Epilogue
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
“Lord in Heaven, be merciful to her. Be merciful. Lord, I have not asked You for one thing in twenty years and I am asking now—”
It was Octavia praying.
Betsy sat on the settle with Arabella clamped hard against her side. The child had not said a word in twenty minutes, which frightened Valentine more than the praying did.
Mrs. Fletcher paced the other way with her keys gripped in her fist so that they should not chime.
And Levi Fernside sat on the top step with his head in both hands, and had sat there since noon, and had not once tried to speak to anybody.
Inside the room, Diana cried out.
Valentine’s whole body went with it. His hands closed, and he made them open again.
I did this to you.
That was the other thing that had been going round, and it was the worse of the two.
He had said, in a firelit bedchamber, that they need not have a child at all.
Then he had failed to be careful, twice, three times, more, because she had come to him and he had wanted her.
He had not been able to make himself be careful.
If this takes you from me I shall not survive it.
“Push. Push, Your Grace, that’s it — that’s beautiful—”
Another cry came, torn and exhausted.
“Wait.” The midwife’s voice changed pitch entirely. “Wait — hold hard now, Your Grace, don’t you push—”
The whole landing stopped.
“—there’s another. God love us all. There’s two.”
Valentine heard it and did not understand it.
“Twins?” said Octavia.
And then, from behind that door, thin and outraged and unmistakable: a baby crying.
Arabella came off the settee like a shot.
A moment later a second cry, higher and angrier than the first. Then both of them going at once, and the sound of women laughing in the room beyond.
Valentine found that he had put one hand against the wall.
The door opened.
The midwife came out with her sleeves shoved up past the elbow and her whole face shining. She looked straight at him.
“Two healthy boys, Your Grace. Both of them roaring fit to bring the roof down.” She wiped her hands on her apron.
“And the Duchess is well. She is tired, and she is well. She asked after you before either of them was so much as wiped. You may come in when we have got her decent, and that will be five minutes and not one moment before. My congratulations, sir.”
Valentine did not say anything.
He was aware, distantly, that this was probably the moment at which a man ought to say something.
Behind him Betsy burst into tears and started cheering at the same instant, which produced a remarkable noise. Levi Fernside came up off the step and crossed the passage and scooped Arabella off the floor.
“You are an aunt,” he said, into the child’s hair. “Do you hear me? You are an aunt, and I am a grandfather, and I am one-and-fifty years of age—”
Arabella was shrieking. “There are two—”
Octavia put both hands over her face and laughed until she had to sit down.
“Well.” Mrs. Fletcher dragged her wrist across her eyes and recovered herself entirely in the space of a breath.
“Then we shall have a celebration, and we shall have it directly. Betsy — come. There is the good ham, and there is the cake I made a-purpose on Tuesday, and there are four dozen of the old Duke’s claret sitting in that cellar which have been waiting sixty years for an occasion.
If this is not the occasion then I should very much like to know what is. Come along.”
They went down in a body, all of them talking at once.
Valentine stood alone in the empty passage with his hand still against the wall.
He discovered that his eyes were streaming and that he had no notion how long that had been going on, and he took out his handkerchief and dealt with it, because he was not going into that room in such a state.
Diana was propped against a bank of pillows with her hair braided back off her damp forehead. Her hands lay empty and open on the coverlet. Drawn up close beside the bed, near enough for her to reach, stood a wooden cot with two very small bundles in it.
“My love,” he called.
She turned her head and smiled at him.
“Come and see.” She was laughing and crying at once. “Valentine, come and look at them. That one has your chin. I am perfectly certain of it and you shall not talk me out of it. And that one has been furious since the moment he arrived and has forgiven nobody yet.”
He took her face in both his hands and kissed her.
When he drew back she put her thumb against his cheek and held it up.
“Your Grace.” Her voice went soft. “I am perfectly well. Truly I am. It was quick at the last, they came easily, both of them, and every single thing the surgeon told us would happen, happened exactly as he said it would.” She smiled.
“I must write and thank your friend. Those herbs of his have been worth their weight in gold, and I intend to tell him so.”
He kissed her again, because he could not answer.
“Diana.” It took him two attempts. “I am never putting you through that again. Not once. These two are enough. They are two more than we ever agreed upon, and I am done.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“You never left me,” she said. “Not for one moment. Not in eight months. You were in this room the whole of today with your hand in mine until they put you out of it.”
Her eyes filled. “Thank you.”
He bent and put his mouth to her forehead and stayed there.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you.” His voice had stopped working properly and he let it. “More than I have any language for.”
And then, finally, he looked into the cot.
Two red, furious, crumpled faces in a great deal of white linen. One asleep, the other awake.
He put out one finger, carefully, and touched the nearer one’s hand, and five impossible fingers closed round his own.
Valentine did not move for some time.
“Thank you, Diana,” he said.
“I should be thanking you.”
“You should not.”
“We shall argue about it later.” Then, with a note of dawning alarm: “Valentine. What are we to name them? I have not the first idea. I have had nine months and I have thought of nothing whatsoever.”
“Nor have I.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not one name. I have thought of a great many things these nine months and never once of that.” He tipped his head toward the door. “But we have an extremely enthusiastic army downstairs, and I dare say they have thought of nothing else since March.”
Diana burst out laughing.
“Then let us have them up,” she said.
“In a moment.” He toed off his boots and got up onto the bed beside her and drew her in against his chest. Beside them in the cot, one of his sons made an indignant noise and subsided. “Let us stay like this a little longer. Just us four. They will keep.”
She looked up at him.
Then she settled back against him with the cot within arm’s reach, and shut her eyes.
The End?