Epilogue #2
“—the aspect, and Clara will want to be consulted on the wallpaper, obviously, because she will have opinions, she has opinions about everything, including the governance of—”
He crossed the distance between them in two steps and took her face in his hands and she stopped talking because his hands were not steady, and they were almost never unsteady anymore, and the fact of their unsteadiness reached her somewhere below every word she had been preparing and dissolved the prepared words entirely.
He looked at her. His eyes were very bright.
“Spring,” he said.
“Spring.”
He pressed his forehead to hers. The same gesture as the foot of a staircase in Hertfordshire, in a house that was beautiful and wrong, and it carried now everything it had carried then and considerably more besides — the months of mornings, the pianoforte finally played properly, the walks in the garden where Clara named things and the evenings where London came through the windows and neither of them needed to say what they were thinking because the thinking was the same.
Behind them, Clara’s voice rose in authoritative declaration: “The Earl of Carrots — I mean the Duke — shall also oversee the management of all biscuits not otherwise assigned.”
Neither of them moved.
“She is going to be extraordinary,” Rosamund said, very quietly, against his forehead.
“She already is.”
“About the baby.”
“Yes.”
“She is going to be completely insufferable about the baby.”
His chest moved against her with the sound she had first heard in a study full of string, low and private and carrying the warmth of a man who had spent years without anyone to laugh with and had subsequently discovered that laughter was something he intended to keep in considerable supply.
“The baby,” he said, “will be very fortunate.”
“The baby will have a seven-year-old tyrant for a sister who will have opinions about its name and its sleeping arrangements and the colour of its nursery walls.”
“The baby will also have a father who is entirely unequal to refusing either of them anything whatsoever.”
She pulled back to look at him. He was still not composed.
The unsteadiness was still in his hands and the brightness was still in his eyes and the severity she had spent a year learning to see through was entirely absent, replaced by the open, unhidden fact of a man who had arrived, at last, at the life he had stopped believing was available to him.
“I know,” she said. “I have never found that a difficulty.”
He kissed her. Not urgently, not with the hunger that had characterised the earlier months when restraint had been a habit not yet broken of — but with the settled warmth of a man who had learnt that he was permitted to do this and had made his peace with the permanence of the permission.
She held his lapels and let him, and somewhere below the warmth was the thing she had arrived at over months of mornings and an afternoon on a bench in Hyde Park and a night on a staircase in Hertfordshire — the knowledge, finally trusted, that this was not something held tightly against loss. This was simply what was.
“Your Grace,” Clara’s voice arrived from behind them. “You are in the doorway again.”
Tristan lifted his head. He did not step back from Rosamund.
He turned his head to look at his ward, who was standing in the centre of the nursery with Bess under one arm and the new Duke of Carrots under the other, regarding them with the expression of a person who had witnessed this sort of thing before and had opinions about it.
“I am in the doorway,” he confirmed.
“It is not efficient,” Clara said. “You are blocking the light.”
“I apologise.”
“You do not look sorry.”
“I am privately sorry.”
Clara examined him. Then she examined Rosamund. Then she looked between them.
“Is there news?” she asked.
Rosamund felt Tristan’s hand find hers. She laced her fingers through his — not tightly, not with the desperate grip of a woman holding on against loss, but with the simple, deliberate pressure of one person choosing another’s hand.
The way she had reached for him on a staircase. The way she intended to keep reaching.
“There is news,” she said.
Clara was silent for a moment. Then she looked at the velvet rabbit in her arms, and at Bess, and at the rocking horse in the corner, and at the room she had claimed and named and made entirely and thoroughly hers over the course of a year in a house that had not known, until she arrived, how much it needed her.
“The baby,” she said, with the authority of a woman who had already made her decision and saw no need to wait for anyone else to arrive at it, “will need a proper name. I shall compile a list.”
Rosamund pressed her face against Tristan’s shoulder. He held her hand and looked at Clara with the expression he always wore when she managed, without any apparent effort, to say the truest thing in the room.
“Of course,” he said.
“There will be requirements,” Clara said.
“Naturally.”
“I shall begin immediately.” She tucked Bess under her arm more firmly, the posture of a person commencing important work. “Adrian will need to be consulted. He is the godfather.”
“He appointed himself,” Rosamund said.
“He is very thorough about it,” Clara said, with great fairness. “He attends all the nursery ceremonies. That is more than most godfathers can claim.”
She turned back to the velvet rabbit, apparently satisfied that the matter had been properly addressed and that the business of the afternoon could resume.
Behind her, the rocking horse stood in its corner, patient and brown, and the paper crown had migrated from Adrian’s head to the mantel where it had always lived — slightly crushed, faded at the edges, the flowers barely recognisable, sitting in the same place it had sat for a year because neither of them had ever found sufficient reason to move it.
Rosamund looked at it. Then at the connecting door, ajar as it had always been.
Then at the man beside her, who was looking at the same things she was looking at with the same expression she suspected was on her own face.
Utter contentment. She thought of the curtain with the hole in it.
The tin of copper coins on the shelf. The mending in her lap and the crack in the ceiling and the morning she had sat in the parlour of a crumbling townhouse and understood, with a clarity that felt like falling, that love alone was not enough.
She was not falling now.
She was standing in the doorway of a nursery in a house that had once been built on a fortune she despised, in a life she had not chosen, holding the hand of a man she had married in fury and grief and the last available necessity — and none of those things were untrue, and all of them were also, now, beside the point.
The point was this. The nursery with its two occupants and its velvet rabbit and its brown rocking horse named Thunderclap.
The hand in hers, warm and steady and no longer pretending to be otherwise.
The connecting door that had been unlocked since the morning she arrived and had never once been closed.
The spring waiting at the end of the year, bringing with it something that would require a room with a good aspect and a wallpaper subject to Clara’s approval.
The point was that Rosamund Everleigh, who had learnt to survive through the careful management of what she allowed herself to need, had stopped managing.
And the world had not ended.
It had, against every available probability, simply become home.
The End?