Epilogue
Three months later, Viscountess Woodmere stood in the front drawing room with a bowl of hothouse roses in her arms and a footman waiting in visible terror.
“On the central table, my lady?” he asked.
Genny considered the light, the carpet, the obedient arrangement of chairs Harrison had approved that morning, and the precise spot where the roses would annoy him most beautifully.
“No,” she said. “In the breakfast room.”
The footman blinked. “The breakfast room?”
“The light flatters them there.”
Behind her, Harrison’s voice said, “The roses do not breakfast.”
Genny turned and smiled at her husband. “Not with that attitude. You never know what flowers might accomplish if properly encouraged.”
The footman wisely departed with the bowl before his viscount could offer a competing instruction.
The Woodmere town house looked very handsome that morning, though Genny considered it too obediently arranged in places.
Harrison had insisted the front drawing room be put to rights before guests arrived for Esme’s small musicale, and she stood in the doorway now with her hands on her hips, studying the result with the expression of a woman confronting unnecessary order.
Sunlight spilled across the carpet in pale spring bars and turned the gilt-framed mirrors along the wall to gold.
The pianoforte stood open. Trays of cakes waited in the adjoining room.
A footman crossed to adjust the curtains.
A maid laid fresh sheets of music upon the pianoforte.
Somewhere upstairs Lady Redford was likely changing her gloves for the third time and declaring the world too poorly arranged for her comfort.
Genny considered the room once more and decided it lacked a touch of life.
Not much. Only a little.
She crossed to the nearest bergère, dragged it a foot closer to the windows where the light fell more kindly, shifted a porcelain shepherdess a little to the left, and stepped back.
“That,” she announced to no one in particular, “is better.”
“It is different,” Harrison said from behind her.
Genny turned.
He stood in the doorway with an account book in one hand and an expression that had become one of her great private pleasures: patient resignation softened by unmistakable affection.
Marriage had not diminished his gravity, his tidy habits, or the dry precision of his observations.
But the old restraint had warmed. His control no longer felt like a wall, but a structure in which she was invited to make mischief.
He was, as always, absurdly handsome in dark blue.
This remained inconvenient. One could not think clearly when confronted with such unfairness of appearance.
Genny smiled. “I have improved it.”
“I thought we had long since agreed that improvement and movement are not always identical.”
“We agreed no such thing. You said it repeatedly. That is not the same.”
His mouth twitched. “The chair was not unhappy where it stood.”
“The chair was languishing in mediocrity.”
“It is now a little farther into the room.”
“Yes,” Genny said. “Where it may at last fulfill its potential.”
Harrison crossed toward her with that measured stride of his which still, three months into marriage, had the power to send foolish little ripples of awareness through her. He paused beside the chair, looked at it, then at the porcelain shepherdess, then at her.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well what?”
“Do you deny the room is improved?”
He took his time answering, which meant he was enjoying himself.
“I deny,” he said at last, “that a chair may be said to possess unrealized ambition.”
“That is because you have never looked closely enough at furniture.”
“On the contrary. I look at it constantly. Usually because my wife has shifted it.”
Genny laughed and went up on her toes to kiss him, because if a woman could not interrupt domestic debates with affection in her own drawing room, she scarcely saw the point of matrimony.
He kissed her back at once, the account book forgotten, one hand settling at her waist with easy familiarity. In that gesture was desire, tenderness, and the rightness of being known and still wanted.
When he lifted his head, his eyes had softened.
“You are very distracting in daylight,” he said.
Genny considered this. “Only in daylight?”
His hand tightened slightly at her waist. “You know that is not what I meant.”
“Yes,” she said, satisfied. “But it is very enjoyable to make you say things twice.”
“That, unfortunately, I have observed.”
She was still smiling when Lady Redford swept into the room without knocking, followed by Redford and Lady Louisa, both of whom halted with gratifying swiftness at the sight before them.
Lady Redford clapped once with immense satisfaction. “There. I told Mama they had become insufferably happy.”
