Epilogue
Six Months Later
The observatory was warm now in the evenings; Cedric had seen to that the very first week, a small iron stove set in the corner that took the lingering spring chill off the round stone room without so much as a wisp of smoke to trouble the lenses.
Clara stood at the great window in its glow, watching the last of the daylight fade from the western sky, and felt her husband come up quietly behind her and fold his arms about her waist.
His hands came to rest, as they always did now, low against the gentle swell beneath her gown, where, this past fortnight, their child had begun to make itself known in small decided movements. He rested his cheek lightly against her hair.
“They will be here within the hour,” he murmured. “You are certain you are well enough for it? We could put them off.”
“I have never been better in my life, and you know it perfectly well, and if you try to wrap me in wool and forbid me the telescope, I shall be very cross with you.” She leaned back into him. “Besides. It is our first. I have wanted this for months.”
“I know you have.” His lips brushed her temple. “I love you.”
He said it easily these days, without effort or ceremony, a dozen times a day, over the breakfast things, across a room, into her hair in the dark, as though he were making up, all at once and with interest, for the four years he had spent saying nothing at all to anyone.
It still undid her a little, every time.
“And I love you,” she said. “Now come away from the window before you fog the glass with all this sentiment, and let us be ready to receive our guests.”
***
Anne and Edward arrived first, as Clara had known they would.
“Three months married,” Anne said, laughing, as she came up the hill on her husband’s arm with her cheeks pink from the climb, “and I have already learned that if I wish to know where my husband is of an evening, I must first ask where his oldest friend has hidden himself.”
“I deny nothing,” Edward said cheerfully. “Farenwoode is excellent company when one can persuade him to remember other people exist.”
“He has not changed in the smallest particular,” Cedric observed, shaking his friend’s hand.
Anne came and kissed Clara’s cheek and then held her at arm’s length, taking in the bloom of her, the rounding figure, the plain glad ease that had settled over her these six months like a habit she had finally been permitted to keep.
“You look,” Anne said softly, “exactly like a woman ought to look and so seldom does. I am so very happy for you, Clara. I do not think I have words for how happy.”
“You shall have to find some,” Clara said, “because I mean to ask you to stand godmother when the time comes, and I should like you to sound enthusiastic about it.”
Anne’s eyes filled at once, and the two of them stood holding hands and being foolish together until Honoria’s voice came up the path behind them.
She arrived on the arm of her captain, and Clara, who would never quite get used to it, marvelled again at the change in her.
The hollow, rehearsed, beautiful mask was gone; what stood in its place was a young woman who laughed without first checking the room to see whether she was permitted, who looked up at the man beside her with a frank delight that had nothing whatsoever rehearsed about it.
“Mrs Weston,” Clara said, smiling, “you are glowing. It is most unbecoming.”
“I am insufferable,” Honoria agreed cheerfully.
“James says so daily. He bears it very well.” She drew her husband forward, a broad, steady, sun-browned man with kind eyes and the unhurried manner of someone who had spent years learning to be calm aboard small ships in large seas.
“James, you have met the Duke, of course. This is Clara, the Duchess, who saw more than I meant anyone to see in that dreadful season, and was kind enough never to expose me for it. I shall be in her debt to the end of my life.”
“The debt,” said Captain Weston, with a slow, grave smile, bowing over Clara’s hand, “is rather more mine, Your Grace. I am aware of precisely whom I have to thank that I am standing here a married man with a future, rather than a cashiered one without.” His eyes went to Cedric. “I do not forget it, sir. I shan’t.”
“Then we shall consider it handsomely settled all round,” Cedric said, “and none of us will mention debts again, on pain of being sent home before the planets rise. James. Your posting. Is it confirmed?”
“This week, sir. The Mediterranean station, with the promotion attached.” Weston’s quiet pride was a fine thing to see. “I am told the recommendation was unusually warm.”
“I cannot imagine how that came about,” said Cedric blandly, and turned to fuss with the telescope before anyone could thank him for anything.
