London, June 1817

“He has eaten the sugared almond off the top of the bride cake,” said Sybil, “and I do not care in the least. Give him to me. I want him.”

Theodore Boyington, aged two years and four days, was handed down the length of the breakfast table like a dish of strawberries. He went from his grandmother to Lady Varley, who gave him a spoon, and from Lady Varley to Lord Livingstone, who held him at arm’s length like a parcel that might go off and then could not bring himself to let go. At last he reached the bride, at the head of the table, in white satin with orange blossom in her hair, who settled him in her lap and let him put his sticky fingers all over her new gown.

“Sybil, your dress,” said Lady Fernshire.

“It is my wedding day, Mama, and I shall be as sticky as I like.” Sybil kissed the top of her nephew’s head. “Is that not so, Teddy?”

Theodore considered this, and offered her the spoon.

Cordelia did not try to take him back. The long dining room in Brook Street was full to the walls. The windows stood open on the June morning, and the air smelled of warm stone and lime blossom, and of the roses along the sideboard that Hobbs had sent up from her mother’s garden in Kent, packed in wet moss.

“You are smiling,” said Laurence, at her elbow.

“I am counting.”

“Counting what?”

“How many people in this room I lied to, once.” She looked at him sidelong. “It is a great many. And every one of them is here, eating your mother’s ham.”

He laughed, low, and found her hand under the table, and held it.

Lord Ashby, who had married Sybil at St. George’s an hour before, was telling the vicar from Kent about a horse. He had been telling him since the soup.

“He is very patient, your vicar,” Laurence murmured.

“He won eleven shillings from you at whist,” said Cordelia. “And Lord Ashby is paying for his new church roof. He would listen to a horse himself, for a roof.”

Across the table Emelia sat beside her husband with her daughter in her lap. Allegra Hollis was eighteen months old, very serious, and had her father’s habit of listening to the whole of what anybody said before she answered. At that moment she was listening to Orsino.

Orsino was underneath the table. He had come up from Kent in his basket, as he came everywhere, with his pale blue ribbon around his neck. He was older and heavier and nearly as wide as he was long, and he had spent the whole breakfast under Allegra’s chair, explaining something to her at great length. Allegra hung over the side of her mother’s lap to look down at him, and nodded gravely at every word.

“She understands him,” said Mr. Hollis. “I am quite sure of it. She understands him better than she understands me.”

“Everybody understands Orsino better than they understand you, Peter,” said Emelia. “He says what he means.”

“So do I.”

“You say it very quietly. And then you listen until people tell you everything they know.” She smiled at him, with the warmth that had come into her face the year she married him and had never once gone out. “It is a terrible habit. Allegra has it too.”

“It is a family failing,” said Mr. Hollis gravely, and Emelia laughed and leaned her head against his shoulder in front of everybody.

Cordelia felt her throat tighten. Emelia had cried for a month, the autumn after the Corinthian, and Mr. Hollis had not once tried to hurry her. He had called every Tuesday and Friday and sat in her aunt’s parlor and listened. By Easter she had married him, in the little church on the Maidstone road, and Cordelia had cried a great deal more than the bride.

Further down the table Lady Eppington had been crying since the ceremony. She had told everybody within reach that she had always said so, and had got as far as the footmen.

“Did I not always say so?” she was asking one of them. The footman, who had never seen her before in his life, agreed that she had.

The servants’ table had been laid in the morning room, at Sybil’s insistence, with its own cake. Through the open door Cordelia could see Mrs. Alder in her best black, presiding over the teapot like a judge, with Ned beside her, half a foot taller and proud of his new livery as Laurence’s own man. Martha had married Tom from the stables at Michaelmas, and Tom sat stiffly beside her in his new coat, looking at the London ceiling as though it might fall in. Miss Pruett was pouring for all of them. Digby moved between the two rooms with a decanter in each hand, like a man who had run the house for thirty years and did not intend to stop.

At the far end of the servants’ table, in a good brown coat, sat an old man with white hair. Pell had come up from Deptford. He had come for the christening too, and stood at the font with tears running into his collar, claiming it was the smoke from the candles. Nobody had believed him.

Cordelia glanced at her father. He was looking at Theodore, on Sybil’s lap, with an expression she had never once seen on his face when she was a child.

His hair had gone white in the winter after the Corinthian, and he walked with a stick. He came to Fernshire every Sunday for dinner and stayed exactly two hours, and asked her questions. Real ones. What she was reading, and what she thought of it, and whether she was well. Then he listened to the answers. It had taken him a long time to learn how.

Edgar’s name was not spoken at that table, or at any other. He was in New South Wales, and would not be coming back.

***

When the cake had been cut and the toasts drunk, Laurence leaned down to her ear.

“Come with me,” he said. “Just for a minute. I have something to show you.”

