Epilogue
One year later
The library at Carrington had been the coldest room in the house the first winter Renae kept it, and it was the warmest now, which she took as a fair measure of the year between.
A fire she had not had to count the coal for burned steady in the grate.
The water stain above the window had been mended in the spring, the shelves had their books back from the pawnbroker, and the long table that had once held nothing but a single account-book turned face down held, this morning, a stack of papers tied in pink legal tape and a solicitor who had driven a long way to untie it.
“It is done, Your Grace. Signed, witnessed, entered, and beyond your cousin’s reach or any other man’s.
” Fenwick set the last of the papers across the table with the quiet satisfaction of one who had waited a year to do it.
“The whole of the trust stands in your own name now. Forty thousand pounds and the interest it has gathered, held by you and answerable to no one. I have not had the pleasure of writing that sentence for a lady more than twice in thirty years of practice.”
Renae read every line before she touched the quill twice, in the slow deliberate way of a woman who had once owned nothing and had learned the cost of signing the foot of a page she had not read to the bottom.
The words held. They went on holding, line after line, and somewhere about the third page the thing in her chest that had braced for a trap a whole year quietly let go of its grip.
“And the duke has no claim on it whatever,” she said. “None at all. Not the smallest portion folded quietly into the estate where it might be useful.”
“None. His Grace was most particular on the point. Insultingly particular, I might say, had I not been so relieved to write it down.”
She turned one of the pages without reading it, only to have somewhere to put her hands. “Twice in thirty years, you said. Who were the others, Mr. Fenwick, if a lady may ask?”
Fenwick gathered his case as he answered.
“A widow and a spinster, Your Grace, both of whom had to outlive a houseful of men to come into what was always theirs. You are the first I have served who came into it with her husband standing in the room insisting upon it. I confess I did not know the species existed, and I am glad to have met one before I retire. I shall enjoy telling my grandchildren that I once observed a duke argue a fortune away from himself across this very table, lose the argument on purpose, and look the happier for the losing.”
“He was, was he?”
Declan stood at the window with his back to the room, and from the set of his shoulders she could tell he had heard every word and meant to pretend the lawn had taken the whole of his attention.
“I was clear with Fenwick and that is all. The money is yours. It was always yours. I will not have one shilling of it crossing into Carrington and giving some future historian the idea that I wedded a fortune and dressed it as a housekeeper to disguise the theft.”
“You did rather wed a fortune.”
“I entered into a matrimony with a woman who had been robbed of one. There is a difference, and I find I mind the difference enormously.” He turned from the window at last. “You wedded me before I had handed you a penny of it back. Before you knew the trust would ever come open at all. I should like that remembered, since the account now says I gained nothing by you.”
“You wedded me before I had any of it.”
“I am aware.”
She folded the last page and set her hand flat upon it, and left it there, because the table between them was the right width for the saying of it and she had learned not to close a distance before the words were across it.
“I wedded you before I understood what I had already been given. The money was always the smaller fortune, Declan. I simply could not see the larger one for the want of it. A starving woman counts the bread, and does not always see the table it is set upon, or the company at it, until she is no longer starving.”
Fenwick discovered something requiring his attention in his case, and let himself out with the soft tact of one who could tell when a room had stopped needing a solicitor in it.
The door closed softly behind his retreat, and the latch slipped into its groove, and for a moment there was only the fire and the snow beginning again past the window and the two of them on either side of a table that no longer had any business between them.
“You could leave now,” Declan said, lightly, when the door had shut.
The lightness was how she had learned he said the things that frightened him most. “You have your name back and your money in it. There is a house in Bath you admired, with the bow windows you said you would never afford, and the means to take it twelve times over. Nothing holds you here that you did not put here yourself. I have spent a good deal of the year aware of that, and I would rather you knew that I know it than pretend the door is locked.”
“You are asking me whether I stay because I must.”
“I am telling you that I have removed every reason you ever had to, and I am standing here to see what is left when the reasons are gone.”
“What is left,” she said, and came round the table now, because the saying of this wanted no width at all, “is the only reason that was ever worth anything. I stayed when staying was my employment. I stayed when staying was a contract with your solicitor’s seal on it.
And I am still here on the one morning in my life when there is not a single account in the world that requires it of me, and I find the staying weighs exactly the same as it did, which is to say it weighs nothing at all, because it was never a duty.
It was only ever a preference. You. For no use whatever. ”
“That is the most extravagant thing anyone has said to me, and I was once offered a dukedom.”
She tucked the deed under her arm. “The dukedom came with debts. I come with none, Your Grace, for the first time in my life, I offer you my heart freely, unconditionally, and entirely which you will find is the better bargain if you have the wit to know it.”
What was nearly a smile crossed him, in him a considerable event. “I have lately acquired a little of the wit. Late, as my father warned me, but acquired.”
He crossed the last of the floor and put his arms round her, in the library where they had first stood a careful inch apart over the household books, and held her with the firmness of one who had stopped expecting the embrace to be taken from him.
Outside the window the snow came down on the south lawn in earnest, and neither of them watched it.
She put the money to work within the month, because money that did nothing was only another locked room, and she had spent quite enough of her life inside those.
She set up a fund for the widows of the parish, who knew first-hand what a frozen jointure could do to a life.
She opened a standing account for the tenant women who lost a husband to a bad winter and stood to lose the roof to the same.
