Epilogue
One Week Later
He did not wear the patch to Thornbury.
Leonora had been braced for an argument about it and did not get one. He came down on Saturday morning in his coat with his face bare, stopped in the hall, and said, “Well?”
“You will be looked at.”
“I am aware.”
“Not the way you have been looked at before. This will be worse, because they will be doing it kindly.” She straightened his neckcloth, which did not need straightening. “You may put it on in the carriage, and nobody in this house would think a word of it.”
“I know. That is rather why I am not going to.”
The county looked. Of course, it looked.
There was a bad ten minutes at the rail near the tents during which a woman Leonora had never met spoke the words Your Grace, how very and then stopped dead in the middle of the sentence with her mouth gaping open, and Colin said, “It is fifteen years old, ma’am, and it does not hurt.
You may look at it as long as you like,” and the woman burst into tears and had to be led away by her husband.
“That went well,” Leonora drawled.
“It did, actually.”
“You made a woman cry at the races.”
“She was not crying over my face. She was crying because somebody had said something true out loud at a public event and she had not expected it and did not know where to put it.” He tucked her hand in the crook of his arm.
“It is much easier than I was led to believe. I have been assured for fifteen years that the world would not stand it, but the world does not seem to have noticed.”
“The world has noticed,” Leonora said. “The world is going to talk about nothing else until Michaelmas. But it is going to talk about it behind you, which is the only version anybody gets. I am extremely proud of you, and I intend to say so at intervals all afternoon.”
“Please don’t.”
“At intervals.”
There was a worse moment an hour later. Leonora saw it coming and could do nothing about it.
A familiar stranger came along the rail with two others, stopped, looked, and said in the dramatic voice of a man performing for his friends, “Good God. So it is true.”
Leonora’s hand tightened on her husband’s arm.
“It is,” Colin confirmed. “Fifteen years. Was there anything else?”
The man, who had come expecting either a growl or retreat and had been handed a civil sentence instead, stood there with his mouth slightly open, before saying something about running bets and scurrying away.
“That was extraordinary,” Leonora remarked.
“That was the whole trick, and I have only just learned it.” Colin was watching the man retreat.
“They have nothing to say. Not one of them. They have been frightening me for fifteen years with a thing they have never once had to put into words, and the moment you say it for them, they are left standing in a field with their hats in their hands.”
The Belmonts arrived in a body at noon and made the whole business easier by being incapable of tact.
Augusta looked at his face for four straight seconds, said, “Oh, it is nothing like they said,” and asked whether he had brought the rules. Lord Huntington shook his hand and did not glance at it once. Evan glanced, nodded, and said, “Right,” and then asked him about the fourth race.
Only Marina got it right. She came up to his other side at the rail and said without a preamble, “It suits you better. And that is not a kindness, that is an opinion, and I have never given anybody a kindness in my life.”
Leonora went looking for the chestnut mare before the fifth round. She had the card out before the runners came down.
“She is not in it.”
“Who is not in it?”
“The chestnut mare with the white leg, the one who came last by twelve lengths last month. I have read this card three times, and she is not entered.” She turned it over. “Colin, she is not here.”
“Perhaps she is being rested.”
“Nobody rests a horse like that. They run her every fortnight until she cannot, and then they sell her, and I know exactly what she is sold for.” Leonora rose.
“She had her ears forward the whole way round. She thought it was a treat. And now she is not on this card, and I am never going to find out what happened to her. I shall think about it for the rest of my life.”
She stopped, because she had said all of that at a public rail with six hundred people within thirty feet, and because her entire family was standing behind her.
“Oh,” she gasped into her glove. “For heaven’s sake.”
“Here.”
“I am perfectly—”
“Here.” Colin put a handkerchief in her hand and stood between her and the rest of the world.
And Leonora, one-and-twenty years old, a duchess of six weeks, blew her nose at the Thornbury races about a horse she had seen once.
“You must think me ridiculous.”
“No,” Colin assured her.
“You are being very calm about this.”
“I am being extremely calm about it.”
Leonora looked up at him, and his expression gave her pause. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Colin Walford.”
“I have done nothing,” Colin said. “And I would be obliged if you would stop looking at me like that in a public place, because your mother is forty feet away and she is extremely quick.”
They got back home at six, and it took the two of them and Mrs. Pike ten minutes to establish that a crawling baby and a running cat could not be caught at the same time by fewer than four people.
“She is under the sofa,” Leonora said, on her knees.
“She is not under the sofa. She is behind it, and so is Mercutio. I believe they have come to an arrangement.”
“Then get behind the sofa.”
“I am a duke of England.”
“You are a man with sawdust in his hair who was a gull on Tuesday,” Leonora snorted. “Get behind the sofa.”
Colin was halfway behind the sofa, with the baby’s ankle in one hand and the cat in the other, when Peg came in and said, “Begging your pardon, Your Grace. The horse has arrived.”
Colin came out from behind the sofa.
“What horse?” Leonora asked.
“His Grace’s new horse, Your Grace. She’s in the yard. Tom’s walking her.”
She looked at Colin, who had gone entirely expressionless, which she had learned to read a month ago as the single most incriminating thing his face could do.
“Colin.”
“I bought a horse. Men buy horses.”
“You bought a horse today.”
“I bought a horse last month, at the races, from a man in a brown coat who was extremely glad to be rid of her, and I have been paying her keep at the Green ever since because there was no earthly way of getting her into this house without you finding out.” He put the baby and the cat down.
“She cannot go fast. She is not going to be able to go fast at any point in her life. She is eleven years old, entirely sound, and has the best manners of any mare I have ever seen. She is yours. You may take her out at a walk for the next fifteen years and never once be asked to do anything else.”
Leonora was at a loss for words.
“You stood at a rail last month,” Colin continued, “in front of six hundred people, and you could not speak for a moment about a mare that did not know she was losing, and then you told me she thought it was a treat. I am not clever about a great many things, but I did understand that.”
Leonora flew across the room, wrapped both arms around his neck, and kissed him. His mouth, his cheek, his scar, all the way up, and then anywhere she could reach, until he was laughing and trying (not very hard) to hold her off.
“You are ridiculous.”
“I am extremely ridiculous.”
“There was a letter, too,” Colin said into her hair. “From Italy. This morning. I did not want to give it to you before the races.”
“What does he say?”
“Nothing you have not read for yourself. Florence, the vineyard, the woman who is not appalling.” He turned the page over.
“And this at the end, which was not in the last one. That when Katherine is grown, he would like her to know him as the best uncle a girl could have.” Colin’s voice hitched.
“Because she already has the best father.”
Leonora pressed her hand flat against his chest. “He is not wrong. And when he does come home, he will find that nobody in this house is counting. It will take him about a fortnight to believe it, and then he will cry somewhere he thinks nobody can see, and Marina will see, because Marina sees everything.”
“You have a great deal of confidence in a man you have never met.”
“I have met his handwriting, his daughter, and his brother,” she said. “I have been married to his brother for six weeks, and I should like it noted that I have never once been wrong about a Walford.”
At that moment, two separate weights butted hard against their ankles. They looked down to find a baby and an orange cat sitting side by side, in a state of open mutiny about the delay.
They each picked one up.
“I love you,” Leonora said.
“I love you,” Colin returned. “And there is pear on your sleeve.”
And the four of them went in for dinner.
The End?