Epilogue
One Year Later
“I am the best at this,” said Louisa.
“You are not digging,” said Gideon.
“I am supervising. Supervising is the hardest job and the most important one.”
“You are six.”
“Nearly six. Nearly six is different, as you would know had you ever been six and paid proper attention to it.”
April had come to Aldenmere, the beeches greening at the boundary and the east-garden roses showing their first leaves.
She was in the conservatory, which three weeks since had stopped being a drawing on a wall and become a room, glass to full height on the south face, the bench set where the morning light came in longest.
“How are they?” Gideon asked from the doorway. She had heard his step before she saw him, the cadence she could name anywhere in the house.
“Impatient. Like everything this spring.”
He came and stood beside her at the bench. “You have given the sweet peas the best of the light.”
“I have. They are an ungrateful flower and will take it as no more than their due.” She looked at him. “You knew the east wall would do this. You set the bench here on purpose, for the morning sun.”
“East light is steady and warm, and best for work that wants patience. It was not a difficult calculation.”
“You can name every plant in the east garden in Latin. Rosalind told me. She tested you on it.”
“I tested him,” said Rosalind, from the bench behind them, where she sat with her legs folded and a book open, thirteen now. “He passed. It was annoying.”
“I had a great deal of time at Aldenmere when I was young,” Gideon said, with the slight unevenness of having revealed more than he meant to. “One learns the names of things. It is a way of being in the world when the world has decided to keep you in one corner of it.”
Cecilia looked at him, at the boy that sentence contained, learning the Latin for things as a way of having anything at all, and thought again that his father had been wrong about all of it.
He reached over and moved one of the seedling trays six inches into the better light, without comment, and she watched him do it, and there it was, the small unthinking attentiveness that was the whole of him.
“Tabitha is composing again,” Rosalind said to her book. “You can hear it from here. It is better than the thing she wrote in February.”
“The music master used the word considerable,” Cecilia said.
“He used it twice. I was there. He also said it should not be delayed, which Uncle has taken so to heart that there is now a second master coming from the county town on Thursdays.”
“We are seeing to it,” Gideon agreed.
“Gideon, I need to tell you something.” He waited, which was what he did, giving a thing its due by not hurrying it. “I am going to need the conservatory, in roughly eight months, to be a good deal less full of seedlings.”
At that, he went very still. She watched his face with the close, clear attention she had given it since the day they met, and what moved across it was the largest thing she had ever seen there, a man for whom the word family had always been a thing that happened to other people, finding out that it was happening to him.
“Eight months,” he said.
“Approximately. Mr Hartwell is more certain of the approximate than I am, which is itself an argument for consulting him again.”
“Cecilia.”
Her name, only her name, as he said it when it was the one word the moment wanted.
“Are you going to cry?” said Rosalind, with interest, not looking up from her book.
“I am not,” said Gideon.
“You might. I should not hold it against you. It is, on the whole, a crying sort of occasion.”
“We are going to need a bigger room,” said Louisa, from the doorway, having been there long enough to reach the conclusion. “For the baby. The corner room on the second floor. It has the best light, and I have weighed all of them, and it is not close.”
“She is right,” Cecilia said. “It does have the best light.”
Gideon turned his face toward the south glass, toward the April garden, the roses coming in and the beeches in their ten days of new green, and breathed in the warm conservatory.
He went and told Mrs Fenn himself, which Cecilia had not asked him to do and which she heard about afterwards from Mrs Fenn, who related it with the particular sniff that was, in that woman, the outward sign of a heart entirely overcome.
“He came to the still-room,” Mrs Fenn said, scouring a pan that required no scouring, “and stood in the door the way he does, and said there was to be a child in the winter, and that he wished me to know it before the house did, because I had kept the house through the years when there was nothing in it to keep. And then he went off again before I could say a sensible word, which is as well, because I had not got one.” The pan rang under her cloth.
“I came to this house when it was full, and I stayed through it being empty, and I had made up my mind it would be empty when they carried me out of it. I had made up my mind about that. A person does, after long enough.” She set the pan down.
“I find I am glad to have been wrong. You may tell him so, or not, as you judge. I shall deny it either way.”
***
The summer turned the corner into autumn, and Cecilia grew unmistakable, and the house arranged itself around the fact, as houses do when a thing is coming that everyone has decided to be glad about.
Louisa appointed herself to the project entirely and reported daily on the corner room, which was painted, the cradle, which came down from an attic where it had waited out two generations, and the question of names, on which she held strong views and revised them weekly.
Tabitha played softer in the evenings, of her own accord, having decided the household wanted gentler music now, and was not told she was right because being told tended to make her stop.
Rosalind said little, watched everything and was found, more than once, sitting near Cecilia for no reason she would admit to.
A girl who had learned that the people you loved could be there one autumn and gone the next, keeping her own quiet inventory of a person she had decided to keep.
***
One October afternoon, Rosalind came and sat on the conservatory bench, which she did now without announcing a reason, and watched Cecilia thumb through the seed catalogue for the following spring.
“My uncle is teaching me the rents,” Rosalind said after a while. “The whole of it. Which tenant is behind and why, and which arrears are worth chasing and which are worth forgiving, and how to tell the difference between a man who will not pay and a man who cannot. He says I have a head for it.”
“You have a head for everything. It is occasionally exhausting to be near.”
“I have a head for this in particular.” She turned a corner of the catalogue down, marking nothing, only needing her hands occupied while she said the next part.
“I have been thinking. About the future. When I am grown. I do not want to be married off to the nearest convenient estate and spend my life being decorative in someone else’s drawing room.
I want my own. Land of my own, to be careful with, the way my uncle is careful.
He says there is no reason a woman cannot hold an estate and run it better than the men who inherit theirs and never trouble to learn what a field is for. ”
“He is right. And you would run it better than most of them.”
“I know I would. I told him so. He said that was the correct attitude and that I was not to let anyone talk me out of it, least of all a husband, should I ever decide one was worth the inconvenience.” A small pause.
“He talks to me as though I shall certainly have it, not as though it is a girl’s fancy he is humouring, but as though it is simply a thing that is going to happen, because I have decided it.
” She looked at the seedlings. “My father would have laughed. He laughed at most things I said. Uncle has never once laughed at the things that I am serious about. He only laughs at me when I am being ridiculous, which is fair, because I am sometimes.”
Cecilia set the catalogue down and did not make a great thing of it, that being the one certain way to send Rosalind back behind her composure. “Then you shall have your estate, and you shall be insufferable about your turnips, and we shall come and stay and be made to admire the drainage.”
“You shall be made to admire all of it,” Rosalind agreed.
“I shall give you the full tour, and you will not be permitted to leave until you have seen every ditch.” From the house, faint, came the pianoforte, Tabitha working at a difficult passage and losing it and going back, patient, again and again.
“She practises the hard part until it stops being the hard part,” Rosalind said.
“She told me that is the whole secret, and that people who wait to be good before they will be heard are simply afraid, and she has decided not to be.” A pause.
“I think she got that from you as well. None of us came here knowing it.”
***
Vane came in November, before the weather closed the roads, and let himself into the conservatory where Cecilia sat in the last of the afternoon light with her feet up on a stool Gideon had put there without being asked.
“I will not pretend,” said Vane, who had long since stopped asking whether he was welcome anywhere and now settled into the chair across from her on that comfortable assumption, “to be surprised. I arranged the marriage. A man who arranges a marriage takes a reasonable interest in its natural consequences and claims a portion of the credit for those as well.”
“You take credit for the harvest and the weather both, by your own account.”