Extended Epilogue
Two years later
Nicholas entered the nursery so softly she barely heard him. Amelia raised her tired eyes from the crib, communicating wordlessly to the nursemaid to leave them for a moment.
A gentle evening light fell in square patters on the carpeted floor. An open window emitted a draft of country air, gently swaying the paper cranes over the child’s crib.
“Are they quite cross with me for abandoning my seat at dinner?” Amelia asked Nicholas as he approached.
He glanced lovingly into the crib. “They understand.”
“It is the first time we have been together in so long. Aunt and Uncle. Mary-Ann and the Marquess. Philippa and George. Your brother and all those friends of his.” Like she was lying at the side of a pool, Amelia let her hand drift over her baby’s sleeping form. “Such a colicky little creature,” she repeated in Louise’s voice.
“A slight for which I have still not forgiven Lady Tate.” Nicholas frowned playfully, stroking Amelia’s hair. “My son is no creature. I shall not pronounce myself on his condition. He is perfect in my eyes.”
Amelia’s heart warmed at the plain devotion he showed their son. It had taken many months to become with child, and both her pregnancy and the birth had tested her body’s limits. Nicholas had been right in that regard. She had barely been strong enough to support a pregnancy. But with Louise’s help, they had made it through.
And by God, what a worthwhile experience.
“I cannot bear to be apart from him,” Amelia whispered, stroking her baby’s soft pale cheek. She brushed his frizzy brown hair, relishing the peaceful rise and fall of his sleeping form. “Little Augie…”
She sighed happily as Nicholas squeezed her shoulder. “Come now, let him sleep,” he whispered. “They have retired to the drawing room and await you.”
Downstairs, the sound of happy conversation and laughter drifted through the renovated halls of Riverside Court. Nicholas entered first, holding the door open for Amelia. Beatrice caught her eye immediately, bidding her to sit beside her.
“How is he?” she asked Amelia, while Nicholas asked the footman to prepare a drink for his wife. “Such a sweet boy. He reminds me so much of Freddy when he was a babe.”
“The eyes,” Amelia agreed, thinking fondly of her brother. “Speaking of, do you receive word from them often?”
“Oh, heavens no.” Beatrice laughed. “I do not think his wife cares for us much up here in Oxford.”
“Aunt Beatrice,” Amelia protested, shocked. “I am sure that is not the case. The viscountess is an extremely busy woman. And Freddy has more than his hands full with the Whigs at present.”
Nicholas returned with a glass of ratafia for Amelia. She took it gladly, thanking him quietly as he departed to join the marquess and Benjamin in a game of Whist.
When Amelia glanced back at Beatrice, her aunt’s eyes glistened with tears.
“Whatever is the matter?” Amelia whispered, placing a hand discreetly on Beatrice’s knee.
Her aunt pulled a handkerchief from her bosom and dabbed her face. “Oh, nothing. It is only… If you had told me two years ago that I would be sitting here beside you in a home like this, with little Augustus upstairs… I doubt I would have believed it. I only wish… You know what I wish.”
Amelia nodded, smiling sadly. “I would like to think they know,” she murmured, mind flashing with memories of Bright Corner—now razed to the ground to accommodate the construction of another, much greater orphanage. “But we all make choices for ourselves.”
“Of course, you are right. I am being a sentimental old fool.” Beatrice blew her nose, then reached for her ratafia. “I think that is what makes me happiest—to know that he saw in you a bravery that we unknowingly tried to smother. I could ask for nothing more for you.”
I could ask for nothing more for myself.
***
Nicholas blew the smoke from his cigar into the air. He had been smoking with Samuel and his London friends from the upper-floor balcony, staring across the new gardens behind Riverside Court.
He started as footsteps sounded behind him, turning to find Amelia approaching.
“Caught me,” he joked, wagging his cigar in the air.
He took another puff as Amelia settled beside him, leaning on the stone balustrade. His whole body tightened still at the sight of her. He doubted he would ever tire of his longing for her.
“We all have our vices,” she said softly, holding her head in her hands. “For my part, it was too much ratafia tonight. Your brother is a scoundrel, bringing me glass after glass.”
“He wants to know you are having a good time in his company.”
“Is what I heard from that Mr. Fringer true? Samuel has actually landed himself in a courtship with a respectable woman?”
Nicholas blew smoke into the air, the tip of the cigar burning orange in the darkness. Downstairs, someone was playing music at the piano.
“It remains to be seen if she is respectable, but yes, that is my impression.”
Amelia shook her head softly, scoffing. “And yet you seem so unfazed by this most shocking turn of events.”
“Why shocking?” He grinned, tapping his cigar on the balustrade. “Rakes have been reformed for less.” He slid an arm around Amelia’s waist. “To the pleasure of their over-indulgent wives.”
She laughed, leaning her head on his shoulder.
As the music played on in another room.
***
The following morning, Amelia insisted on walking.
Nicholas protested, naturally. He protested most things that involved Amelia exerting herself beyond the walls of Riverside Court, despite the fact that she was in better health now than she had been in years.
Louise’s treatments had worked something close to a miracle. The seizures had not returned since the spring. Her memory, though still imperfect, no longer frightened her as it once had.
