Epilogue #2
“I take credit for everything that turns out well within a day’s ride of me.
It is a simple philosophy, and it has never once failed to gratify me.
” He looked at her, and the lightness went out of it by a degree.
“He wrote four pages to me. Gideon, who used to write me one line and consider it extravagant. Four pages, about a corner room and the light in it, and whether a winter child would take cold by the north stair, and a great many calculations concerning the placement of a cradle that I doubt any infant in the history of the world has ever required. I read it twice, and then I sat a while.” He turned the brim of his hat in his hands.
“I have known him since we were young. I knew him when his father was alive, which I would not wish on anyone, the knowing or the man. I did not think I would live to read four pages from him about the light in a room.”
“He does not know he does it,” Cecilia said. “The light. He arranges every room I am in toward the best of it, and has done so since the beginning, and would tell you it was a simple calculation.”
“It is the least simple calculation he has ever made, and the only one he refuses to see the size of.” Vane set the hat aside.
“I came to say a thing, and I shall say it plainly, because I have noticed the two of you conduct half this marriage in things left unsaid, and I have no patience for the fashion. When the child comes, I should like to stand as godfather. I have no children of my own and shall have none, by settled inclination, and I find I should like to be the one who turns up twice a year with unsuitable gifts and opinions no one asked for. I am well qualified. I have been doing precisely that for these three already, without the office to justify it.”
“You should ask him, not me.”
“I am asking you because you will tell me the truth, and he will tell me a calculation.” He waited. “Well, then?”
“He would be glad of it,” Cecilia said. “He would never find the words to say how glad, and he would say something dry instead, and you would both pretend that was the whole of it. Yes. Ask him. He will accept in the worst possible way and mean it more than either of you will be able to bear out loud.”
“That,” said Vane, satisfied, settling back, “is the answer I rode two days for.”
***
The child came in the second week of January, in a hard, clean cold that held the county still, and came without the disaster Gideon had spent eight months silently arranging against, which Mr Hartwell remarked upon as though it were ordinary, because to him it was.
A boy. Cecilia held him in the corner room with the best light, in the grey of a winter morning, and Gideon stood at the side of the bed, having entirely run out of the composure he had been issued at birth and never spent until now.
“You may hold him,” she said. “He is not made of anything that breaks easily. He is, in point of fact, extremely cross, which I am told is a sign of robust health.”
He took the child, careful past all reason, as though catching something falling. The boy considered him with the unfocused outrage of the newly arrived, and Gideon looked down at him for a long time and said none of the things crossing his face.
“His name,” said Louisa, who had been admitted on strict terms and was using every second of it, “should be decided by someone who has weighed the options. I have weighed them.”
“I am sure you have.”
“Edmund. It is a good name. It is dignified, and it cannot be made foolish, which is important, because boys will try. I have considered the alternatives at length, and Edmund is not close.”
Cecilia looked at Gideon. “Edmund?”
“Edmund,” he agreed, and the matter, in the way of matters Louisa had decided, was settled.
***
They christened him in the village church in March, on a raw bright day, with the whole household turned out and Mrs Fenn in a bonnet that had not seen daylight in decades.
Vane stood godfather, and held the boy at the font with an unfamiliar carefulness, and made, for once in his life, no remark, which Cecilia counted as the single most eloquent thing she had ever known him to do.
Afterwards, on the church step, with Edmund returned to his mother and roaring his opinion of the cold water to the entire parish, Vane recovered himself.
“He has lungs,” Vane observed. “He gets those from no one in this family. You are all of you tragically composed.”
“You may take the credit,” said Gideon.
“I shall. I take credit for the lungs, the christening, the weather, which held, and the entire institution of godparenthood, which I have improved merely by entering it.” He looked at Gideon, at the child, and at the family ranged on the church step in the March light.
“I am glad,” he said simply. “That is all. I am glad, and I do not say it often, and I shall not say it again, so you had both best have heard it.”
“We heard it,” Cecilia said.
“Good. That is settled, then.” He put his hat back on. “Then I shall require feeding, godfather’s privilege, and Mrs Fenn has made the seed cake, and I did not ride two days in March to stand about being sincere on a church step.”
They went home to the house that had been dark for ten years but was not dark now, and Tabitha played, Louisa instructed everyone, and Rosalind added the day to the inventory she kept of the people who had stayed.
***
It was at the county assembly in April, the first Cecilia had attended since Edmund came, that she saw Lady Foskett.
She had not known the woman would be there, but would have gone all the same.
Eight years of standing at the edge of other people’s evenings had cured her of any wish to hide at the edge of her own.
She was crossing the floor on Gideon’s arm toward Mrs Alderton when the particular cold that the back of the neck keeps for old enemies climbed her, and she turned.
There she was, Lady Foskett, in last season’s silk made over to pass for this one, seated among the lesser gentry near the door, where a woman went when her invitation was a courtesy, and everyone in the room understood it to be one.
For one moment, the old reflex moved in Cecilia, the eight-year habit of making herself small, useful and unobjectionable in that woman’s eyeline. It moved, and then it died, quietly, of disuse.
Lady Foskett rose. She had to, a duchess being present, and the having-to was written in every inch of the rising. “Your Grace,” she said, and the curtsey she gave was correct to the last degree and cost her, plainly, a great deal.
“Lady Foskett.” Cecilia inclined her head the precise amount the difference between them now required, which was not much, and was exact. “I had not known you were in the county.”
“My sister’s people are near Alderton. I am visiting.
” A pause, in which the woman’s eyes went over the silk Cecilia wore, the duke at her side, the ease of her, taking the inventory she had always taken and finding, this time, nothing in it she could use.
“You look very well. Marriage appears to have agreed with you, against the odds.”
“It has agreed with me entirely. I have a husband I am fond of, four children, a garden, and a great deal of work that is my own. I find it suits me better than I was ever given to expect I deserved.” She said it without heat, an accurate finding rather than a blow, which made it worse, and she watched it land that way.
“You once asked me a question in your breakfast room, the morning you put me out of your house. Who else would have me? Do you remember it?”
Lady Foskett’s mouth opened and shut. “I am sure I never said any such thing.”