Epilogue
One Year Later, Spring
The garden was absurd.
Lorraine stood on the terrace in the April sunshine and surveyed the devastation with the expression of a woman who had requested a modest herb garden and received, instead, something resembling Versailles after a cheerful explosion.
Roses—climbing, rambling, sprawling—engulfed the south wall in a profusion of pink and cream and deep, theatrical crimson.
Lavender bordered the gravel paths in extravagant purple drifts.
The kitchen garden had quadrupled in size, producing—according to Mrs Potter, who had developed proprietary feelings about every vegetable on the estate—enough basil to supply the whole of Yorkshire.
And in the centre of it all, installed three weeks ago by a team of men from York who had sweated, cursed, and charged an eye-watering sum, stood a stone birdbath of such monumental proportions that even the kestrels circling the folly regarded it with visible suspicion.
“Your husband,” said Margaret Harding, settling into the garden chair beside her with a cup of tea and the satisfied expression of a grandmother who had been proven spectacularly right about everything, “has no concept of restraint.”
“My husband,” Lorraine replied, one hand resting on the considerable swell of her belly, “was told that I wanted somewhere pleasant to sit in the afternoons. He interpreted this as an invitation to redesign the entire eastern grounds.”
“James was the same. I once asked for a window box in Calcutta and received a conservatory.” Margaret sipped her tea.
From the lower garden came the sound of laughter—Thomas’s, high and bright, followed by a deeper sound that still, after a year, made Lorraine’s chest expand.
Dominic laughing. The full, unguarded laugh of a man who had spent four years forgetting how and was now, with the enthusiastic assistance of an eight-year-old accomplice, making up for lost time.
She could not see them from here—they were somewhere beyond the hedge, engaged in an activity that Thomas had described at breakfast as “an expedition of critical scientific importance,” and that Dominic had declined to elaborate upon with an expression of conspiratorial innocence that fooled no one, least of all his wife.
His wife. A year, and the word still caught her off guard. Not because it felt wrong—it had never, for a single moment, felt wrong—but because it felt so thoroughly, mundanely, magnificently right that she sometimes forgot it had ever been otherwise.
They had married in March of the previous year, six weeks after the proposal, in the small stone chapel at the edge of the Rovewood estate.
Lorraine had worn cream silk—a gift from Margaret, who had taken one look at Lorraine’s plan to wear her best grey dress and responded with the quiet, implacable authority of a woman who had negotiated with Indian princes.
Thomas had carried the rings on a velvet cushion and had only dropped them once.
Julian Pierce, Earl of Westbrook, had served as best man and had wept more copiously than anyone present, a fact he denied with increasing indignation whenever it was mentioned.
Graves had, witnesses attested, smiled.
The ton had been, as expected, appalled.
A duke marrying his governess—a governess with a scandal—was precisely the sort of thing that supplied drawing rooms with conversation for an entire season.
Lorraine had received three letters of congratulations from former employers, seventeen of horrified reproof from people she had never met, and one from Lydia that began Dear Sister, I hope you will understand why Arthur and I cannot publicly acknowledge—and which Lorraine had used to light the fire.
She had returned Lydia’s conscience money the following day. There was even less reason to keep it now. She was the Duchess of Ravenswood, and the Duchess of Ravenswood did not require ten pounds from a sister who could not bring herself to write the word congratulations.
“He’s getting tall,” Margaret said, shading her eyes as Thomas emerged from behind the hedge, grass-stained and grinning, his solemn face transformed into something radiant. “Every time I visit, he’s grown another inch. James says he’ll be as tall as his father.”
“Dominic says he has William’s build.” Lorraine watched as Dominic appeared behind Thomas, carrying what appeared to be a wooden frame—a structure, perhaps, or—
“Is that a nesting box?” Margaret asked.
“Ah.” Lorraine’s mouth twitched. “The expedition of critical scientific importance.”
“For the kestrels!” Thomas called, spotting them and breaking into a run.
He arrived breathless, flushed, incandescent with the particular joy of a child who had spent the morning building something with his father.
“We made it together. It’s for the eastern ridge, near the folly.
We measured the entrance hole precisely—thirty-two millimetres, because that’s the optimal diameter for Falco homunculus.
” He paused. “Father helped with the sawing.”
Father.
The word had arrived quietly, without ceremony, on a Tuesday afternoon in October.
Thomas had been painting at the nursery table, Dominic reading beside him—a habit that had begun as occasional and become, by unspoken agreement, immovable.
Thomas had needed a jar rinsed and had said, without looking up, “Father, could you fill this, please?” Dominic had risen, filled it, and sat back down.
Neither had acknowledged it. Lorraine had stood in the doorway with her hand pressed to her mouth, tears streaming down her face, and known that some moments were too large for words, and too perfect for ceremony.
The adoption had been formalised in June.
Thomas Harding was now Thomas Harding Vane—legally, permanently, irrevocably the son of Dominic Vane, Duke of Ravenswood.
James Harding had handled the legalities with the calm efficiency of a retired diplomat and the barely concealed emotion of a grandfather.
The documents were signed in the study, beneath the kestrel painting—the first one, garish and crooked, For His Grace lettered carefully across the bottom—that still hung on the wall and, Dominic had informed the household, would remain there until the house itself fell down.