But Nicholas worried. That was his way. He worried beautifully, infuriatingly, with a clenched jaw and a hand hovering near the small of her back as though she might shatter at any moment.
“The site is less than two miles,” Amelia reminded him as they set off down the lane, Augustus bundled against her chest in a woolen sling that Mrs. Smythe had fashioned for her from a French pattern. “And the day is fine. Look at the sky.”
Nicholas looked. The sky was, in fact, a brilliant and cloudless blue, the sort of May morning that made Oxfordshire seem like the only place on earth worth inhabiting.
“When have I ever been able to deny you anything, sweetheart?” was all he said.
The new orphanage was not yet finished. The bones of it stood on the eastern edge of the old Bright Corner grounds, where the manor house had been pulled down the previous autumn. Amelia had watched the demolition from the ridge with Philippa beside her, neither of them shedding a tear. It had surprised her, how little grief she felt. The house had been a tomb long before they had abandoned it.
What rose in its place was something else entirely.
The new building was twice the size of the old St. George’s, with wide windows and a south-facing garden that Mrs. Thatcher had already claimed for vegetables. The stonemasons were still at work on the upper floors, and scaffolding clung to the western wall like ivy. But the ground floor was nearly complete, and the children had been moved in three weeks prior with all the chaos that entailed.
“There she is!” Mrs. Thatcher bellowed from the front steps as they approached, wiping her hands on her apron. “Your Grace, we did not expect you until Thursday.”
“I could not wait until Thursday,” Amelia confessed. “I wanted to see how the schoolroom turned out.”
“Well, it turned out wet, on account of the rain coming through the ceiling on Tuesday. Mr. Marsh has been up there with pitch and canvas ever since.” She peered at the bundle against Amelia’s chest and softened completely. “And you have brought the little lord.”
“He insisted,” Nicholas said drily behind them.
Mrs. Thatcher smiled and ushered them all indoors. The entrance hall smelled of fresh plaster and beeswax and something baking in the kitchens below. Amelia breathed it in and felt her chest expand with a pride so fierce it bordered on pain.
They had barely crossed the threshold when the thunder started.
Not from the sky, which remained faultlessly blue through the tall new windows, but from above. The ceiling groaned, and then came the unmistakable sound of dozens of small feet pattering down a staircase at speed.
“Brace yourself,” Mrs. Thatcher muttered.
The children poured into the hall like water through a broken dam. Charlie appeared first, thirteen now and tall enough that Amelia had to look up at him. Behind him came Mary with her braids flying, and then a stream of younger faces, some familiar, some new.
“Is that him? Can I see? Let me see!” came the chorus.
“Gently,” Amelia laughed, kneeling so the smaller ones could peer into the sling. Augustus, woken by the commotion, blinked up at the ring of faces above him with an expression of profound bewilderment that reminded Amelia so forcefully of his father that she had to press her lips together to keep from laughing harder.
“He is so small,” whispered a girl called Nan, who had arrived at St. George’s only a month ago and still spoke in a voice barely above a breath. She reached out one tentative finger and touched the baby’s hand. Augustus seized it immediately, and Nan’s face broke into such a smile that Amelia felt tears prick behind her eyes.
“He likes me,” Nan said, astonished.
“He has excellent taste,” Amelia nodded.
She glanced up to find Nicholas standing several feet back, watching the scene with an expression she had learned to read over the course of their marriage. It was the look he wore when something moved him and he did not want anyone to know. His arms were crossed, his jaw tight, his eyes suspiciously bright.
Charlie noticed too. “Your Grace,” he called to Nicholas. “Would you like to hold him for us? So we can all see him properly?”
The other children took up the request immediately.
Nicholas looked at Amelia, and she saw the old reluctance flicker across his face. Not fear of children, exactly. He had moved past that, slowly, over many months of sitting through rehearsals and applauding wobbly performances and allowing small hands to tug at his coat without complaint.
But there was still something in him that tensed around young ones. A wound from his own childhood that had scarred over but never fully healed.
He crossed the hall and knelt beside her. She lifted Augustus from the sling and placed him in Nicholas’s arms. The baby gurgled and grabbed a fistful of his father’s cravat.
The children pressed closer, and Nicholas did not flinch.
“There,” Amelia murmured, smoothing the collar of Augustus’s gown. “You see? He is not so frightening.”
She meant the baby. She also meant something else entirely.
Nicholas met her eyes over their son’s head. The look he gave her was not the smoldering gaze of a rake or the guarded smile of a man protecting himself from the world. It was open, and raw, and so full of love that she felt it settle in her bones like sunlight.
“No,” he agreed quietly. “Not frightening at all.”
Augustus chose that moment to spit up on his father’s waistcoat.
The children roared with laughter. Nicholas chuckled through his nose, holding the baby at arm’s length while Amelia fumbled for a cloth, and Mrs. Thatcher muttered something about the silk being ruined, and Charlie offered to fetch water, and Nan still had not stopped smiling.
And Amelia, kneeling on the floor of the house she had built, surrounded by the children she had cared for, with her husband beside her and her son between them, thought she would remember this. All of it. Every single moment.
And when Nicholas caught her eye across their son’s ruined christening gown, laughing unguardedly with all the others, she knew with absolute certainty she would.