“She’ll always be part of our lives. Do you remember Cleo, the mummy?”
“You found out who she was, then?”
“No. That’s the name I gave her. I hope to bury the mummy with Seraphina, but keep the portrait.”
“You do have some funny ideas. I’m expecting.”
Ariana had guessed. “When?”
“In the late summer. Inching’s pleased.”
“No qualms?”
“Why should there be?”
“Exactly. But all good news will be welcome. Hermione Faringay will have her child soon, and if you are also safely delivered, then by Christmas we can be at ease.”
“You are expecting, too, then?”
Ariana instinctively put her hand on her belly. “I have hopes. I haven’t told Kynaston yet.”
Ethel chuckled. “Let sleeping worries lie?”
“Exactly.”
“Which brings to mind...”
“What?” Ariana asked.
“What’s your husband planning to do about mine?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. I pointed out that he’s suffered from being short as much as I have from being tall.”
“What of Churston, then?”
“We can’t do much about him without involving Inching, but he is aware that his part is known, and he never expected things to go so far.”
“‘He who blows on an ember... ,’” Ethel muttered.
“‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’” Ariana countered, and indeed, with so many happy outcomes, why stir coals?
•••
Ariana and Kynaston traveled south to Delacorte, stopping off at various estates and business ventures that Titus had neglected. She thought he was being excessively conscientious, but she didn’t mind the wandering, for once at Delacorte, she was going to have to accept that it, not Boxstall, was her new home.
It wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared. The house was mellow Elizabethan, nothing at all like Boxstall, and there were no ruins lurking in the park. Norris had already sent her favorite books, including theÉgypte, and some family paintings.
Ariana was sure that Phyllis had played a large part in that, perhaps nudged by the Dowager Lady Langton,though Ariana’s mother was mostly absorbed by her own upcoming marriage to Reverend Corby.
On midsummer, with Seraphina’s parents present, they laid the previous Countess of Kynaston to rest in the wilderness at Delacorte with Cleo’s mummy alongside. Cleo’s portrait already hung in the house alongside portraits of Seraphina, but a stone carver had reproduced the look on the stone that would stand over the grave, inscribed to Seraphina, Countess of Kynaston, and an unknown Italian lady who had been originally buried in Egypt.
Ariana had written a full account, which was now in the Delacorte library.
She and Kynaston were already preparing an Egyptian Hall there, done in as accurate a way as possible, and having the reproduced mural on one wall. Edgar Peake had come to see it installed, and brought as gifts the various Egyptian statues and artifacts he had. “For it never seemed right to have items that have no connection to me or my adventures.”
