Epilogue
ONE MONTH LATER
“She is going to cry before the vows.” Isabella leaned toward Mary in the second pew, her whisper carrying the conspiratorial warmth of a woman who had crossed the English Channel specifically to witness this moment. “Look at her. She is already blinking.”
Mary looked. Charlotte stood at the altar of a small stone church outside Paris, sunlight pouring through the arched windows and falling across her cream silk gown in ribbons of gold.
William stood beside her, his hand gripping hers, his face flushed with the combination of terror and joy that belonged exclusively to grooms who had written four drafts of their vows and still feared they would forget every word.
Charlotte was blinking.
“She will hold,” Mary said. “Charlotte never cries in public.”
“She cried at Lady Huffington’s musicale during her first season. You told me she wept through the entire second aria. You told me.”
“That was London. This is France. The rules are different.”
Isabella squeezed Mary’s hand. Beside her, Isabella’s parents sat with their hands folded and their best traveling clothes pressed, and Isabella’s younger brother had already fallen asleep against his mother’s shoulder.
The church was small and ancient, with rough stone walls and wooden pews polished by centuries of worship.
Wildflowers filled the window ledges. The scent of lavender drifted from the fields beyond the door, and the late September light turned the whole interior to amber.
Charlotte had chosen this church because it was a ten-minute walk from the apartment she and William had taken near the Sorbonne, and because it had no connection to England or scandal or the life they were leaving behind.
In the front pew, Lord Langham sat with his hat on his knee and his chin trembling. Beside him, Quentin slouched with the easy posture of a man who attended weddings the way other men attended horse races for the entertainment and the refreshments. He caught Mary’s eye and winked.
Across the aisle, Richard sat beside Lucrezia.
His hand rested on her knee, and she leaned into his shoulder, and the ease between them was visible even from three pews away.
Lucrezia wore a deep burgundy gown that made her dark hair gleam, and she watched the ceremony with the focused attention of a woman already imagining her own.
Evander sat beside Mary. His arm rested along the pew behind her shoulders, not quite touching, a proximity that would have been invisible to anyone watching but that Mary felt in every nerve.
He had been like this since the morning they woke in the same bed for the first time.
Close. Present. A man learning, day by day, how to occupy the space beside someone without retreating from it.
The rector spoke. William recited his vows.
He forgot two lines, and Charlotte mouthed them to him, and the small congregation laughed, and William grinned and started again, and the love in his voice when he said I will carried through the stone church and out through the open door and across the lavender fields.
Charlotte spoke her vows without blinking once. Her voice was steady and clear, and she held William’s hands and looked at him as though the entire world had narrowed to his face.
Isabella leaned toward Mary and whispered, “I was wrong. She is not going to cry.”
Mary wiped her own eyes with the back of her glove. “Someone has to.”
The rector pronounced them married. William kissed Charlotte, gentle and thorough, and Tommy, who had been sleeping in a basket beside the altar, chose this moment to announce his opinion with a wail that echoed off the stone walls.
The congregation laughed. Charlotte scooped him up and held him between them, and William kissed the top of Tommy’s head, and the three of them stood at the altar in the French sunlight, a family at last.
Evander’s hand found Mary’s in her lap. His fingers laced through hers and held.
“To the bride and groom. And to France, which has the good sense to welcome them.”
Quentin raised his glass. The long table beneath the chestnut trees erupted in cheers, and Charlotte buried her face in William’s shoulder, laughing, and William lifted his glass with the stunned gratitude of a man who still could not believe his fortune.
The celebration filled the garden of a stone farmhouse Evander had rented for the occasion.
Tables draped in white linen stretched beneath the trees, laden with bread and cheese and summer fruit and bottles of wine that the local vintner had delivered at dawn.
Paper lanterns hung from the branches, unlit for now but ready for the evening, and the air smelled of cut grass and warm stone and the jasmine that grew along the garden wall.
Mary sat beside Evander at the head of the table and watched the people she loved spread across the garden.
Isabella and Charlotte sat with their heads together at the far end, catching up on a month of separation with the speed and volume of two women who had a great deal to say.
