Epilogue
“Oh! There’s a new Romeo and Juliet in Brighton, I forgot to tell you.”
Rose snorted as she turned the page of her newspaper. “I promise you, once you’ve been Juliet three times, you can almost recite the entire play.”
Her husband’s face, just visible over the top of her newspaper, was astonished. “You… You can recite the whole play?”
Rose laid down the newspaper with a grin. “‘Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins—’”
“That’s enough about loins this early in the morning.” Samuel fanned himself with his hand from the opposite sofa. “Not unless you’re eager to let me delve into yours?”
“Twice this morning has left me quite… Well, not sore. Let us say, well-stretched,” Rose said with pinking cheeks, though it was mildly wonderful to be so desired by such a man. “My point is, I could probably declaim the entire thing for you if you wanted. No need to go to the theater.”
“I thought you’d be all for it!” said Samuel with a quizzical expression. “You know…back in the theaters you love.”
But from the wrong side, Rose almost said but did not quite.
It was difficult to explain. This life, her new life—it was everything she wanted, and sometimes a little bit more.
Yet that did not mean she regretted her old life. Her life on the stage had been wonderful, in its way. Oh, it had been grubby at times, and there had been moments when she had wondered what on earth she had been thinking…
But it had been wonderful—and stepping into a theater not as an actress, but as a patron felt…odd. Not wrong. But not yet right.
“I don’t know,” Rose said slowly.
And somehow, he understood her. How did he do that, just…just understanding her like that?
“I am more than happy to attend something else. An opera, or a ballet. There’s a horse race next week, if you want to get into the country,” Samuel said with a shrug as the longcase clock chimed eleven. “And there are plenty of other plays we could see, and right here in London, like Mac—”
“Do not utter that name in my presence!” Rose hissed.
She had not known that she was going to say such a thing, but she was married. She was allowed to hiss at her husband, particularly when he was being an idiot.
Samuel blinked. “I thought it was only inside a theater that one should not say Mac—”
“Do I have to come over there and stop up your mouth?” said Rose, placing a hand on her chest in mock—well, mostly mock—outrage.
Her husband waggled his eyebrows. “That sounds wonderful, actually.”
Rose laughed, and his laughter joined hers to fill the morning room, and she hardly knew how she was supposed to contain so much wonder.
Being with Samuel was…easy.
That was not to diminish the man, far from it. Rose had never encountered anyone, man or woman, who had made her feel so happy, so comfortable, so completely at one with the world that she did not have to look over her shoulder or worry about what was to happen next.
It wasn’t just not fearing for her next meal, though that was a lovely consequence. No, it was being with Samuel. His presence alone was reward enough.
Rose left her newspaper behind as she stood from her armchair and stepped across to her husband. Before she could even speak a word, he had grabbed her waist, pulled her down across his lap, and done precisely what she had threatened to do to him.
Stopped up her mouth…with a kiss.
Melting into his embrace, heart fluttering and pulse racing, Rose parted her lips and wound her fingers swiftly into his hair.
Oh, there was nothing like this: not even a resounding standing ovation could feel like this, the weightlessness of her body, the soaring of her pulse, the way his hands—
“My lord, my lady, there are—ah.”
Rose sprang up from her husband’s embraces—or more accurately, clutches—and tried to smooth her hair down at the same time as her skirts and at the same time as her spirits.
She was not entirely successful.
Arden was pink but kept his gaze resolutely on his master. “As I was saying—”
“We are going to have to introduce some sort of knocking system,” Samuel muttered, straightening his cravat with flushing cheeks.
Rose tried not to snort.
“Indeed, my lord,” said their butler, now raising his eyes heavenward as though he could receive help from that quarter for his unruly master. “Your family is here, my lord.”
“My—My family?”
There was no more that could be said; that was, there was no time for additional words from either Samuel or herself, for the door banged against the wall as a torrent of Chances entered the room.
“—got to do something about it—”
“Utterly disgraceful, he’s giving us all a bad name!”
“—and it will get to the papers soon, if we don’t do something!”