“It’s a fine nesting box,” Margaret told Thomas, examining it with grave attention. “Will you show your grandfather when he arrives? He’ll want the full specifications.”
“James isn’t arriving until Thursday,” Lorraine said.
“He moved his travel up. Sent a letter yesterday.” Margaret’s eyes crinkled. “Something about not wanting to miss the event.”
“What event?”
Margaret looked pointedly at Lorraine’s belly. “My dear. You are approximately the size of a carriage house. I do not think the event will wait for Thursday.”
Lorraine opened her mouth to reply—something about first babies and long labours and the medical consensus that she had at least another fortnight—and felt a sensation low in her abdomen that was not, in any interpretation, consistent with another fortnight.
“Oh,” she said.
Margaret set down her tea.
Dominic—who had survived Badajoz, commanded soldiers under fire, and faced down two grandparents and an entire legal system—took one look at his wife’s face and went the colour of uncooked pastry.
“Now?” he said.
“Apparently, your daughter shares your disregard for scheduled timelines.”
“You don’t know it’s a daughter.”
“I know it’s a daughter.” She gripped the arm of her chair as the sensation intensified and became, unmistakably, what it was. “Dominic. Fetch the midwife.”
He did not move.
He stood rooted to the terrace, his face blank with terror, his hands—those capable, scarred, battle-tested hands—clenched at his sides in a gesture she had not seen in months.
“Dominic.” Her voice sharpened, threaded with affection and the beginning of real discomfort. “You stormed a fortified city at Badajoz. You can walk to the servants’ entrance and ask Mrs Potter to send for Mrs Aldridge. Go.”
He went. At a dead run.
Margaret Harding watched him go, then turned back to Lorraine with the serene composure of a woman who had given birth in a monsoon in Madras and found Englishmen’s reactions to the process endlessly diverting.
“William was the same way with Anne,” she said. “Calm as a millpond right up until the moment it began, and then he tried to ride to three different surgeons at once.”
“Was Anne—” Lorraine paused, breathing through the tightening. “Was she frightened?”
Margaret reached over and took her hand. The grip was firm, warm—the hand of a grandmother who had crossed an ocean to find her grandson and found, instead, a family.
“She was brave,” Margaret said simply. “As you will be. As you already are.”
***
The baby arrived at half past nine that evening, after six hours of labour that Lorraine would later describe as “educational” and that Dominic would describe as “the worst experience of my entire life, and I include the war.”
He had stayed. He had held Lorraine’s hand through every contraction, let her crush his fingers until the knuckles cracked, pressed cold cloths to her forehead, and whispered things she could not hear over the roaring in her ears but felt, somehow, in the steady pressure of his hands and the rough, unshakeable steadiness of his voice.
When the cry came—thin, furious, the outraged shriek of a very small person arriving in a world considerably colder and brighter than the one she had just left—Dominic made a sound Lorraine had never heard from him.
Not a laugh, not a sob, but something between and beyond both, drawn from the place where ice had lived for four years and where now there was only warmth.
“A girl,” the midwife announced. “Healthy, Your Grace. Strong lungs.”
“I told you,” Lorraine managed, exhausted and incandescent, aching in every conceivable place. “I told you it was a daughter.”
Mrs Aldridge placed the baby—red-faced, furious, already exhibiting the determined chin that characterised every woman who would ever inhabit Rovewood Hall—in Lorraine’s arms. She was tiny. Impossibly tiny. Warm and squalling and smelling of something ancient and new—the scent of beginning.
Dominic sat on the edge of the bed. Looked at his daughter. Looked at his wife.
His face, in the lamplight, held an expression she had seen only once before—in the blue guest room, the day he had fought for Thomas and won. The expression of a man discovering that the world contained more goodness than he had believed possible—and that some of it was his.
“What shall we name her?” Lorraine asked softly.
He touched the baby’s cheek with one scarred finger. The gesture was so gentle, so careful, so profoundly tender that Lorraine felt her heart shift and widen around this new, vast, terrifying love.
“Anne,” he said. “If—would that be—”
“Anne.” Lorraine smiled through her tears. “Anne Margaret Vane.”
From the corridor came the sound of small, rapid footsteps, followed by a whispered negotiation between Thomas and Jenny that Jenny was clearly losing.
“He can come in,” Lorraine said.
Thomas appeared in the doorway in his nightclothes, the compass around his neck, his eyes enormous. He approached the bed with the careful, reverent tread of a boy who understood, with the intuition of a child who had lost everything and found it again, that some moments were sacred.
“She’s very small,” he observed, peering at the bundle in Lorraine’s arms.
“She’ll grow,” Dominic said.
“She’s very red.”
“That will also improve.”
Thomas reached out and touched the baby’s hand—one finger, barely a brush—and Anne Margaret Vane, three minutes old and already possessed of strong opinions, wrapped her fist around her brother’s finger and held on.
Thomas looked up at Lorraine. At Dominic. His brown eyes—William’s eyes—shone.
“I’m going to teach her about kestrels,” he said.
Dominic pulled him close. Pressed his face into Thomas’s hair. Held his son, and looked at his wife and daughter, and the room was full—of warmth and lamplight and the thin, furious cries of new life, and the deeper, quieter sense of something long-broken finally, completely mended.
The compass swung on its ribbon against Thomas’s chest, its needle pointing north.
Home.
The End
I hope you truly enjoyed your journey through Tempted by the Duke!