A Sanctuary for the Duke’s Heart – Extended Epilogue

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Two years later

The rosemary had grown tall enough to brush the lower shelf of the propagation bench, which meant it needed cutting back before it crowded the feverfew, and Julian had been meaning to mention this to Marianne for three days. He had not mentioned it because every time he entered the glasshouse, she was either tending something that required her full attention, or talking to someone, or watching the children with the particular quality of stillness she brought to moments she was consciously recording, and interrupting any of those things for the sake of a rosemary plant had consistently seemed like poor judgment.

He stood now in the doorway of the new glasshouse, the one Griggs had built two autumns ago along the south wall of the kitchen garden, and decided that the rosemary could wait another day.

Charlotte and Beatrice were somewhere in the far section where the climbing jasmine had established itself along the ironwork with the aggressive enthusiasm of a plant that had decided its instructions were merely advisory. Their voices carried through the warm, scented air in the particular register of children who were doing something that occupied them completely, rising occasionally into laughter and then settling back into the focused murmur of a game with internal logic that adults were not expected to understand. He had stopped trying to follow the rules some months ago and had found this a considerable improvement.

Between the jasmine and the nearest bench, in the shade that the vine threw across the stone floor in long, irregular patches, sat the cradle.

Julian crossed to it without hurrying, as he always did now when he entered a room where Robert was sleeping, moving with the unhurried care of someone who had learned that the instinct to check was best satisfied quietly rather than urgently. The infant lay on his back with his dark hair pressed flat against the linen, his hand curled around nothing in particular with the firm grip of someone who had not yet encountered anything that did not deserve holding on to.

Robert Montford had arrived in late spring with the same combination of timing and indifference to convenience that appeared to characterize the Montford approach to significant events. He had been, in Marianne’s precise assessment, delivered approximately four hours after the fact, entirely worth it. Julian had not trusted himself to say anything coherent for some time and had instead sat beside her with her hand in both of his until the capacity for speech returned.

He was, Julian thought now, looking at the sleeping face, simply the best thing he had ever had any part in.

He heard Marianne before he saw her, the soft sound of her movements among the orchid staging at the far end of the glasshouse, the particular rhythm of someone working with focused attention. She appeared between two rows of established plants with a small pot in each hand, and the look she wore when she was checking something against an internal standard and finding it satisfactory.

She saw him, and the look shifted into the one that had not stopped catching him off guard in two years of daily exposure to it.

“He has been asleep for an hour,” she said, setting the pots down on the nearest bench. “Charlotte was very insistent that he needed the rosemary for pleasant dreams. I did not have the heart to explain that he is four months old and unlikely to have formed strong botanical preferences yet.”

“She may be correct,” Julian said. “He does appear to be dreaming pleasantly.”

Marianne came to stand beside him and looked at their son with the expression she had for things she was still in the process of believing were entirely real. Two years had settled certain things about her that had been uncertain when he first knew her; the guardedness was mostly gone, the careful composure still present but no longer defensive, transformed into something that looked more like simple steadiness.

The glasshouse had done that, he thought, or had been part of it. She had put down roots here with the same patient attention she gave everything that needed time to establish.

“Tom Griffiths says the east beds are ready for the second planting,” she said. “The soil has responded better than I expected to the new amendment. We should have enough established stock by late spring to begin supplying the Cheltenham orders again properly.”

“Mrs. Langley will be pleased to hear it.”

“Mrs. Langley already knows. She told me this morning before I had finished my tea.” There was a slight lift at the corner of her mouth. “She remains, in retirement, more comprehensively informed about the glasshouse operations than I am.”

From somewhere in the jasmine section came the sound of the girls’ game escalating briefly before resolving itself.

***

Mrs. Langley was installed in the chair she had claimed as her particular territory on the day the new glasshouse had been completed, positioned at the angle that gave her a clear view of both the main staging and the garden path beyond the glass panels. She was not, technically, retired in any sense that affected her involvement in decisions she considered material, which was to say most decisions, but she had developed the grace to frame her observations as suggestions rather than instructions on approximately half of the occasions that arose.

Julian sat down beside her on the bench that had been placed there for the purpose, or possibly for his purpose specifically, since she had directed its placement herself.

“The orchids are establishing well,” she said, without looking away from the staging. “Better than I expected after the contamination. Marianne has a particular understanding of what they need.”

