The terrace stones held the morning sun. Rafe could feel its warmth through the soles of his shoes as he settled into the chair with his sketchbook upon his knee.

Verity stood at the low wall, looking toward the sea. A light wind moved the loose hair at her temples. Below her, olive trees stepped down the hillside toward a strip of pale shore. Sergeant lay across the flagstones where the sun reached him. He had grown greyer about the muzzle in the two years since they left Edgeworth, and risen so slowly after breakfast that Rafe had to help him find this place. Now, the old dog slept with one ear turned toward Verity’s voice.

Rafe held his pencil above the page. He had drawn her here before, usually with a shawl about her shoulders or a book balanced against the wall. This morning, she stood with one hand resting over the other at her waist. She had not yet begun to show, but the gesture had become familiar since her news was certain.

Come spring, there would be a child.

He had woken beside her that morning and found himself listening to her breathe. She opened her eyes to discover him watching.

“You are doing it again,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Looking as though you have been entrusted with a country and cannot find its borders.”

“I thought it was a smaller responsibility.”

“Then you are more alarmed than I knew.”

She smiled and drew his hand beneath hers. He remembered its warmth now as he began to mark the line of her shoulder. He had seen men ride toward gunfire without allowing fear into their faces. None of that prepared him for the happiness and apprehension that came each time he thought of spring. He had not told Verity how often he pictured holding a child who was not yet born. She seemed to know it without being told.

She turned from the sea. “You will lose the light if you stare at me instead of drawing.”

“I am drawing.”

“Very slowly,” she told him playfully.

“I intend to get it right.”

“You have said that of every portrait.”

“And you have moved during every one.”

Verity leaned against the wall and offered him a patient pose that lasted scarcely a minute. Beyond her, the sea changed color where a cloud passed over it. Their house stood a little above the coast, far enough from the harbor for the nights to be quiet. From the terrace Rafe could hear gulls and, when the wind turned, the carts on the road below.

He promised to show her a coast like this before either of them knew they might come here together. She told him once how she wanted to see the sea without ships carrying wounded men across it, and to walk among ruins where no one needed her hands for a bandage. He held to those words through the last months at Edgeworth. After they married, they came to Italy and found this place. Verity stood on the terrace at their first visit, tasting the salt in the air, and asked him whether they could stay.

They married in Spain.

Rafe could still recall how unlikely the journey seemed when they first set out from England. The church court had not finished its work, and Henshaw sent letters after them from one posting town to the next. They crossed to Spain and went near the site of the field hospital where Verity had once tended him. Little remained of it. The ground had been cleared, and a footpath crossed the place where canvas walls had stood. She walked it beside him, finding landmarks he would never have recognized without her.

The formal papers arrived that morning. Henshaw’s careful letter enclosed them, with a final assurance that no dispute remained concerning her freedom to marry. Rafe read it twice before he could believe he might put the waiting behind them.

Ezra and Win had crossed from London to meet them. Ezra stood beside him at the small church, with his hand firm on Rafe’s shoulder before the service began. Win stood with Verity and wept from the first prayer to the last. Afterward she insisted she had cried only when Verity did, a defense neither woman troubled to maintain.

Rafe remembered Verity taking his hand before the vicar. At the field hospital she had kept her fingers against his wrist to feel whether his pulse held. Years later, in the church, he held her hand because she offered it and heard her speak the vows clearly. Their first meeting and the life that followed seemed to meet there for a moment.

Only after the wedding had they traveled on to Italy. The first time Verity saw the coast from the road, she made the driver stop. She climbed down and walked to the edge of a field, impatient with the delay it took Rafe to follow her. When he caught up, she was looking at the water with an expression he knew he would spend years trying to draw.

On the terrace, Sergeant gave a drowsy sound and shifted one paw.

“He would like us to believe he has guarded the house all morning,” Verity chuckled.

“He has guarded a particularly valuable patch of sunlight.”

“He takes his duties seriously.”

Rafe had nearly finished the curve of her cheek when footsteps sounded within the house. Their housekeeper brought out a tray with the post and set it upon the little table. Verity thanked her in Italian, with an accent that made the woman smile. Rafe waited until she had gone before putting down his pencil.

“One from Win,” he said, sorting the letters. “And Cordelia.”

“Win first.”

He broke the seal. Win’s letters usually began with news of London and came quickly to the point where she told Verity what she truly wished to know. Ezra settled into a post as an agent for a merchant with business along the docks. The work kept him occupied without requiring the riding that made his leg ache for days. Win wrote that he still came home with too many questions about whether she had been lonely, and that she had begun leaving small tasks for him to do so he might see how fully she occupied her days.

“She asks whether Sergeant remains master of the household,” Rafe read aloud.

Verity looked down at the sleeping dog. “Tell her his authority has increased with age.”

Win made a life in London that belonged to her. She was Ezra’s wife and no one’s servant. She had friends nearby, a small garden behind their rooms, and opinions about every tradesman Ezra brought to the door. Rafe sometimes tried to set their letters beside his memory of the guarded pair at Edgeworth: Win keeping her eyes on her work and Ezra making light of what he wanted because he feared she might see it. Their ease together still surprised him.

