Epilogue #2
Even Betsan, promoted now to a proper lady’s maid in full standing, had a new lightness to her step that Nell liked to think she’d had some small part in restoring.
After the fright of that terrible autumn, she had begun, in her spare hours, to ask Nell shy questions about the herbs on the high shelf, as though some small seed of curiosity about the trade had taken root in her too.
One particular evening, the last of her patients seen to and sent home, a young shepherd boy with a nasty gash along his shin that she’d cleaned and stitched with her usual care, sent off finally with a promise from his mother that he’d be kept off the hillside a full week, Nell was tidying her instruments back into their proper places.
Suddenly she felt, rather than heard, Adrian arrive in the doorway.
Something in the air of a room changed when he entered it, a settling, a warmth, though she could never properly explain the sensation to anyone who asked her to.
Her skin would grow warm, her cheeks would flush. She turned to look at him then.
He stood there in his shirtsleeves, having clearly come straight from the stables by the faint smell of horse still clinging to him.
His dark brown hair was windblown from some ride across the eastern fields, and his chestnut eyes were watching her with that same hot attention he always brought when he watched her work. He did not say much.
He never did, not really, not in words, though she had learned to read the whole of what he meant in the quiet way he simply stood there. So patient, present, and entirely unwilling to be anywhere else in the house just then. She adored the feeling.
“I do have some other news.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about Greaves.”
The air in the room suddenly felt cold, and her eyes locked on her husband. Her breath hitched in her throat. Even after so much time, the name haunted her when spoken aloud.
“I haven’t thought of that name in some time,” she said finally, drawing her shawl around her shoulders. “What of the horrid man?”
“While rotting in his cell awaiting his final sentence, he took his own life.”
“Oh goodness,” she said, making the sign of the cross. “I would not wish that on anyone…not even Greaves.”
“I know…but I thought you deserved to hear it from me. It seems he could not accept his fate, and ultimately took it into his own hands.”
“How did the boy’s leg fare?” he asked, after a moment.
“Well enough. Deep, but clean. He’ll have a fine scar to boast of to his friends, and precious little else to show for his trouble, so long as his mother minds what I told her.”
“You always know within the first glance whether a wound will trouble you or not. You are a marvel, my wife.”
“Mostly,” she said. “Some days I’m surprised. That’s the nature of the trade. You learn to expect the surprise, and to be glad of the days without one.”
He crossed the room in three long strides, closing the distance between them, and took her hand in his.
Her right hand, ink-stained faintly along the side where she’d been noting down the shepherd boy’s treatment in her ledger, the skin work roughened and calloused in all the old familiar places, the very hand he had once, in another life entirely, noticed with such careful, hidden curiosity was no proper lady’s hand at all.
He simply held it. No paltry words, no flowery declaration, only the warm, solid weight of his own hand wrapped around hers, his thumb moving once, gently, across her knuckles, tracing the small, faint scar along the side of her forefinger that she’d carried since a childhood accident with her father’s instruments, a mark he had asked about once, months ago, and remembered still, apparently, well enough to find it again without looking. She let him stroke her hand.
She stood there in the rays of sunlight of the evening. She had come to this house meaning only to disappear. Just long enough to buy her passage to Edinburgh and a new, anonymous life somewhere far from anyone who might recognize her.
She had meant to vanish so completely that not even she would be able to properly trace the woman she’d once been. Instead, somehow, through every lie unraveled and every hard truth finally spoken aloud, she had become, for the first time in her entire life, entirely and unmistakably herself.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a medical office fashioned in the village? Where you could more easily see your patients?”
“I can see them just fine here, and we need not wish for room. Truthfully…I like being so close to where you are.”
“I think that is a good enough reason. If you need any improvements to continue your work, anything…just say the word, and it will be yours. You are a marvel, and somehow my wife.”
“I want for nothing, in this room or elsewhere. You are a wonderful husband,” she said, her cheeks sore from smiling so often.
“Shall we retire for the evening?” Adrian asked. “You have been working so hard,” he said, stroking her hand with his thumb. “I think we should take some rest…together.”
“But what of dinner, of Cassandra and Tristan?”
“They will manage. We can have a tray brought up.”
“You spoil me,” she said, and he scooped her up into his arms. He held her tight and planted a kiss upon her head.
“If only you knew how much spoiling you pleased me.”
“I think I have some idea.”
“Let us be off then, Countess.”
THE END