Two Years Later

Lily Ashcombe had apparently discovered mud.

This would not ordinarily have constituted a crisis, except that she had discovered it approximately twelve minutes before her second birthday guests were due to arrive.

“Lily.”

Her daughter looked up from beside the garden path with a streak of earth across one round cheek, both hands black to the wrists, and one white stocking distinctly brown. Something Clara sincerely hoped was merely a worm dangled between her fingers.

Lily smiled. “Mama.”

“Yes. Mama.” Clara approached cautiously. “And Mama would very much like to know what you have.”

Lily proudly held it higher, confirming Clara’s suspicion.

Definitely a worm.

“Wonderful.”

“Mama!”

“I see it.”

Apparently interpreting this as admiration, Lily beamed.

Clara crouched beside her. “Do you remember that Grandmama had a new dress made for you?”

Lily nodded solemnly.

“And do you remember that she said you were not to ruin it before luncheon?”

Another solemn nod.

Clara glanced pointedly at the mud covering her daughter’s hands and stockings. Lily considered the problem for several seconds before offering her the worm.

“That does not solve it.”

“What has she done?”

Clara glanced over her shoulder to find Edmund coming down the path toward them, his cane tapping lightly against the stones. He still carried it on longer walks and difficult days, though there were increasingly many mornings when Clara realized hours had passed without seeing it at all.

He stopped beside her and surveyed Lily’s ruined stockings before his attention settled on the worm dangling from her fingers.

His expression remained remarkably composed. “She appears to have made a friend.”

“Your daughter has destroyed her stockings.”

“My daughter?”

“Yes.”

“I see we have reached the stage of parenthood where responsibility is assigned according to circumstance.”

“She has a worm, Edmund.”

“So she does.”

Lily thrust it toward him.

Edmund regarded the creature with considerably less enthusiasm than he had shown their daughter. “Thank you, darling, but I think he would prefer the garden.”

“No.”

“I feared you might say that.”

Clara laughed.

Sometimes the changes at Ravenshade revealed themselves in moments exactly like this.

The glasshouse stood restored behind them, its doors open to the morning air. Footsteps and conversation now filled corridors where silence had once seemed part of the architecture. The dowager tolerated children’s toys in the morning room overnight. Bea entered through the front door without announcing herself, usually with Graves following behind while pretending this remained improper.

And Edmund could kneel beside his daughter without first wondering whether the damp ground would make rising difficult.

Life had made itself comfortable at Ravenshade.

Apparently, it had also brought worms.

Edmund crouched beside Lily and began negotiating for the creature’s release.

His recovery had refused to follow the orderly progression he would have preferred. Some weeks his leg scarcely troubled him. Others brought pain that left him leaning more heavily on the cane or retiring earlier than usual.

He no longer treated those days as failures.

That mattered more to Clara than any improvement Graves could measure.

Nor had reclaiming Ravenshade meant attempting to do everything himself. Edmund attended estate meetings, read the accounts, knew his tenants and made his own decisions. He even asked Ellis for advice on occasion, albeit grudgingly.

Clara considered this tremendous progress.

“There.” Edmund rose carefully after returning the worm to the earth.

Lily stared mournfully at the spot where it had disappeared.

“You betrayed her,” Clara told him.

“I liberated a prisoner.”

“She is going to scream.”

“I have made peace with the consequences.”

Lily’s lower lip trembled, and Edmund immediately reached for her. “Or perhaps I have reconsidered.”

Clara laughed as he lifted their daughter into his arms, mud-ruined stockings and all. “You are hopeless.”

“I am her father.”

“Those statements are not mutually exclusive.”

“Clara.”

She smiled sweetly at him.

Voices drifting from the direction of the house announced the arrival of their first guests. Several tenant families were already crossing the lawn, children racing ahead while their parents followed more sensibly. Servants carried trays toward the long tables arranged beneath the trees, and the glasshouse doors stood open so visitors could wander through the restored beds.

Clara had argued for a small gathering. Ravenshade apparently had a different understanding of the word small.

“There she is!”

Bea came hurrying down the path with Graves following at a considerably more dignified pace.

Marriage had changed very little about Bea except her surname and her confidence that every room she entered would shortly become more interesting because she was in it. Graves, meanwhile, had surrendered whatever hope he once possessed of appearing unaffected by her.

“Birthday girl!” Bea called.

Lily immediately reached toward her, and Edmund looked suitably offended. “I have been discarded.”

