Epilogue
One Year Later
“She has your dramatic timing,” Jane said.
Henrietta Margaret Bennister, called Hen by everyone who cherished her and Her Grace by Mrs. Vale on the grounds that a proper title did not have an age requirement, was three months old and had already shown a capacity for disrupting the household that rivalled her mother’s first visit to Aldermere’s kitchen.
Thomas held his daughter in the crook of his arm with the careful, focused attention he had once given to questions about cold stores and sleeping arrangements, the quality of the attention unchanged and only its object altered, and the object was at present attempting to seize his cravat with both fists.
“She has your aim,” Thomas said, disentangling the cravat from fingers surprisingly strong for their size.
“She has a great deal of both of us, I am afraid, which the county will find alarming in about sixteen years.” Jane came to stand beside him and let Hen catch one of her fingers instead. “Listen to the house, Thomas. Do you hear it?”
“I hear our daughter deciding whether to cry.”
“I hear the house. It used to be silent, and it is not silent now, and I do not think you have quite noticed it because you have been inside the change while it happened.” She tilted her head toward the corridor, where a maid’s footsteps and a snatch of Whitlock’s whistling carried up the stairwell.
“A year ago this passage made no sound at all. Now it carries voices, yours and mine and hers, and the carrying has done something to the house that I cannot name but can hear.”
“It is warmer,” Thomas agreed, after a moment.
“Not transformed. I will not pretend it has turned from a monument into a picture of domestic contentment overnight, because it has not. But it is alive in a way it was not, and I find I had forgotten what a house sounds like when someone has left a window open in it.”
“Henry’s door is still open, I noticed.”
“It has been open since the night I turned the key, and it will stay open.” He shifted Hen against his shoulder.
“Mrs. Croft airs the room every week and gives it the same care she gives every other, and I have asked her to leave the riding gloves on the windowsill exactly where they are. The dust cloths are gone and the book is shelved, but the gloves stay. Some things are meant to remain where they were set down.”
“I think Henry would have thought highly of her.” Jane said, nodding at Hen. “I do believe he would have been a terrible influence and taught her to ride before she could walk and you would have despaired of them both.”
“He would have.” Something moved across Thomas’s face that was grief and was also, now, something gentler than grief had been allowed to be for a long while.
“He would have spoiled her without mercy, and I would have allowed him, and that is the first time I have been able to say a sentence about my brother that did not cost me anything to finish.”
Jane did not make a remark of it, because she had learned that the surest way to chase such a sentence back into him was to admire it aloud.
She only leaned her head against his arm, and for a little while neither of them said anything, and the not-saying was comfortable in the way the house had become comfortable.
“Louisa writes that she and Philip mean to come for a fortnight at Michaelmas,” she said eventually.
“Philip has taken to spending his weekends here, which I did not foresee. Louisa insists on it, of course, but I believe he has discovered, somewhat to his own surprise, that he enjoys the company of a brother-in-law who listens a good deal more than he speaks.”
“You speak more than you did.”
“Among the family, yes. I will never have the careless abundance other men seem to produce without effort, and I find I have no wish for it. The speaking simply no longer costs me what it once did, which is enough.” He looked down at his daughter.
“I speak to you at breakfast, and to Hen in the nursery, who is an excellent listener on the grounds that she has no opinions yet, and to Louisa when she comes, and even to Philip, which a year ago I would not have predicted of any man.”
“And Margaret and Mrs. Vale? I had a letter from Margaret that mentioned, very casually, that she and Mrs. Vale had taken a joint subscription to a London culinary journal, which I believe is the most romantic thing my sister has ever done.”
“They will both deny to their graves that they are friends,” Thomas said.
“They call it professional respect, and the professional respect appears to consist of a steady correspondence about recipes, a shared journal, and a standing invitation for Margaret to use our kitchens whenever the bakehouse ovens cannot keep up.”
“Which is often now,” Jane said, and could not keep the pride out of it.
“The bakery’s name was restored at the assembly and Margaret has kept it polished ever since, and it has outgrown a village bakehouse entirely.
My grandmother started it with bread and funeral biscuits, and now there is a duchess fielding letters about it in her morning room, and I do not know what my grandmother would make of that, except that I think she would tell me not to let it go to my head. ”
“And Lottie? You have been suspiciously quiet about Lottie.”
“Lottie is being courted.” Jane’s mouth curved.
“By a curate named Mr. Fenton, who buys far more buns than any single clergyman can reasonably eat and turns the colour of a radish whenever she looks at him directly. I have met him and I approve of him, cautiously, in the way an older sister is obliged to approve of a younger sister’s suitor, which is to say I approve of his character and his kindness and I am reserving my judgement on his conversation, since at present the blushing has rather limited it. ”
“You approve of a man who cannot speak in your sister’s presence,” Thomas observed. “I find I am the last person entitled to hold that against him.”
Jane laughed, and Hen, startled by the sound, opened her eyes very wide and then, deciding the laugh was a friendly development, attempted to eat her mother’s finger.
The End
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