And she founded a small endowment for a charity that took in the children of women without the protections she had wedded into, so that no woman within reach of her purse need ever fold a nursery’s linen year on year against a child the world had decided she could not keep.
She did the arranging herself, at the satinwood desk Declan had given her, with the good light falling over the green leather till noon.
The letters went out in her own hand, and the answers came back, and once a fortnight a woman she had never met arrived at the kitchen door at Carrington with her life in a bundle and was given a place at the long table and a reason to believe the worst of it was behind her.
The cook fed them. Mrs. Croft had grown a great deal softer about the eyes since the larder filled, though she would have boxed the ears of anyone who said so.
“You are giving away a remarkable quantity of your own fortune,” Beatrice observed one afternoon, settled in the best chair by the best window, watching the morning’s letters go into the basket for the post. “I approve, naturally. One does merely note it.”
“I am spending it. There is a difference, and I find I mind the difference.” Renae kept her eyes on the direction she was writing.
“I had a great deal of grief once, Beatrice, and nowhere to put it but a wardrobe. I have decided to put it somewhere it might do some good instead. It is the only revenge I have ever wanted on the years I lost, that they should buy a few other women the thing I did not have.”
“That is not revenge, my dear.”
“No. I suppose it is not. It is only housekeeping, on a rather larger scale than I am used to.”
Beatrice watched the letters drop one by one into the basket. “You will make the county uncomfortable, you know. A duchess who hands her own money to women no one else will so much as name. They will not know where to seat you at dinner.”
“Then they may let me stand. I spent nine years seated very precisely, in the chair furthest from the fire, and I have lost all patience with the question of where a woman belongs at a table. Let them be uncomfortable. Discomfort is how a county learns a new thing, and they have plenty still to learn from me.”
“They will not thank you for the teaching,” Beatrice said, and set down her cup.
“No one has ever thanked me for a thing I did well, and I have stopped waiting on it.
I perform my duty simply because it demands to be done, leaving the matter of gratitude to chance or indifference.
Consequently, I rest far more soundly than those who lie awake, counting the cost of their own virtue and awaiting the world's applause.
***
The daughter arrived as the year closed, on a bright hard morning with snow lying clean across the south lawn, in the third-floor room that had stood shrouded and grey until a dusty woman threw the window up and chose to believe in a future.
She came loud, in a manner her grandfather would have approved of, and the house, long a stranger to the sound of a child, learned it again in a single afternoon and was the better for it.
The nurse pronounced her sound and red-faced and possessed of an excellent temper, by which the nurse meant a terrible one, and Renae held her against the place where, for ten years and two matrimonies she had carried only the weight of her own yearning.
She found Declan in the chair beside the cradle that evening, where he had been some hours, and from the look of him meant to stay some more.
“She is extremely loud,” he said.
“You have said that of everything you cherish for a year now. I begin to understand the phrase.”
“It is the only one I trust. The others overstate.” He had his finger caught in a very small fist and showed no inclination to recover it.
“I spent so many years in a house where a child was taught that being quiet was the same as being good. I should like this one to be loud her whole life and never once be told the noise is a fault. She ought to pass her youth in rooms that are enlivened by her very presence.”
Renae lifted the baby to her shoulder. “She will, and we will see to it between us. When she is loud at the dinner table, as she will be, you are not to send her a considerate tray in another room. You are to be loud back.”
“I am not certain I have it in me to be loud.”
She settled the child more comfortably in the crook of her arm.
“You went into a pond once, Your Grace. There is a loud man in you somewhere. He has only been kept very quiet by a house that did not deserve him, and I mean to let him out a little more each year, until our daughter has never once met the silent version of her father.”
He bent over the cradle rather than answer at once. “One would think, from your description, that I am a convict merely enjoying a brief respite for my obedience.”
“You are precisely that. The sentence was thirty years, the gaoler was a house, and the pardon was entirely my own doing, so I shall expect to be thanked for it daily, since no one thanks me for anything else.”
“Then it shall be our task to open all closed doors. There is no shortage of doors still barred against us.”
“We shall open all of them,” he said, and meant it as a vow, which was how he had learned to mean things.
Late that night, when the house had gone quiet around the new small noise at the heart of it, Renae walked the corridors with her sleeping daughter a fresh and astonishing weight against her shoulder.
She passed the breakfast room that held no silence any longer.
She passed the door of the yellow room three floors below the one she had papered in another house, the room that was a nursery in earnest now and would mean only joy in this one.
She passed the library where a duke had once handed a housekeeper a glove and contrived not to touch her hand, and she stopped there a moment in the dark and let herself remember the careful inch of air they had kept between them, and how little of it was left.
She was none of the things the world had spent two matrimonies trying to make her.
The cold house had wanted her for furniture, the frozen estate for a dependent widow, her own rescue for a woman who owed her rescuer gratitude and silence, and she had outlasted all three.
She had her name back and her money in it, and a door at her back that no longer locked, and she had weighed the whole of it that morning across a solicitor’s papers and chosen, with nothing left owing in any account on earth, to stay exactly where she was.
She drew the blanket closer round the child and carried her up the last flight to the warm room at the top of the warm house, and she went without once looking behind her to see whether anyone required it of her, because no one did, and the not needing to look was the sweetest thing the year had given her.
The End
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