Epilogue
One Year Later
“He is very small,” Sophy said, in the tone of a girl who had been promised a brother and presented with a creature not yet capable of conversation. “I thought he would be able to do more.”
“He will. He is only a fortnight old. You could do very little at a fortnight, and look at you now, terrorising ponies and keeping accounts.”
“I do not terrorise them.”
“Bishop may hold another opinion.”
“Bishop is very often unreasonable.”
Victoria shifted the sleeping weight in her arms so that Sophy might better inspect the small, faintly indignant face.
Frederick’s mouth moved in some private objection to the arrangement, but his eyes remained closed.
One tiny hand had escaped the blanket and rested against Victoria’s sleeve, the fingers curled as though he had already found something in the world worth keeping.
Sophy leaned nearer.
“He has very red cheeks.”
“He has had a demanding morning.”
“What did he do?”
“He ate, slept, objected to being dressed, and then slept again. It has exhausted him.”
Sophy considered this with the seriousness due to a difficult profession.
Victoria brushed one finger over the soft darkness upon the baby’s head.
Even now, a fortnight after his birth, there were moments when the fact of him startled her: this warm, breathing weight; this second child placed into her arms without threat, bargaining, or fear waiting beyond the door.
There had been no calculating voices in the passage, no question of who might claim him, no need to measure every expression before it was seen.
There had only been Elias beside her, pale with worry and wholly incapable of concealing it, and Sophy demanding repeated assurances from the landing that the baby had not forgotten she was waiting to meet him.
“This is Frederick,” Victoria said. “He is your brother, and one day he will require a great deal of instruction from you. Your father and I shall teach him the dull things. You may undertake the important ones.”
“What important ones?”
“How to tell when Bishop means to bite. Where Cook keeps the sugared almonds. Which stairs complain beneath your feet.”
“And that the blue parlour door sticks when it rains.”
“Certainly. His education would be dangerously incomplete without it.”
Sophy considered the list.
“I can teach him Ruth’s stories.”
“I cannot think of anyone better suited.”
“He must not change them.”
“No. He may listen first and offer opinions when he has acquired some.”
Sophy nodded, apparently satisfied that this placed the matter upon a proper footing.
Victoria kissed the baby’s dark head.
“You will also have to teach him that the world has not always been as gentle with everyone as it has been with him. He is beginning life very safe, and people who begin safely must sometimes be taught to notice those who did not.”
Sophy’s gaze remained upon her brother.
“Was I not safe when I was little?”
Victoria chose her answer with care. Sophy was old enough now to remember more than Victoria wished she had seen, but still young enough to believe that every sorrow must have belonged to someone’s failure to behave properly.
“You were always loved. But there were times when the grown people around you did not arrange matters as they ought. That was never yours to mend, and it is not yours to carry now.”
Sophy looked down at her brother.
“Will anyone take him away?”
“No.” Victoria kept her voice simple and certain. “No one will take either of you away.”
Frederick chose that moment to wake and protest his circumstances at considerable volume. His face reddened further; his escaped hand opened and shut in outrage.
“He cries a great deal,” Sophy observed. “Did I cry so much?”
“You did not, as it happens. You were a very quiet baby.”
“Because I was better?”
“No, darling. Babies are not good or bad according to how much noise they make.”
Victoria settled Frederick more securely against her and rose enough to sway him gently. His cries diminished for a moment, gathered strength again, and then broke into small, offended breaths against her shoulder.
“He cries because he knows someone will come when he does,” she said. “That is a fortunate thing for a baby to know.”
“I shall not miss the noise when he stops.”
“You may surprise yourself.”
“He is loud enough to be heard from the schoolroom.”
“That may be his present ambition.”
Sophy regarded her brother with the grave, proprietary attention she had once reserved for Ruth, who now sat retired and honoured upon a nursery shelf, her long service recognised.
“He may hold Ruth,” she pronounced at last. “When he is bigger. If he is careful.”
It was, from Sophy, very nearly a coronation.
Footsteps sounded in the passage, too quick at first and then deliberately moderated before they reached the nursery. Elias entered from the fields still wearing his riding coat, one glove thrust carelessly into the other, and stopped in the doorway.
The respectful pause was habit now rather than uncertainty, a remnant of the man who had once trained himself never to assume that any room containing Victoria and Sophy was his to enter.
He no longer waited to be invited, but some part of him still marked the threshold, as though gratitude required him to notice each time he crossed into the life that had become his.
A trace of wind remained about him, carrying the cold green scent of the fields into the warm nursery. His hair had been disordered beneath his hat, and there was a streak of mud near one boot which the nursery maid would certainly discover after he had gone.
“They told me downstairs that he had woken,” he said. “I came with very little dignity. I nearly brought the horse upstairs.”
“He has woken, been inspected by his sister, and found wanting in accomplishments,” Victoria said. “She has elected to give him time.”
“I am grateful for her leniency.”
Victoria held the baby towards him.
