Epilogue #3
The door burst open, admitting Catherine and Timothy, both looking frazzled.
“Is it—oh!” Catherine’s hands flew to her mouth. “She is beautiful. I have a niece!”
“Born at the opera,” Timothy murmured, a little wild about the eyes. “Which somehow feels precisely right for your family.”
“May I hold her?” Catherine begged.
Adrian looked as though he’d sooner surrender a limb, but Marianne nudged him. With visible reluctance, he assisted the transfer.
“Hello, darling girl,” Catherine crooned. “I am your Aunt Catherine. I shall teach you mathematics and music—and how to argue with your papa.”
“She does not require instruction in that,” Adrian muttered. “It appears hereditary.”
A knock at the door interrupted them. A very uncomfortable-looking footman entered.
“Your Graces—the management begs to know if anything is required. Also, the audience is quite apprised of the… blessed event. They inquire whether the performance should continue.”
“Of course,” Marianne said. “The singers ought not delay their tragedy on our account.”
Timothy cleared his throat. “The entire opera house is talking about this. By morning, all of London will know.”
“Let them,” Adrian said, eyes never leaving his daughter. “Let them know the Duke and Duchess of Harrowmere have a daughter—born at the opera, during Don Giovanni—because she is a Blackwell and we do nothing by halves.”
“Including scandal,” Marianne murmured, smiling.
“Especially scandal.”
Elisabeth opened her eyes fully then, looking up at her father with a calm, imperial certainty.
“She knows she is loved,” he whispered.
“Of course she knows. She is clever—like her mother.”
“Beautiful—like her mother.”
“Dramatic—like her father.”
“We shall never live this down,” Adrian said. “Our daughter—born at the opera.”
“Would you wish to?” Marianne asked. “It is the perfect beginning for our perfect girl.”
As if in agreement, Elisabeth yawned—a tiny O—then settled to sleep, entirely assured she belonged.
“Shall we attempt to get you home?” Mr Peterson asked gently.
“In a moment,” Marianne said, reaching for Adrian’s hand. “Let us simply—be here. Where it began.”
Adrian kissed her temple, then their daughter’s brow. “Here is perfect.”
Outside, the opera continued—music swelling, voices rising—while inside the retiring room, the Blackwell family celebrated their own tale. Comedy, romance, drama; life, like opera, rarely fit neatly into a single category.
Later, much later, when they finally made it home—carried through the opera house to thunderous applause from an audience that had abandoned Mozart for the real-life drama—when Elisabeth was properly bathed and dressed and installed in her nursery, when the household had celebrated with champagne and tears, Marianne and Adrian lay in their bed with their daughter between them.
“She is truly here,” Adrian breathed.
“Very dramatically here.”
“At the opera.”
“During Don Giovanni.”
“In the retiring room.”
“While the performers sang their hearts out.”
They looked at one another—and dissolved into slightly hysterical laughter.
“No one will believe it,” Adrian said.
“Oh, they shall. It is too perfectly us to be fiction.”
Elisabeth stirred, making small contented sounds.
“Will she forgive us,” Adrian wondered, “for so theatrical an entrance?”
“She is a Blackwell. Drama is her birthright.”
“Poor child.”
“Lucky child. Two parents who adore one another, a family that will dote upon her, and the best birth-story in London.”
“The gossips will dine upon it for years.”
“Let them. Our daughter was born to music—and love. What could be more fitting?”
After a silence, he said very softly, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For seeing me that night. For refusing to look away. For giving me everything I never knew I wanted. For our daughter. For teaching me happiness.”
“Adrian—”
“I love you. Both of you. Beyond words.”
“We love you too. Even if you are overprotective.”
“I am appropriately protective.”
“You threatened to have Mr Peterson transported.”
“Again, that was stress-induced hyperbole.”
They might have continued their familiar bickering, but Elisabeth had other plans. She wailed, a fierce little cry that suggested she had inherited both parents’ determination to be heard.
“Already making demands,” Adrian said, sounding absurdly proud.
“Definitely a Blackwell.”
As Marianne fed their daughter for the first time, Adrian’s arm around them both, she found herself thinking of circles—how life curved back upon itself, how love created its own gravity.
They had begun at the opera, with a glance that shifted the course of two lives.
And now, in that same place, their daughter had made her entrance, completing one circle even as she began her own.
Outside, London slept, unaware that its newest scandal was also its most beautiful love story—the Beast and his merchant duchess, and the opera-born child who proved that the most shocking events were sometimes the most wondrous.
Elisabeth nursed contentedly, already at home in her dramatic beginning, while her parents watched her with the kind of love that had tamed a beast, elevated a merchant’s daughter, and produced this perfect, improbable, absolutely miraculous moment.
The End