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He was finally getting the chance to grieve.

“I have given your son a home,” he went on, quieter now, his voice beginning, finally, to break apart in the way he had never once allowed himself before, not even on the worst nights of the fever, not even with the knife wound fresh in his arm. “I have given him my name, and he has your eyes….exactly your eyes. I see you in him every single day, and it does not hurt the way I feared it would. It only makes me glad of him. I wish you could see him. I wish you could see what a fine little creature he is becoming. He has your temper already. God help the lot of us.”

Gregory never liked to speak too much. If anything, he preferred to keep his words short. So that he was comfortable enough to say all of this spoke of the progress that he had made.

He wept, then, properly, for the first time since the night the maid had told him the truth of it.

Phillipa held him there among the quiet headstones with the wind moving through therees.

“Thank you,” he said at last, when the worst of it had passed, wiping his face with the back of his hand in a gesture so unguarded and boyish that it caught at her heart all over again. “For coming.”

“You have been strong for long enough, Gregory. I think you have more than earned the right to simply be sad for an afternoon.”

He laughed, a little wetly, and drew her against his side, and they stood together a while longer.

“Do you think she is at peace now?” he asked after a moment.

“I know that she is,” Phillipa nodded. “It must bring her a lot of peace to know that her son is being loved, and cared for. As a mother, I know that this must be the most important thing for her.”

Gregory could only let himself find comfort in those words.

“What would I give for a chance to speak to her again,” he sighed. “I took for granted, all my life, that opportunity.”

“You can always come speak to her here,” Phillipa said.

Her grave was not in the same place that everyone else in their family was buried. That could not be changed, given the circumstances under which she had passed away. But Gregory had vowed to take care of the upkeep of the surrounding Church.

It was a small gesture to give back.

“I think I will be doing that more often now,” he sighed. Now that he had properly said his piece to her, he felt as though he could express more with less pressure now.

“We will always bring her flowers from our garden,” Phillipa replied. “And she will always be an important part of this family. Just because she is gone now doesn’t mean that we cannot keep her memory alive still.”

His wifes’ words were like a salve to his soul. Once again, he found himself grateful that married someone like her. Empathetic, and kind.

And so loving.

“I should like to bring Theodore here someday,” Gregory said, as they finally turned to go. “When he is old enough to understand. I should like him to know her name properly. I don’t want him to only know the tragic end.”

“We will bring him. All of us, together.”

“All of us,” Gregory agreed, and took her hand, and they walked back out through the old iron gate into the ordinary, going-on world, carrying her with them, finally, the way she should always have been carried, as a sister who had been loved, and was missed, and was, at long last, properly mourned.

CHAPTER 27

“Your Grace, I scarcely know where to put it all.”

Mrs. Fairley stood in the middle of St. Anthony’s newly expanded dormitory, three weeks after the ball, surrounded by crates of blankets and boots and medicines. The ledger in her hand was so thick with entries that it had required a second volume to continue it.

The expression on her face hovered somewhere between laughter and tears.

“The subscription has done better than either of us dared hope,” Phillipa said, surveying the room with no small satisfaction of her own. “Lady Carrow alone has pledged more than I asked for, and three other houses besides St. Anthony’s have already written to ask how they might be included in the spring.”

“We have taken in nine more children this month, and for the first time in as long as I have kept this house, I am not lying awake wondering how I shall feed them all come winter.” Mrs. Fairley pressed a hand briefly to her mouth, overcome. “Eleven years, Your Grace. I told you once I had waited eleven years for someone to say the words you said to me that day, about a proper subscription. I did not think, even then, that it would come to quite so much as this.”

“It is not only my doing. You have run this house on scraps and sheer will for over a decade. I have only brought you the means to do what you were already doing, a great deal more easily.”

“That is not nothing, Your Grace. That is a very great deal, to those of us who live inside these walls.” The matron looked toward the window, where a cluster of children, Tom and Joan prominent among them, were engaged in some elaborate game. “And little Joan, settled into your own house now, happy as a lark by all the reports that reach me. I will confess, I did not expect to see that particular ending for her, clever and stubborn as she is. I am very glad to have been wrong about it.”