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“She is settling in beautifully. She has already informed my husband that the drawing room wants more cushions, and reorganized the nursery bookshelf twice to her own satisfaction.”

Mrs. Fairley laughed, properly, the sound of it carrying warm through the crowded, well stocked room. “That sounds very much like our Joan. Give her my love, Your Grace, when you see her next, and tell her Mrs. Fairley says she had better come and visit, and bring her little brother, so we may see for ourselves how tall they have both grown.”

“I will tell her.” Phillipa looked around the transformed room once more, the crates and the blankets and the noise of children who no longer went cold or hungry through a London winter, and felt something settle in her chest. “I think, Mrs. Fairley, that this is exactly the kind of good I hoped for, the night I first walked into this office with nothing more than a donation and a great deal more hope than sense.”

“You have given this house a future, Your Grace. I do not know how a person properly thanks another for that, so I shall simply say that I am grateful, and leave it at that.”

“Then we are agreed. That is thanks enough, between the two of us.”

EPILOGUE

Later that evening, Phillipa found herself in her study.

“We miss you dreadfully, and cannot wait to see you again.”

Phillipa read the line back to herself, pen hovering, and decided it would do very well.

She was writing to her father, inviting him to Brawnhite. She found that she wanted, this time, to tell him everything, the ball and the trial and the miracle of a life that had, against every expectation she had once held for it, turned out happy.

We should like very much to have you with us, she wrote. There is a bench in the garden where Gregory and I sit in the evenings and look at the stars, and I find I have a great many questions still, about the ones you used to point out to me when I was small, that no one else seems able to answer half so well.

She was still bent over the letter, Theodore on her lap babbling determinedly at the inkwell, when she heard the front door, and Augusta’s voice in the hall, and Ronan’s laugh beneath it, both of them arriving, as they so often did these days, without the smallest pretense of having been invited.

“Well?” Augusta came into the morning room already pulling off her gloves, Ronan close behind her. “Has he come back yet? I could not sit at home another moment not knowing.”

“Not yet. Soon, I think.”

It had been three weeks since the ball, and a lot of careful work on the part of Gregory’s solicitor to see that the whole sorry business was handled with as little public scandal as such a thing could possibly be handled with.

This morning, at last, had been the day appointed for Michael Dornet’s trial.

Gregory had risen before dawn, dressed in near silence, and sat a long while on the edge of their bed for a long time.

“You need not do this alone,” Phillipa had told him, sitting up against the pillows, still half asleep but unwilling to let him leave without saying it. “I would come, if you wished it.”

“I know it. I think, this once, I should like to stand for her myself, without anyone beside me to lean on.” He had taken her hand, kissed it, the old familiar gesture that still, even now, took her breath a little. “I will come home the moment it is finished, and tell you everything, I promise you that. Only let me carry this last piece of it alone. I owe her that much, I think. To be the one who finally stood up and spoke her name in a room full of strangers, and said plainly what was done to her.”

“Then go, and come home to us.”

“Always,” he had said, and gone.

Theodore, as if he understood the significance of the day in some small way, chose that moment to seize a fistful of his mother’s hair and declare, with great conviction, “Mama.”

It was not his first word but it was the first time he had said Mama and clearly meant her by it, and Phillipa’s whole chest went warm and tight at once.

“Did you hear that?” she said to Augusta, forgetting entirely about the trial for one whole glorious moment. “Did you hear what he said?”

“I heard it. I believe the entire street heard it, from the volume of your reaction.” Augusta was laughing, and reaching for the baby herself, when the front door sounded again, heavier this time, and both women went very still.

Gregory came into the morning room still in his dark coat from the courthouse, and for one terrible second his face gave nothing away at all, and Phillipa’s heart stopped entirely in her chest.

Then he smiled, tired but real, all the way to his eyes, and the whole room seemed to exhale at once.

“Life,” he said. “The judge gave him life in prison and he will not trouble this family again.”

He sat down heavily in the chair nearest the door. A quick glance at him was enough to know that he was entirely exhausted.

Phillipa crossed to him at once, kneeling by his side with Theodore still balanced on her hip.