Epilogue
Ashfield Park, one year later
The morning room at Ashfield faced East.
It was Sophia’s favorite room in the house and had become so in the steady way of any room one comes to occupy without precisely deciding to occupy it. The light came in through three tall windows at the breakfast hour.
The carpet was the one Margaret had ordered from Persia in the second year of her marriage to Edmund, and it had been faded by ten years of morning sun on the same patch of floor.
Sophia had taken, in the past several months, to standing in that patch with her tea each morning before the household came down.
She was in that patch that day.
She was not, that morning, drinking tea.
The cup was in her hand. The tea was cooling.
She had been intending, when she carried it down from the breakfast table, to read the small stack of correspondence the morning post had brought, and she had instead, by some quality of the light or the steady scratch of Edmund’s pen across the room, allowed herself to stop.
She took stock of it.
Edmund was at his desk by the south window.
He was turning over the quarterly accounts. His expression was unguarded those days, and it was, that morning, the expression of someone finding the accounts tolerable but not engaging.
He looked up and saw her watching him. He did not say anything. He had registered, eight months earlier, that being watched by his wife was a thing he found that he liked, and that there was no requirement for either of them to remark on it any further.
She smiled at him.
He returned to the accounts.
***
Henry had grown two inches since October.
Sophia had measured him against the door frame of the schoolroom three weeks earlier, and the precise pencil mark she had made was visibly above the mark she had made at the start of the autumn term.
Henry had been pleased about it in the matter-of-fact way Henry was pleased about anything. He had informed her, proudly, that he was able to name every horse in the stable. He had shared the fact with her four times in the past week.
Catherine, in the corner of the morning room, was answering the letter that had come from Mr. Lyle.
Mr. Lyle was a widowed landowner whose property lay perhaps eleven miles to the East of Ashfield.
He had been introduced to Catherine in the spring, at a country dinner of the kind Catherine had previously avoided, and a quiet correspondence had developed between them by the careful initiative of both parties.
The letters arrived on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Catherine, who had been managing her own affairs for more years than she had been managing anyone else’s, had not, until two months before, registered that she liked the letters. She had, by then, registered it.
Mr. Lyle was steady and thoughtful. He made Henry laugh.
He treated Catherine’s competence as the extraordinary thing it was, and he did so without commenting on it, which Sophia had come to recognize as the truest form of regard.
Catherine had said nothing about the matter to Sophia directly.
Catherine never did. Sophia did not need her to.
***
Arabella and Jonathan had been married in the autumn.
It had been a small ceremony, in the chapel at Ashfield, with perhaps thirty people present and a breakfast that had run well into the afternoon. Edmund had given his sister away. Catherine had wept, briefly. Henry had carried the ring. Eleanor had come down from London and stayed four days.
Jonathan had proven, in the months of their marriage, to be exactly as wholehearted as eight years of waiting had suggested he would be.
Arabella’s letters from their small house in the village arrived once a fortnight. They were long. They were detailed. They were entirely without subtlety.
They reported, with the generous frankness Arabella had recovered in the year since the matter with Lord Graystone, on the kitchen garden and on Jonathan’s reading habits and on the cook’s daily campaign against the under-housemaid; and they conveyed, in every careful paragraph, that the writer was well, and that the writer was happy, and that the writer wished her sister-in-law to know.
Sophia read every letter twice.
***
Mrs. Holt lived in a small village in Dorset.
The arrangement had been made in the weeks after the trial, quietly, by Jonathan and Edmund and a small piece of paper signed in the magistrate’s chambers.
Mrs. Holt had a cottage. Her sister and her sister’s son lived with her.
The annual sum that came to her through Edmund’s solicitor was sufficient for the three of them, and Mrs. Holt had written to Sophia once, in the spring, to say that the garden was doing well and that the boy was learning to read.
Percival Cummings’ proceedings had run their course in the late spring.
He had been stripped of his title. He had been stripped of what remained of his holdings.
He had been transported on a ship out of Portsmouth on the last day of June, and he was, from the morning of the first of July, no longer a matter the Cavendish household was required to manage.
Edmund had registered the day on the calendar in his study with a single line. He had not commented on it.
The writing box sat on a high shelf in the upper sitting room.
It was where Sophia had put it the week after the trial.