“Take your son, my lord. He has been asking for you in the only language he possesses, which is complaint.”
Elias removed his gloves entirely and set them upon the nearest table, though one fell immediately to the carpet. He did not notice. His attention had fixed upon Frederick with the same astonished concentration Victoria had seen every time the child was placed in his arms.
He received him slowly, as he received all precious things, and settled the small weight into the crook of his arm with the growing competence of a man who had spent a fortnight practising at impossible hours.
Frederick’s cries weakened into a series of uncertain sounds.
One hand emerged again and caught, without strength or intention, at the edge of Elias’s waistcoat.
Elias went very still.
Victoria had watched him hold Sophy’s hand through fevers, lift her from a fallen pony, submit to being instructed in the proper voices for Ruth’s stories, and stand beneath her nursery window in the rain because she had once asked whether he would come if she called.
Yet there remained something unguarded in the way he held his son, as though each small movement asked a question he had not expected to be permitted to answer.
Sophy came to stand beside him.
“He likes you.”
“He has very little judgement.”
Frederick opened his eyes briefly, stared without comprehension at the man above him, and closed them again.
Elias’s expression altered so slightly that anyone who did not know him might have missed it. Victoria did not. She had learnt the shape of every feeling he once believed he had hidden.
“Hello,” he said quietly. “I am your father. I have no notion how to do it, but I mean to learn where you can see me.”
Frederick, indifferent to the confession, closed one small fist around his father’s finger.
Elias looked down at the grip as though it were an answer to a question he had not known how to ask.
“He holds very tightly,” he said, not quite steadily.
“He has your way of it,” Victoria replied. “Once he has taken hold of something, he appears disinclined to surrender it.”
“I have some sympathy with the habit.”
His eyes lifted to hers over the child’s head.
“So do I,” Victoria said.
Pruett came up with the afternoon’s clean linen and stopped in the doorway.
For a moment, she merely watched the Earl holding his son. Her expression was that of a woman measuring the distance between this room and all the rooms through which she had followed Victoria before it.
“He has your chin, my lady,” she said at last, “and something of his lordship about the eyes.”
She came nearer to look at Frederick properly, with the quiet familiarity long service had earned her.
“I remember Miss Sophy at this age,” she continued. “You scarcely let her out of your arms, though there was never much peace in the house for either of you. I am glad this little one has come to you in happier circumstances.”
“So am I,” Victoria said.
Pruett looked from the sleeping child to Elias and back again.
“It is a different nursery,” she said simply.
“Yes,” Victoria replied. “It is.”
Elias smiled without looking up from Frederick.
“Lady Maribel has written. Nathaniel and Miss Ellery appear to be very happy, though my aunt reports that they are making unnecessarily heavy work of it.”
“She will take credit for the marriage.”
“She has taken credit for the marriage, the weather, and most of the bridegroom.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She also asks to be informed when Frederick is old enough to be introduced to suitable infants.”
Victoria laughed.
“She will have his future arranged before he can walk.”
“Undoubtedly. We shall disregard the greater part of it and permit her to enjoy herself.”
Pruett began setting the clean linen into the press.
“It is no bad thing,” Elias said, looking down at his son, “to be born among people who concern themselves with one’s happiness.”
“No,” Victoria said. “It is not.”
Frederick shifted in his arms and made a small sound of complaint. Elias adjusted him with the growing competence of a man who had spent a fortnight learning at inconvenient hours.
Victoria watched him.
“You have become very accomplished.”
“I have learnt that he dislikes cold sheets, delayed meals, and any arrangement in which he is not the principal concern.”
“He has made excellent progress in understanding the world.”
“I fear the world has encouraged him.”
Sophy came nearer to inspect the adjustment.
“His head goes there, Papa,” she informed Elias. “You had it too low.”
“Then I am fortunate to have a more experienced person supervising me.”
Sophy accepted the compliment with suitable gravity. Elias adjusted Frederick accordingly, and the child quieted almost at once.
“There,” Sophy said. “I told you.”
“So you did.”
Victoria looked at the three of them in the warm nursery: Sophy standing close enough to oversee her brother, Elias seated comfortably with the baby in his arms, Pruett putting away the linen as though such happiness had always belonged to the ordinary work of the house.
Once, Elias had paused at every threshold and waited to be invited into the life before him.
Now Sophy corrected his hold, Frederick slept against his chest, and no one in the room thought to question that his place was in the middle of it.
That night, after Frederick had been fed and the house had settled into darkness, Victoria found Elias already asleep, worn through by new fatherhood.
She paused in the doorway.
The key lay untouched in the little dish beside the glass. Once, she had measured every night by whether she turned it. Later, she had left the door open deliberately and taken quiet pride in the choice.
At some unmarked point, she had ceased to think of it at all.
That was the finest work safety did, she understood. In time, it ceased to feel like a thing one must guard and became simply the shape of one’s life.
She left the key where it lay.
Then she crossed the room, slipped beneath the covers beside her husband, and slept.
The End