“She does.”

“I told her ten years ago, when she first came to work for me, that she had a gift.” Mrs. Langley paused in the manner of someone preparing to say something that required framing. “That is not strictly accurate. I told her two years ago, because I did not know her ten years ago. But I told her as soon as I knew her, which amounts to the same thing in terms of my judgment being correct.”

“It does,” Julian agreed.

She looked at him with the dark, assessing eyes that had, he had come to understand, seen the end of this story approximately six months before he had. “You look well, Julian. Considerably better than you did when you began visiting my glasshouse for herbs.”

“I was not well then.”

“No.” She said it without softening or embellishment. “You were a man who had decided that discipline was an adequate substitute for living. It is a common mistake among people who have experienced significant loss. The discipline is genuine, the living is simply postponed rather than replaced.” She returned her gaze to the orchids. “Marianne had made the same error in a different direction. She had decided that invisibility was safety.”

Julian thought of a woman in a gray dress moving among plants in the half-light of a November morning, her back to the doorway, her whole bearing arranged to take up as little notice as possible.

“She was not invisible to me,” he said.

“No,” Mrs. Langley agreed, with the satisfaction of someone whose judgment has been confirmed. “That is rather the point.”

***

Thomas and Audrey arrived mid-morning from Cheltenham in the manner they always arrived, which was to say Thomas with his characteristic ease and Audrey with a basket and the quietly radiant quality she had acquired somewhere in the past eighteen months that made her almost unrecognizable as the pale, anxious woman who had sat on the edge of a settee at Alderwick Hall declining to meet anyone’s eyes.

The basket contained pastries from Mrs. Denham’s shop on Montpellier Walk and three small seedlings in paper pots, labeled in Audrey’s careful hand with the names of varieties she had been cultivating in the kitchen garden of the house she and Thomas had taken in Cheltenham, for what she described as the girls’ friendship garden.

Beatrice received this information with the gravity it deserved, examined each seedling with thorough attention, and then directed Charlotte in the matter of where they should be positioned relative to the existing plantings. Charlotte, who had her father’s capacity for precise instruction and her own considerable opinions about the aesthetic arrangement of growing things, offered two counter-suggestions. A negotiation followed that arrived at a satisfactory outcome for both parties within approximately four minutes.

Julian watched Thomas watching this and recognized the expression, because he wore it himself fairly regularly.

“She is exactly like you,” Thomas said, not specifying which child he meant.

“I know,” Julian said. “I find it simultaneously gratifying and humbling.”

“Audrey says Beatrice is going to be a botanist,” Thomas said. “She made this assessment based on a twenty-minute conversation about soil acidity at our last visit. She is usually right about these things.”

Audrey had moved to where Marianne stood near the orchids, and the two of them were speaking with the ease of women who had found in each other a particular kind of friendship, the kind built not on shared circumstance but on complementary qualities recognizing each other. Audrey’s shyness and Marianne’s steadiness had turned out to suit each other very well.

Thomas picked up the thread of something they had been discussing at their last visit, an arrangement he had been considering regarding a property adjoining his Cheltenham holdings, and Julian attended to it with one part of his mind while the other remained on the room, the sleeping infant, the sound of the girls in the jasmine, his wife’s voice from the far end of the glasshouse.

***

The afternoon brought a carriage Julian had not expected, which pulled up the garden path rather than the main drive. The woman who descended moved with the careful self-possession of someone who had arrived at composure through considerable effort and was not casual about it.

Lady Isobel Crowhurst had written three weeks prior with a brief, precise letter explaining that she would be passing through Cheltenham on her way north and hoped, if it was not inconvenient, to call at Alderwick Hall on a specific date. Julian had written back that it was not inconvenient. Marianne had added a postscript in her own hand.

Isobel came into the glasshouse with a leather case that looked similar to the one she had carried to Mrs. Langley’s townhouse nearly two years ago, though the quality of her bearing was different now. Less the compressed urgency of a woman moving carefully through fear and more the settled purpose of someone who had organized her circumstances to her own satisfaction and found them adequate.

She greeted Julian and Marianne briefly and then produced from the case a sheaf of documents that she laid on the bench with the methodical clarity she brought to everything.

