The Maid’s Little Girl Found the Duke Asleep—What She Did Changed Him Forever

Chapter 14

They married in early autumn, in the small chapel at Halloway Hall, under a special licence, on a Tuesday, because Meg had said that she would rather be married on a Tuesday than make a fuss about a Saturday.

It was, by ducal standards, a quiet ceremony. There were thirty-one people. There were two carriages, one of which was the estate’s second-best and one of which belonged to the curate. There was a supper in the small dining room that Mrs. Cottrell had planned for a fortnight and pretended to have planned for three days.

By Meg Hollis’s standards it was enormous. She had been married the first time in a chapel with eleven people in it, four of whom had been her husband’s cousins and two of whom she had never worked out.

Mrs. Cottrell cried through the first hymn and insisted afterwards that it was the smoke from the candles, and repeated the claim to three separate people, none of whom believed her, and would not have mentioned it for anything.

Mr. Sallow stood near the back with his hands behind him and maintained the expression of a butler who had merely stepped in to make sure the wine was properly served, and had practiced that expression for eleven days.

Mr. Ashworth stood next to him and did not bother with an expression at all.

Posy was the flower girl. She took the office with military seriousness. She had rehearsed for four days in the corridor with a basket of paper petals, and she walked down the aisle of the chapel at a pace that made two of the guests laugh out loud, and she stopped twice on the way to the altar because she had formed the view that the petals were unevenly distributed on the left side and had to be corrected.

The second stop lasted forty seconds. Nobody in that chapel had the heart to move her along.

Meg walked toward Elias Thornbury without anyone giving her away.

She had thought about this, in the weeks before. She had thought about her cousin from Farrow, who had been willing; she had thought about Mr. Ashworth, who would have been absurd; she had thought, once, about the curate. And then she had decided that there was no one alive who would be handing her over, because she had been handling herself since she was twenty-six years old in a cold kitchen with a baby on her hip and a bill for the rent on the table.

She had belonged to herself for a long time before she had loved anybody.

When she reached the front of the chapel, Elias took her hand. He had asked her, beforehand, in the plainest terms, whether she wanted him to take it or wait for her to offer it, and she had told him that this was the single most Elias Thornbury question she had ever been asked, and that she would offer it.

She offered it. He took it.

Their vows were short.

Neither of them had wanted the long version. When the curate — a decent young man named Mr. Ellery who had prepared the service with great care and was visibly disappointed to have two thirds of it struck out — had asked what they wished to promise, they had given him a list, and it had surprised him, and he had written it down exactly as they said it.

They did not promise that love would erase grief. Neither of them believed it, and neither of them would have signed their name to it.

They did not promise that the past could be repaired. It could not. It was fixed, and both of them had stopped pretending otherwise, and Meg had said, in one of their conversations, that the only thing she had ever wanted from a man about her first marriage was for him not to try to improve it.

They promised to tell each other the truth, including when it was inconvenient, and especially when it was frightening.

They promised to be present — in the room, awake, upright, not managing anything from three rooms away.

They promised that each of them could leave any decision that concerned them both, and that neither of them would make a decision about the other without asking.

And they promised the courage to remain open when fear demanded walls, which was the sentence Elias had insisted on and which he had written himself, on a piece of paper, and shown her, and asked her whether she would sign it.

She had read it twice and said yes and asked him what had given him the words.

Three years of building them, he had said. And a child who walked through one.

Afterward, lanterns were lit across the garden.

There was music, because the groom’s brother played the fiddle and had been asked to bring it and had brought it without being told twice. There were tenants from the river farms, all four, and three of them brought their wives and one brought a pie. There was Sir Robert Ives, the magistrate, who had spent the whole of the Vaughn business looking as though he wished he had taken up a different profession and who was now, three cups in, telling Mr. Ashworth a long story about a horse.

There were neighbours. There were servants who had been given the evening and had stayed anyway, because in that house over that autumn, the ordinary rules about where people ate had quietly stopped being enforced.

Posy spent the evening in a state of glittering importance. She was permitted to stay up until nine, which she had negotiated. She danced with Mr. Sallow, who turned out to be an unexpectedly competent dancer and who would be teased about it by the footmen for a month. She informed the curate, in the middle of a conversation he was having with someone else, that the reason the girls could not see the star was that they were not looking properly, and then walked away. She ate four honey cakes and was caught, at half past eight, attempting to redistribute the lanterns in the garden so that her mother could see them better from the house.

Long after most of the guests had gone, when the lanterns were down to the last few and the fiddle had been packed away, the three of them ended up where the story had begun.

In the east room.

Lily sat on the carpet with the old dragon book in her lap. Meg was on the sofa with her shoes off and her head against Elias’s shoulder. Snowdrop occupied the windowsill with her mismatched eyes half closed and her tail hanging down, one of the few creatures in England who considered the whole evening beneath remark.

A fire had been laid and lit, and the curtains were open, and the room smelled of clean soap and old paper and, faintly, of the beeswax the housemaids had used on the furniture, because Mrs. Cottrell had ordered the ordinary wax and not the lavender, and nobody had ever explained why and nobody ever would.

Lily reached a page she always skipped.

It was the page with the baker’s hat.

In the story, the dragon was given a hat by a village baker who was the only person in the whole book who knocked instead of drawing a sword, and in the illustration the dragon wore the hat and looked mortified, and it was, objectively, the funniest page in the book, which is exactly why Lily had skipped it eleven times in a row.

Elias put his hand flat on the page.

“The baker’s hat,” he said.

Lily sighed. “It is not important.”

“It is part of the story.”

“You used to miss pages.”

“I have improved.”

Meg laughed — a real one, into his shoulder, the kind she made when she had stopped remembering to be careful.

Lily gave in, and read the page, and read it badly, and laughed halfway through reading it, which made her read it worse, and by the end of the page all three of them were laughing in a room that had not contained a laugh for three years.

Outside, a servant passed along the east corridor on his way to the back stairs with a jug of hot water for the nursery.

He heard the laughing through the open door.

He kept walking. He did not look in, because he had work, and because there was no longer anything at the end of that corridor to be careful about.

Elias Thornbury looked at his sister’s portrait on the shelf, upright and smiling out of the painted ivory with her hand across the front of her dress.

Then at Meg, who was wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist and shaking her head at the two of them.

Then at Lily, cross-legged on the carpet under the warm falling circle of the candlelight, arguing that the baker had been the best character in the book all along.

Nothing he loved had been replaced.

Rosalind was in the walls of the room, and in a cup on a shelf, and in a blanket that had come from London in a paper parcel and had been used the way it was meant to be used. Hugh was in the way his daughter’s face went sharp and stubborn when she was being told something she did not intend to accept. They did not require silence to prove that they had mattered, and the future did not have to apologize for arriving.

Love had made room for more love. Grief had stopped demanding that everything after it be a disappointment.

Lily reached the final line of the dragon story and closed the book with both hands.

“Done.”

Elias looked at her. “Again tomorrow.”

She smiled at him — the slow, deliberate smile of a child who knows exactly how much power she is holding and intends to keep holding it.

“Maybe. If you are good.”

Meg laughed again.

Elias drew them both closer, one arm around his wife and one hand resting lightly on the top of his daughter’s head, and held them there, and did not say anything at all, because there was nothing left that needed saying.

Behind them, the old oak door stood open onto the corridor.

And this time, nobody reached back to close it.