Epilogue #2
"I spoke to Cuthbert," she said, her eyes tracking the fold of the wool.
"Several weeks after Fleet Street. The week you went north to see the estate manager at Pridewell and left me with the ledgers.
I asked him for every scrap of documentation he had regarding the heirloom.
The names of the buyers, the dates of the transfers, and every clerk who had witnessed a signature for my father. "
She looked up at him, her dark eyes wide and unblinking.
"He had records, though it took some weeks to pull them from the vaults.
The man who purchased it from my father in 'twenty-two had sold it to a silversmith in York, and that man had sold it on again to a collector in Lincolnshire.
By the time we traced the movement, it had passed through four separate sets of hands. "
She paused, her breath catching slightly.
"But the last man was willing to sell. He had bought it purely as an investment and found it less interesting than he anticipated. The Pridewell name and a reasonable sum from my own allowance produced the outcome I was looking for."
Leander had not moved a single muscle. His face was perfectly unreadable, but his eyes were fixed on her fingers with a fierce, burning intensity.
"Henry was there from the beginning," she said softly. "He sent you to find my father, and you found Poppy and me instead. I have thought about that every morning since you told me about it. He was part of this before either of us knew the other existed."
She paused, holding the green wool out to him, her palms open. "The search. The three years of it. He started all of this, and I wanted him to have the last word in it."
Leander looked at the package for three seconds. Then he reached out and took it.
He unwrapped the wool slowly, his large fingers working with care that was entirely unlike his usual rhythmic efficiency.
The cloth fell away into his lap, and what was inside caught the low amber light of the fire, throwing it back into the room with that warm, heavy, greasy luster that only old gold possesses when it has lived in pockets for a generation.
The pocket watch was smaller than she had imagined from his descriptions.
The gold case was worn completely smooth around the edges from years of handling. There was a soft blurring of the metal that only happened when an object had been reached for daily, turned over in a palm during thought, and held with the specific, unconscious frequency of a talisman.
He turned it over in his hand. Julia saw his thumb move across the back of the casing, once, a slow, heavy stroke, the way he had moved his thumb across the old maps when he was committing their parameters to some internal record.
He did not say anything.
She did not need him to speak.
She watched his face do the thing it always did when something arrived for which he had no form of words prepared.
The slight, total stillness of his features, the almost imperceptible knotting of the muscle at the corner of his jaw, the way his attention went entirely inward, pulling the walls of his mind down around the moment.
His thumb moved across the engraving again, tracing the letters HWA where they had been cut into the gold forty years before.
"Henry William Alcott," he said.
The name came out low and rough, spoken to the watch as much as to her.
"He was part of this," she whispered, leaning her shoulder against his. "He should know it turned out well."
Leander looked up at her then, and what was in his face was the full, unmanaged version of the man.
Nothing filed away, nothing cleared for the benefit of the room.
His eyes were very bright in the firelight, reflecting the red coals and the yellow lamp, and he looked at her with an expression she had no name for, because she had never had the experience of it before and had therefore never needed the word.
He reached up, his large, rough hand coming to the side of her face, his palm dry and warm against her cheek, exactly as he had done on the night she had gone down the dark corridor to knock on his door.
He leaned down and kissed her.
When he stopped, she stayed close, her forehead resting against the line of his jaw, close enough that she could see the slow, heavy rise and fall of his chest beneath his waistcoat.
"Thank you," he said against her hair.
"It was my privilege," she said.
Leander laughed. The real one, the full one that arrived without warning and without self-consciousness, the laugh she had been collecting since the day he fell off the library ladder.
He pulled her in against his side, his arm heavy around her waist, and she went easily, her silk skirts rustling against his wool trousers.
They sat together in the quiet room while the fire burned down to a deep, steady red, the house solid around them, and Henry's watch resting securely in his palm.
Outside, the iron-shod wheels of London continued to turn over the cobblestones.
Indifferent, continuous, entirely unconcerned with the two people inside the townhouse on Grosvenor Square who had found each other at the end of a broken axle.
A Berkshire house party, a hedge maze, a Fleet Street pavement, and one very specific pocket watch.
Inside, the fire burned.
Inside, they stayed.
The End?