Quentin had charmed Isabella’s mother into a conversation about Italian opera, and Isabella’s father had found common ground with William over the merits of French bread versus English.
Richard rose from his seat and crossed to Evander. He carried two glasses of wine and offered one.
“Lucrezia and I have news.” Richard kept his voice low, but his face gave everything away. The brightness in his eyes. The barely contained joy. “She said yes.”
Evander took the glass. “When?”
“Last week. I asked her in the garden of the pensione in Florence, and she told me my Italian was terrible and my proposal was worse, and then she kissed me and said yes.” Richard grinned. “We plan to marry this fall. In Lucrezia’s family’s church. You and Mary will come?”
“We will come.” Evander lifted his glass. “Congratulations, Richard.”
“Thank you. For everything.” Richard’s voice roughened. “For finding me. For believing me. For giving me the chance to build something instead of hiding from what I had broken.”
Evander gripped his brother’s shoulder. The gesture was brief and firm and said more than the conversation that surrounded it.
Quentin appeared at Richard’s side. “Italy. How romantic. Will there be a vineyard? I insist on a vineyard. I refuse to attend a wedding without one.”
“There will be a vineyard,” Richard said.
“And a soprano? Lucrezia must sing at her own wedding. It would be criminal otherwise.”
“She has already chosen the aria.”
“Excellent. I will clear my calendar. My very busy, very important calendar.” Quentin drained his glass. “Blackholm, your family is becoming exhaustingly well-traveled. At this rate, I shall need a Continental wardrobe.”
“You already have one,” Evander said.
“I have three. But they require updating.”
Mary laughed. Quentin bowed to her with a theatrical flourish and wandered back toward the wine table, and Richard followed, and the garden hummed with conversation and laughter and the particular, irreplaceable warmth of people gathered to celebrate something good.
Isabella dropped into the chair beside Mary, flushed from the sun and two glasses of wine. “How does it feel? Watching your sister marry the man she loves in a French garden?”
“It feels like the end of a very long story.”
“And the beginning of a new one.” Isabella glanced at Evander, who was speaking with William at the far end of the table. “You look different, Mary. Both of you. Lighter.”
“We are lighter.”
“The ton has been remarkably dull without you. Lady Thornton has taken to spreading rumors about Lady Abernathy’s pug again, for lack of better material.” Isabella sipped her wine. “And the story about Tommy?”
“Holding.” Mary kept her voice low. “Evander put it about that the child was a distant nephew, entrusted to our care temporarily until a relation in the country could take guardianship. There has been whispering. There is always whispering. But no one has discovered the truth, and Evander has made it quite clear that speculation will not be tolerated.”
“Dire consequences?”
“Very dire. He is talented at dire.”
Isabella smiled. “I am happy for you, Mary. Genuinely. After everything. You deserve this.”
Mary squeezed her friend’s hand, and Isabella squeezed back, and the afternoon stretched golden around them.
“Papa, careful with his head.”
Lord Langham held Tommy at arm’s length, his face caught between tenderness and terror.
His grip was too wide, his elbows too stiff, and his expression suggested he was trying to remember a skill he had last practiced two decades ago and had not been very good at then.
Tommy stared at his grandfather with suspicious interest.
“He is heavier than I expected,” Langham said.
“He is nearly four months old. They grow.” Charlotte adjusted her father’s arm, guiding the elbow up. “Tuck him into the crook. Yes. Like that.”
Langham settled Tommy against his chest. The baby’s fist found Langham’s cravat and gripped it with the iron determination Mary had come to think of as his signature. Langham looked down at his grandson, and his face changed.
The anxiety fell away. The bluster, the reputation-management, the fretful calculation that had defined every interaction Mary had witnessed between her father and the world outside his study.
All of it dissolved, and what remained was a man holding a child and understanding, perhaps for the first time, what all the managing had been for.
“I owe you both an apology,” Langham said.
His voice was quiet, pitched for his daughters and no one else.
Charlotte stood on one side, Mary on the other, and the garden buzzed with conversation behind them.
“Not the one I gave in the parlor. That was panic, not remorse. This one I have been rehearsing for a month, and I will not get it right, but I want you to hear it.”
“We are listening, Papa,” Charlotte said.