Epilogue
THREE MONTHS LATER
“Ihave decided,” Ivy announced from her place of honor at the dining table, with a napkin tucked under her chin, “that Greythorne is the best house in England, and I shall live here forever, and no one is to argue with me about it.”
“You have your own home, monster,” Beatrice pointed out.
“I have visited my own home. It has Samuel in it, and that is not a very satisfactory thing.” Ivy speared a roast potato with authority. “This one has frogs in the pond, a duke who tells lies about the Scottish weather, cake at the end of dinner, and Rosaline. I have made my decision.”
Rosaline sat at the end of the table in the golden blaze of the candles and looked down the length of it at the people gathered there.
She had thought her heart might not be large enough to hold all that it had been asked to hold.
She had grown up at a table exactly like this one and had never once been warm at it.
Darton House had done its dining in a silence where she could hear her own heartbeat with her father at the head.
When he had died, Samuel took his place, and the cold civility and the careful watching at every meal were a test she had failed repeatedly.
She had believed, for her entire childhood, that this was simply what a family table was.
It had taken her months and a Scot in a kilt to learn that a table could be a loud, boisterous, frog-obsessed riot, and that the riot was the entire point.
She had not realized that she had been starving her whole life for exactly this and never once had a word for the hunger inside.
It had been three months. Three months since the knife wound, the wrecked parlor, and her choice made freely. In that time, the cold, beautiful house of her marriage had transformed, without her ever quite catching it in the act, into a home. Tonight, it was full to the rafters.
Beatrice held forth at Ivy’s elbow, sharper and happier than Rosaline had seen her in years. Abigail and Leo had discovered in one another a shared, bottomless appetite for gossip and were three courses deep into dismantling the reputations of half of London with clear delight.
And at the head of the table, in a kilt he now wore whenever he pleased and dared anyone to remark on it, sat her husband, watching the whole loud, warm chaos with an expression she had learned to read as a man quietly overcome.
“A toast.” Leo rose, glass in hand, and the table grew quiet.
“I was told not to make it maudlin, which is a cruel restriction to place on a man of my gifts, so I shall be brief.” He inclined his head toward Magnus.
“To Callum McCormack, whose name, as of the sixteenth of this month and by act of a very embarrassed Crown, is entirely his own again. No longer deemed a traitor, he was a good man and has been restored to the record as a good man.” His voice had no wit in it at all.
“It took his son seventeen years and more courage than the rest of us combined possessed. Greythorne, your father would be proud. To Callum McCormack.”
“To Callum McCormack,” everyone echoed, even Ivy, who did not know who he was but understood that it mattered.
Rosaline watched her husband over the rim of her glass. He did not speak at once. He turned the stem of his glass in his fingers—that old habit—and when he lifted his eyes, they were bright with unshed tears. They found hers first, before anyone’s.
“For years I chased it,” he said to the table, but mostly to her. “And I always thought that when it came, it would feel like settin’ down a great weight and walkin’ away lighter. It didnae feel like that at all, in the end.”
He reached across the table and took Rosaline’s hand, there in front of all of them, unashamed.
“It felt like this. A table full of noise, and me wife at the end of it, and the dead finally quiet enough that I could hear the livin’.
Me faither has his name back, but I nearly bought it with the only thing worth more, and I’ll spend the rest of me days grateful that I was stopped in time.
” He lifted her hand and kissed it. “So, to the livin’. I’ve had me fill of grievin’ the dead.”
“That was maudlin,” Leo drawled.
“Aye. And I make no apology.”
Rosaline pressed her napkin briefly to her mouth and did not let herself weep at her own dinner table, because Ivy would want to know why and it would take an hour to explain.
But she looked at her husband, lighter and unburdened at the head of the table, now that the sixteen-year weight was finally lifted from his shoulders.
She recalled the hollowed man who had ridden home bleeding from a warehouse three months ago with nothing left in him but a purpose, and she marveled at the distance a person could travel in a single season if someone only left the door open and did not close it on them again.
Later, when the plates had been cleared, and the good port had been brought out, Ivy migrated onto Rosaline’s lap, despite being eight years old, and far too big for such things. The talk turned, as it so often did, to Beatrice.
