WD_Final-39

Epilogue

Five years later, on the Dalmatian Coast

The Marchioness of Ashcroft sat on the nearly deserted stretch of Adriatic coast with all those she loved most in the world surrounding her. Her husband sat on the bench nearby, sketching.

After the splint had come off, he’d worked for hours every day to regain use of his arm, starting with sketching their cat, lazy old King, may he rest in peace, whose likeness had delighted the children of Patience’s friends. Giles had spent a year with nothing but pencil and pen, writing and drawing, before he’d dared to return to paint. Having to work carefully lightened and loosened his style from what it had been before the accident. His arm ached him from time to time, especially when it rained, but that, he always said, he was happy to live with.

When she’d quickly become pregnant after they married, they’d moved to France. The better to raise children away from the lingering scandals of their parents and long English memories. Since then, they’d twice traveled farther east. First to the city of Ravenna for a time. Then, after the British withdrew from the occupied Dalmatian islands, across the sea.

Their son, christened Giles Benjamin Charles Emery Warrington Hale but called Ben—age four—chased their daughter, Louisa Margaret—age two and three quarters—on the sand. The little ones screamed and laughed. The children’s nursery maid, Mademoiselle Amélie, ran with them, her hair loose and trailing behind her when the wind wasn’t lifting it this way and that. The gold curls caught the sunlight just so. At sixteen, Amélie was more a loving playmate to the children than anything else, and neither Giles nor Patience would have it any other way.

Patience held baby Michael to her breast where the greedy, fat-cheeked newborn guzzled noisily, busily nursing himself into a milk stupor. She’d fed two children from her own body already—and Louisa still came for a sip at bedtime or when she was ill—but it never stopped being surprising that so small and helpless a creature could have such a powerful little rosebud mouth. Michael kept her up all night, but she already adored him despite sleep deprivation.

Her father sat nearby, carefully folding paper into boats that the children would float on the tiny lakes and ponds when the tide rolled out. His hat rested by his feet along with a bound copy of The Haunted Tower, all the chapters newly collected in a single volume. (Three dozen more copies were at home waiting for the marquess to distribute to all his friends—Giles boasted about Patience quite shamelessly.) Mr. Emery’s hair had become thinner and even more wiry in the past few years, and he didn’t often bother having it cut. The ocean’s wind fluttered the white length this way and that, making it look like a bird tied to a post, trying frantically to get away.

Patience had penned a letter to her parents about expecting her first child and had received a reply at unusual speed. They’d written saying that her father was selling his shop and her parents were moving to the Continent to be closer to their daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren.

When they’d come, she’d expressed surprise at her father’s decision.

“You and your children are my legacy,” he’d told her. “This is what I worked so hard for—to give your mother and you everything. I didn’t quite achieve it, but that’s what makes what we have now an even more precious gift.”

And now, they enjoyed it together. So far as she knew, he’d never looked back.

Mrs. Emery, overcoming her awe of the duchess—and to be perfectly honest, that had taken some time—had befriended her. Then, in an unexpected twist, they’d become rivals. Friendly rivals—each spurring the other on to more imaginative heights of fantastical embroidery. There was no telling where it would end. For the new baby, they’d each started a panel on a wide swathe of linen. Each project was so ambitious, the family teased them that little Michael would be well out of the nursery before the panels were complete.

There was one thing, though, that had been significantly altered. After Patience had explained her last encounter with the jewel, Giles had agreed that it no longer made a suitable toy for bedroom play. So they’d had the sapphire reset in a necklace…and shared secret smiles whenever Patience had occasion to wear it.

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