Epilogue
One Year Later
“Acceptable,” Aunt Eugenie said, setting down her teacup with the decisive click of a woman who had been evaluating young men for forty years and who regarded the evaluation as a public service.
“He is acceptable. The chin is weak, but the character is not, and character outlasts chins, as I have had to observe in this family more than once. You may keep him, Cordelia.”
Cassie, seated beside her young man at the far end of the luncheon table, blushed to the roots of her hair and gripped Mr. Harding’s hand beneath the tablecloth.
Mr. Harding, who was a quiet solicitor’s son from Wiltshire with excellent manners and a complete absence of ambition to be anything other than kind, blushed with her but did not let go of her hand and did not look at the Dowager Duchess of Saintbury for longer than was strictly necessary.
Imogen watched from the head of the table, which was her table now, in her dining room, in her house, because Imogen Goodall was the Duchess of Ravenhurst and had been for ten months.
The betrothal luncheon had been Aunt Eugenie’s idea.
A small gathering at Ravenhurst Park, family only, the announcement to be made over cold chicken and champagne and Aunt Eugenie’s opinion, which was the same thing as a benediction and considerably harder to obtain.
Cassie had completed her second season under the Saintbury name, sponsored quietly, the sponsorship never traced to Ash, and the season had been everything the first season had not: successful, calm and uncontaminated by scandal.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Cassie had met Mr. Harding at a lending library in Bath and had fallen in love with him between the poetry shelves and the periodicals, and the falling had been mutual and gentle.
Ash was beside her. He was always beside her now, at meals, at events and in the long quiet evenings when the house settled around them, they sat together, in the warmth of proximity, in the particular gravity that two people who had survived the worst of each other exerted on each other’s orbits.
He had filled out again. The gauntness of the inn was gone, the hollows beneath his cheekbones restored, the coat fitting properly at the shoulders.
The library at Ravenhurst Park had been doubled in size.
This was the first thing Imogen had done as Duchess, before the redecorating and before the hiring of a second under-gardener to manage the rose garden that Cassie had fallen in love with during the house gathering.
The library had been expanded into the adjoining morning room, the wall removed, and the shelves extended.
The pawned volumes had been restored. The missing ones replaced by Ash’s solicitor, Mr. Briggs, at considerable expense.
Aunt Margery had taken a small house in Bath.
She was happier there than she had been in a decade, surrounded by other women of a certain age who shared her interests in camomile tea and lamp oil and the relative merits of different kinds of flannel.
She wrote weekly letters that were long, warm and full of details about her neighbors, her garden and the cat she had adopted, a large orange creature named General who ruled the household with the particular authority of an animal who understood that his comfort was the organizing principle of the establishment.
Bethany was at Ravenhurst for the autumn shooting, which was an event Bethany had no interest in attending and which she had attended anyway because Henry Frost was also attending.
Henry Frost was the reason Bethany had been smiling for three months, a development that Imogen and Ash had noticed and that they discussed in bed at night in the particular low voices of two people who were invested in the happiness of their friends and who were trying not to invest too visibly.
Frost and Bethany had met during their visits to Ash and Imogen, and Frost had discovered that a woman who had spent six seasons being cynical about rakes was also a woman who could be funny, warm and unexpectedly tender when she stopped being on guard.
Bethany had discovered that a man who was the conscience of a wager set was also a man who listened, who did not interrupt and who refilled her glass without being asked, and the discovery had been mutual and had produced letters and then more visits and then the autumn shooting.
Devlin was on the Continent and not spoken of.
His name had not been mentioned at Ravenhurst Park since the wedding, and the not-mentioning was not a rule but an instinct; the particular silence that settled over a household when a name was associated with damage that had been survived but not forgotten, and the silence was sufficient, and the sufficiency was its own form of justice.
That night, in their chambers, Ash was in bed beside her, propped on one elbow, his shirt off, the lamplight catching the lines of his body, while she was reading.
“Listen to this,” she said, and held up the Mayfair Tattler, which had arrived that morning with the post and which she had been saving for bedtime because bedtime was when she and Ash discussed the ton’s opinions of them
. “A small society item about the curious devotion of the once-wicked Duke of Ravenhurst to his bookish wife. The duke, it says, has not been seen at a single ball this season without the duchess on his arm, and the duchess, it notes, has been seen reading at three of them.”
“Only three?” Ash said. “I counted four. You read behind the Asquiths’ hydrangeas for twenty minutes.”
“The hydrangeas do not count. The hydrangeas were research.”
“The hydrangeas were Crébillon.”
“Crébillon is always research.”
He laughed. The real laugh, the one that had escaped at the Marchmont and had kept escaping ever since, the laugh that arrived without permission and that he no longer tried to catch, because catching it had been part of the old life and the old life was over.
His new life was freedom, and the freedom was hers as much as his, because she had given it to him, and he had earned it.
She set the Tattler down. He took it from her and dropped it on the floor, because the floor was where newspapers belonged when a man was in bed with the woman he loved, and the woman was wearing nothing under the quilt.
The lamp was low, the house was quiet, and there were plans to be made and the plans did not involve newspapers.
“We have plans,” she said.
“We do.”
“You are going to have to tell Aunt Eugenie.”
“I am aware.”
“She is going to have opinions.”
“She always has opinions. Her opinions are the highest compliments she gives.”
Imogen smiled and kissed him. He kissed her back.
The lamp burned low, the Tattler lay on the floor, and his father’s watch sat on the bedside table.
The carrying was over, because the watch had found its resting place, and the resting place was a bedside table in a room shared by two people who had come through the worst of each other and had stayed, and the staying was a story.
That story was not yet over, because they had a lifetime ahead to fill the pages of their book.
The End