“You took away her worm,” Clara reminded him.

“That does seem to have damaged our relationship.”

Bea accepted Lily into her arms and kissed her muddy cheek without hesitation.

“Good heavens,” Graves said as he joined them. “What happened to her?”

“She discovered natural philosophy,” Edmund replied.

“She found a worm,” Clara translated.

“Ah.”

Lily reached toward Graves with one filthy hand, and he promptly stepped back.

Bea stared at him. “Doctor.”

“I am wearing a clean coat.”

“You are being challenged by a two-year-old.”

“I am exercising judgment.”

Bea kissed Lily’s temple. “Pay him no attention. Your uncle Alistair is terribly dull.”

Graves looked at his wife. “I am not her uncle.”

“You will be by the end of the afternoon if I tell her often enough.”

He turned to Edmund, evidently expecting support, but Edmund merely regarded him with the solemn neutrality of a man who had no intention of involving himself in another husband’s difficulties.

Clara smiled. Some things at Ravenshade required no improvement at all.

The courtship that had once consisted largely of Bea turning pink and Graves discovering urgent reasons to stare at pieces of paper had eventually become a marriage, to the surprise of absolutely no one except, perhaps, Graves.

His practice now divided his time between the village and Ravenshade, though Clara suspected the arrangement owed as much to Bea’s refusal to live too far from her family as it did to medical necessity.

It suited them. Bea knew every birth, argument, courtship, and broken fence within several miles, while Graves knew which of those required treatment. Between them, very little escaped notice.

“Lady Ravenshade.”

Clara turned.

Thomas Vale stood a short distance away, his cap held awkwardly between his hands.

He looked different from the frightened man she had first met near the coast. Time had restored weight to his face and steadiness to his manner, though he still carried a certain watchfulness Clara suspected would never disappear entirely.

“Mr. Vale.”

He smiled. “Happy birthday to the little lady.”

“Thank you.”

Lily, currently attempting to transfer mud from Bea’s sleeve to her own hair, did not acknowledge the greeting.

Vale had returned to the coast the previous year. Edmund had helped him secure work overseeing repairs and shipments at the harbor, though Edmund insisted upon describing this as nothing more than giving an experienced man employment.

Clara allowed him the fiction.

Vale had spent years believing fear had made him a coward, while Edmund understood something about carrying blame that did not belong to you. Perhaps that was why neither man ever spoke very much about what passed between them.

They did not need to.

A carriage rolled onto the drive, and Clara recognized it immediately.

“Eveline,” she said.

Edmund followed her gaze without any of the tension that would once have accompanied the name. That ease had taken time, but Eveline’s occasional visits to Ravenshade no longer carried the awkward watchfulness of those first months after Griffin’s removal. She never came often enough to suggest she wished to reclaim the place she had once held in Edmund’s life, and gradually they had found something quieter to put in its place.

Her apology had not erased what happened, nor had Clara required it to. Forgiveness, she had discovered, was easier when no one demanded that it also become forgetting.

Eveline stepped down from the carriage carrying a brightly wrapped parcel.

“Oh dear,” Edmund murmured.

Clara looked at him. “What?”

“She has brought a present.”

“It is a birthday gathering.”

“Have you seen the nursery?”

“That is not Eveline’s fault.”

“Someone bought the wooden horse.”

“Your grandmother.”

Edmund glanced toward the terrace. “Of course she did.”

“Speaking of whom …”

The dowager had appeared at the top of the garden steps, surveying the gathering with the expression of a woman assessing whether everyone had managed to organize themselves properly in her absence.

Then she spotted Lily.

The change was subtle enough that Clara might not have noticed it in anyone else, but she had learned the dowager too well over the past two years to miss it.

She descended the steps and came directly toward them. “What has happened to her dress?”

Edmund looked at Clara, who returned the look while Bea suddenly became fascinated by the lilies.

“Lily discovered a worm,” Clara explained.

The dowager regarded her great-granddaughter.

Lily regarded her back before extending one muddy hand toward her.

With a sigh, the dowager reached for her. “My darling girl, you are an absolute menace.”

Lily grinned as the dowager took her into her arms anyway.

Clara caught Edmund’s eye.

There had been a time when Clara could scarcely imagine this woman relinquishing control of a dinner menu, much less carrying a muddy child against expensive silk. Yet the dowager had changed, too.

She remained sharp, proud, and occasionally terrifying, but she no longer mistook control for love. Nor did she treat Clara as a temporary steward of a household that truly belonged to someone else.

