“You found her pretty?” I say to Henry.
“I—Bram wasn’t supposed to—she is pretty. Any man can see it.”
But his eyes have a strange, yearning expression.
“What about Miss Florence Higgins?”
“Of course,” he says. “We are nearly engaged. Can’t a man call a girl pretty without it being taken ill?”
I can see by the smirk on Bram’s face, however, that it is more than that.
And Henry’s guilty, haggard expression confirms it.
“She is lovely,” I say. “And fierce.”
“That’s no matter to me,” Henry says.
We all begin to talk of other things.
But when I look back at Henry, I can tell.
He is still thinking about Evie Colley.
Epilogue the Second
Two Years Later
December 1859
Annabelle
Most wealthy Londoners want to spend Christmas far from town.
But I am not one of them.
Do not be mistaken. I have come to love Trescott. We went back, in fact, for the birth of our daughter, Adeline, feeling that it was good luck to have Mrs. Ludlow attend me. And we spent most of our daughter’s first year there.
That time transformed Trescott for me.
It is no longer a place of sad, difficult memories.
It is where Addy first smiled, where she laughed for the first time, where she first crawled, and took her first steps. It is where Alfred held her all day long when she was a tiny babe and wouldn’t countenance being put down. And where I nursed her from a skinny newborn into a plump little child.
It is also where she had her first fit of childish pique (for better or worse, my daughter has inherited my spirit) and threw a carving of a woodland creature into the glass of an antique grandfather clock.
But I have learned in the past eighteen months that there is no reason why such an occurrence—which in my childhood would have had me proclaimed by my father a devil—must yield a bad memory.
No, in fact, it doesn’t. Not when you have a father like Alfred de Lacey, né Saintsbury, who merely scoops you up, thereby saving you from your own audacity, and sees to the mess, carefully explaining to you why glass and sturdy woodland creatures do not mix. Not to mention a mother who proclaims that the clock has always been an ugly thing in the first place—and that, after all, accidents are bound to happen when one is so small and only just learning about the world.
I have warmed to some of the people there, too. We now welcome Mr. Perry and his family to the Abbey as friends. And Mr. Thompson has moved away to Somerset—in bitterness, I expect, at our continued refusal to install his son as vicar.
Upon Addy’s birth, we received a visit from Alfred’s father and his wife.
The man expressed his gratitude to me for marrying his son.
And he apologized to Alfred for being too hard on him in his youth.
To my surprise, upon Adeline’s birth, Alfred resigned the living at Trescott and it was given in full to Mr. Peabody.
