Chapter 20
Twenty
HARPER
Epilogue
Three Years Later
Eleanor Sally de Warenne believed puddles were among God’s greatest creations and by the age of three had developed a remarkable talent for finding them before any responsible adult could intervene.
“She has Geoffrey’s determination once she decides upon something,” I told Aldwin as Eleanor marched directly through a stretch of mud with absolute confidence in her own judgment. “No force on earth is moving her now.”
“She has your habit of ignoring practical advice,” Aldwin replied.
But there was no real severity in it. He stood beneath the apple trees watching his niece with one hand resting against the low stone wall beside the garden.
Autumn sunlight caught in his dark hair while Eleanor crouched beside a puddle studying her own reflection with the concentration of a philosopher confronting the mysteries of existence.
Then she sat directly in it, chortling.
Aldwin closed his eyes briefly as I laughed.
Some things at Thames had changed enormously in three years. Others remained reassuringly inevitable.
The war had ended two years earlier. Peace, uneven and fragile, had followed it slowly. The damaged western tower had finally been rebuilt before winter. Tenant families had returned to abandoned cottages.
And somehow, impossibly, I had become part of the machinery holding all of it together.
Two women crossing the courtyard waved toward me on their way from the herb gardens.
Apparently surviving a civil war while correctly predicting grain shortages permanently altered a household’s understanding of your usefulness.
Aldwin noticed the exchange and shook his head faintly. “You realize the steward fears you now.”
“He should. I introduced inventory tracking.”
“A terrifying innovation.”
“Civilization rests upon proper grain accounting.”
“I was unaware.”
“You would be if you’d ever balanced winter stores.”
Eleanor held up a dripping leaf triumphantly from the puddle.
“Excellent work,” I informed her solemnly.
Geoffrey found us there sometime later. He crossed the garden with the steady confidence of a man entirely at ease in his own home before settling beside me beneath the trees, his shoulder brushing mine.
That still startled me sometimes. Not the castle or the century. Not even the life. Just this. The unconscious certainty of belonging somewhere completely.
“You’re late,” I told him.
“I was intercepted by correspondence.”
“A likely excuse.”
“The king continues insisting upon governance.”
“How inconsiderate of him.”
Geoffrey’s mouth curved faintly.
Across the garden Eleanor had now begun attempting to transport puddle water using the structural integrity of a single leaf.
Aldwin looked deeply concerned by the engineering involved.
“Aldwin is staying for supper,” Geoffrey said.
“I assumed as much when I saw his horse.”
“There is also apparently a widow in the north.”
I turned immediately toward him.
“A widow.”
“A baroness,” Geoffrey clarified, though the slight shift at the corner of his mouth suggested he understood perfectly well how little clarification that provided. “They have been corresponding regarding estate matters.”
“Of course they have.”
“Extensively, it seems.”
I glanced toward Aldwin, who was pretending very hard not to hear us while Eleanor abandoned leaf transportation entirely in favor of throwing mud directly at a tree.
Something in him had changed over the years. Not healed entirely. I wasn’t certain grief ever truly healed. But he laughed more easily now. The silences around him no longer felt hollowed-out in quite the same way.
“That’s good,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Geoffrey agreed. “I believe it is.”
By evening, rain had begun falling softly against the castle walls.
Eleanor finally exhausted herself shortly after supper and allowed us to carry her upstairs half asleep against Geoffrey’s shoulder clutching a deeply unfortunate frog-shaped carving she had become emotionally attached to sometime earlier that week.
“She named it Archbishop,” Geoffrey informed me quietly as we crossed the corridor.
“Why?”
“I did not ask.”
Wise man.
Later, after Eleanor had surrendered fully to sleep beneath linen blankets embroidered by women who would never understand the impossible chain of events that had brought me there, Geoffrey stood beside the bed watching her.
Candlelight softened the sharp lines of his face. He still looked at Eleanor sometimes with visible astonishment, as though some part of him remained unconvinced she was entirely real. Perhaps some part of me did too.
“Harper,” he said quietly.
I looked up.
For a moment he adjusted Eleanor’s blanket unnecessarily, smoothing fabric already perfectly smooth.
“Do you regret it?”
The question settled softly into the room between us. I looked at our daughter sleeping safely beneath handmade quilts while rain whispered softly beyond the shutters.
Then I looked at Geoffrey. At the man who had once stood in a chapel and offered me freedom even when it cost him dearly to do so.
“No.”
Something shifted immediately in his expression, small enough another person might have missed it entirely.
“No?” he repeated quietly.
“I remember my old life,” I said softly. “All of it. The noise and the lights and my work. My friends. Coffee.”
That earned the smallest flicker of amusement from him.
“And I grieved it,” I admitted. “I think part of me always will.”
Honesty mattered with Geoffrey. It always had.
“But this became my life.” I reached for his hand. “You became my life.”
The room went very still.
“I chose this,” I whispered. “I chose you. And if I stood again in that archive knowing everything that would happen afterward…”
I tightened my fingers gently around his.
“I would still place my hand on the manuscript.”
Geoffrey closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again all that careful restraint I had once found intimidating had softened into something warmer now.
He hauled me into his arms and kissed me. When we broke apart, he rested his forehead lightly against mine.
Rain moved softly against the stone outside while Eleanor breathed steadily in sleep between us.
“Happy?” he asked quietly.
I looked around the room at the candlelight warming old stone, the rain silvering the shutters, and at my daughter asleep beneath handmade quilts.
Then I looked at the man I loved. The ache of missing my old world still existed sometimes, but it no longer felt like standing with one foot turned toward departure. It simply felt like loving two places at once.
“Yes,” I said softly. “Very.”
And downstairs somewhere in the keep, I was almost certain Eleanor’s muddied shoes were still waiting exactly where she had abandoned them despite Agnes threatening judicial consequences earlier that afternoon.
Some battles, I had learned, were not worth fighting.
* * *