Epilogue
One Year Later
“That one,” Rose said, pointing at the ground with the authority of someone who has been thinking about this specific patch of ground for several weeks, “is where the lavender should go.”
Cynthia looked at the patch of ground, currently just earth, occupying a modest section of the kitchen garden between the rosemary and what had once been, and might again become, a respectable bed of kitchen herbs.
She looked at Rose, who was wearing her oldest dress, had mud on both elbows and the focused expression of a natural philosopher directing an excavation of importance.
“The lavender wants more sun,” Cynthia said. “The south wall would give it better exposure.”
Rose looked at the south wall and then at the ground. She performed the internal calculation of someone who has received new information and is determining whether it outweighs the previous information sufficiently to require a revision of the plan.
“The south wall is where I wanted the climbing rose.”
“You could have the rose at the south wall and the lavender at the east corner,” Cynthia said. “The east corner gets morning sun and shelter from the north wind. Lavender does well in sheltered morning sun.”
Rose considered this with the seriousness it deserved.
She had been directing the restoration of Lavenham Hall’s kitchen garden since March with the comprehensive ambition of someone who had looked at a neglected space and seen its full potential, and who had communicated this clarity to everyone involved with a persistence that Cynthia had come to think of, with deep and genuine affection, as characteristic.
“The east corner,” Rose said, arriving at her conclusion with decisiveness. “Yes. That’s better.” She pulled her list from her pocket and made a note. “We’ll need more plants than I thought.”
“We can get them from Thornwick. Mrs. Fenwick’s brother keeps a plant nursery.”
“Does he have good lavender?”
“I’ll ask.”
Rose made another note. She looked at the garden, at the cleared beds, the turned earth and the beginning of order being established in a space that had been untended for years.
She had the expression she had when she was satisfied with the direction of things: not pleased with the completion, because it was not complete, but satisfied with the direction.
“I want to have it finished before summer,” she said.
“Then we had better write to the Mrs. Fenwick,” Cynthia said.
Rose was already writing the note in her head.
Cynthia could see it in the quality of her attention, which had moved from the present garden to the future one.
She was nine now, or nearly, her birthday was in a fortnight, which she had been noting with the matter-of-fact awareness of someone tracking an important date.
She had grown, or seemed to have grown, or perhaps had simply become more completely herself in the year since Cynthia arrived.
She rode ponies. This was one of the things that had arrived in the spring and had settled in as a permanent feature: Rose on the smaller of the estate’s two horses, moving across the north moor with competence.
Declan rode beside her on a horse considerably larger and looked across at her from time to time with the expression Cynthia thought of now as simply his.
She read voraciously. She still had nightmares sometimes, but they did not come as often, and they did not have the desperate, drowning quality of the first months.
When they came, she knew where to find comfort.
She still kept lists. She still corrected the natural history.
In February, she had undertaken a systematic audit of the library’s collection and produced a document identifying the gaps and suggesting acquisitions, which she had delivered to Declan with the composed authority of someone submitting a professional report.
He had ordered every book on the list. The books simply began arriving, at intervals, in brown-wrapped parcels, which Rose opened with satisfaction.
Lucinda had been convicted in October.
The trial had lasted four days. Crane had testified on the third day, in the reduced and careful voice of a man who had made his calculation and was honoring it.
His account of what he had administered and at whose instruction had been precise, complete and entirely damning.
The jury had deliberated for two hours. The verdict had been delivered with the particular finality of things that have been a long time coming and have, upon arrival, no drama left in them, only the fact.
Edmund Heathe’s death had been declared a murder. The trust established in Rose’s name was secured, administered by Ashby until Rose came of age, entirely beyond anyone’s reach except Rose’s own.
Cynthia had been in the library when Ashby’s letter arrived with the verdict.
Declan had read it at his desk and brought it to her without a word, holding out his hand.
They had sat together in the library, but neither of them had said anything for a long time, and that had been, she thought, exactly right.
He had gone to the graveyard the following morning and had come back with the quality she had learned to recognize as the quality of a man who has said what needed to be said and found that saying it mattered.
She had gone herself, one afternoon in the new year, on a day when the light was thin and clear, and the moors were white with the last frost of winter.
She had stood at the iron railing, looked at the stone, and said: Your brother kept his promise.
Your daughter is extraordinary. The house is breathing.
The wedding had been in December.
Small, by the standards that a duke’s wedding might be expected to observe: the church in Thornwick was also small, but it was why they had chosen it.
Mrs. Fenwick was in the third pew. Thomas Leigh was beside the door, in the quality of stillness he had developed for occasions he found significant.
Bess, who had taken the day off for the first time in recent memory and attended in her best dress with the composed, evaluative expression she brought to things she had decided deserved her full attention.
Mrs. Poole had cried. Silently, but with perfect composure. Cynthia had seen it from the front of the church and had felt something very warm press against the inside of her chest.
Rose had been the bridesmaid she had requested to be, in the simple cream dress she had selected herself after a comprehensive assessment of options, and she had walked her part of the proceedings with the focused, unhurried seriousness of someone who has been entrusted with a significant function and intends to execute it correctly.
***
Cynthia was the Duchess of Lavenham.
The title still did something unexpected to her on certain mornings. But for the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt that she was truly living the life she was dreaming of.
