Epilogue
They were married in the small church at Marcombe three weeks after the morning in the churchyard, beneath a hard, bright sky, with frost still white in the shadows of the graves.
There were no more people in the pews than the law and affection required, which was exactly as many as Elowen wanted.
She wore the one good blue.
Lucian had asked her, plainly, whether she wished the county assembled in its finery. He had waited for the true answer rather than supplying the easy one, and the true answer was no.
So there was no county, no splendour, and no long table at which two hundred people must be fed by a woman who would never sit down.
There was instead a breakfast for the household in the hall. Mrs Pike sat among the servants in her chair, her cap set perfectly straight. Amabel cried happily over the bride cake. Lady Seraphina said something dry enough to make the rector choke upon his wine.
It was, Elowen thought, the first celebration of her life that no one had required her to make possible.
It happened around her, and she stood at the centre of it and was glad.
The county talked, of course. A duke who married the gentlewoman who had managed his household furnished several months’ conversation in a single morning, and Elowen had braced herself for the lifted brows, the unanswered calls and the chilly civilities.
Very little came of it.
Lucian, who had spent most of his life explaining nothing to anyone, explained this without ever offering a word of explanation.
He carried his wife upon his arm into every drawing room in the neighbourhood as though the question of her worth had never occurred to him and would be a marked impertinence in anyone else.
The county, which took its opinions from the first house almost as readily as it took its fashions, soon discovered that it had always considered Miss Vane a most superior woman.
Lady Cressida Loxley called within the month and remained for the full half-hour. As she departed, she observed that she had long maintained the Duke of Marcombe possessed more sense than he was generally credited with, and that she was seldom wrong and never modest about it.
After Cressida had called, the rest followed with impressive speed.
But the standing that mattered was not the county’s, nor was it established in any drawing room.
It was established in her own house.
When something was to be decided, Elowen was asked.
Not consulted as a capable dependent might be consulted before being overruled by rank or figures. Asked as one half of the decision.
Felton brought the estate questions to them both and soon ceased to find anything remarkable in doing so.
The tenants who had learnt during the flood that Miss Vane was the person who came when something went wrong now curtsied or bowed to the Duchess and told her their troubles in the same breath.
They appeared to see no great difference between the women.
Elowen found that she did not either.
She changed the house.
She began with the bell-board.
She sat below stairs with Mrs Pike, who could still distinguish every bell by its voice, and together they drew up a new order.
The family bells were divided fairly among the upper servants, so that no one person ran the length of the house all day.
When the nursery should have need of its bell, two attendants would share its answering.
No bell was to ring after ten at night except in illness or genuine urgency.
The household discovered, with some surprise, that many wants could wait until morning.
Mrs Pike called the arrangement soft and kept the new list pinned beside her chair nevertheless.
When the housekeeper from Exeter arrived and proved sensible, Mrs Pike told her, “Her Grace has notions. They are not fool’s notions, mind, and you will oblige me by writing them down.”
From Mrs Pike, this amounted to a coronation.
The greater alteration was quieter.
Lucian learnt to notice before Elowen served.
It was harder than facing the county because it ran against the habits of a man who had spent his life mistaking silence for consideration. He had to learn when to offer help and when an offer would become an order merely because a duke had spoken it.
He was not always graceful.
He would enter a room and find Elowen already half-risen to attend to something.
“Sit,” he would say too abruptly. “It has been seen to.”
Then, hearing himself, he would stop.
“I asked Patty,” he would amend. “I am not ordering you. I saw that you meant to rise, and I thought you might prefer not to.”
Sometimes Elowen sat; sometimes she did not.
Years of habit could not be undone in a season, and Lucian learnt that allowing her to choose must include allowing her to choose differently from him.
***
He brought her tea himself on the first evening they spent alone at Marcombe as husband and wife.
She had not asked for it. She had been standing at the window of the Blue Morning Room, thinking along the old grooves: whether the fires were banked, whether Amabel had eaten, whether the doors below had been secured.
A list had begun to form in her mind when Lucian entered carrying a tray.
He set it down and poured with the same grave concentration she remembered from the night of the flood, as though tea were an unfamiliar rite requiring his entire attention.
Then he placed the cup in her hands. Not upon the table at her elbow, where it might cool while she attended to everything else. Into her hands.
The warmth rose through her fingers.
Lucian sat opposite with his own cup and did not watch to see whether she drank. That was what made it possible.
Elowen looked down at the tea.
“Drink it,” he said when she hesitated. “That was not an order.”
“It had the sound of one.”
“I am improving slowly.”
“You are.”
“No one wants anything,” he said. “The house will endure a quarter of an hour without you. I have that upon the authority of the woman who wrote the whole establishment down in a fair hand so that it might endure without her indefinitely.”
“I drank a hot cup once,” she said. “After the flood. You made it.”
“I remember.”
“It was very good.”
“It was strong enough to trot a mouse across.”
“That was its chief virtue.”
He turned his cup in its saucer.
“I mean there to be a great many more.”
Elowen looked up.
“More mice?”
“More cups of tea. Warm ones. Preferably drunk before the affairs of the county intervene.”
“That is a considerable ambition.”
“It is the most sensible one I have ever had.”
She lifted the cup.
Elowen Vane, who was Elowen Wycliffe now, Duchess of Marcombe, though she had not yet grown accustomed to the weight of either addition, drank her tea before the fires were banked, before the doors were locked, and before every other creature in the house had been seen to.
She drank it first.
It was hot, and strong, and made for her.
It was the best cup of tea she had ever had.
Amabel’s first full season came that spring, and she was a success.
She refused two respectable offers and one brilliant one because she had acquired the troublesome idea that she ought to be wanted for a reason a person could name rather than for eight thousand pounds and a pretty face. She announced that she would wait for such a reason, however long it took.
Elowen heard this, said nothing, and went into the garden with wet eyes.
She blamed the wind with considerable severity.
At night, in the first months, she sometimes woke in the warm room and waited out of habit for the house to summon her: a bell, a hurried step, the old certainty that somewhere a need had arisen and would become hers before anyone thought to ask.
The house remained quiet.
Beside her, Lucian slept, his breathing even in the darkness. Now and then, as though some part of him kept watch even in sleep, his hand would find hers beneath the coverlet and rest there.
Elowen would lie awake for a little while, listening to the silence and learning its new meaning. It was not a pause between demands, nor the stillness of a house waiting to require her again.
It was simply night.
By summer, she no longer woke so often. The Blue Morning Room was warm, the west garden had begun to flower again, and Marcombe had learnt that many things might wait until morning. Elowen had learnt it too.
When she did wake, Lucian was there beside her, and the house stood quiet around them.
This time, she did not wait for the house.
She closed her eyes and slept.
The End
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