Epilogue
Juliana’s letter arrived on the Tuesday before Christmas.
Sophia opened it at the Lockwood breakfast table while Roland ate his toast and read Mr. Lockwood’s paper, which Mr. Lockwood had surrendered without complaint and which Roland had accepted without ceremony, the two of them having arrived at a comfortable arrangement about the paper on the second morning that had been in place ever since.
The letter was four pages, which was Juliana at full extension.
The first chapter is better than anything in the first book, Juliana had written, and I say this knowing it will give you an insufferable three days.
The argument in Chapter Six about the nature of observation versus participation is the most honest thing you have written and I expect you know it.
I have three objections to the ending which I will raise at dinner on Thursday when you cannot put me aside by returning the letter.
On a separate matter entirely: Sebastian says Roland is welcome to the east field for the morning if he wants a proper ride.
He does not say this to be kind. He says it because the east field is the best ground on the estate and Sebastian gives people things he values.
The final line, at the bottom of the fourth page, in slightly different ink, added after the rest had been sealed and then reopened:
I am very glad, Sophia. That is all.
Sophia folded the letter and held it for a moment.
“Good?” Roland said, not looking up from the paper.
“Three objections to the ending,” Sophia said.
“That sounds like Juliana.”
“It is entirely Juliana.” She set the letter beside her cup. “Sebastian is offering you the east field.”
Roland lowered the paper. “Is he.”
“He does not say it to be kind,” she said. “He says it because it is the best ground on the estate.”
Roland looked at her for a moment, something quieter than a smile passing across his face and meaning considerably more. Then he returned to the paper and said, as though it were of no great significance: “I find I like your family.”
“I know,” she said. “They find they like you.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, still looking at the paper: “My mother sent a letter. She hopes the weather holds and asks whether we will come for dinner on the third of January. She wishes to invite your parents as well, if they would be amenable.”
Sophia looked at him. “My parents.”
“She wishes to know them better. Apparently this is something she has decided.” He turned a page. “I believe this is progress.”
“Considerable progress,” Sophia said. “Six months ago she would not have asked.”
“No,” Roland said. “She would not.”
He said nothing further. He did not need to.
The post had been busy that week. Louisa’s letter had arrived the day before, from the Ashworth estate in Hampshire, where she and Philip were spending their first Christmas as a married couple.
She had written four pages about the ongoing battle that was the Ashworth library reorganisation, along with their Christmas plans and Philip’s father, who apparently held equally strong opinions about the arrangement of the dinner table.
She had also mentioned, in the middle of the second page as though it were not significant, that Genevieve Ashcombe had married in October.
A widower from Northumberland with a quiet manner and a good estate.
Louisa had attended the wedding and reported that Genevieve had looked well and seemed content, and that was all she had said about it, which was exactly right.
At the end, in slightly different ink: I miss you. Come in January.
Sophia had written back that morning, before breakfast: January. Without question.
* * *
Beatrice arrived that afternoon with Henry and Mary, who had spent the twenty-minute drive from the Sterling estate conducting a sustained negotiation about the rabbit.
The rabbit, the cloth rabbit that had attended every family occasion for two years, had been left on the hall table at the Sterling house when they departed, discovered to be missing approximately four minutes into the journey, and retrieved by the groom at considerable inconvenience to the carriage’s schedule.
Mrs. Lockwood appeared from the drawing room. “Roland, would you help Henry with the cases? The groom has his hands full with Mary’s requirements.”
Beatrice came through the Lockwood door with Mary on her hip and looked at Sophia with direct, warm affection.
She had managed the morning and was glad to have done so, gladder still to be here.
Then she looked past Sophia into the drawing room, which Sophia and her mother had rearranged that morning to accommodate the additional guests.
Beatrice set Mary down. She looked at the room. She looked at the chairs by the fire, which Sophia and Roland had moved the previous evening to better receive the east window light.
“The chairs,” Beatrice said.
“They were in the wrong place,” Sophia said.
“They have been in that place for twenty years.”
“They were wrong for twenty years,” Sophia said. “The light from the east window—”
“I know where the light comes from,” Beatrice said. “I grew up in this house.”
“Then you will understand the correction.”
Beatrice looked at the chairs. She looked at Sophia. She looked at Roland, who had come in from the hall and now stood in the doorway with the quiet, familiar look he always wore when Sophia and her sisters were deep in conversation and he had decided not to enter it.
“You moved them together,” Beatrice said.
“Yes,” Sophia said.
A pause. Beatrice studied the chairs carefully. For her, the arrangement of a room was never a casual matter.
“The angle is better,” she said. She did not say Sophia was right. She did not need to.
She picked up Mary and went upstairs, and Sophia turned to find Roland in the doorway, a brief unguarded smile passing across his face. She said nothing and he said nothing and the house went on around them.
* * *
By Christmas Eve, Lockwood was full exactly as it should be.
Juliana and Sebastian had arrived the previous afternoon with William and Rose.
William was five and had become absorbed by horses sometime in the autumn, in the thorough way he became absorbed by things, and had been saving a question since October about whether a grey horse was always faster than a bay or only sometimes.
He had heard someone mention the steeplechase in his hearing and had been holding the question ever since, waiting for the right person.
He delivered it to Roland in the hall within four minutes of arrival, before his coat was properly off, to Roland’s apparent satisfaction and William’s complete delight.
Rose was three and considered every room she entered to require immediate improvement.