“The rest of this Season will be nothing like the start of it,” Abigail said, with the particular relish of someone who had survived her own.
“Properly out, this time. Almack’s and all of it.
Do you realize what will happen now that London has worked out the Duke of Greythorne has an unmarried sister-in-law? The ton may lose their heads.”
“They may keep their heads.” Beatrice buttered a roll with surgical precision.
“I intend to be so alarmingly well-read and so poorly disposed toward small talk that I will frighten everyone off but the one man interesting enough to withstand it. I shall marry him and make his life a fascinating trial. I have thought it through. It is a much more exciting strategy than to be agreeable.”
“That,” Abigail said, delighted, “is the worst plan I have ever heard, but it will work perfectly! And I hate that it will work perfectly.”
“I learned it from Rosaline. She married a duke by being difficult in a maze.” Beatrice lifted her glass toward her sister with a small, wicked smile. “I am simply refining the method.”
“You will terrify them all, and I will enjoy every moment of it,” Rosaline said, meaning it.
Whatever else the cost of the last year had been, this was some of what it had bought. A sister who buttered rolls like a duelist and feared nothing and no one.
Beatrice would go into her second season armored as her own sharp self, without Samuel’s cold hand on her elbow to make her small.
Samuel had not so much as written to them in weeks.
Rosaline had gleaned from Leo that he kept to his club, maintaining his distance, as far from all of them as a frightened man could be.
Once the fear was gone, he seemed very small indeed.
She had spent years giving him far more room in her life than he deserved.
She caught Magnus’s eye down the length of the table. He raised one eyebrow, the smallest question, and she felt herself flush and gave him the smallest nod in answer. She watched delight break over his face like sunrise.
“Before the evening’s out,” Magnus said, rising, and the table hushed immediately, “me wife and I have something to tell ye. Or rather, she does, for it’s more hers than mine, though I’ll claim me share of the credit.”
Every eye swiveled to Rosaline.
She had thought she would be shy, but she was not. She sat in the candlelight with her youngest sister in her lap, her family around her, and her husband’s hand on her shoulder, and found that the words came easily.
“We are going to have a baby,” she announced. “In the spring.”
For one heartbeat, there was silence. And then the table came apart at the seams.
Abigail was on her feet. Leo said something no one heard because Ivy had begun to shriek with joy. She scrambled up and flung both arms around Rosaline’s neck. “Will it be a girl? Will it like frogs? May I teach it everything I know?”
Which was, Ivy assured them, a great deal.
Beatrice’s eyes had grown suspiciously wet. She blinked hard and became very interested in her glass of port.
Magnus stood amid the glorious wreck of his dinner table. His face was open now, all that careful stillness gone. He looked around at them as though he could scarcely believe that every good thing he had never thought he would be allowed to have was gathered at one table on one warm night.
“A spring bairn,” he said bemusedly, half to himself. “God help us all.”
“It will have your temper,” Rosaline told him.
“It’ll have yer stubbornness. The poor wee thing hasnae a chance.”
Rosaline laughed, with her sister’s arms around her neck and her husband’s hand warm on her shoulder.
There was a whole season waiting ahead of them with a stubborn, temper-ridden child in it. She had spent most of her life believing safety and joy were two different countries, and that she was permitted to live only in the first.
She had been wrong.
They were the same place, and she was standing in the middle of it. It had simply taken her this long to learn it.
It was very late before Abigail and Leo finally took their leave, still arguing amiably over whose gossip had been superior as they were seen out to their separate carriages. By then, Ivy had fallen asleep against Beatrice, who carried her upstairs while Rosaline and Magnus lingered below.
Rosaline stood in the hall with her husband’s arm around her and watched the last lantern go out.
She felt the deep contentment of a house emptied of her loved ones because she knew, without question, that they would be back.
At Darton House, the quiet after guests had been a relief; the dangerous part of an evening survived.
Here it was only a pause. A held breath between one warm noise and the next.
“Come to bed, wife,” Magnus murmured against her hair.