Epilogue
Three Months Later
“Come now, Rosie. You cannot possibly cry more than you already have today,” Anna said, though she was dabbing at her own eyes with a handkerchief, as she came outdoors. “There are hours left of this breakfast. We have not even seen the cake!”
“Need I remind you how much you cried at your wedding?” Rosalie remarked, only crying a little, and only because the morning thus far—the church, the vows, her father delivering her down the aisle—had proven to be exactly what she had dreamed.
She sobbed again as she looked out toward the cliffs.
“It has just been... a very lovely day.”
“Cornwall in July...” Anna said, coming down the steps to join her. “It was a fine choice, no matter what the papers wrote. Much nicer than London. Somewhere new... Albeit not to us. Does he like it?”
Rosalie smiled. “Yes. He likes it very much.”
“I should have expected nothing less, the way he dotes on you. It is sickeningly sweet. Who would have thought?”
They stood a little apart from the rest of the gathering on the terrace of their ancestral house outside of Truro, the sea just visible in a long gray-blue line past the hedgerows.
Rosalie had missed this view more than she had properly admitted to herself.
The air was different here, clear and familiar.
Anna and William had come down from Scotland a week earlier; Anna’s condition was now advanced enough that she moved through the garden with one hand braced against the small of her back. She complained about her pregnancy constantly, but she had never once looked happier and more fulfilled.
“You really are glowing,” Rosalie told her, taking Anna into a side hug. “I am so happy to see you like this.”
“William says the same, though I suspect he is required to say as much, for fear I will strike him otherwise. My moods are unpredictable at the best of times, but these last few months...” Anna smiled, unable to help it.
“Suffice to say you only like me so much because I am not staying overlong. Marriage suits me, though. Hopefully, motherhood will suit me as well.” She glanced over her shoulder.
“It suits your friend Mrs. Harcourt too. She and her husband have been inseparable all morning.”
Rosalie glanced at Emily and waved when she noticed her, hanging off Thomas’s arm as they spoke to the Marquess of Beaumont and his wife. Emily looked happier than Rosalie had ever seen her. There was a glow there too, beneath the Cornwall sunshine.
“It occurred to me, watching you walk down the aisle, that none of us had predictable courtships, did we?” She laughed.
“Do you suppose there is something wrong with us? You and His Grace, and your game. And me and William, stealing him out from under another woman’s nose, though she could never have loved him, I know that. ”
“Maybe this is what love requires,” Rosalie said, adjusting her bracelets now that her emotions had calmed. “A little daring. You said that once.”
“Yes, well, I say a great many things that should be written down and put into a book for women to read,” she said sarcastically. Anna’s smile faded slightly, some private thought crossing behind her eyes. “Did you hear about Beatrice?”
Rosalie nodded. She had heard the news two weeks prior, in a letter from Emily that had arrived with more glee in its phrasing than the subject strictly warranted. “The divorce, you mean,” she said.
“It was her husband’s doing, apparently.
Some scandal in New York involving a woman twice Beatrice’s age.
That must have been a shock to her, to learn that age and beauty matter for little in the end.
” Anna shook her head slowly. “I ought to feel nothing but satisfaction. God knows she has earned very little sympathy from either of us, and yet...”
“It is still sad. I feel the same,” Rosalie finished. “However much she deserved a taste of her own medicine, no one quite deserves this.”
“I have wondered, you know, whether she would have been happier married to someone she actually wanted, rather than someone chosen to prove a point to the rest of London. First with William, who she wanted because he was handsome. Then with Levant, who she wanted because he was rich...” Anna considered this.
“In all the years I have known her, she never once seemed to be choosing for herself. Only choosing against someone else.”
“Which is a poor foundation for any marriage.”
“Yes, a poor foundation for anything, to my mind.” Anna squeezed her arm. “I hope, wherever she ends up after this, that she finds her way to a better life. We can allow that kindness to her, our good wishes, even if she has rarely extended the same good faith to anyone else.”
They fell quiet for a moment, watching the wedding guests scatter across the lawn ahead of the games that morning, until the side terrace door opened behind them and Gabriel emerged.
He tugged at his cravat and muttered under his breath, looking like a man who had just escaped a conversational assault.
Rosalie’s heart flipped at the sight of him. They had been betrothed for three months, but he still had this effect on her: of surprise and excitement, of total joy and admiration.
