Epilogue #3
“You did. I have had some time to consider my answer, and I find it is this. A great many people, as it turns out. I had only been kept somewhere it suited a person to keep me cheap.” Cecilia smiled, and it was a kind smile, which was the cruellest available to her and the only one she wanted.
“I hope your sister’s people are very good to you.
I hope someone is. Good evening, Lady Foskett. ”
And she turned on Gideon’s arm and walked on toward Mrs Alderton, and did not look back to see how the woman took it, and that was a luxury eight years in the buying.
Gideon said nothing until they had crossed the room. Then, low, with the dry precision that was entirely his, he said: “That was very well done. I had been prepared to be coldly civil to her on your behalf for the better part of an hour. You have spared us both.”
“I have wanted to say it for nine years. It was shorter than I expected and better.”
“The best things generally are.” He looked down at her, and something was working behind the composure, a thing he had been carrying for some while and had clearly decided this was the night to set down.
“I have done something. I ought to have asked you first, but I find I had no wish to, because you would have told me it was too much, and I wished for once to do a thing that was too much before you could stop me.”
“That is the most alarming sentence you have ever spoken to me, and you once told me there was a counter-petition.”
“It is less alarming than that. It is a great deal more expensive.” He drew her a little aside, out of the press of the room, into the quiet by the long windows.
“When you were a girl, before the debts, you read about places. You told me once, very late, in the library, that there had been a book of engravings of the Swiss lakes, and that you had wanted, more than you had wanted anything you were willing to name, to stand on the shore of the Lake of Geneva and watch the mountains come down to the water, and that you had put it away long ago as the sort of wanting a sensible woman does not keep, because being sensible was cheaper than being disappointed.”
Cecilia stood very still. “I do not remember telling you that.”
“You told me. I have kept a list of the things you have decided not to want. It is a short list, and I have been adding to it since the first autumn, for the same reason you keep yours.” He was watching her face.
“We are going. In June, when the boy is old enough to leave with Mrs Fenn and his sisters, who have already drawn up a schedule of his care that runs to four pages and is more rigorous than anything Phelps has ever drafted. I have taken a house above the lake at Geneva for the summer. We will go down through France, and we will stand on that shore, and you will watch the mountains come down to the water, because you wanted it once and decided you could not have it. I have spent my whole life deciding that about everything, and I am finished doing it, for you and for myself both.”
She found she could not, for a moment, command her voice. “The children.”
“They will survive six weeks of being run by Louisa, who has been training for the office since birth. Rosalind will manage the estate correspondence, which I have been letting her do in any case, and will be unbearable about how well she did it, and will be right. Tabitha will practise the hard parts until they stop being hard. And Vane has volunteered to descend upon them at intervals and undo whatever good we have done, which is the office of a godfather, and he means to discharge it thoroughly.” His hand found hers.
“I have arranged everything. I have arranged it the way I arrange everything, in advance and in detail and telling no one, and for once in my life, I have arranged it toward a thing instead of against one. Say yes, Cecilia. I have left you almost nothing to object to, and I should very much like to watch you fail to find the objection.”
“You have thought of everything.”
“I have thought of one thing, repeatedly, for eleven years, and the rest followed from it.” He paused. “Will you come and see your lake?”
“Yes,” she said, when she could. “Yes, of course I will come and see my lake. You impossible man, you have made me cry in the Alderton assembly rooms, which I shall never be forgiven for, and which I find I do not mind in the least.”
***
They went in June, and stood on the shore above Geneva in the long gold evening with the mountains coming down to the water exactly as the book of engravings had promised a poor girl many years ago.
Cecilia stood in the circle of her husband’s arm and looked at the thing she had decided, long ago and for very good reasons, that she would never be permitted to have, but finally had it.
And when they came home in August, brown and rested and full of it, the house was standing, the children were thriving, and Louisa’s schedule had held to the letter.
Mrs Fenn pretended she had not counted the days, and Gideon stood that first evening back in the conservatory doorway with his son on his shoulder, his wife beside him and the sweet peas climbing the south glass in the last of the summer light.
He was home, and had been, he understood now, since the first autumn, since a penniless woman with a level voice walked into his dark house and began, without asking his leave, to let the light in.
The End