Sebastian had looked at the east field in the morning, read the drainage on the lower end, and had said something briefly to Roland about it that had produced a conversation between the two of them which ran for forty minutes and which Sophia tracked from the window without being able to hear a word, watching them walk the field boundary together, easy with each other, having decided they got on.
Henry Sterling was quieter than the rest of the house but steadily present, attending to things before they were asked, adjusting the fire when it needed adjusting, carrying Rose up the stairs when she fell asleep in the drawing room without being asked and without drawing attention to the carrying.
Beatrice watched him do all of this with the settled gladness Henry still produced in her, even now, after everything that had brought them here.
Mary had reached the age of three-and-a-half and was conducting a campaign for the possession of William’s toy horse that showed considerable strategic sophistication.
Mrs. Lockwood managed the whole of it, her pleasure visible.
Her house was full of the people it was meant to contain.
She cried twice and denied it both times.
Mr. Lockwood moved through the rooms quietly satisfied.
He had reached the age at which a full table was the only thing he had ever really wanted, and he had it now, and he knew it.
At dinner on Christmas Eve they were nine at the table: Mr. and Mrs. Lockwood, Juliana and Sebastian, Beatrice and Henry, Sophia and Roland, and the question of whether Beatrice had been right about the chairs, which had apparently not been resolved to her satisfaction and which she raised again over the soup.
“The angle is improved,” Beatrice said. “I said so. But the distance from the fire is now wrong.”
“The distance from the fire is the same as it was,” Sophia said.
“It is not. They are six inches further from the hearth.”
“They are exactly where they were when we moved them.”
“I measured.”
“You measured the chairs,” Roland said. Not a question.
Beatrice looked at him. “I had a moment,” she said.
Henry said, into his soup: “She measured twice.”
A sound went around the table that in another household might have been called laughter.
Mr. Lockwood set down his spoon and looked at the table, the candles, the faces, the full noise of people who loved each other and were not always graceful about it, and said well, which contained everything at once.
Mrs. Lockwood looked at her daughters and pressed her lips together very firmly.
After dinner the men sat briefly with their port and the children were managed toward sleep by a combination of negotiation and mild deception, and the drawing room assumed the comfortable end-of-evening ease of people who had eaten well and were content to be together without requiring the conversation to do any particular work.
Sophia found herself beside Roland on the settee at the far end of the room, slightly apart from the rest. It was not by any arrangement, only the natural drift of the evening. Two people who had learned each other’s gravity tended to end up in the same place without ever deciding to.
He was looking at the fire. His coat was off and his cravat slightly loosened, the small disarray of a man at the end of an evening spent in his wife’s family home, and she was aware of him with the same completeness she had felt since April of the previous year, unchanged by time and no longer something she cared to conceal.
She leaned against him.
Not performatively, simply because he was there and warm and she had been in company for six hours and he was the thing at the end of company, the place she was heading toward whenever the room allowed.
She felt him register it in the slight shift of his body toward hers, and his arm came around her shoulders without ceremony, the way he did all things that were real to him.
Across the room Beatrice was telling Henry something about the chairs, gesturing to demonstrate the six inches, and Henry was listening with patient attention despite clearly having no opinions whatsoever about chairs.
Juliana was reading. At some point in the last hour she had produced a book from nowhere, which generally meant she had decided the evening no longer required active management from her.
Sebastian watched the fire, entirely at ease in the familiar room.
William had come downstairs once to ask Roland a question about horses that could not wait until morning and had been answered and returned to bed apparently satisfied.
Rose had not come downstairs because she had fallen asleep abruptly and without appeal, having decided the evening was over and acted on the decision immediately.
Mary’s rabbit was on the mantelpiece where it had been placed for safety three hours ago.
“Three objections to the ending,” Roland said quietly.
“Mm,” Sophia said.
“What are they.”
“She will tell me Thursday,” she said. “I expect one is the last chapter and one is something structural in the middle and one is a word I used twice that she noticed and I didn’t.”
“Will she be right?”
Sophia thought about it. “Probably about the word,” she said. “Possibly about the structural thing. The last chapter she will be wrong about but I will not win the argument.”
“Because she is wrong in an interesting way.”
She looked up at him. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
“The third one is better,” he said. “Than the first two.”
She looked at him. “You have read twelve pages.”
“I have read the first chapter three times.” He paused. “It is better.”
She had spent the winter writing it from exactly where she was, inside the life, entirely inside it, and she had not yet told anyone except Roland, who had said good and moved the desk chair to improve the morning light without being asked.
He held her gaze for a moment, and she found herself thinking that she no longer searched him for glimpses of something real beneath the surface. She trusted the reality of him now.
She looked at the room — her parents, her sisters, their husbands, the fire, the mantelpiece, the rabbit left beside the hearth — and felt the evening settle around her so completely that she stopped trying to turn it into anything other than itself.
She leaned more fully into Roland’s side.
His hand was warm on her shoulder. Outside the frost lay on the fields and the elms were stripped back and the long dark of a country Christmas lay over everything.
Inside the candles burned and the fire held and her father was asleep in his chair and her mother had noticed and had decided not to remark on it, and Beatrice had finally conceded something about the chairs and Henry had looked at the ceiling briefly and said nothing, and Juliana had turned a page.
“I am glad we came,” Roland said, into her hair.
“We will come every Christmas,” she said.
A pause. “Yes,” he said. “I thought so.”
She could hear the smile in it, brief and unmistakably his. She did not look up to confirm it. She already knew it was there.
The fire murmured softly in the grate. The room went on around them, warm and full and exactly itself.
Sophia Colville sat in the middle of it.