“She says Ezra has found an artist to mend the frame of the portrait we sent,” Rafe continued. “He claims the man admired your work.”

“The man admired the frame.”

“He may have admired both.”

“You have never seen Ezra bargain. He would praise a frame for an hour to bring down its price.”

Rafe folded the letter, smiling. Win ended with instructions to give Sergeant a pat and a reminder that she expected news from Verity herself, regardless of what Rafe chose to write.

“Cordelia next?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Her aunt had moved to the south of England. The distance from Edgeworth seemed to agree with her. She wrote less about what people ought to do and more about what they had done: a neighbor who brought her flowers, a child learning to read, a stretch of coastline that put her in mind of the place Verity now called home. She still asked whether Verity wore a shawl when the evenings turned cold. Verity had come to hear affection in the question.

Rafe opened the letter. Aunt Cordelia began with congratulations on the news they had sent her. She offered no advice. Instead, she described how pleased she was to imagine Verity sitting beneath an Italian sun and hoped she might visit before the child arrived.

“Tell her to come,” Verity expressed at once.

“I shall.”

He read on. Celestine married a gentleman Aunt Cordelia thought kind, and went to live near his family. Rafe was glad of it. He once let her expect an offer he had no intention of making, and he hoped her marriage gave her a happier life than his attention ever would have done.

“Crote came away empty-handed,” Rafe revealed. “He tried to press an old claim and found there was nothing available to settle it.”

Verity rested her elbows on the wall. “I hope that is the last we hear of him.”

“Cordelia seems to hope so, too.”

Arabella remained in York. She still used Vane in her letters, though in law she was the Countess of Edgeworth. Before Rafe and Verity sailed, Verity arranged a small income for her. Arabella resisted it until Verity wrote that she meant to honor what Arabella had given them, and asked her to accept help without allowing Roland another word in the matter.

The two women exchanged letters now and then. Arabella wrote of her work and the friends she had made in York. She had begun, cautiously, to spend some of her afternoons as she pleased. Rafe would sometimes find Verity reading one of her letters more than once before answering it. They had never lived in the same household, yet each knew something of the years the other had lost to Roland. Arabella remained his wife by law, but she made a life in which he had no place.

Rafe came to the last page. Aunt Cordelia had heard that Roland was still at Edgeworth.

“The leases hold,” he told Verity. “Henshaw has seen to the latest question about Pritchard’s road.”

“Good.”

“The tenants whose terms have ended have been leaving when they can. A few have stayed. Aunt Cordelia says the fields near the house are less well kept than they were last year.”

Verity looked out toward the sea. Rafe knew she had not ceased to care about the land merely because she was free to leave it. They had spent evenings going through Harris’ copies before the journey, making certain the tenants knew what protections were written into their leases. Those agreements kept Roland from turning a family out because he disliked them. They could not make people wish to stay and work for him once their terms ended.

“Does she say how Coombes fares?” Verity asked.

“He is staying. The north culvert held through the autumn rains.”

“I am glad.”

Rafe read the last lines to himself. Roland kept his title and the estate. He lived among rooms he had once claimed his return would set right and went into a county where doors were shut to him. His name had become enough to end a conversation. Rafe wished for some sentence upon his brother after learning what he had done to Arabella and Verity. The women had chosen to build their lives beyond him. Roland was left with Edgeworth, and with the knowledge that it answered more readily to Verity than it ever would to him.

Rafe folded Aunt Cordelia’s letter.

“Is that all?” Verity asked.

“Yes.”

She watched him for a moment, then came to sit beside him. He laid the letters on the table and took up his sketchbook. He turned it toward her. She studied the figure at the wall, then the broad shape of Sergeant asleep at her feet. Rafe had put only a few lines into the view beyond them. The sea needed less work than her face. When she looked down at the page, her hand came to rest over his.

“You have drawn me thinking,” she mused.

“You were.”

“I was thinking we shall need another chair for this terrace.”

“For Aunt Cordelia?”

“For her, if she comes.” Verity’s hand moved lightly to her waist. “And a smaller one, in time.”

Rafe looked at the sunlit space beside Sergeant. He could almost see a child there, reaching for the old dog’s silver muzzle while Verity watched from her chair. There had been a time when he wanted nothing more than to live until morning. Now, he wanted years of mornings with her.

He laid down his pencil and held out his hand. Verity came to him, settling between his knees as naturally as if she had always belonged there. He rested his forehead against hers.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I loved you when I scarcely knew your name. I did not know then how much of you I had yet to meet.”

Her fingers moved into his hair. “You have had two years to discover my faults.”

“Every day,” he said, and she laughed softly. He drew back enough to see her face. “I love you more for knowing you.”

The laughter faded, but its warmth remained in her eyes. “I love you, Rafe. I chose you before I knew I was free to.”

He kissed her. When she returned to the wall, she looked back at him once, smiling, and he had to begin the drawing again.

Sergeant lifted his head at the sound of Verity’s voice, then settled back into the sun. Rafe turned to a fresh page. His wife stood before him with the sea at her back, with one hand resting where their child would grow. He put pencil to paper while she told him what to write to Win.

THE END