Epilogue 1890
Epilogue
My dearest,
I think Thomas would have wanted you to have these letters.
They’re full of you, but also of him. Some of the drawings might surprise you.
I’d be a little careful with those—they’re probably not a side of him you’re entirely ready to see.
But everything else, these words, this love, are as much a part of him as we are. I hope you will understand.
Do you remember the week we spent together at the seaside?
You, me, Thomas and our friend Micha. I think that was when you lost interest in piracy and highway robbery and fell in love with geology.
We were all very relieved. It was Micha, you know, who found you that spiral ammonite, the one Thomas would later have made into a necklace—I think it’s still among your things in the rectory, with the sea glass and the cockleshells.
We were all very happy that week. I think of it often, especially now.
I have so many memories of Thomas, all of them precious, but these are my favourites.
I remember your cold little hand in mine and your eyes as wide as the horizon.
And I remember two men in love chasing each other through sun-bright shallows.
All my love,
Mother
She had forgotten England’s muted beauties, the pearl-pale iridescence of the sky and the deep, golden softness of the light.
Her world was full of harsher glories: nights of amethyst and emerald, rolling oceans as black as ink with moonlight glistening upon the waves, deserts where the stars fell like rain, lost lakes, brighter than mirrors, hidden high among white peaks, waterfalls so deep within the rainforest they shimmered in shades of silver and jade, falling into pristine pools the colour of her husband’s eyes.
And now she walked briskly through the village guided by an instinctive familiarity that ran deeper than mere memory, and she felt neither homecoming nor alienation, for hers was a restless heart that lived in all places.
Few would have thought to call her beautiful, but she cut a striking figure nonetheless.
She looked to be a little beyond her thirtieth year, her movements energetic rather than graceful, her skin honeyed by exposure to the sun, and her pale, coarse hair streaked with bronze.
She wore an open-weave linen walking dress, beaded in an almost military style and trimmed in maroon velvet.
It could not have been the work of any London seamstress, for it clung to the long, lean lines of her body’s natural form.
She paused a moment when she came to the church, her cool rainy-day eyes sweeping a building that seemed as much a part of her childhood as Thomas’s gentle voice or the silly orange dog she had chased so often through the meadows.
She had done her weeping in Ian’s arms, beneath unfamiliar constellations, but these reminders of moments lost to time plucked the scabs from her grief and left it raw again.
In the churchyard, the fallen leaves tumbled brightly this way and that at the whim of the breeze, whisking through the gold-tipped grass like a serpent with a scarlet tail.
There were conkers gleaming in the undergrowth, and she bent to pick up the largest she could find.
It nestled against her palm, warm and smooth, like a living thing, a little piece of English magic.
Thomas had loved the autumn. The crunch of leaves beneath his feet would turn him as playful as a boy.
Together, they would comb the churchyard for conkers, fighting over the most promising of them.
They would bear their prizes proudly back to the rectory, where they would bore holes through them and thread them on strings in preparation for battle.
It did not take her long to find the grave.
It stood on a slight rise, in a glitter of sunlight.
The soil was freshly turned and heaped with flowers, so many flowers, in all the richest hues of autumn.
She had come too quickly for tokens, but she wished she had some flowers of her own to cast among the multitude.
It seemed beyond comprehension, somehow, to witness all the intricacies of a man turned into a piece of earth.
She would also have liked some moments alone, to readjust her universe about this new-made hollow, but there were already mourners here, two men she did not recognise, one kneeling on the grass, the other with his hand resting lightly on the first man’s shoulder.
Something about the way their bodies inclined, the ease of their touching, suggested a deep familiarity.
At her approach, they both turned, the intimacy of their tableaux still, somehow, unbroken.
The kneeling man was perhaps some fifteen years her senior, and remarkably handsome, despite the grey that laced his spill of wayward curls.
The younger of the pair was not as well favoured, but his eyes were quick and merry, his mouth generous.
And there was something about the other man.
He tugged upon her memory, like an echo of something not quite forgotten.
An anxious silence hung between them like a veil. And then . . .
“Hope?” he said.
It should have startled her, to hear her name on the lips of a man she thought she did not know.
But she did know him. He had sat with her in the garden one clear winter night and named the stars for her.
His pencil had given form to all her fancies.
And he had loved Thomas, an idea partially grasped with a child’s understanding she had only later understood. “Micha.”
He gave a harsh, uncertain laugh. “I’m surprised you can remember me.”
“You remembered me.”
“I know all about you.” He smiled, and the beauty of it would have turned anyone breathless.
“Thomas wrote of barely anything else. He was so proud of you. As am I.” Suddenly he seemed to recall the hand upon his shoulder.
“Forgive me, I’ve always had terrible manners.
Sam, this is Hope Bannatyne. Hope, this is Samuel, Viscount Larcombe. ”
“Bannatyne?” The viscount’s sandy brows flicked upwards. “The geologist?”
She recognised his name too. It had been associated with a scandal in the seventies.
Arrested with two other gentlemen in a public convenience, he had been charged with conspiracy to commit an act a gently raised young lady should not have been able to comprehend.
His family had intervened, and he had been released with only a fine, but his reputation was tarnished beyond repair, and he had fled to the Continent.
She regarded him a little curiously, never having met an affront to civic decency before, but she saw only a man, a rather sweet and earnest one.
“My husband,” she explained. “I left him in the basin and shall rejoin him at the Indo-Australian Archipelago next year.”
The viscount inclined his head politely. “I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
“As am I.” She caught then Micha’s smile, a very sad and private smile, and she went on, “I believe it was a hereditary indisposition my father suffered.”
