Two Years Later

Serafina wrote at the window of a house that was, at last and wholly, her own.

The light was good there in the mornings, and she had claimed the window seat for her desk over her husband’s cheerful objections that a duchess ought to have a proper study, and won, as she generally did. She sat with her pen and her half-covered page, one ear turned to the small, determined, disgraceful noises behind her. There a person of one year old was engaged in a serious military campaign against the hearthrug, which had personally offended her in some fashion known only to herself. The child had her father’s dark hair and her mother’s stubbornness and a war-cry that could curdle milk. “You will not defeat it by shouting,” Serafina told her, without the least effect. “I have tried.” The baby regarded her with lofty contempt and returned to the war. Serafina wrote three sentences and crossed out two of them, and turned to watch her daughter conquer the rug, and did not mind the lost sentences in the least.

The column still ran. Every week, faithfully, in the same paper, under the same man’s name, for Reynard had proved far too valuable and far too sharp to retire merely because his author had married a duke. The difference now was that each piece passed under one other pair of eyes before it went to the printer. Gideon read every one over her shoulder, and argued with her conclusions with enormous enjoyment. He was wrong at least a third of the time and admitted it perhaps a tenth. Twice he had been so provoked by a line of hers that he had written a rebuttal under a false name of his own, which she had gleefully printed the following week and then demolished the week after. It was, she thought, the finest quarrel of her life, and she meant to keep it up until they were both very old.

And in the drawer of her desk, under the estate accounts and the household lists, there were three chapters of a book. The real book. The one she had wanted so badly and for so long that she had never once, in all her guarded life, dared say the wanting of it aloud. Until Gideon. 

She had said it aloud now, to Brennan, before she knew he was to be her husband. Now, she said it to Gideon, in the dark, as she said all her most frightening and exciting things. He had asked to read what she had, and had read it. And he had looked up at her with such plain, fierce belief in his face that she had gone straight back the next morning and written the next chapter. It would be finished one day. There was no hurry. She had the whole rest of her life to write it in, and a house full of love, and a man downstairs who thought her the cleverest creature in England and was not shy of saying so.

Gideon’s great works had come home with him. He built in England now, close enough that he slept most nights under his own roof. He had turned all that restless engineering hunger that had once driven him across the world to a far humbler business, and, he swore, a far more satisfying one: the country around them. He had drained a valley that had flooded every spring within living memory and given three villages their winter fields back.

He was cutting a branch line that would carry a poor district’s goods to market in an afternoon instead of two hard days. He came home from the work muddy to the knee and cheerful as a boy and full of figures, and told her all of it over supper whether she asked or not. And she found, to her own surprise, that she wanted to hear every last figure. They were two people who built things. It had taken them both a long strange while to find the one other person who understood that a mind at work was no burden to be endured. It was a joy to be shared.

The fire in the grate was small, and screened, and burning low and orderly behind its brass guard, and Serafina sat within a few feet of it and did not flinch at all. That had been the slowest thing to come, and the dearest. For sixteen years a hearth had been a mouth that ate everything she loved. But she had spent two years now in rooms where the fires were laid by people who loved her. They were screened for her sake without her ever having to ask, and tended so that she was never once left alone in the dark with the smell of smoke. And somewhere in those two gentle years the old terror had loosened its grip and slipped away, so quietly she could not have named the day. She had learned the thing at last that her whole scorched childhood had hidden from her. A hearth in a house full of love was not a danger. It was only warmth.

Fiona came in without knocking, as she always did, and Serafina saw at a glance that she was lit up like a lamp.

“Out with it,” Serafina said, setting down her pen. “You have a face on you like the cat in the dairy. What has happened?”

“I am with child,” Fiona said, and the words tumbled out of her before she had even reached the window seat, bright and unstoppable. “At last, Serafina. At long last. And there is more.” She sat, and took Serafina’s hands, and her eyes were shining. “Johnny and I mean to go home. To Ireland, for a while, a good long while, so the babe can be born among his people and mine, in the green wet country we both came out of, with our own mothers’ hands to help. He has wanted it a long while. And now there is a reason to do it, and I could not go without telling you first, before another living soul.”

