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It was several months later that Genevieve stood at the top of the front steps and listened to the sound of the departing carriage fading down the drive. The creak of wheels, the rhythm of hooves, the diminishing quality of a large noise becoming a small one and then nothing at all, and felt the night settle around her in the way that nights settled after events: the house breathing out, the candles still burning in the windows behind her, the garden dark and quiet beyond the gravel, and everywhere the pleasant, bone-deep exhaustion of an evening that had gone well.
It had gone well. Better than well. She was still slightly surprised by that, trying not to show it yet suspecting she was not entirely succeeding.
“Genevieve.”
Lady Harrington was behind her in the doorway, still upright and composed at an hour when most women her age would have retired long since, because her constitution appeared to operate according to principles that ordinary biology had not been consulted about.
“It was a very good evening,” she said. It was not the sort of statement she made easily, and Genevieve had learned to receive her compliments without diminishing them, which had taken some practice. “You managed it well. All of it.”
“I had a great deal of help.”
“You always have help available to you. You chose to use it wisely, which is the part that is actually your accomplishment.” She looked at Genevieve with an expression that was, by her standards, warm. “Your first ball. There will be others. I expect they will all be managed equally well.” She paused. “Good night, Genevieve.”
“Good night, Grandmamma.”
Genevieve listened to her footsteps on the stairs and then the settling quiet of the house absorbing her departure. She remained on the steps a little while longer and looked at the dark garden and felt, in its simple, uncomplicated fullness, happy.
Caroline’s carriage had been the second to last.
They had stood in the hallway for longer than was strictly necessary for a goodbye, which was how it always was with Caroline, who treated departures as an opportunity for everything that had not been said during the evening proper.
“You look happy,” Caroline had said warmly at the door.
“I am happy,” Genevieve replied.
“I know.” Caroline smiled at her. “It looks very well on you. Both of you.” She glanced past Genevieve to where Thomas was standing with Samuel near the foot of the stairs, engaged in the kind of conversation that men conducted at the end of evenings, easy and unhurried, neither of them apparently concerned about the hour. “Right. I am going before I start saying more things than are necessary.” She squeezed Genevieve’s hands. “Write to me.”
“Always.”
She left. Her carriage departed with the brisk efficiency of a woman who, having decided to leave, did not linger over it, and Genevieve turned back to find Samuel making his way toward her across the hallway.
“Wonderful evening,” he said, with the straightforward warmth of a man who did not ornament his compliments. “You should be very pleased.”
“I am very pleased.”
He smiled at her, and there was in his smile, as there always was, the uncomplicated quality of genuine friendship, the warmth of someone who wished her well in the simple and complete way that people wished well for those they actually liked. She was grateful for it.
Thomas appeared beside her. He had the look he had at the end of evenings. Slightly loosened from the day, the ease of a man in his own house after a good night. He put his hand at the small of her back with the naturalness of long habit, though it was not, in fact, long habit at all, merely a habit practiced with such consistency and sincerity that it had the quality of something that had always been true.
“Have a safe ride,” Thomas said.
“Always.” Samuel shook his hand and went out into the night with the ease of a man who has had a good evening and sees no reason to complicate its ending.
Thomas watched him go. Then he looked at Genevieve, and the look was the one she was still, months later, not entirely accustomed to. Open and direct and entirely, straightforwardly hers.
“Ready?” he said.
“More than ready,” she said.
The bedchambers were quiet and warm, the fire banked down to a comfortable glow, someone having seen to it earlier in the evening in anticipation of a late return. Genevieve sat at her dressing table and began the process of removing pins from her hair. She had learned to do without assistance on most occasions, and she found, after long evenings, a kind of meditative pleasure. It was the gradual dismantling of the formal self, the return to something simpler.
Thomas appeared in the mirror behind her, still in his evening coat, in the process of removing his cuffs with the distracted efficiency of a man whose mind was elsewhere.
“No one said a word,” he said. “Did you notice?”
“I noticed.” She found another pin. “The whole evening.”
“Not a whisper. Not from anyone.”
“Mrs. Hargreaves made a point of telling me how well she thought we seemed,” Genevieve said. “Which a month ago would have been the kind of thing she said while meaning the opposite. Tonight I think she simply meant it.”
Thomas set his cuff links on the dresser and looked at her in the mirror with an expression of quiet satisfaction that she found she liked very much.