He nodded. “We came as soon as I received your mother’s letter. It struck him swiftly, and he did not linger, as his father did.”
“By the time I even learned he was ill, it was already too late. I’m glad you were with him.”
Micha drew in a breath, but it shuddered between his lips, and then his fine, dark eyes flooded with tears. He gasped out an anguished obscenity, and, suddenly, he was in Larcombe’s arms, the two of them clinging together, like twin vines.
Hope found she was not particularly disconcerted by the sight of two gentlemen embracing, and her decency—such as it was—remained staunchly unthreatened, but she stepped away to give them the privacy of each other.
She studied the headstone, which was a smooth piece of stone, simply carved: All he did, was done in love.
Thomas Edward Mandeville 1831–1890. And she wished for Ian, that she might weep, and be held, also.
“All right.” Micha’s voice was rough with tears. “You can come back. I’ve finished making a fool of myself now.”
Hope turned to them. They were still partially entwined, hand in hand. “It’s no more foolish to mourn than it is to love.”
That made him smile. “You might not be his daughter, but I can tell he raised you.”
And that made her smile. “I’m proud to bear such a legacy.”
They were silent awhile. A breeze rose up and gently stirred the flowers on Thomas’s grave, bearing away a handful of scarlet and gold petals that soared into the pale sky like a flotilla of tiny kites.
Micha rose to his feet. “Perhaps we should not linger. Your mother will surely want to see you. And various of the Nettlefield ladies who, I swear, must be immortal. Oh, and there’s children. I’ve no idea who they belong to, but there’s about twenty-seven of them.”
Larcombe grinned, showing slightly crooked teeth. “There are three of them, Micha. Three.”
“Are you sure? They seem innumerable.”
“I am quite sure. Unlike you, my darling secretary, I can actually count.”
Their laughter warmed her, as did the prospect of her waiting family, but Hope was not ready to leave Thomas to his sunlit silence. “In a moment.”
“I . . . you know . . . I think I should go back.” Larcombe’s fingers brushed the inside of Micha’s wrist, before he released his hand.
“I can tell them you’re coming. There’s no rush.
” He strolled away through the churchyard, a slight, rather dandified figure, light-gilded among the swirling autumn leaves.
“He seems to take great care of you,” offered Hope, noting the way Micha’s eyes pursued the viscount into the distance.
“Yes.” He smiled his brilliant, heart-stopping smile. “I care for him very deeply.”
“I’m so glad you’re happy, Micha.”
He ran an idle, caressing hand over the top of the grave marker. “Thomas deserves nothing less. His letters were always full of joy. He loved you and your mother very much.”
“Yes, I know. He loved you too.”
“And I’ve never stopped loving him.” A shadow swept across his eyes. “I don’t suppose I ever will.”
Hope was too much a scientist to care very much for a divine presence she could neither see, nor prove, nor analyse, but she would not have denied solace to a grieving man. “Perhaps you will see him again.”
“Do you really believe that?” Micha’s lip curled into a sneer so familiar it made her ache a little for all the lost possibilities of life.
“Well . . .” But she was too like Thomas to countenance a lie, even a soothing one. “Well . . . I do not. But people believe and disbelieve all kinds of things. Some people do not believe in evolution. It does not mean they are correct.”
Micha laughed suddenly, a touch of bitterness, and a touch of mischief. “Oh Hope, you haven’t changed.”
“I am quite a bit taller, thank you.”
After a moment, he said, “But what does it mean, if there’s nothing? Where does that leave us?” His voice cracked. “Here we are, parting from each other all over again, and I can’t even visit. He can’t even send me letters. He’s simply gone.”
“Some cultures,” she suggested gently, “believe in continuance.”
“Reincarnation? Past lives? All that spiritualist shit? Fuck, no.” The sneer was back. “One life has been quite enough for me. I’m not doing this again.”
Hope gazed at him, in mingled sympathy and bewilderment.
A thousand lives would not have been enough to satisfy her curiosities or diminish her passions.
Though she grieved with him, she wished she could offer him some comfort.
Thomas would have known what to say. “Perhaps it is more abstract than that. Perhaps there is continuance through time.”
“There’s what?”
“I’m not much of a philosopher, and certainly no theologian, but it seems to me all lives, all actions, all choices have their consequences.”
“And death is the most inevitable of all consequences? That’s not very reassuring, my dear.” But Micha was trying to smile, and it softened his words.
“I just meant that everything changes, with everything we do. And the world itself reshapes itself not from the upheaval of great continents, but in the tiniest of ripples, so the slightest movement of the most inconsequential archipelago has meaning beyond calculation or prediction.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be islands.”
“Connected islands, like ideas passed from mouth to mouth, or book to book, or people holding hands.” Hope looked again at her father’s modest, flower-strewn grave.
“Perhaps, this is not the end of anything. Perhaps there will be other lovers, who know greater freedoms and can make other choices, all touched in some small, indefinable way by the lives around them, and before them, leading all the way back to us, and the lives that have touched ours.”
“That’s scant fucking consolation, forgive my bluntness.”
“It is,” she agreed, “but it’s some.”
He smirked and saluted her like a fencer acknowledging a hit. Then he sighed. “We never did see Venice. Or his damn deserts.” He shrugged. “But maybe someone will. Someday. Maybe that’ll do.”
Hope reached out and tucked her hand into his. And they waited with Thomas until the sun slipped beyond the horizon, and his grave turned slowly from gold to silver in the fearless light from the first scattering of stars.