Epilogue
Oliver chose Ashford Hall.
They travelled down to Hampshire at the end of June, the Fairchilds in one carriage, Oliver ahead in his. Mrs. Henning had aired the rooms and filled the vases and stood at the front door, waiting as though she had personally prayed for this moment.
Charles Fairchild stepped down from his carriage and studied the facade. His gaze moved along the roofline, down the ivy-covered east wing, across the stable block visible beyond the lime avenue.
“Your south gable needs attention,” he said, eyeing Oliver pensively.
Oliver nodded. “It does.”
“Lead flashing. You can see where the mortar has failed from here.”
“The surveyor identified it last autumn. I have been meaning to address it.”
“You should address it before winter. Once the damp gets beneath the lead, you will be replacing stonework as well as flashing, and stonework on a house this age costs more than most people’s annual income.
” Fairchild turned to Oliver. “I could look at the surveyor’s report, if you like. I… used to understand these things.”
“I should welcome that very much, sir.”
Elizabeth touched her husband’s arm. He covered her hand with his, briefly, and the two of them followed Mrs. Henning inside. Oliver watched them go. The older man’s shoulders were straighter than they had been a month ago. Not restored, not entirely, but adjusting.
The proposal was meant for Monday evening. But Sebastian arrived unannounced on Monday afternoon, dusty from the road, demanding supper and an audience for a story about a horse he had nearly purchased in Newbury.
“A grey mare,” Sebastian said over dinner, gesturing with his fork. “Sixteen hands. Magnificent temperament. The asking price was outrageous, naturally, but I was prepared to be outrageous.”
“What stopped you?” Louisa asked.
“She bit me.”
“The mare?”
“On the shoulder. Without provocation. I was merely standing beside her, admiring her conformation, and she turned her head and bit me as though I had blatantly offended her.”
“Perhaps you had,” Oliver said.
Sebastian scoffed. “Horses do not take offence.”
Oliver laughed naturally. It had been coming easier lately. “That horse did.”
“She bit me, Oliver. On the shoulder. Through my coat.”
“And yet you are telling this story with a fondness that suggests you are going back for her.”
Sebastian paused. “I am going back for her on Thursday.”
Louisa laughed. Oliver watched her across the table, candlelight catching the copper in her hair, and thought: tomorrow. He would ask her tomorrow.
By the time the household retired, it was past eleven. He found Louisa in the library chair, asleep, a novel open across her lap. The book was upside down. She had been reading it wrong side up for at least ten pages before surrendering.
He crossed the room and eased the book from her hands. She stirred.
“Go to bed,” he said fondly, as he looked down at her.
“Stop giving me orders.” She stood, retrieved the book, and left the room in her stockings without looking back.
He found her in the garden after breakfast, standing near the stone wall where honeysuckle climbed in open defiance of every attempt to train it. She was reading a letter from Eleanor, her lips moving faintly over the words.
“Eleanor says I am to write her immediately if you do anything interesting,” Louisa said, folding the letter. “She finds the countryside intolerably dull by report and is relying on me for entertainment.”
Oliver laughed softly at this. “I shall endeavor to be interesting.”
“You have not managed it so far this morning. You were very quiet at breakfast.”
“I was thinking.”
“Dangerous habit. About what?”
“About you.”
She glanced up. He held her gaze a beat longer than the sentence warranted, and a faint color rose along her cheeks.
“Walk with me,” he said.
She tucked Eleanor’s letter into her sleeve and fell into step beside him. They followed the path along the garden wall, past the potting shed and the greenhouse, past the sundial with its cracked gnomon, past the oak tree where a thick fork in the branches still held the shape of a hiding place.
“I was ten,” Oliver said, pointing. “The offending subject was Greek. My tutor assigned Xenophon to a boy who wanted only to ride.”
“How long did you last?”
“Four hours. I was discovered only when I sneezed.”
“Four hours in a tree. You must have been miserable.”
“I was triumphant. Four hours without Greek is four hours well spent.” He paused. “My mother found me first. She was walking the grounds and heard me sneeze from the path. She looked up, and I looked down, and she stood beneath the tree for a full minute deciding whether to be angry.”
“Was she?”
“My brother rarely grew angry. She brought me a sandwich. Ham and mustard. She passed it up through the branches and told me I could have twenty more minutes, but after that I was to come inside and apologize to Mr. Alderton, and I was to mean it.”
Louisa smiled. “She sounds wonderful.”
“She was.”
