Epilogue
What Takes in New Ground
Henry
“You are murdering the comfrey,” Violet said.
Henry sat back on his heels and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. The June sun was on the garden and on his neck and on the earth between his knees. The feel of earth between his fingers was warm and still surprised him.
“I am dividing the comfrey,” he said.
“You have been dividing it for the past half an hour. At what point does division become carnage?”
“When I say so.”
“Even the chamomile is attempting escape.”
“Perhaps because—”
Bessie appeared from the corner with two glasses of lemonade and a look of mild alarm at the state of his trousers. Henry helped his wife to her feet and led her to the iron table in the sun.
He brushed the dirt from his hands and sat across from her. The lemonade was sharp and cold.
“If anyone could see you now,” Violet said, surveying the mud on his shirt and the soil beneath his fingernails, “they would put you in an asylum.”
“I would consider that a holiday.”
“You may withdraw from the task if you wish.”
“And let my wife toil alone?” He shook his head. “I should rather you delegate the whole enterprise to servants and enjoy this glass of lemonade in a civilised manner in our drawing room.”
“No,” she said with finality.
Her hand reached across the table for his. He looked at their fingers, hers brown with soil, his no better, laced together over the iron. A year ago, he would not have believed he could be content with dirt under his nails. A year ago, he had not believed he could be content at all.
“You will thank me when you need to chase the babe through the dirt,” she said. “It will not be as foreign to you, thanks to me.”
Henry set down his glass. The word sat between them.
“Was that a hypothetical?” he said. “Do I dare hope?”
She was smiling. The wide, unguarded kind she had given him only a handful of times, each one worth more than anything in the house. “Dr Bainbridge confirmed this morning.”
He did not remember standing. The chair went over behind him, and the lemonade went with it, and the next thing he knew he had his wife in his arms and was turning her in the afternoon light.
Her laughter was in his ear and against his throat.
He set her down and took her face in both hands and kissed her forehead, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth.
He held her against him until his breathing steadied, and even then, he did not let go.
“I love you,” he said.
She wiped his face with her thumb. “I love you too. I had no idea it was possible to be this happy.”
“Is smearing dirt over my face some sort of ritual at Thornwick?”
She laughed again. He kissed her once more and released her, and they went back to the garden because she would not be kept from it.
He wrote to Edmund that evening. He wrote it himself, in his own hand, with the door open so that he could hear Violet moving about the corridor.
Edmund,
You will wish to know. Your cousin expects a child in the new year. Violet is well. I am, for the first time in a considerable while, something that might pass for happy if you can believe it.
Bring the boy at Michaelmas. I should like to meet my nephew.
H.
He looked at the word nephew for some time.
It was not, strictly, accurate. The boy was his cousin’s natural son.
But Henry had paid for the child’s keeping for a decade under a dead man’s name, and the least he could do now was give the living one a place in the family he was trying, at last, to build.
He sealed the letter and set it on the salver for the morning post.
The reply came inside the week. Edmund’s hand was rounder than his own, the letters generous and slightly unsteady, and the paper smelled faintly of hay and horse, which told Henry about his cousin’s new life.
Henry,
I am glad. I am so glad I could weep, and I have, and the boy looked at me as though I had gone soft in the head. He is not wrong. Young Edmund does not like porridge, he does not like being told what to do, and he does not like strangers, which I gather he has inherited from you.
We will come at Michaelmas. He is afraid of horses, which presents difficulties on a farm, but we are working on it.
Your cousin, Edmund
P.S. Thank Kit Harris on my behalf for not breaking my jaw.
Henry read the letter twice and put it in the drawer beside the stick of sealing wax.
He sat for a while, watching Violet in the garden with her sisters around her, all of them bent over the vegetable beds.
His own child would grow up among them. The boy or girl, he had not yet permitted himself to imagine either, would not know what it was to be alone in a house.
He had not known either, since the morning Violet refused to succumb to the Alliance’s pressure.
He got to his feet and went out to join them.
The Hampstead Botanical Circle convened at Iredell House on a Thursday in July, which Mrs Bickle declared the greatest triumph of her natural life, surpassing even the time she had correctly identified a New Zealand fern at the Horticultural Society and silenced a botanist from Cambridge.
They arrived in the ducal carriage, all five of them, because Violet had insisted and because Mrs Bickle’s bonnet alone required the legroom.
Mrs Acklam brought a jar of salve for Henry’s hands, which she said would take the roughness out of his palms if he was going to continue gardening like a common labourer.
Mrs Colston brought a cutting of white deadnettle from the hospital garden, wrapped in damp muslin.
Mrs Finney brought gossip. Mrs Brindle brought nothing and said nothing, which Henry was familiar with.
He received them in the garden because Violet had told him to and because he had learned that his wife’s instructions generally led to outcomes he could not have arrived at on his own. He thanked whatever fortune had compelled Violet to demand his name.
Mrs Bickle took his hand in both of hers and pumped it. “Your Grace. You are looking very well indeed for a man who was nearly murdered.”
“Thank you, Mrs Bickle.”
“Not as green as last time, is he?” She turned to the others. “The last time I saw him he was the colour of old lettuce. Now look at him. There is colour.”
He let them pass and stood in the garden while the voices moved through the kitchen passages and down. Mrs Bickle’s commentary carried through stone. He heard Violet’s laugh and was overwhelmed with gratitude.
Later, following the Circle’s heartfelt goodbyes and many hugs, they embarked the Iredell carriage. Henry hugged his wife’s shoulder and watched it move off out of the gate. They waved until the trees took them and the sound faded.
He turned her gently and drew her against him. She pressed her face into his chest and stayed there while the sun went down gold over the rooftops and the garden quieted around them.
You finished it!