Epilogue
SIX MONTHS LATER
The cottage had a pear tree.
Kenneth noticed it as the carriage rounded the final bend of the lane, a young thing planted close to the front wall where it would catch the southern light, its branches already thick with the clustered blossoms of mid-April.
George Mercer stood beneath it with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and his collar loosened.
“They’re here!”
Freddie had the carriage door open before the wheels stopped.
“Mama, come look, they’ve got a pond!”
Kenneth watched Alice gather her skirts and step down from the carriage, watched the small unconscious turn of her mouth when Freddie’s hand found hers and pulled.
The warmth that spread through his chest was not the restless heat of the first months, but something steadier, something that had found its bearings and was no longer asking permission to exist.
Rachel met them at the door. Alice crossed the threshold and reached for her sister, and Kenneth hung back, because the reunion required nothing from him except his absence from the center of it.
He watched Alice’s hand come to rest on the baby’s head, watched her face soften when Rachel shifted the bundle into her arms.
“Sebastian,” Rachel said. “After Bach. George refused to consider anything less canonical.”
“I suggested Handel,” George offered from the doorway, where he was gripping Freddie by the collar. “She overruled me. She overrules me on most things. I gather it’s the natural order.”
“It is,” Alice said, without looking up from the baby’s face.
Charlie had come to stand beside Kenneth. He studied the infant with the measured scrutiny he applied to all subjects warranting proper examination.
“He’s very small,” he noted.
“You were smaller,” Kenneth told him.
Charlie looked up. His green eyes held a question he did not ask.
Kenneth placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and left it there. The weight of his palm on the small bones beneath was answer enough.
“Come,” Rachel urged. “Sebastian could use some fresh air. Let us have tea in the garden.”
They had barely reached the steps when a carriage stopped in front of the gate.
Lord Peltbury climbed down with the stiff, uncertain movements of a man arriving at a place he had not been invited to for a long time and was no longer sure of the protocol.
He carried a parcel. It was wrapped badly, the paper creased where his grip had tightened, and the sight of it, the plain effort of a man who had never purchased a gift for a grandchild and had clearly attempted it without assistance, settled something in Kenneth’s chest that he had not expected to settle.
He watched Alice rise from the table. Watched Rachel’s face move through surprise and wariness and then something more cautious than either, the guarded willingness of a daughter who had been hurt and had not yet decided whether the hand being extended was the same one that struck.
“I have been a poor father.” Peltbury addressed neither daughter and both.
The parcel hung at his side. “These months without you have made that difficult to ignore.” His jaw worked once, a motion Kenneth recognized.
The recognition carried its own weight, because he understood what it cost a man to stand in a garden and admit that the structure he had built his authority upon was the thing that had cost him everything worth having.
“I should like to make amends. If you will permit it.”
Rachel looked at Alice. Alice looked at Kenneth, a glance so brief it would have been invisible to anyone who had not spent months learning to read her. What he read was not a request for guidance, but confirmation that the decision she had already made was the right one.
“Then sit down,” Alice said to her father. “You are just in time for tea.”
It was not forgiveness, but a beginning nonetheless.
She pulled a chair to the table, and her father sat in it. Rachel placed Sebastian in his arms carefully.
Peltbury looked down at the infant, and his face came apart in a way that was terrible and necessary, and which Kenneth permitted himself to witness from across the table without comment.
Charlie leaned against his side, and Kenneth put an arm around him.
The afternoon settled around them.
They arrived at Bearmoor House in the last of the evening light, the April dusk stretching long across the hills in shades of amber and violet that the boys, asleep against Alice’s shoulders in the carriage, did not see.
Kenneth carried them upstairs, one in each arm, their weights familiar, the warm slack heaviness of children who had burned through a day of cousin-meeting and pond-investigating and grandfather-assessing and had nothing left to give the waking world. Alice walked beside him.
She pulled back the coverlets, and he lowered each boy into his bed.
Freddie’s eyes cracked open. “Is Sebastian going to visit us?” he mumbled.
“When he’s older,” Alice said.
“I’ll teach him about the pond.”