“Your father,” he said, arriving beside Rosalie and snaking his arm around her waist, “has a remarkable talent for talking me into situations I would rather escape.”
“What has he done now?” Rosalie asked, looking up at him while Anna scoffed.
“He is trying to convince me to convince your mother to allow him to join us on our bridal tour.”
“Heavens, no,” Anna said, scowling. “Scoundrel. He knows Mother likes you so much and would not refuse.”
“I only managed to extract myself by claiming a pressing need to find my wife.”
Something in the word ‘wife’ still seemed to catch him slightly with a small, private pleasure.
Rosalie blushed and hid her smile behind her handkerchief.
Anna rolled her eyes and excused herself to find the baron before he could make more mischief, leaving Rosalie and Gabriel alone for the first time since they had left the chapel.
“Ros,” he said tenderly, pressing a kiss to her temple.
“I am sorry about my father.”
“Oh, you needn’t be. I take it as a mark of his affection.”
“That he has begun using you in his games?”
“Yes, quite.”
“A family trait.”
He laughed. “It would seem... You know, I passed Sinclair and his wife in my escape. He greeted me. They seemed remarkably at ease.”
“Did you speak to them?”
“He congratulated us both, and she said very little, but she was pleasant enough, for an actress.” Gabriel shook his head, something rueful in the gesture. “I did not expect your family to receive either of us with such grace.”
“They know how much I love you. And we can only look forward now,” Rosalie said, turning to place a hand on his chest. “The past has had quite enough of our attention this year. I intend to be selfish with the future instead...”
Gabriel smiled, then he nodded toward the terrace. Her father had come outside with a friend and took a chair. They placed a rug over his knees despite the July warmth, and he continued holding court.
“I do think he looks well,” Gabriel said.
“I just wish he would take the advice of his doctor and slow down.” Rosalie smiled despite the worry underneath it. “But perhaps this is slow enough.”
Further along the lawn, Lady Chipping walked slowly beside her mother, deep in some conversation that made her mother laugh.
Gabriel watched them for a moment with an expression Rosalie had come to recognize as something between disbelief and gratitude.
He wore it often, with her, with others.
She hoped one day the disbelief would fade and that he would accept the good things without resistance, knowing he deserved them.
“No doubt they will be talking about our autumn trip,” he said. “It has also been on my mind.”
“You know where to procure passage to Calais.”
He tugged her tighter, and laughed. “Who knew I had married my own comedienne.”
“You do not sound troubled by the prospect.”
“Never troubled with you.” He narrowed his eyes as he returned them to his aunt.
“But I still marvel at it some days. That she wants to go anywhere at all, after everything she has endured.” He turned back to Rosalie, something more serious settling into his face.
“Which reminds me... I have something for you. I meant to give it to you privately. Let us walk somewhere else.”
She took his hand when he offered it, and they walked down the lawn together, her ivory, embroidered bridal gown whispering against the grass. He took her beneath a copse of trees, where the sound from the party was muffled.
Gabriel drew a small box from his coat and opened it in her palm. Inside sat a brooch, old-fashioned in its setting, with a small cluster of enameled violets, worked in silver.
“It was Marcus’s,” Gabriel said quietly. “Well, in some fashion. He gave it to my mother the Christmas before he passed. She wore it often after he was gone. For many years I could not bear to look at it, though Elisabeth insisted I would want it one day... Now I wish for you to have it.”
Rosalie looked up at him, understanding at once the full weight of what he was handing her.
“I have told you everything these last months,” he said. “My family...” He closed her fingers gently around the box. “And I want you to have this because I want it worn again by someone I love, rather than kept in the dark. Would you like to wear it?”
Rosalie’s eyes filled with tears again, and this time she did not pretend to hide them.
“Yes, very much.”
She nodded and stood still as he affixed the brooch to her gown. When he was done, he ran his fingers over the metal, then brought his hand up to her chin, tilting her face to look at him.
“You are all I need now,” he said to her, thumbing the edge of her jaw. “I pray every night, with gratitude, for having met you. My Ros...”
He kissed her in the quiet of the trees, gently and tenderly. She thought, not for the first time that day, how lucky she was to be loved.
And how lucky she was to love him in return. This man she had chosen—the duke who was hers.
The End?