***
They settled in, the six of them, the way friends did: James asking the intelligent questions of a man who had navigated by these same stars for a living, Edward making himself useful by the stove and pretending not to watch Anne every time she smiled, and Honoria and Anne and Clara drawn together at the long work table where the charts were spread.
“And the Dowager?” Anne asked, low, careful. “How does it stand, there?”
“Better than it did.” Clara chose her words honestly, as she always tried to with Anne.
“She is in Scotland this month, with an old friend. She goes often now. She and Cedric write. They are gentle with one another in a way they never used to be, and a little careful, like two people walking on ground that is mending but not yet firm. It will take time. But she came to the wedding, and she wept, and she has knitted enough small things for this baby to clothe a regiment of them.” She smiled.
“I think she is learning, rather late, how to love people without arranging them. It does not come naturally to her. But she is trying. That is a great deal more than I once thought I should ever say of her.”
“And my…” Honoria hesitated over the mention of the man who had been her father.
“I had a letter. From a cousin. My father has gone abroad, the Continent somewhere. After it all came out, there was nothing left for him here. No invitations. No influence. No one who would receive him.” She turned her wineglass slowly by the stem.
“I find I feel almost nothing about it, which I suppose ought to trouble me, and does not.”
“It oughtn’t to trouble you in the least,” said Anne stoutly, and that was the end of that.
Clara let her gaze drift, while they talked, to the small brass telescope that stood now on its own stand by the eastern window, older and plainer than Cedric’s great instrument, its fittings worn smooth by another pair of hands.
He had found it for her before they were even wed; had traced it through three dealers and a saleroom in York to the man who had bought it out of her mother’s ruined estate; had bought it back, and said nothing at all about it until the morning she walked into the observatory and found it standing there in the light.
“Your mother looked at the sky through this,” he had said, when she could not speak. “It seemed to me it ought to find its way back to you.”
She had wept then as she rarely allowed herself to weep, for the mother who had loved her dearly, if sometimes fearfully, and was gone; and Cedric had simply held her, and understood, and asked for nothing.
It was, she thought, the truest measure of him she had: that he had gone quietly hunting through salerooms for something that could offer him nothing, and could only make her glad.
“Clara.” Cedric’s voice came from across the room.
He had the great telescope trained and waiting, and his friends were drawing back to make a place for her at the eyepiece, and his face in the lamplight wore the warm expression that even now, six months a wife and carrying his child, could still make something in her chest turn over.
“Come and look. Saturn is up, and the rings are as fine tonight as I have ever seen them. You first.”
She crossed to him, and he drew her in against his side, and she bent to the eyepiece; and there it hung in the black, the small impossible ringed jewel of it, just as it had on those first nights in the observatory, when everything between them had still been fear and longing.
She straightened and looked about her: at Edward and Anne with their heads bent together over a star chart, at Honoria laughing at something her husband had murmured, at her own husband’s hand warm at her waist, and her mother’s telescope catching the lamplight by the window, and the whole wide wheeling sky laid out beyond the glass.
The gratitude came over her so suddenly and so completely that her eyes stung with it.
She had come to this house of grey stone with one small travelling case and the settled certainty that she would spend her life being useful in rooms that were never hers.
And instead there was this: a room full of warmth, and friends gathered out of everyone’s various wreckage into something whole, and a man who loved her openly, daily, for no reason but herself.
So this, she thought, blinking hard, smiling at the lot of them, is what it looks like. This is what love looks like, when at last you stop being afraid of it and simply let it in.
“Well,” she said aloud, a little unsteadily, “do not all crowd at once. The sky, I am reliably informed, will keep.”
And Cedric laughed, and pulled her closer, and overhead the stars came out in their thousands over Farenwoode, and bore their patient witness, as they always had, to the small and luminous business of people learning, against every expectation, to be happy.
The End
Thank You for Reading “The Duke's Inconvenient Lady”!