Epilogue
One Year Later
Gavin stood at the dark window of the music room with the rain loud against it. “A year ago tonight, you came up that drive in a hired gig with a wet portfolio and the worst opinion of me that anyone has ever formed in under an hour.”
Elizabeth looked up from the fire. The long west windows had gone black with evening, the same windows their daughter had hidden behind a year and more ago to watch a drive she feared, and the room was warm, and the hearth was lit.
“My opinion of you was not the worst formed in under an hour,” she said. “Lady Carraway managed a worse one in about ten minutes, with a lorgnette, and she was wrong, and I was only premature. There is a difference. I came round. She has not, and dines on it still.”
“You came up the drive looking for wages,” he said.
“I gave you, instead, a locked face, a colder welcome than you deserved, and every reason to think Ravensmere had no place for you. I have spent the year since apologising for it in every way the language allows, and I find tonight I should like to apologise for it once more, formally, on the anniversary. I am sorry for the man I was when you came. I am sorrier still that you had to be brave before I had learnt to be kind.”
“You talk a great deal now, Gavin.” She said it the way she said most things to him these days, dry on the surface and warm all the way under. “Do you remember warning me, in the library, that you would say ‘I love you’ so often I would beg you for the old silence?”
“I remember.”
“You were wrong. Though I will own there are mornings when the abundance surprises me.”
“I am making up arrears. I was four years behind on a single sentence and a lifetime behind on the rest.”
He left the window at last and came to sit beside her on the settle, his shoulder against hers with no careful foot of distance left anywhere in him. The man who had once guarded an inch with a glove leant in now without seeming to know he did it. She noticed. She always noticed.
“Where is the house’s other loud member?”
“Upstairs, refusing bed, and winning, because Sally has no defences against her and never did. She has been at the pianoforte the whole afternoon, badly and with enormous confidence, which her music master tells me is the proper order in which to acquire the two qualities. She talked through the whole of it. She talks through everything now. There are days I can scarcely hear myself in this house for the pair of you.”
“Good,” Gavin said. “That is the sound I want the house to make. I had two years of the other sort. I will take loud, badly played, and talked through to the end of my days rather than have one more evening of that particular quiet.”
“Your aunt writes that the major has gone abroad,” Elizabeth said. “Matilda has it from a friend in town. Somewhere warm and cheap, where a man may live on the memory of his regimentals and no one has read the Gazette closely enough to cut him.”
“Does that satisfy you?”
“It does, oddly. I expected to want him ruined in some grander fashion. Instead, I find I want him three countries off and wholly irrelevant, which your aunt says is the most expensive revenge there is, because it costs you nothing and him the whole of everything.”
“My aunt is generally right, and unbearable about it, which is a family failing she shares with the rest of us.”
“And Lord Stannard comes Thursday. For Iris. He has asked whether he might bring her a pony, and I have said yes, and you are not to be jealous of the pony, Gavin. A child may have an uncle and a pony and a father all at once. The supply of her affection is not, it turns out, a fixed quantity to be fought over. There is more of her every year, not less, the more of us there are to love her.”
Iris came into the room on the word, in her nightgown, having defeated Sally as predicted.
She climbed onto the settle between them without being asked, into the warm space their bodies made and put her cold feet against her father’s leg with the casual tyranny of a child who had long ceased doubting her welcome.
“You are talking about when Mama came,” she announced. “I can tell. You always go soft in the face about it. Tell the part where I was under the piano, and she found me, and you did not know what to do.”
“I never know the part where I did not know what to do,” Gavin said. “I have struck it from the record. In my version of that night, I was masterful throughout.”
“You were not,” said Elizabeth and Iris together.
Iris shrieked with delight at the answer landing in unison, and Gavin bore it with the particular contentment of a man outnumbered by exactly the two people he would have chosen to be outnumbered by.
“Tell the part where you were cold and horrid,” Iris demanded, because it was her favourite, and she had the shape of it by heart.
“I was cold and horrid,” Gavin obliged. “And your mother thought me the least welcoming man in the county, which was not an unjust conclusion.”
“You stood about looking like a locked door,” Elizabeth said.
“I did. Then she stayed in spite of me, and opened the place by main force, and that is the whole of how you come to be on this settle with your cold feet on my leg.”
It was later, when Iris had finally gone up in her father’s arms, talking the whole way and asleep before the landing, that Elizabeth stood again at the window and looked out across the dark park.
“You are quiet,” Gavin said, behind her, having come back down. “Not troublingly quiet. But particular quiet.”
She smiled at the glass. “You have become difficult to deceive.”
“I have had instruction.”
“There is something I have been waiting to tell you. I sent for the physician this morning, Mr Naseby.”
He stilled.
She turned from the window then and put his hand where it would find the thing out without her having to shape the words at once, because there were still occasions, even in a house this loud, when a thing was better handed over than announced.
She watched the comprehension cross his face, slow at first, then all at once.
“In the spring,” she said. “Naseby thinks April.”
For a moment the man who had learnt to talk could not manage a word. Elizabeth let him have the silence. It was the good kind now, and she had no wish to crowd it.
“A child,” he said at last, unsteadily. “Ours.”
“Yes.”
His hand trembled against her. She covered it with hers.
“I am going to be unbearable about this,” he said. “I am going to talk of nothing else until April, and very probably for some years after. You may consider it fair warning.”
“I considered myself warned a year ago, in the library, and stayed anyway.”
He bent his head to hers.
“Be unbearable,” she said softly. “I find I have developed quite a tolerance. Now come up to bed and be it quietly, for once, because your daughter is asleep and your wife is tired, and there will be time enough tomorrow for you to have opinions about April.”
He laughed then, low and unguarded, and took her hand.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I shall have a great many.”
“I know.”
She led him from the window, and he followed her into the warm, noisy, chosen life they had made.
The End