Epilogue #2
“I failed you.” Langham’s chin trembled.
“Both of you. I arranged your lives without asking what you wanted because I was too afraid to hear the answer. I managed your marriages the way I managed my accounts, and I treated your happiness as a line item that could be deferred.” He looked at Mary.
“You told me, in that parlor, that I only ever cared about my reputation. You were right. And I am sorry.”
Mary looked at Charlotte. Charlotte looked at Mary. The same glance they had exchanged a thousand times growing up, the silent language of sisters who had survived a household together and knew each other’s thoughts before they formed.
“We accept your apology,” Mary said. “But we expect you to keep your word.”
“Letters,” Charlotte added. “Every week. Both directions. And visits. Twice a year, at least. Tommy deserves to know his grandfather.”
“Twice a year.” Langham pressed his lips to Tommy’s forehead. “I will be here so often they will give me my own customs stamp.”
Tommy grabbed a fistful of his grandfather’s hair and pulled. Langham yelped. Charlotte and Mary dissolved into laughter, and the sound of it, two sisters laughing at their father while their children and husbands and friends filled a French garden behind them, was the sound of a family.
A family that had come apart and chosen, piece by piece, to come back together.
“He will not remember this.”
Mary stood beside the carriage that would take Charlotte, William, and Tommy back to their apartment in Paris.
The garden was quieting, the guests departing, the lanterns now lit and swaying in the warm evening breeze.
Charlotte held Tommy against her shoulder, and the baby slept, his fist curled against his mother’s collar.
“He will not remember it,” Charlotte said. “But we will. And we will tell him. Every year. How his aunt held him first, and loved him first, and taught his mother how to change a cloth and warm a bottle and tuck a blanket to the waist and not an inch higher.”
Mary’s eyes burned. She reached out and touched Tommy’s cheek, soft and warm in the lantern light. His lips moved in his sleep.
“You call him the dock worker,” Charlotte said. “I have been calling him that, too. Mrs. Bridwell will be pleased.”
Mary laughed, and the laugh caught on a sob, and Charlotte pulled her into a one-armed embrace, Tommy pressed between them, and Mary held her sister and her nephew and breathed them in.
“Visit in the spring,” Charlotte whispered. “Promise me.”
“I promise. I already promised. I will keep promising until you believe me.”
“I believe you.” Charlotte pulled back and wiped Mary’s cheek with her thumb. “Take care of your husband. He needs managing.”
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
William shook Evander’s hand. The grip was firm, and William held it a moment longer than formality required. “Your Grace. I will never be able to—”
“You can. By taking care of them.” Evander glanced at Tommy. “Write to us. Send us drawings when he is old enough to hold a pencil. And do not let him eat the pencil.”
William laughed. Charlotte climbed into the carriage. William followed. Tommy slept on, oblivious to the goodbyes happening around him.
Mary stood beside Evander and watched the carriage pull away down the lane, the lantern swinging at the back, growing smaller and dimmer until it turned at the road and disappeared into the French evening.
Evander’s arm came around her shoulders. Mary leaned into him and pressed her face against his coat and let the tears fall, because they were not tears of grief. They were the tears of a woman letting go of something precious and trusting that it would be safe.
“He will be happy,” Evander said against her hair.
“I know.”
“And we will see him in the spring.”
“I know that, too.” Mary wiped her eyes and looked up at him. “Take me home. Wherever home is tonight.”
Evander smiled. The real smile, the one she had first seen in the nursery the night of the fox story. “About that.”
“You planned this.”
Mary stood in the entrance hall of a chateau that Evander had, apparently, rented for the occasion.
The foyer was marble. The staircase curved.
The chandelier held more candles than the Atherton ballroom, and through the open doors, she could see a garden with a fountain and, beyond it, the rolling hills of the French countryside lit silver by the moon.
“I planned several things.” Evander set his coat on the stand and loosened his cravat. “This is the first.”
“The first?”
“We are going on a honeymoon, Mary. The one we should have had two months ago. I have made the arrangements.” He pulled a folded itinerary from his coat pocket and held it up.
“Paris for a week. Then south to Lyon. Then the coast. Italy, if you wish. Florence, perhaps, to see where Richard and Lucrezia will settle. Or Rome. Or both. We have time. I have cleared my calendar, and Godfrey is managing the estate, and Mrs. Cahill has instructions to write if the house catches fire and not before.”
Mary took the itinerary from his hand and opened it.
Dates, cities, hotels. Pages of them, written in Evander’s precise hand, organized with the same meticulous attention he gave to estate ledgers and Bow Street reports.
Except these columns contained restaurant recommendations and cathedral visiting hours, and a note beside Florence that read Mary will want the galleries. Book the entire afternoon.
She pressed the itinerary against her chest and looked at him, and the expression on her face made Evander’s composure crack in the way she loved best. Not into coldness. Into warmth.
“When did you do this?” she asked.
“Over the past month. In the evenings, while you were with Tommy.” He paused. “I wanted to give you something, Mary. Not a gown or a title or a household. Something that was just for us. Something that had nothing to do with scandal or duty or the circumstances that brought us together.”
“A honeymoon across Europe.”
“A beginning.” He crossed the foyer and took her hands. “The marriage started wrong. I know that. I made it wrong, with my distance and my fear and every wall I put between us. But the walls are down now, and I want to start again. Properly. With you.”
Mary rose on her toes and kissed him. The itinerary crumpled between their chests, and Evander’s arms encircled her, and the marble foyer of a French chateau held them in the candlelight, and the fountain murmured in the garden, and the moon lit the hills, and everything that had been broken was, at last, mended.
“Take me upstairs,” she whispered against his mouth.
He did.
The bedroom was large and moonlit, the windows open to the warm night air.
They undressed each other slowly, no urgency this time, only the steady, luxurious attention of two people who had learned each other’s bodies and wanted to learn them again.
Evander’s hands traced the curve of Mary’s waist, and Mary’s fingers mapped the scars on his chest, and they fell into the wide French bed together.
Evander lowered himself over her, his weight braced on his forearms, and the moonlight painted silver lines across his shoulders.
Mary traced them with her fingertips, following the light down his chest, across the scar beneath his collarbone, to the place where his heart beat hard and fast against her palm.
“No rush,” he murmured against her throat. “We have all night.”
“We have all summer.”
His laugh vibrated against her skin, low and warm, and his mouth followed the curve of her neck to the hollow of her shoulder, and Mary’s eyes drifted closed.
His hands moved over her with a patience that made her arch toward him, seeking more, and he gave it, slowly, thoroughly, as though learning her for the first time despite knowing her by heart.
She whispered his name. He answered with his mouth against her collarbone, pressing a kiss into the hollow there before moving lower. His lips grazed the curve of her shoulder, then the sensitive skin along the inside of her arm, and Mary shivered beneath him.