Ravenshade was Clara’s home now. The dowager herself had said so, though only once, naturally. Clara did not expect a repetition in this lifetime.

“Come,” the dowager told Lily. “We shall find you clean stockings before your guests see what your parents have allowed.”

“Our doing?” Edmund asked.

The dowager ignored him and carried Lily toward the house.

Clara waited until they were several steps away before laughing.

Edmund looked at her. “I believe this is your fault.”

“My fault?”

“You established the rule this morning. When Lily misbehaves, responsibility may be reassigned according to circumstance.”

“I believe I said she was your daughter.”

“Precisely.”

“She was digging in the mud and holding a worm.”

“You taught her to dig.”

“In a garden.”

“And now she has discovered what lies beneath one.”

Clara slipped her hand into his. “Terrible consequences.”

Edmund looked down at their joined hands and smiled. “I am glad we agree.”

Across the lawn, more guests were arriving. Tenants who had once approached Ravenshade only when summoned now crossed its gardens with their families, their children racing along paths that had once been closed. Mrs. Turner scolded a footman for carrying cakes at an angle while pretending not to notice when one of the tenant boys stole a sugared almond.

Behind them, the doors of Ravenshade stood open.

Griffin’s name was rarely spoken anymore. There had been proceedings, testimony, and accounts uncovered, though the precise truth of the wreck had never been proved as completely as Edmund once believed he needed it to be. Griffin had nevertheless lost his authority, his place at Ravenshade and the trust of those whose dependence he had spent years cultivating.

Clara did not know whether that counted as justice. She knew only that he no longer occupied the center of their lives.

Edmund had insisted upon that.

He has taken enough from this family.

And so they had stopped giving him more.

“Mama!”

Clara turned to find Lily racing down the path toward them. The dowager had evidently abandoned the effort to change her stockings, because the child still had the same muddy knees and considerably more determination.

Edmund released Clara’s hand just in time for Lily to collide with his legs. Laughing, he bent and lifted her into his arms.

“Were you not supposed to be getting clean?” Edmund asked.

“No.”

“I see.”

“Cake.”

“Ah.” Edmund nodded gravely. “Now we reach the true purpose of the afternoon.”

Lily nodded with equal seriousness.

Clara stepped closer and brushed a curl from her daughter’s forehead.

Two years old. Sometimes the thought still startled her.

Lily had Edmund’s brown eyes and Clara’s determination, a combination the dowager described as God’s punishment for both of them. Clara thought she was perfect, although she could have done without the worm.

Edmund shifted their daughter against his hip and glanced toward the long tables. “Shall we?”

“In a moment,” Clara said.

He looked at her questioningly, but Clara’s attention had gone to the lilies blooming beside the glasshouse. They had spread since the year before, white flowers rising among the green where Edmund’s mother had once planted them.

When Clara first came to Ravenshade, the garden had been locked, Henry’s rooms sealed, and the glasshouse left broken. So much had been preserved by refusing to touch it, as though keeping everything exactly as it had been could somehow prevent another loss.

She knew better now.

Gardens needed tending, and houses needed voices. Families needed truth, even when it hurt, and love needed room enough to change what came after.

Edmund’s fingers brushed hers. “What are you thinking?”

Clara smiled at him. “That your daughter needs a bath.”

“Our daughter,” Edmund corrected.

“Not while she looks like that.”

Lily giggled.

Edmund gave Clara an aggrieved look. “You see what you have taught her?”

“She is exceptionally clever.”

“Terrifyingly so.”

Clara leaned closer and kissed his cheek.

“Me,” Lily immediately demanded.

Clara laughed and kissed her muddy cheek too. “There. Satisfied?”

“No.”

Edmund laughed.

Beyond them, Bea was calling everyone toward the tables while Graves attempted, with little success, to remove a ribbon that had somehow become attached to his sleeve. Eveline stood talking with Mrs. Turner near the glasshouse, Vale had joined Ellis beneath one of the trees, and the dowager had already taken command of the cake.

Clara looked at them all before turning her gaze toward Ravenshade.

Once, this house had been defined by closed doors, guarded secrets, and everything its inhabitants had been too afraid to say aloud. Now laughter carried through a garden that had been allowed to bloom again while their daughter squirmed impatiently between them, demanding cake.

Edmund caught Clara’s eye. “Ready?”

She tightened her hand around his. “Yes.”

Together, they followed their daughter toward home.

THE END