He pulled back just far enough to see her face. His eyes were red at the edges. The severity she had catalogued in courtrooms and corridors was entirely gone, and what was left was the man underneath — the one who had knelt on a nursery floor and played badly at dragons and learnt her mother’s music in the dark.
“If you command it, I will spend the rest of my life earning what I owe you. But if there is any mercy in you still?—”
She kissed him.
Not with urgency, not with the hunger of months of restraint finally breaking — she kissed him the way she had learnt to do everything that mattered over the past four years. Steadily. With the full weight of what she meant, without flinching from the cost. His hands tightened on her face. She felt him breathe.
When she pulled back, he looked at her and for the first time in her life she felt as though nothing more precious than her existed.
“Come home,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
A sound erupted from the upper staircase.
Not a cry — a sound of uncontained delight, the kind produced only by a small person who had been lying in bed listening and had identified sufficient justification to stop lying in bed. Footsteps, rapid and uneven, the percussion of a child who had been told to stay and had weighed that instruction against the available evidence and found it wanting.
Clara rounded the corner of the upper landing still in her nightgown, Bess crushed against her chest, hair wild in every direction, and took the stairs at a pace that briefly suggested catastrophe before she reached the bottom, aimed herself across the hall with the focused velocity of something fired from a small but determined cannon, and collided with Tristan’s legs.
He caught her before she could bounce off entirely — lifted her in the single, fluid motion of a man who had been doing this for months and had long since stopped noticing when it became automatic. Clara wrapped both arms around his neck with the possessive confidence of a child who had decided this person belonged to her and was only now returning from an inexplicable absence. She leaned back just far enough to look him in the face with the direct, unflinching assessment she had been deploying since a chapel in Mayfair, and said:
“You made Rosamund cry.”
“I know.”
“You are never allowed to do that again.”
“I know.”
“Say that you promise.”
“I promise.”
Clara examined him for a moment, verifying the quality of the promise with the thoroughness she brought to all important matters. Then she tucked herself back against his shoulder and announced, to no one in particular, that she wanted to go home and that Thunderclap had probably missed her terribly and that the Earl of Carrots would need a full account of everything that had happened because he was the Duke of his territories and dukes required accurate intelligence.
Tristan looked at Rosamund over her sister’s curls.
The last of the granite gave way. Not into softness, exactly — into the warmth of a man who had stopped arguing with himself. Who had been arguing with himself for four years and had arrived, at last, at the point where the argument was finished.
“I have my orders,” he said quietly.
Rosamund laughed.
It came from somewhere below her ribs, bright and involuntary — the laugh of a woman who had spent four years building walls around the last things she loved and had just discovered that the man on the other side of them had been building his own, for longer than she had known, and had always intended they face the same direction.
She crossed the hall and took Clara’s hand where it rested on his shoulder. The three of them stood in the entrance hall of Ashvale as the first grey light of morning pressed through the open front door, and London lay fifty miles behind them, and ahead of them was a carriage and a road and a house with a paper crown on the nursery mantel and a copper beech in the garden and two doors that had been, from the very beginning, designed to open.
Rosamund looked at the hand she was holding. Then she looked at him.
He looked back, and the look held the whole of what neither of them had been ready to say until now — steady, unguarded, carrying the quality of two people who had finished the longest argument of their lives and found, on the other side of it, that they were still in the same room.
“Thunderclap,” Clara reminded them, with some urgency.
They went home.
EPILOGUE
“The Earl of Carrots,” Clara announced joyfully, “has been promoted.”