Redford leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. “Insufferably happy I could have borne. It is the air of smug conspiracy between them that concerns me.”
Louisa, more charitable and therefore no less amused, looked from the moved chair to Harrison. “Has the furniture survived the marriage?”
“Barely,” said Harrison.
Genny stepped away from him with all the dignity of a viscountess who had just been found kissing her husband before guests. “The furniture is thriving.”
Esme gave the chair one sharp glance. “It has been moved.”
Harrison looked at his sister. “You see my trials.”
“I see,” Esme said, “that for a man who once reorganized an entire flower arrangement by symmetry, you have grown remarkably willing to be improved.”
Genny laughed outright.
Harrison sighed with the patience of a man long resigned to familial betrayal. “I am surrounded by women who misuse the language of order to justify personal whims.”
“That,” Redford said, strolling in at last, “sounds like marriage in its most successful form.”
Louisa moved closer and kissed Genny’s cheek. “You look happy.”
The words were simple, but they landed with quiet force.
Happy.
The answer rose before she spoke it, not bright and brittle as performance, but deep and steady enough to loosen something behind her breastbone.
Once, happiness had felt like a performance, something bright to hold up before anyone looked too closely.
This did not.
This was Harrison’s hand finding the small of her back as he passed. It was his account book left open because he had paused to ask her opinion and waited for it. It was laughter without armor, and silence he did not mistake for emptiness.
“Yes,” she said, and because all of them knew her well enough to hear the truth in it, she did not need to ornament the answer further. “I am.”
Esme’s expression softened at once. Redford’s too, though he disguised it by reaching for a cake. Louisa smiled as though she had expected nothing less.
The moment might have turned sentimental if Niall Foxmere had not entered behind them and said, “Good Lord. It is worse than I feared. Woodmere looks content.”
That ruined any danger of tears and restored the room properly to laughter.
The musicale itself passed in excellent order, though Genny did move one chair again while Harrison was distracted by subscriptions for a new charitable lending library Esme had decided all respectable society must now support.
He noticed, of course. He always noticed.
But instead of correcting it at once, he merely looked across the room at her, and in that look was such helpless affection that Genny felt something inside her soften all over again.
Later, after the last guest had departed and the house had gone quiet, she found him in the library with his coat discarded, his cravat loosened, and one of her own stray notes tucked absurdly between the pages of a ledger where it clearly did not belong.
She leaned in the doorway and smiled. “You have my paper.”
He glanced up. “You left it in my study.”
“It says remember the flowers for Lady Penworth.”
“Yes.”
“Then why is it among the estate accounts?”
Something softened in his expression. “Because I was distracted.”
The note lay between columns of figures, absurd and beloved.
Genny crossed to him slowly. “My poor lord. What an exhausting condition.”
“It would be more exhausting,” he said, drawing her gently between his knees, “if I disliked it.”
“And do you?”
He looked up at her with that grave, steady tenderness that still had the power to undo her completely. Even now, safely married and loved, her breath caught at the sight of it.
“No,” he said. “Not in the least.”
Genny bent and kissed him, her hands settling at his shoulders, the library dim and quiet around them. Somewhere upstairs a maid closed the shutters. Somewhere in the mews a carriage rattled past. Ordinary sounds. An ordinary evening.
Genny rested her hands on his shoulders and felt the sweetness settle around them.
When she drew back, Harrison rested his forehead lightly against hers.
“The flowers were sent, I hope?” she asked.
“They were.”
“And the chair in the drawing room?”
He gave a long-suffering sigh. “May remain where you put it.”
Genny smiled in triumph. “You do love me.”
“With astonishingly poor judgment,” he agreed.
“On the contrary. Your judgment, on this single matter, is flawless.”
He laughed then, low and warm.
Outside, spring deepened over London. Inside, Viscount and Viscountess Woodmere remained in the library a while longer, the ledgers neglected, the flowers sent, the furniture imperfectly arranged, and the future before them lively, untidy, and entirely their own.
Genny thought it exactly as marriage ought to be.