass inspection, but there was nothing chaste about the way his fingers warmed around hers, or the way the room thundered out of focus for the span of two heartbeats.
He straightened, the corner of his mouth almost softening into a smile, and one of the children shouted, “Again!”
“Later,” Vicky said, and God help her, meant it.
By noon she’d been put under the arch in the picture gallery (“Oh look, more mistletoe!” cried Annie with a wolfish grin), under the bough beside the stair, and, in an act of warfare both elegant and shocking, beneath the life-sized portrait of an eighteenth-century duchess who clearly knew what to do with a riding crop.
Each time Hubert kissed her with public restraint and private promise.
Each time Vicky pretended she didn’t melt around the edges; she fooled no one, least of all herself.
Dinner was an operetta of clattering and joy.
Nathan carved a roast as if defending a fort.
Bea declared him a menace and rescued the plum pudding from his heroics.
Gracie took a scientific inventory of the decanters and declared the claret a moral hazard.
Hubert—dear heaven—sat beside Vicky and poured her wine with hands she had felt on her skin, steady as vows.
When his finger brushed hers on the stem of the glass, a ridiculous shiver traveled straight from her wrist to her knees.
After, when paper crowns had been fixed upon reluctant heads and crackers pulled with shrieks and petty triumphs, the children were trundled off like tiny, drunk sailors, flopping and protesting in equal measure.
Elise kissed every drowsy forehead and hummed a lullaby in her sweet, silent way.
The house exhaled at last, settling into that particular winter quiet that feels like a cathedral—firelight, the tick of the clock, happiness cooling into something deeper.
Anne found Vicky by the tree, spearing an orange with cloves as if committing a fragrant murder. “Well?”
“Well?” Vicky echoed, pricking another constellation into the rind.
“Are you going to keep letting archways do your bidding, or will you do it yourself?” Anne pressed a small, dark bottle into her palm. Mulled red, oaken and spiced. “For courage,” she said solemnly, and then, wickedly: “And for warmth, if you intend to get lost on the second floor.”
“Anne,” Vicky hissed, but her laugh broke through. “I am not—”
“You are,” Anne said, all airy certainty and sisterly tyranny. “Steal into his room. It’s Christmas. The house is full of blessings.”
“Also full of people,” Vicky pointed out, even as the wine warmed her throat and loosened every argument.
“Then be quiet,” Anne said, kissed her cheek, and flitted away like a dangerous elf.
Vicky stood for a breath with the bottle hidden in her skirts, the tree’s candles painting lace upon the ceiling, the scent of pine and oranges sharpening into something that felt like decision. Courage, the wine murmured. Or perhaps desire, which wears courage’s cloak when it goes out at night.
She went.
The corridors were deep with carpet and dark with the kind of old, companionable shadows that houses acquire after centuries of Christmases.
The sconces burned low. She passed the portrait of a long-dead Blakeney who looked as if he could keep secrets, and another who looked as if he’d opened casinos in his cellars.
Her slippers made no sound. Her heart made far too much.
Hubert’s door stood a fraction ajar, light pooling under it in a golden seam. She tapped once—soft, like a conspiracy. No answer. She tapped again, and when that felt foolish, she pushed the door with two fingers and slid inside.
He was by the hearth, exactly as she had pictured him, because she knew him now with the ridiculous arrogance of love.
Coat off, waistcoat unbuttoned, shirtsleeves rolled back to his forearms. The dark wool of his trousers had been creased precisely and then forgotten; his hair had lost the battle hours ago and gone delightfully rakish.
He had a book open in one hand, palm spanning the binding as if he knew how books ought to be held. He looked up.
For a beat, everything held—flame, air, the steady mechanism of the world. Then he rose, closing the book without looking down and setting it on the mantel like a man stepping out of armor.
“Vicky,” he said, and he said it like a thanksgiving.
She closed the door behind her and put her back to it, suddenly shy and not at all inclined to be. “I brought you something.”
His gaze flicked to the bottle, then back to her face, slow and careful. “Contraband?”
“Courage.”
“You rarely lack it.”
“Tonight,” she confessed, crossing the carpet on legs that felt curiously untrustworthy, “I prefer certainty.”
He reached for the glass on the table and held it while she spilled wine into it. She drank, and then he did, and then they were very close and quite out of reasons.
“Say it,” she whispered, because she wanted to hear it in this light, on this night, with snow at the panes and the world so impossibly kind.
He did not ask what. He was learning her.
“I love you,” he said. No flourish, no embroidery, only the clear, sturdy thing itself.
“Vicky Abbott, I love you. I love you when you fight and when you laugh and when you do the reckless thing because it is the right thing. I love that you have a shop and a spine and a mouth that says exactly what it likes. I love you.”
She went unstrung. That was the only phrase for it. All her arguments and defenses and cleverness fell like pins from a governess’s bun. She reached for him and found she was already there, his hands on her arms, his mouth close enough to fog her breath.
“Then perhaps,” she said, and God help her, she was smiling, “you ought to show me. It is Christmas, after all. We are obliged to be generous.”
His laugh was a low, wrecked thing, as if some ancient restraint had finally been allowed to sit down. “As you command, Miss Abbott.”
“Mrs. Stouts,” she corrected, with wicked softness.