"Home, darling."
"With Frank and Matilda and Audrey and Percy?"
"With everyone. The whole family. All the dogs. All the horses. Everything."
Florence smiled. It was the first smile Alexandra had seen from her daughter in six days and it was small and sleepy and perfect, the smile of a child who had been promised the thing she wanted most, and it broke Alexandra's heart and healed it in the same breath. Erin's hand found hers and their fingers locked together over Florence's sleeping body and the three of them sat in the warm circle of the lamp's light, mother and mother and daughter, together again, and outside the window the sky was beginning to lighten at the eastern edge, the first thin line of grey pressing against the darkness like a promise kept.
"Yes please," Florence said. Her voice was drowsy, her eyes already closing again, her body settling deeper into Alexandra's arms. "I want to go home."
20
The kitchen smelled of scrambled eggs and toast and the particular, unhurried warmth of a morning that nobody was rushing through.
Erin stood at the range, the enormous cast-iron range that had been in the castle kitchen since before she'd married into this family, and she pushed the eggs around the pan with a wooden spoon and she listened to her children. All three of them. The sound of all three of them, in the same room, at the same table, filling the air with the noise that children made when they were together and safe and had no reason to be quiet.
Frank was talking. Of course Frank was talking, Frank had been talking since they'd arrived home at four in the morning, had leaped from Vic's arms the moment the front door opened and launched himself at Florence with a force that had nearly knocked them both over. He hadn't stopped since. He was telling Florence about the card games he'd played while she was gone, about how Audrey had moped around the castle looking for her, about how he'd learned to make his own breakfast because nobody was paying attention to meals. He was telling hereverything, all at once, the words tumbling over each other in the way they did when Frank was excited or overwhelmed or both.
"And Audrey slept on your bed every single night. Every night, Flo. She wouldn't sleep anywhere else. Vic tried to move her and she just went right back. And she did that thing where she puts her chin on the pillow and looks really sad?—"
"She does that when I'm at school too," Florence said. She was sitting at the table in her dressing gown, her blonde hair still tangled from sleep, eating toast with butter and jam. Not the jam from the guest pantry, the jam from the family kitchen, the one the children preferred, the one with the label that Frank had drawn a face on three months ago. She was eating slowly and methodically, the way Florence always ate, cutting her toast into four rectangles and working through them in order. She looked like a girl having breakfast. She looked ordinary. She looked like the most extraordinary thing Erin had ever seen.
Matilda was sitting beside Florence. Not talking, Matilda was rarely the one talking when Frank was in full flow, but sitting close, her shoulder touching Florence's shoulder, her hand resting on the table near Florence's plate in a gesture that was not quite touching but was ready to. She'd been like that since they'd come home. Near. Present. Within arm's reach, as though proximity was a form of protection, as though by staying close enough she could prevent anyone from taking Florence away again.
Erin watched them. She stood at the range with the wooden spoon in her hand and the eggs beginning to set and she watched her three children at the table in the morning light and the feeling in her chest was so large that her body could barely contain it. Relief. Gratitude. Joy, actual joy, the kind she'd forgotten existed over the past six days, the kind that made your face ache because you'd been smiling for so long. And underneath it all, deep and steady like a current beneath a river,love. Not the fierce, protective love that had driven her through the crisis. The love that had sharpened her into a weapon and aimed her at anyone who stood between her and Florence. This was the other kind. The quiet kind. The kind that came from standing in a kitchen on a summer morning and watching your children eat breakfast.
Alexandra appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a cream cashmere jumper and jeans and her hair was loose around her shoulders and she looked tired, they both looked tired, they'd slept for perhaps two hours, but her face was soft and her eyes were bright and she was looking at the scene in the kitchen with the expression of a woman who had been given back something she thought she'd lost.
"The eggs are about to burn," she said.
Erin turned back to the pan. The eggs were fine, just beginning to firm at the edges, but she pushed them off the heat and added a knob of butter the way Alexandra liked them. "They're perfect. You don't know how to cook eggs."
"I know how to eat them. I know when they're too dry."
"They're not too dry."
"They look dry from here."
"Sit down, Mrs Kennedy. I'll bring them over."
Alexandra smiled. The smile did something to Erin's chest that six days of crisis had made her forget: the quick, warm contraction that happened every time Alexandra smiled at her across a room, the reminder that this woman, after all these years and three children and a kidnapping and a constitutional crisis, could still make her heart catch. She crossed the kitchen and kissed Erin on the cheek, a quick kiss, domestic, a wife kissing a wife in a kitchen, and the ordinariness of it was so precious that Erin had to press her lips together and breathe through her nose.
"Mummy's kissing," Frank announced to no one.
"Mummies always kiss," Matilda said, without looking up from her cereal.
Florence was watching them from the table with those blue eyes, Alex's eyes, wide and serious and noticing everything. She'd been watching her mothers closely since they'd come home, tracking their movements, registering their proximity to each other, the touches, the looks. The observant child who had told Mrs Ashworth that the phone lie didn't add up was now observing her parents with the same quiet intelligence, checking that the people she loved were solid and real and not going anywhere.
Erin served the eggs. She sat down at the table across from Alexandra, Florence between them, Frank on Florence's other side still talking, Matilda beside Alexandra eating her cereal with the focused precision of a child who took breakfast seriously. The kitchen was bright with morning light: the tall windows letting in the low, golden sun of early summer, the stone walls warmed by the range, the air smelling of toast and butter and the lavender oil that the kitchen staff used to polish the table. Audrey was beneath the table, her enormous fawn body stretched out across the flagstones, her chin resting on Florence's foot. She hadn't left Florence's side since they'd walked through the door.
"Can I ride Percy today?" Florence asked.
The question was so normal that it stopped Erin mid-bite. Six days. Six days of terror and fury and desperate searching, and Florence's first morning request was to ride her pony. Because she was eight. Because children processed things differently, or didn't process them at all, or processed them in their own way and at their own pace and sometimes that pace included ponies and breakfast and asking about the dogs.
"Maybe this afternoon, darling," Alexandra said. "Let's have a quiet morning first."
"But I haven't ridden in a week. Percy will think I've forgotten him."
"Percy has been spoilt rotten by the grooms. He's had extra carrots every day. I don't think he's suffering."