They walked in silence for a few paces. The path curved toward the lake. The water lay flat, and silver beneath a sky streaked with high cloud, and at the far end a heron stood motionless in the shallows, one leg raised, its patience absolute.
Oliver stopped walking. His hand found hers. The ring was in his waistcoat pocket, a sapphire flanked by seed pearls. His mother’s ring. He had taken it from the safe a week ago, and it had been pressing against his ribs ever since.
“Louisa.”
She turned to face him. The wind moved a strand of chestnut hair across her cheek, and she pushed it back.
“I rehearsed this,” he said. “I stood in my bedroom last night and spoke to a mirror, and every version sounded like a man performing a proposal. I do not want to perform.”
Her eyes found his, and she tilted her head.
“Then don’t.”
“I love you. I love that you argue with me and that you read novels upside down and that you told Phelps his tea was too weak on your first morning in this house, and he looked at you as though you had handed him a personal revelation.”
“His tea was too weak.”
“It was. He has since corrected it, and I believe he respects you more than he respects me, which is saying a great deal because Phelps has known me since I was a boy, and he watched me become a Duke… And he’s been there for every step.
Even though I may have made some of those steps rather tedious for him. ”
Her mouth twitched. “You are stalling.”
“I am.” He reached into his waistcoat pocket. “I am stalling because this is the most important question I will ever ask, and I would prefer not to ruin it.”
“You are not going to ruin it.”
“You do not know that.”
“Oliver.” She stepped closer and looked up at him. “Ask me.”
He opened his hand. The ring gleamed in the sunlight.
“I am not asking because it is expected. I am not asking because it is practical or convenient. I am asking because I cannot imagine the rest of my life without you standing in my garden, criticizing my tea and my hedgerows and whatever else displeases you.” He looked at her. “Will you marry me?”
Louisa looked at the ring, and he turned it. “It’s a star sapphire,” he explained gently. “The asterism is invisible until the light catches it at the right angle…”
She looked up at him. Her lips pressed together, and for one terrible second he thought she might cry, and then she laughed, a sound that carried across the water and startled the heron into flight, its grey wings beating once, twice, before it lifted above the tree line and vanished.
“Yes,” she said. “Naturally, yes.”
He slid the ring onto her finger. It fit.
She kissed him beside the lake, her hands gripping the lapels of his coat, and his arms closed around her, and the morning was warm and still and full of birdsong.
* * *
They married in September.
The chapel at Ashford Hall was built of flint and chalk, its windows narrow and its pews worn smooth by two centuries of the parish. Louisa wore her mother’s veil. Oliver wore a cravat Phelps had tied four times before declaring it acceptable.
“You look like you are about to faint,” Sebastian said beside him at the altar.
Oliver swallowed dryly. “I am not going to faint.”
“You are very pale. This is a new shade. I would describe it as bridal terror.”
Oliver looked at his friend with narrowed eyes. “Sebastian.”
“Yes?”
“Be quiet.”
Sebastian grinned and adjusted his own cravat and said nothing further, though his hand moved to Oliver’s shoulder and rested there, briefly, before dropping away.
The doors opened. Eleanor entered first, her chin raised, her bouquet in front of her. She took her place across the aisle and caught Oliver’s eye for a long second, and then she nodded knowingly. Oliver let out a deep breath and smiled.
Then Louisa appeared in the doorway, her hand on her father’s arm, and Oliver’s breath was knocked right out of him.
She had chosen ivory, and he had no idea whether it was the color or the happiness that made her seem to glow with radiance.
The veil’s lace had yellowed faintly at the edges, but the eyes he could see through it glistened with utter happiness.
He shook his head slightly. How was it that she became more beautiful each time he saw her?
Elizabeth pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. When Charles returned to the pew, he took her hand and held it for the remainder of the service.
The vicar began. Oliver watched Louisa’s face as the words filled the small chapel, the ancient language of promises settling into the flint walls.
“I will,” she said when the moment came, and her voice was clear.
“I will,” he said, and felt the words travel through him, past the places where fear had lived, past the memories that had told him he was not built for this, past every reason he had ever invented to keep himself alone.
“Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” the vicar’s voice rang out. Oliver leaned down and allowed his lips to meet his wife’s chastely. He rested his forehead against hers, and knew at once that the smile on her face was mirrored on his own.
“We’re married,” he whispered, and she nodded.
“We are.”
He leaned forward and kissed her again.
The applause echoed against the flint walls and spilled through the open doors into the September afternoon, where the lime avenue stood golden in the slanting light, and the grounds of Ashford Hall stretched green and quiet toward the hills.
The End?