Serafina held her friend’s hands and was glad and grieved in exactly equal measure, and did not try to hide either from her, because they had long since given up hiding anything from one another. A house without Fiona in it would be a quieter house, and a colder one, and there was a selfish part of her that wanted to say do not go, stay, I cannot spare you. She said none of it. They had stopped being lady and maid a long time ago, somewhere in the thick of all their troubles, and become a bond that needed no roof over it to keep it safe, one that letters could carry and distance could not wear thin. Ireland was not so very far. There would be letters by every post, and visits in the summers, and christenings on both sides of the water for years and years to come, hers and Fiona’s children growing up knowing one another across a narrow sea.

“Go,” Serafina said, and kissed her friend’s cheek, and meant it with her whole heart even as it ached. “Go and be happy, and name the child something I can pronounce, and write to me the very hour it is born.”

“I will name her after you, if she is a girl,” Fiona said, “and then she will have to learn to pronounce it, for it will be Serafina, and a great mouthful it is for a small Irish baby.” She laughed, and wiped her eyes, and squeezed Serafina’s hands hard. “Do you remember, when we began? You a friendless slip of a girl and me a green thing off the boat with no more notion of a great English house than a hen has of Sunday. And look at the pair of us now. A duchess and a duchess’s dearest friend, and both of us to be mothers, and neither of us ever again anybody’s afterthought. If you had told me, that first cold morning, that it would come to this, I would have said you had been at the cooking sherry.”

“I would not have believed it either,” Serafina admitted. “I did not think happiness was a thing that happened to people like us. I thought it was for the Rosamunds of the world, and that our part was only to fetch and carry at the edges of it. I have never in all my born days been so glad to have been wrong.”

Gideon found them there a little later, hoisting their daughter up against his shoulder. She had recovered from her war with the rug and was gnawing thoughtfully on his collar now. The last of the line he had once come home certain he would end, babbling wet and content into his neck. He stood with the child on his arm and looked at the two women by the window, his wife and her dearest friend, their hands still clasped and their faces bright with news. “Ireland,” he sai, having caught only the last of it. “You are taking my best friend home to Ireland to have his baby, and I am to be glad about it.” But he was smiling, and he raised one eyebrow, which meant he had guessed the whole of it and was pleased.

Later, when Fiona had gone off glowing to find Johnny and share her news with him properly, the house settled into its afternoon quiet. Gideon set their daughter down on the hearthrug, at a safe distance from the screened and orderly fire. The child sat and regarded the small tame flames with the grave suspicion of the very young. And Serafina came and sat down beside her on the floor, duchess and gown and all, and gathered the warm indignant weight of her into her lap, and found that she was not afraid.

She looked into the little fire that had eaten her whole childhood and no longer had any power over her at all. And she thought that one day, when this small person was old enough to sit still and listen, she would teach her a riddle. She would do it here, by a fire, exactly as her own father had done for her in the last good year of her life, before the world went dark. Only this fire would be safe, and this house would be full, and the answer at the end of the riddle would not be lost in the smoke. She would hand her daughter the game and none of the grief.

Serafina looked round the room at all of it. The child. The unfinished book in the drawer and the column on the desk and the small tame fire that no longer frightened her. And the man who had chosen her, in a borrowed coat under a false name, when she had believed herself the most unchoosable creature alive. She thought of the lonely girl she had been, moving through her uncle’s great house by its hidden passages, unseen and unwanted, certain to the bone that to be overlooked was to be worth less. She saw now how badly that child had reckoned the sum. Being unseen had never cost her one grain of her own worth. It had only kept her waiting, all those long years, for the arrival of the single person whose eyes were clear enough to see her whole.

Her father had taught her, by a fire long ago, that the answer to his favorite riddle was a name, a reputation, the one thing a person carried out of a burning house and could never quite have back. She had solved a great many riddles since. But the one that had mattered most, the one she had never been able to work out alone in all her clever, guarded, solitary life, had turned out to have the simplest answer of all. She had only needed someone to sit still across a guttering candle and want to hear it.

She had been seen, at the last. And she had been, every single day since, entirely and openly and unhiddenly loved.

THE END

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