“The last of Alastair’s creditor arrangements are resolved,” she said. “The Cheltenham solicitors have confirmed it. The quarry land reverted to proper title following the fraud proceedings, as you know. I have directed what remained of the unencumbered estate toward three endowments.” She set a separate paper on top of the others. “The largest is for the benefit of women in reduced circumstances requiring legal assistance. I thought it appropriate.”

Marianne looked at the documents and then at Isobel with the directness she had for things that mattered. “Thank you for coming in person.”

“I found I wanted to.” Isobel glanced at the cradle in the shade of the jasmine, at the sleeping infant, at the two small figures now emerging from the far section with their aprons full of something botanical. “You have built something good here,” she said, with the precision of someone who did not offer observations carelessly. “I am glad of it.”

She stayed for an hour, drank tea, and spoke with Mrs. Langley about Edinburgh with the ease of two people who shared a pragmatic view of the world. When she left, she moved with the same careful self-possession as when she arrived, and Julian thought she looked like a woman who had set down something heavy and was finding the difference instructive.

***

The afternoon light had deepened into the long golden slant of early evening when Catherine arrived.

She had written the previous week, a letter that Julian had read twice before giving to Marianne without comment, who had read it once and said that she thought it would be all right. The letter had been short, the language stripped of its usual decorative authority, and it had said simply that she hoped she might come to call, that she understood if the answer was no, and that she was sorry for what she had done and for how long she had taken to say so plainly.

She came around from the terrace rather than through the main house, which Julian recognized as deliberate, a choice not to assert the family access she had exercised without question for years. She wore gray silk without ornamentation and moved without her usual composed assurance, which made her look older and, somehow, more like the person she actually was beneath the performance.

Marianne went to meet her.

Julian watched from where he stood beside Mrs. Langley’s chair, ready to intervene if it was needed and understanding that it would not be, because Marianne had already decided how this would go, and her decisions of this kind were generally correct.

Catherine’s apology was brief and genuine in the way that genuine things stripped of rehearsal tended to be. She looked at Marianne directly while she spoke and did not look at Julian, which was right. When she had finished, she stood with her hands still at her sides, waiting.

Marianne’s answer was equally brief. She said she accepted, and that the girls would be pleased to see their aunt, then she asked if Catherine would like to come and see the glasshouse.

Catherine’s eyes held the particular brightness of someone managing considerable feeling with imperfect success. She said she would like that very much.

Julian exhaled quietly.

***

The evening settled over Alderwick Hall slowly, the light thickening from gold to amber as the sun moved behind the tree line. The glasshouse held the warmth of the day in its glass and stone and the accumulated heat of living things, the mingled scents of jasmine and rosemary and the turned earth of the new beds drifting together into something that had become, over two years, entirely synonymous with home.

Mrs. Langley had dozed briefly in her chair and woken with the serenity of someone who had arranged the world to her satisfaction and found sleep in it untroubling. Thomas and Audrey were walking the grounds in the long evening light, their voices carrying faintly through the open door. Catherine and Isobel had found themselves sitting under the rose arbor in conversation that Julian had not expected and did not interrupt.

He sat on the bench beside Marianne, their shoulders touching, the cradle within arm’s reach. Robert had woken an hour ago and been fed and held and passed between several people who had strong opinions about the correct way to hold an infant; he had regarded all of them with the calm imperviousness of someone who found the world mildly interesting but not yet alarming.

He was asleep again now.

Charlotte and Beatrice sat in the entrance of the glasshouse with their backs to the garden, weaving something from the ribbons and stems they had collected through the afternoon, their voices low and purposeful and entirely content.

Marianne was not looking at anything in particular, which meant she was looking at all of it, the way she did when she was recording a moment deliberately. He had learned to recognize this and to leave space for it.

After a while, she quietly said, “I told Beatrice when we came here that I hoped we might find something worth staying for.”

“And?”

She turned to look at him, her expression without performance or careful arrangement, simply what was true.

“We found considerably more than that,” she said.

The evening light moved through the glass panels and settled across the sleeping infant and the weaving children and the accumulated company of people changed by consequence and time, and Julian thought that Mrs. Langley had been right about most things, including this.

Gardens must grow, or they die. Even memorial gardens. Perhaps especially those.

He took Marianne’s hand and held it, and the glasshouse held its warmth around them, and the evening was patient and golden and entirely sufficient.

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