“Mother’s letter arrived last week,” Genevieve said. “She said Clarissa has settled in London. With the Ashworths, mother’s cousins, you will remember them. She says she is very well.”
Thomas was quiet for a moment.
“Do you believe her?”
“I believe she is doing what she does, which is finding her feet in a new situation and making it work through force of will and good bone structure.” She set a pin on the dressing table. “I hope she is well. I hope she finds something that makes her genuinely happy, whatever that looks like for her.” She paused. “I do not want her anywhere near us, and I do not want to correspond with her in any meaningful way, and I think those positions are entirely compatible with also wishing her well.”
“They are,” Thomas said.
“She made one more attempt, apparently. Someone told Caroline there had been some renewed version of the old gossip, just before Clarissa left for London. Something about our marriage being—” She made a small gesture. “Whatever she’d decided to say this time.”
“I heard something about it.”
“It lasted approximately a week.” Genevieve looked at herself in the mirror. “I think it’s done. I think we have seen the last of it.”
“I think so too.” Thomas came to stand behind her, and met her eyes in the mirror, and the look was warm and steady and entirely familiar in the way she had never quite stopped marveling at. That she had such a specific ease with the person who looked at her like that.
“It’s a good feeling.”
“It is.” She set down the last pin and turned to face him. “Actually, I am rather glad it’s done now. The timing is—” She stopped. She had been thinking about when to say it all evening. “The timing is convenient.”
Thomas looked at her.
“Convenient,” he repeated.
“I went to see Dr. Hale on Wednesday,” she said. “I had been wondering, for a few weeks. I wanted to be certain before I said anything.” She looked at him steadily, with the smile she had not quite been able to contain since Wednesday. The one that kept appearing at inconvenient moments during conversations and over dinner and once very nearly during a discussion of estate drainage that had not warranted a smile of that quality at all. “We are going to have a baby, Thomas.”
The silence that followed was not long. He crossed the distance between them in two steps and took her hands, looking at her face as though he was checking that it was real, as though the fact of her and the fact of it were things he needed to verify with his own eyes.
“Are you—” He stopped. “Are you well? Are you—”
“I am perfectly well. Better than well.” She laughed at his expression, which was doing a great many things simultaneously. “Dr. Hale says everything is as it should be.”
“A baby,” he said, as though the word required repetition to be made real.
“In the autumn, he thinks. Late autumn. Maybe early winter.” She looked at him. “I kept thinking about the garden. I know that sounds foolish, but I kept thinking about it being finished by then, or close to it, and there being somewhere for them to… I had this image of a child running through it. Several children, eventually. Running through the garden we built, in the house that’s ours, and I thought—” She stopped, because the smile had arrived again in full force and was making it difficult to be coherent. “I thought that was a very good thing to be building toward.”
Thomas looked at her for a moment. Then he did something he did not do often, which was to say nothing at all and simply pull her close, and she let him, and rested her head against his chest and felt his arms around her and the warmth of the room and the quiet of the house settling around them.
“Several children,” he said, into her hair.
“At least several.”
“Running through the garden.”
“Through the rose arbor specifically. I have very clear ideas about the rose arbor.”
She felt him laugh, the laugh that happens in the chest, that she could feel rather than simply hear.
“Of course you do.”
“I have opinions about most things.”
“You do.” He drew back enough to look at her, and his face was still doing that thing, the joy of it, the uncomplicated fullness of it.
She looked at him, at the face she knew, that she had learned over months and was still learning, that she intended to spend a very long time continuing to learn. The fire had burned lower.
“I love you,” she said. It was still, sometimes, slightly remarkable to say it simply, without calculation or management or the old careful hedging. She had been practicing simplicity. She was getting better at it.
“I love you too,” Thomas said, with the directness he had been practicing too. He was also getting better at it.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back, and the fire burned quietly and the house was still around them, and outside the garden grew in the dark, patient and unhurried, becoming what it was always going to become.
OFFER: A BRAND NEW SERIES AND 2 FREEBIES FOR YOU!
Grab my new series, "Love and Yearning in the Ton ", and get 2 FREE novels as a gift! Have a look here!
Hello there, my dear readers. I hope you enjoyed the book and this Extended Epilogue! I will be waiting for your comments. Thank you! 🙂
Lovely story and intelligent writing.
Peaceful read. Found it hard to put down.
Dinner will be somewhat late tonight.