Epilogue #3
“I had thought I would be angry,” she said at last. “I rehearsed being angry about it, in February, for the better part of an afternoon. I find this morning that I am not able to manage it. You did not do it to be thanked. No one was meant to know, and you instructed your own steward to keep your name off it, which is the opposite of the thing a man does when he is buying a woman’s gratitude against a future need of it.
You fed us through three winters and asked for nothing, and you did it while believing I had stopped waiting for you.
That is the part I cannot be angry at. A man who helps where he expects to be refused is not managing anyone.
He is only being kind in the dark, where it is hardest, because no one claps for it. ”
“It did not save the estate.”
“No. Three settled accounts do not undo a decade of poor rents, and I have read the rents, so I know to the shilling what they did not do. They were never going to be the thing that saved us. They were the thing that meant my mother did not weep over the apothecary’s bill the winter she could not breathe.
I shall not pretend that is a small office.
I have done the arithmetic of that winter more often than I care to count, and your Mr Marsh is in it. ”
“You may scold me for the secrecy. I have left you the room to.”
“I shall keep the room and decline the scolding. The secrecy was the kindest part of it. I have been helped openly by a great many people who wished to be seen helping me, and I have loathed every one of them for it, gently, in the way one hates a draught. You are the only person who ever helped me and arranged for me not to find out. I shall allow the departed to keep his good name. He did better work in this family than most of the living.”
She was quiet for some moments. The river at the end of the lawn had not yet broken into the small mist that would come up in another hour, and the high south window showed the country very clear and very still.
In her left hand, which she had not been able to think of for the past two minutes, the book sat with the inscription open.
She set it down on the table beside the case.
“The girl you knew.”
“Yes.”
“She was not, on the whole, the girl you have got.”
“No. She was a different woman. I am very fond of her. I have not, in all the years since I saw her in your father’s orchard, stopped being fond of her.
I have however come, in the year you and I have had to know each other again, into a different fondness.
The girl was very brave. She was two and twenty and certain.
The woman is seven and twenty and is not entirely certain of anything, and has, in the past three days, told me she is not entirely certain she should have agreed to the second sermon at the church door, on the grounds that the first was sufficient.
I treasure the girl, Melody. I hold the woman in my highest esteem more.
I shall not be sorry for it. The girl had not yet learned to walk into a room she did not own.
The woman has walked into a great many. I am wedded this morning to the woman who has walked into them, and not to the girl I sat with under the apple branches.
The girl I shall keep in the library. The woman I shall keep in the rest of the house. ”
She turned at last and looked at him.
“That was the longest sentence you have made me in these past months, Your Grace.”
“It was. I had been working on it since February.”
“You have improved upon the inscription,” she said.
“I had not meant to. I shall not, in any case, write it in. The improvement is for the woman. The inscription is for the girl.”
“I see.”
He held out his hand.
He did not take her hand. He held his own out, palm up, the way a man holds out a hand when he is asking for something and is not certain whether he will be given it.
The hand was the right hand. He had taken off the glove.
The cuff of his linen had been set back at the wrist as a man sets the cuff back when he is about to do work in a stable, and the glove was on the table by the case where he had taken it off when he came into the library.
He held the hand out very slowly. The slowness of it gave her the half-second she required to decide to come halfway, and she came halfway.
Her own hand, ungloved since she had taken her gloves off in the gallery at half past nine, came up to meet his, and she put her hand into his hand at the rate at which his hand had been offered, and they met in the middle of the library at the rate that was theirs.
His hand closed over hers.
She did not, for a moment, look at his face.
She looked at the inscribed book on the small table by the second window, and the leather case beside it, and the two of them sitting on the polished wood of the table where she had set them three months ago and not been able, until this morning, to come into the room with him present beside them.
The inscription had been answered. The room had no business, this morning, with any further work.
And this time, when Cole Armstrong reached for her hand, there was no room left in the world for anyone to call her forgotten.
The End