Rose took a hasty step backward. There was something about a plethora of Chances. Individually, they were all absolute delights—she had yet to meet one that she did not like—but taken all together…
“I h-hope we weren’t int-t-terrupting anything,” said the Dowager Marchioness of Aylesbury, kissing a stunned Rose on the cheek.
“Nothing at all,” lied Samuel rather impressively, Rose had to admit.
One could almost believe him.
Lilianna snorted as she sank heavily down onto a sofa, her hands clutching her large belly. “Less said about that, the better, I say. And to think, I’ve come out of confinement for this! Right, we’ll need at least three pots of tea—”
“This isn’t actually your house, Lil,” Samuel said with a sigh as he allowed the stated sister to kiss his cheek. “It’s Rose’s house.”
All eyes turned to Rose.
And Rose adored it. If there was one thing she missed about traipsing across a stage, it was the constant knowledge that you were being looked at and admired by a great many people.
The Chance family was its own theater, all on its own.
“Inform Mrs. Bailin we’ll have tea and coffee and cake, Arden,” she said firmly, indicating that her in-laws should be seated. “Do sit down.”
The role of hostess was one she had agreed to play for a rascal of an heir all the way back in Brighton. It had come as a surprise, Rose realized ruefully as she plumped up a cushion for her father-in-law and asked Frank not to spill ink on a cushion, that she quite enjoyed it.
“Now what’s all this hubbub?” Samuel said as he attempted to prevent Benjamin from pouring a glass of brandy from his own collection. “It’s just past eleven in the morning, you blighter—”
“It’s not a hubbub,” Lilianna said grandly. “It’s a scandal!”
Her husband met her eye and Rose tried not to grin. Her sister-in-law had missed a trick by not stepping onto the stage herself.
“I am sure it is not that bad,” she said aloud as calmly as possible. “Ah, here’s the tea.”
As Mrs. Bailin and the footmen wheeled in a great number of tea trays—Rose had learned after their last visit that each of the Chance branches required a great deal of cake—the hubbub rose once again.
“—giving all of us a bad—”
“And it’s serious this time. There’s talk of prosecuting—”
“—n-n-never heard the l-like!”
“Honestly, you’re a rabble, not a family,” said Samuel with a laugh, handing a slice of cake to Frank, who examined it critically.
“This cake’s angle is not symmetrical.”
“It’ll taste the same,” Samuel said as he rolled his eyes, turning to his wife.
Once again, Rose tried not to giggle. “Would you like me to cut you a more symmetrical slice, Frank?”
“Don’t m-m-m-mollycoddle her,” called her mother over the noise. “And d-don’t call her ‘Frank’!”
“Here you go,” Rose said, cutting a slice very carefully, putting it on a plate, and handing it over to her youngest sister-in-law. “Frank,” she added, sotto voce.
Frank grinned.
“I h-heard that!”
“I rather think you were meant to,” opined Samuel with a laugh, throwing himself into an armchair. “Now, honestly, one of you can surely tell me why you’ve all marched over here in such high dudgeon?”
“I’m not in high dudgeon,” said Benjamin, and Rose noticed as she glanced over at him that he had somehow managed to get a glass of brandy, after all. “I think Cousin Zander should be allowed to live how he wants.”
There was a moment’s pause.
Just a moment, but it was sufficient. Rose had spent too long attempting to perfect the perfect pause between lines in a scene to know that this was a pause which the family had delivered before.
Samuel rolled his eyes. “Not again.”
“He truly is going to disgrace us,” said Lilianna smartly. “Don’t you think, Arthur?”
Rose started. The man standing behind Lilianna, lounging on the sofa protectively, had not yet said a word and had somehow faded into the background.
“Anything you say, my love,” said Earl of Taernsby with a wink to Rose.
“Well, whether or not you approve, Benjamin,” said the dowager marquess slowly, “that hardly signifies.”
Benjamin bristled. “Papa—”
“It is what Society thinks that matters,” continued his father, “and we all know what will happen when the news gets out about his latest unfortunate escapade. And it will get out.”