Declan was the same. This was the truest account of him: he was the same man she had watched in the study doorway on the first day, standing with his back to her at the window. He was also, entirely and completely different.
He was still sometimes stern, still given to standing at the windows as though the sky had offended him, and still in need of the library, the fire, and a certain kind of evening alone before he came to find her.
He was also a man who read fairy stories with distinctive voices, to a child who had once been frightened of the sound of his footsteps.
Who went to the graveyard when he needed to and came back carrying what he needed to carry.
Who had learned, across this year, to say the important things in the underneath voice, not perfectly and not always at the right moment and sometimes requiring a significant runway of preparation, but genuinely.
He was himself, more completely, than he had been.
She thought this was, in the end, the only form of change that was real.
***
The kitten had come in April.
Rose had asked once, in October, and had then not asked again, which was the more effective strategy. In April a small ginger thing had appeared in the kitchen as if delivered by reasonable means.
It was not technically the kitten from the blacksmith’s yard, that kitten had been in the blacksmith’s yard for a year and had grown into a cat with established opinions, but it was a ginger kitten of comparable provenance, acquired through Thomas Leigh from a farm on the north estate.
Rose had named it Edmund, which Cynthia had not expected and which had arrived in her chest with the precise, particular weight of something that meant exactly what it meant.
Declan had looked at Rose and had said, with the careful, full gravity of a man meaning every word: “That is a very good name.”
***
The kitchen was warm.
This was, Cynthia reflected, the fundamental truth of Lavenham Hall in the evenings: the kitchen was always the warmest room.
She had discovered this on the first sleepless night, and it had become, across the year, the room she thought of when she thought of warmth.
Cynthia was in the kitchen rolling the dough.
She cut the rounds and laid them on the pan with the efficiency of someone who has done it many times. Rose was also there helping her.
She put the pan in the oven.
Cynthia looked at the kitchen, the flour-dusted surfaces, noticed the smell beginning to rise from the oven, and she felt the particular, plain, complete happiness that one feels at home.
She put her hand, for a moment, against her stomach.
She had not told him yet, about the baby. She had been waiting, not from doubt, not from uncertainty, but from the particular quality of wanting to choose the right moment. Tonight, after the kitchen. In the library, she had thought.
She had the sentence already. She had been carrying it for a week.
Suddenly the kitchen door opened.
He came in from the corridor with the particular quality he had at this hour: coat off, cravat loosened, the day’s last responsibilities concluded.
He had been in the study with the Lincolnshire estate accounts and had the expression he wore when he had finished something that required sustained concentration.
He looked at Rose, who had flour to the elbows, an animal-shaped piece of dough in her hands and an expression of resigned satisfaction.
He looked at the kitten, who had abandoned the investigation under the chair and was now crouching in the middle of the kitchen floor looking at nothing.
He looked at the cooling rack, which had a dozen biscuits on it from the first pan, golden-brown and slightly uneven.
He crossed the kitchen. He reached out one hand as he passed the cooling rack, with the practiced, fluid ease of someone who has been making this particular motion for a year and has refined its execution to a point of genuine competence, and he took a biscuit from the rack.
She swatted his hand.
“Those,” she said, “are not ready.”
He looked at the biscuit in his hand and said, with the precise and composed delivery of a man reproducing a specific phrase for a specific purpose: “They are not objectionable.”
Rose looked at her uncle and then at Cynthia, and laughed genuinely.
Declan ate the biscuit and was looking at the oven, where the second pan was.
This is the right moment to tell him about the baby. The kitchen at the end of the day with the biscuits, Rose, the kitten and the flour on my dress, Cynthia thought.
She took his hand and said the words that she was practising in her mind for days.
He was very still for a moment.
Then he looked at her, and the smile arrived; the full, unguarded, complete smile that she had first seen in a blacksmith’s yard and that she had been accumulating ever since.
The smile of a man who had been led back into himself and had found, on return, that there was more to come back to than he had known.
Rose set down the dough, looked at their faces and arrived, with the precise and immediate accuracy of Rose at her most fundamental, at the correct conclusion. “I think,” she said, to no one in particular, “I am going to need more dough.”
She could not maintain her careful composure for more than a few fleeting seconds.
It slipped from her like breath in winter, and before she knew it, she was running straight into Declan and Cynthia, who gathered her in without hesitation.
The three of them clung to one another, laughter breaking through tears that would not be restrained.
But these were not tears of grief; they were bright, trembling tears of joy, long delayed and suddenly overflowing.
Rose drew back only long enough to look at them, her face shining. “You’ve made me a sister,” she said, her voice unsteady with wonder, as though she scarcely dared believe it herself. “A sister in heart.”
Declan’s hand rested gently against Cynthia’s abdomen, his touch reverent, protective, as though he already knew the life there. Cynthia covered his hand with her own, her eyes soft, luminous with something deeper than happiness.
“This,” she said quietly, her voice full, certain, “this is home. And I am no longer alone.”
Beyond the house, past the sweep of the drive and the sheltering trees, the small graveyard lay in its quiet watch. Edmund rested there; brother and father, gone too soon. And yet, in this moment, it did not feel as though he were absent. It felt, rather, as though he were near; seeing and knowing.
He would have been glad. Glad for his brother, for the life beginning anew, and for his own daughter, Rose, who stood no longer at the edge of loneliness, but firmly within love.
The End