Chapter 22
The carriage wheels dwindled into silence along the drive. The entrance hall fell still; Thomas Leigh stood waiting, while Mrs. Poole lingered at the corridor’s end. The footman, James, closed the door with slow, deliberate care.
Declan looked at them. “Come through,” he said and went to the servants’ hall. He had never stood in the servants’ hall for anything that was not the delivery of a practical instruction, and the household knew this.
“You have kept this household together through circumstances that have not been ordinary.” He stopped. “I have not always been available. The work of the past months has not been mine alone. It has been done by people in this household who knew what was right and did it without recognition.”
He looked at Mrs. Poole.
“What you did, what you carried, and what you chose to do with it when the time came, required courage. Edmund would have been grateful.”
The servants’ hall received this.
Mrs. Poole looked at him. She felt honoured to be thanked publicly by the man she served, and found this not unwelcome.
“Your Grace,” she said. Two words containing everything.
“That is all. Thank you.”
He left them to it and went upstairs.
Rose was on the window seat.
She had been there since the carriage left, Mrs. Poole had told him, sitting in it in the way she sat on difficult days, knees up, arms around them, watching the drive. Cynthia had been with her, and she had said to him: “She knows. She is waiting for you.”
Rose turned when she heard his footstep. Not with the cautious, checking quality of the early months, but directly. She oriented toward the door.
He went down on one knee in front of her, so that they were at the same level.
He took her hands and felt that her grip was immediate and trusting, the grip of a child who had been waiting.
“You are safe,” he said.
She looked at him with the dark, watchful eyes. She was listening.
“No one is going to take you away. Not today, not by any legal means, not ever. You are safe, and you are here. You are mine to protect, and I am not going to fail at that.” He paused.
“I should have told you this sooner. I am sorry for that.” He looked up at her.
“But I am telling you now. You are safe, Rose. I promise you.”
Rose looked at him for a long moment. She was doing the reading thing, the complete, unhurried assessment she brought to information that mattered. He held still and let her read.
Whatever she found in his face satisfied her.
She let go of his hands and put her arms around his neck. She was small, slight, and she held on with the complete, unself-conscious certainty of a child who had decided, no second thoughts, no hesitation.
He put his arms around her. He held her, really held her, with both arms and without the tentative, managed quality of someone uncertain how to do this. He held her the way you hold something that matters extremely.
Rose made a small sound. Not distress but something else; the sound of something released.
He held her for a long time.
***
He found Cynthia in the library.
She was standing with her back to the door, looking out at the moors. Her back had the particular quality of someone who does not perform things for audiences, and her shoulders were very slightly shaking.
He stood in the doorway for a moment. He understood that she did not know he was there, that she had needed to be somewhere that was hers and had not expected to be followed. He was witnessing something private.
He thought about everything she had done since she had come.
He said her name, and when she turned, her face was red. She had been crying quietly, with the particular private quality of someone who had waited until they were alone. She did not try to compose herself immediately.
He crossed the room and stopped before her, not at the distance of a duke and his governess, but close. The distance of two people who have been in the same room long enough that the formal distance has become a choice.
“Everything I should have done for Edmund, you did. Everything I should have been for Rose, you showed me how.” He looked at her face.
“I have worn my grief like a fortress for two years. Every door in this house was locked, and every corridor was cold. You walked through the gate as if it was not there. You did not ask permission. You simply came in.”
Her eyes were very bright.
“I cannot ask you to stay as governess. It would be a lie.” He looked at her. “I am asking you to stay as the woman who made this a home. As the woman who is…”
He could not finish the sentence.
“You were never the monster they said. You were only waiting for someone to stay,” she said. Simply and completely.
He was very still.
He had been called cruel for two years. He had been called cold and hard, and his reputation was ruined by people who had seen the armor and had mistaken it for the person.
She had located what was underneath the armor since the afternoon she asked what Rose liked, since the corridor at two in the morning, since everything in between.
She had been looking at the thing underneath and naming it correctly, not indulgently, but with the precise and accurate naming of a woman who had looked at the evidence and arrived at the honest conclusion.
You were only waiting for someone to stay.
“I did not make it easy.”
“No,” she agreed. “You did not.”
The corner of his mouth moved. She saw it and her expression did the thing it always did, the specific, private, warm thing that was hers.
“Cynthia…”
“Yes,” she said.
“I am going to say something, and I would ask you to allow me to say it without…” He stopped and looked at her. “I have been trying to find the right moment for this since the morning in the east wing. I have decided that the right moment is not available and this one will have to do.”
She was entirely still.
“I love you.” The library was very quiet. “I have been aware of it for some time, but I have not been capable of saying it because it has been a process. But I love you. I love you with considerable completeness, and I would like, if you are willing, to…”
She stepped forward and put both her hands against his chest, which stopped the sentence entirely.
“Declan,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I know.” He looked at her. “I have been aware of it for some time. And I love you. I have been loving you since approximately the second month, and I have been very patient about waiting for you to arrive at this conversation.”
He looked at her. He thought about all the evenings, the hall table, the biscuits, the Hessians in the ditch, the entire absurd and entirely irreducible accumulation of the months.
“The Roman roads.”
She looked at him. “What about them?”
“You were never reading them.”
She said nothing.
“From approximately October, you were never reading them.”
“They are a very dull book,” she said. “I kept them as an excuse.”
“A prop for what?”
“For sitting in a library at half past ten with something to look at that was not you,” she replied.
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he put his hands on either side of her face, and he kissed her.
He drew back enough to look at her.
“You took a very long time,” she told him.
“Yes,” he said. “I am aware.”
“Rose is going to say she told us so.”
Her hand had found his. They stood at the library window in the late afternoon light with the house breathing around them and the moors going their unchanging color in every direction.
“It is over.”
“The worst of it,” he said. “Yes.”
“Not all of it.”
“No. Ashby, the investigation, and Crane. But the worst of it.” He paused. “Rose is safe.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you are…” He stopped and looked at her. “You are not the governess. Whatever we call it. Whatever the arrangement is, from today. You are not…”
“I know what I am,” she said. “I am the woman who made this a home,” she said, simply. “You said so.”
He looked at her profile, the slight upward curve of her mouth, the particular expression of someone who is entirely satisfied with a situation. He thought about the necklace, the biscuits, all of it, the whole absurd, accumulating, irreplaceable history.
The afternoon light moved across the floor. The house breathed, steadily and deeply, the full and recovered breath of a house that had been holding it for a very long time.