Rose swallowed, the sense of foreboding so strong within the room, she could almost taste it. She caught Samuel’s eyes as he spoke.
“Ruin,” her husband said slowly.
Everyone in the room fell to chattering again, some decrying Cousin Zander in the strongest terms—that was Lilianna—and others laughing about the adventure the man had presumably gotten up to—that was Benjamin.
Frank had pulled a protractor out of goodness-knew-where and was carefully measuring the angle of her cake, tongue between her teeth and not a bite of her dessert consumed, and Samuel’s parents were talking in hurried whispers about whether they should reach out to his brother William and see if they could delicately assist.
And in all the chatter and confusion, Rose carefully stepped around the room and lowered herself onto a seat beside her husband.
“Well, well,” Samuel said quietly. “A ruin. A true scandal.”
“Not that we know anything about that,” she returned with a smile.
His own expression was so knowing, and yet so loving, that Rose was in half a mind to send the whole pack of them away so she could curl up onto his lap once more.
This husband of hers, he did not spook easily. No matter her past, no matter how she had come into his life, he had fallen in love with her and would stand by her. It was wonderful.
“A letter for you, my lord.”
Rose looked up. Their butler’s voice was half lost in the din, but he was just about audible.
“Say that again, Arden!” Samuel called out in a loud voice.
His family’s voices became murmurs, and then eventually, silence fell.
Arden cleared his throat. “A letter for you, my lord. Erm… For my Lord Aylesbury. The senior. Forwarded from your home.”
Rose only caught the moment of mirth for a moment, before her father-in-law steadied his face and held out his hand.
The letter was short, and it was read quickly. When it had been finished, the dowager marquess looked at his wife and sighed.
“My brother requests our help.”
“I knew it!” Lilianna had jumped to her feet and was only a little unsteady, her husband’s hands jerking out to balance her. “Come on then, Frank. We had better get over there right now. Where are they—the townhouse? Bath?”
“I d-d-don’t actually th-think the letter m-meant for all of us to g-go,” said their mother.
“Come on, then,” chortled Benjamin, walking forward with the brandy glass still in his hand. “I wonder if Uncle William still has that marvelous port?”
Rose giggled as Arden just about managed to snatch the glass from the man’s hands as he passed him in a flurry of family, the room emptying somehow just as swiftly as it had been filled.
There was only the copious cake, mostly uneaten, and the numerous teapots and coffeepots, still mostly full, that remained as evidence that the rest of the Aylesbury Chances had ever been there.
Samuel cleared his throat. “Would you mind taking these back down to the kitchens, Mrs. Bailin? The servants can available themselves of it all. Shame to let it go to waste.”
“Very kind of you, my lord,” murmured their housekeeper. The footmen and butler stepped in to assist.
And so the room was emptied almost as swiftly as it had been filled.
Rose exhaled slowly. “Well. That was interesting.”
“Oh, I hear the name Alexander Chance embroiled in one scandal or another every day of the week. I don’t know where the man gets his energy from—and nothing ever really comes of it,” Samuel said with a shrug, taking her hand.
“Just as nothing came of all that ‘Lady A’ business. I dare anyone of the ton to comment that they guess it referred to you and see what I do to them. Do not think on it. I have far more interesting things to think about.”
“You do?”
She should have expected it, yet Rose was still capable of being surprised by this charming, winsome, infuriating man. The way he pulled her swiftly from her seat, however, and tugged her onto his lap… Well, that was impressive. No practiced actor could have done it better.
“Now, where were we?” Samuel murmured, his breath blossoming across her décolletage.
Rose beamed as she looked down at the man she would spend the rest of her life getting to know, and loving more and more with everything she learned. “I think you were about to ravish me.”
“Well, then, I had better get to it,” her husband, the most brilliant man she had ever met said slowly, “so there is time to ravish you a second time before lunch.”
“I wouldn’t take a chance on that.” Rose laughed, and then she ceased laughing as the man she adored covered her mouth with his own and began a very thorough ravishing, indeed.