Margaret’s letters were still inside it.
Sophia had not, on any morning of the past several months, opened the box again.
She had registered, three months before, that she was not going to open it.
Margaret’s work had been done. The work had been read, and carried, and finished.
She had been intending, for some weeks, to ask Edmund whether he might wish to read the letters one day. She had not yet asked. There was time.
***
They had gone out to the folly together in October.
The four stones in the floor were brass-edged squares laid by a long-dead Cavendish ancestor, and the one Sophia had been remembering for fourteen months was the third from the door. Edmund had brought a small bar.
The stone had come up with less difficulty than either of them had expected. The hollow beneath it was perhaps eight inches deep. In it, Margaret had placed a small oiled-cloth packet.
The packet contained two things.
The first was a painted miniature of Robert, in his regimentals, perhaps three years before his death. Margaret had carried it in her writing case while she was alive.
Sophia had set it on the mantel of the upper sitting room, beside the large portrait of Margaret. Edmund had not commented on it. He had stood for a moment in front of the two of them together, and then he had turned away, and his hand, when it found Sophia’s, had been steady.
The second was a folded square of paper. For Edmund, it said, on the outside, in Margaret’s hand. Edmund had taken it into the study and closed the door.
He had been in the study for an hour. When he had come out, his eyes had been red, and he had laid the paper on the small table in the entrance hall and gone out for a walk in the garden, and Sophia had not, on his return, asked what was in it. Margaret had written it to him. It was his.
The paper sat in his desk, in the locked drawer where he had once kept the anonymous notes. He had told Sophia, in November, on the way back from a long walk, the single sentence Margaret had asked him to read aloud whenever he required it.
Be loved again, Edmund. Be loved again completely.
He had not, in the months since, required it.
***
Eleanor came down from London every month.
She came on the Friday of the first full week, in a hired carriage with a small valise and a packet of biscuits from the bakery near her own house, and she stayed through Monday morning. She brought gossip. She walked with Sophia in the gardens. She read to Henry.
She had taken, in the past four months, to giving Edmund detailed unsolicited reports on the conduct of three of his more difficult tenants in his absence, which Edmund had received with the courteous resignation of someone who had decided, at some point in the previous year, that Eleanor had earned the right.
***
Sophia had begun painting again.
She had not painted since she was nineteen. She had taken it up again perhaps four months after the move to Ashfield, with a small experimental sketchbook and a single brush, and the sketchbook had become a portfolio, and the portfolio had become, by the end of the spring, a clear small intention.
She had claimed the old conservatory at the west end of the house as her studio. The light in it was the late-afternoon light a painter required.
Her first finished work hung in Edmund’s study.
It was a portrait of him.
She had begun it in February and finished it in May.
She had not told him she was painting him.
He had registered, in March, that he was being studied across a great many breakfast tables and dinner tables in the considered attention she had been bringing to a private project, and he had not indicated that he had registered it.
He had continued to behave normally in his own house while being studied, and that small unwitting cooperation had given her a portrait she had been able to paint without any of the careful arrangements she had been afraid she would have to ask of him.
She had hung it in his study without comment on a Sunday morning when he had been out riding, and he had walked into the study in the afternoon to attend to the steward’s reports.
Sophia had been in her studio when she had heard him stop in the doorway of the study and stay there for four minutes without continuing into the room.
He had not, when he had emerged, said what he thought of it. He had not needed to. He had crossed the gardens to the conservatory, and he had stood in the doorway for seconds looking at her, and his expression matched the one on his face the night they caught Percival in the solicitor’s office.
The portrait remained in his study. He looked at it more often than he was prepared to admit.
***
Sophia lifted her tea.
It had gone cold. She set it down, crossed the room, and came to stand at Edmund’s elbow at the desk. He looked up. She put her hand on his shoulder. He covered her hand with his own.
“Sophia.”
“Yes.”
“You have been watching me work for the past quarter hour.”
“I have.”
“Was there a reason?”
“No.”
“Very well.”
He returned to the accounts. She kept her hand on his shoulder. After a moment he set down his pen, laid his cheek against the back of her hand at his shoulder, and they remained like that, in the steady warmth of an east-facing room in May, for as long as either of them required.
The morning post was still on the side table.
She had not yet read any of it.
There was no hurry.
THE END