“Now? Laurence, it is Sybil’s wedding breakfast.”

“Sybil is feeding our son ice. She will not notice we have gone.”

She followed him out into the hall and up the stairs to his mother’s little sitting room at the back of the house, where the window looked down on the garden. It was cool and quiet after the dining room. On the table by the window stood something flat and square, wrapped in an old shawl.

She knew the shawl. It was her oldest, and she had last seen it on the seat of a carriage, on the evening of her own wedding day.

“Open it,” said Laurence.

She untied the knot with fingers that were not quite steady, and let the shawl fall away.

It was the portrait.

The one he had abandoned in the morning room in Kent, three summers ago, because he could not get the mouth right. He had finished it. Her hair was coming down on one side, as it always did. There was a smudge of ink on her cheek, exactly where she always rubbed it. Her chin was carried a fraction too high, and the mouth was right. It was turned up at one corner, the way it turned when she was trying very hard not to laugh at somebody.

She stood and looked at it, and could not say anything at all.

“I took it away from your father’s house the day we married,” he said. “I have been working at it ever since. At night, mostly, after you were asleep. Up in the old schoolroom at Fernshire, with the door shut.”

“Without me sitting for you?”

“I did not need you to sit.” He looked at the painting, and not at her. “I knew your face by heart before I ever finished painting it the first time. I only needed to learn how you look when you are happy. It took me a while.” He smiled a little. “You were not very often happy, that first summer.”

“I was happy at the masquerade.”

“I know. That is where I got the mouth.”

She understood then, with the shawl around her feet, that he had painted her face for nearly three years in an empty schoolroom at night, with nobody watching and nothing in the world to gain by it. He had known it by heart long before she forgave him for anything.

She found that she was crying, and that she did not mind.

“It needs a frame,” she said, when she could speak.

“I thought perhaps something plain…”

“No.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her glove. “It needs Papa’s frame.”

Laurence stared at her. Then he began to laugh.

“The gilt one? With the acanthus leaves?”

“It has hung empty on the wall at home since the summer you came,” said Cordelia. “Three years. He would not let anybody take it down. He said he had paid for it and he would have a portrait in it one day if it killed him.” She was laughing too, through the tears. “Bring Papa up. I want to tell him myself.”

They brought him up. He came slowly, on his stick, and stood in the doorway of the little sitting room and looked at the painting for a long time without a word.

“It goes in your frame, Papa,” said Cordelia. “The one from London. It always did. It was only waiting.”

Her father looked at the portrait, and then at her. His face worked. Then, for the first time in years, Lord Livingstone threw back his head and laughed out loud, until he had to lean on the doorframe and wipe his eyes.

“Three years,” he said. “Three years I have looked at that empty frame over my sideboard. Your mother would have laughed until she cried.” He put his hand on Cordelia’s arm, very gently. “It is a good likeness, Fernshire. It is the best likeness I ever saw. You have her to the life.”

***

They went back down to find the whole party gathered around Sybil at the head of the table, and a basket on the cloth in front of her, with a blue ribbon tied on the handle.

“It is two days late,” Sybil was saying. “Teddy’s birthday was on Thursday, and I was too busy being married to think about it. So I have brought it today instead.” She lifted the lid. “Happy birthday, darling.”

Inside, curled in a nest of flannel, was a kitten. It was black all over, with four white feet and a pale blue ribbon around its neck, the right shade.

Theodore looked at it with enormous eyes. Then he put out one sticky hand and touched its nose, carefully, and the kitten sneezed.

“Kitty,” said Theodore, in tones of deep wonder.

There was a noise from beneath the table.

Orsino came out from under Allegra’s chair. He walked the whole length of the dining room with his tail straight up and his ribbon askew, while every person at the table turned to watch. He climbed onto Cordelia’s empty chair, and from there onto the table, and stood over the basket looking down.

The kitten looked back up at him and mewed.

Orsino turned around, deliberately, and sat down on the tablecloth with his back to it. His opinion of the whole proceeding could not have been clearer.

The table burst out laughing. Sybil laughed until she cried, and Lord Ashby laughed because she did. Lady Fernshire laughed behind her napkin, and Lord Livingstone for the second time that day. Allegra, not understanding, laughed because everybody else was, and the kitten sneezed again.

Cordelia stood at Laurence’s side, in a room full of people she had once lied to, and laughed with every one of them.

She had spent three years writing letters to a man who did not exist. She had made him brave, and kind, and clever, and a little absurd. She had given him a wound and a war and a passion for hoopoes. She had believed, for three whole years, that she would never meet anybody half so good.

She looked up at the man beside her, with her son’s sticky handprint on his sleeve, her cat on the tablecloth, and the light of a June morning in his eyes, and she knew that she had been wrong.

She had never once in her life been so happy to be wrong.

THE END