“You do not have a pond, Frederick,” Kenneth said.
“I will,” Freddie said, then his eyes closed.
Alice smoothed Charlie’s hair, listened to his breathing, and then they left the room and closed the door behind them.
The corridor was quiet.
Six months ago, Kenneth had stood in a corridor much like this one and listened to her through a wall and believed listening was enough.
He turned to his wife. She was already looking at him.
“Come to bed,” she said.
The bedroom door closed behind them. The fire had been laid by a maid and burned low in the grate, casting the room in the warm half-light he had come to associate with the hours that belonged only to them, after the household and the boys and the world had been set aside.
Alice turned to him at the foot of the bed, and his hands found the fastenings at the back of her gown before the thought had fully formed, his fingers working the buttons deftly.
She reached for him. Her hands found his cravat, pulling the knot free, then his shirt, drawing it over his head. Her palms pressed against his chest, the heat of them seeping through his skin to settle behind his ribs.
He lowered his mouth to the crook of her neck, tasting salt and verbena and the warm scent beneath both that was uniquely her. The sound she made against his ear was low and knowing, stripped of everything tentative, and he felt it at the base of his spine.
He lifted her. Her legs wrapped around his waist, her arms circling his neck, and he turned and sat on the edge of the bed with her in his lap.
The position settled her weight against him without adjustment, her thighs braced on either side of his hips, the heat between them immediate and encompassing.
His hands settled on her waist, his thumbs tracing the curve she had spent years concealing beneath high-necked gowns and careful fabrics.
The fullness of her under his hands, the softness and the weight and the devastating warmth of her skin, undid him so thoroughly that he could no longer recall the shape of the man who had existed before.
His mouth found her collarbone, and she arched into the contact, her fingers tightening in his hair. When he lowered his lips to the swell of her breasts, where the firelight pooled gold on her skin, her breath caught and her hips moved against him with a purpose he answered without thought.
She braced her hands on his shoulders and sank onto him, slow and deliberate. The sound that left his mouth carried nothing of language. It was the sound of a man losing the last shred of control and discovering, in the loss, that control was never what he wanted.
She moved, and his hands tightened on her hips. The firelight danced across her skin in shades of gold and amber.
He watched her, watched the fall of her hair across her shoulders and the tilt of her head as the pleasure built, watched her neck flush.
He pressed his mouth there and felt her pulse against his lips, and the rhythm between them deepened into something that made every thought in his mind melt away.
“Look at me,” she said.
He looked. Her eyes were open, hazel and gold in the low light. She held his gaze and moved against him, and the want on her face was not the want of the woman in the garden or the attic or the bath.
He gripped her hips and pulled her closer, and her breath fractured. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, and the rhythm between them accelerated, building in long waves that wound tighter with each stroke.
When she arched against him and his name broke from her mouth across two syllables, he followed her with his face pressed into her throat and his arms locked around her back. The pleasure crested through both of them with a force of a grand wave.
She stayed in his lap, her forehead pressed against his, her breathing rough and slowing, her hands still gripping his shoulders.
The fire shifted in the grate. The room settled around them, warm and quiet and entirely theirs.
Her hand moved from his shoulder to his chest. She pressed her palm flat against his breastbone, over his heart, the way she had done on the night of the fire, with the same weight and precision, and a new quality of attention he could feel in the deliberateness of her fingers.
“Kenneth.”
“Yes?”
She took his hand from her hip and brought it to her stomach.
“Are you certain?” he asked softly. His voice was rough, and the roughness carried things he could not trust to cleaner speech.
“Since February.” Her thumb traced a slow line across his knuckles. “I wanted to be sure. And I wanted,” she said, her voice shifting into the register that cost her, the one with nothing between it and the meaning, “to tell you in a room where you could hear it, not through a wall.”
His forehead pressed against hers, and he breathed in the scent of her, the warmth of her, the steady, staggering fact of her.
“Then I hear you,” he rasped.
His hand spread wide across her stomach, his fingers spanning the place where the future had already begun, and she covered his hand with both of hers.
The End?