Marcel was wishing she had gone after her brother. Truth was beginning to be spoken among them, but it was halting, difficult, necessary, hurtful, endearing . . . He could go on and on. Sometimes it came blurting out all in a flood, as now with Estelle. Sometimes it was denied with some bitterness, as a moment ago with Bertrand. But he would endure it all if there was a chance of getting his children back, totally unworthy though he was.
“We have loved you anyway,” Estelle said. “It was something we could never choose to do or not to do. It just . . . is. And call us foolish if you wish, but we want to see you happy.”
“I can never make amends for the lost years,” he said, “but I will try to give you . . . now. It is all I can offer—now on into as much of the future as we are granted. I am happy, Estelle, or was until fifteen or twenty minutes ago.”
“No, you were not,” she said. “Not really. We will never be quite enough for you, Papa, just as in time you will not be quite enough for either of us. I do not feel any burning wish for a Season yet, but I surely will in time. I will want a husband and a family and a home of my own. And Bertrand will want a wife. He and I will not even be enough for each other, though we always have been and still are. We wanted you to be fully happy, and it seems to us that you gave up the chance because for once in your life you wanted to do something noble.”
“For once in my life?” He raised his eyebrows and she flushed.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I am sure you must have done other noble things. Even when you announced your betrothal in Devonshire, you were being noble.”
He gazed at her, this daughter of his who had so recently found her voice and revealed herself as a young woman of firm character and principle and considerable courage. She had blossomed before his eyes.
“I will tell you this, Estelle,” he said. “I am as proud of both you and Bertrand as any father could possibly be of his children. I will tell Bertrand that too. But . . . what exactly is it the two of you want me to do?”
She smiled at him, linked her arm through his, and turned them back in the direction of home.
“I assume,” she said, “that was a rhetorical question, Papa.”
Twenty-two
Viola and Abigail arrived at Brambledean Court four days before Christmas. They had come sooner than planned because heavy clouds had loomed overhead for a few days and the blacksmith, who had a reputation in the village for forecasting weather with some accuracy, had predicted snow for Christmas and lots of it.
Brambledean was the principal seat of the Earls of Riverdale, but Viola had never lived there as countess and so felt no awkwardness about going there now. Alexander and Wren had been busy since early summer repairing the damage that neglect of years had caused to both the park and the house, though they had concentrated most of their efforts upon restoring the farms to prosperity and making repairs to the laborers’ cottages. There was still much to be done. The park looked very barren even for December, though the lawns were neat and much deadwood appeared to have been cut away from trees and hedges. The driveway had been resurfaced and the wheel ruts of years smoothed out. The house was still shabby, but curtains and cushions had been renewed in the main rooms and walls had been painted or papered. Everything gleamed with cleanliness and liberal doses of polish.
“It is not yet a showpiece,” Wren said as she took them up to their rooms despite the increasing bulk of her pregnancy. “But it is cozy, or so we tell ourselves. It is home. And now it will have a sort of housewarming. Oh, I am so glad the two of you have come. My first Christmas with Alexander would not have been complete without the whole family here.”
But Harry would be absent, Viola thought without saying the words aloud. There had been one letter from him since she returned from Northamptonshire. In it he had wished her happy in her upcoming marriage, though he had expressed a wish that he had been able to interrogate the Marquess of Dorchester before the betrothal became official. He remembered him as Mr. Lamarr, but while he and his young friends had looked up to him with some awe as one devil—his exact word—of a fine fellow, he had not been the sort of man a son would want to see his mother marrying. There had been no letter from him since. Viola assumed her son would express some relief in his next one.
“Except for Harry,” Wren added. “Let us hope that the wars will be over by this time next year and we can all be together. Including this babe,” she added, patting her abdomen.
They were not the first to arrive, early though they were. Althea and Elizabeth, Alexander’s mother and sister, had come the week before, and Thomas and Mildred, Lord and Lady Molenor, had arrived the day before with their three boys, who had been let loose from school for the holidays—that was how one of them described their presence to Viola anyway. She loved them instantly—Boris, aged sixteen, Peter, fifteen, and Ivan, fourteen. They were polite, charming boys, who looked to her like three kegs of powder just awaiting a spark so that they could explode into activity and mischief.
Camille and Joel arrived the next day with Viola’s mother and the three children. Sarah fell instantly in love with Boris, who lifted her to one shoulder almost as soon as her feet were inside the nursery and galloped about the room with her while she clutched his hair and shrieked with fear and joy. Winifred eyed Ivan and informed him that he was her first cousin once removed since he was her mama’s first cousin and that he was four years older than she. If he would tell her when his birthday was, she would be able to tell him exactly how many more months than four years. Ivan looked at her rather as if she had two heads.
“March the twenty-fourth,” Peter told her. “Mine is May the fifth.”
“And mine is February the twelfth,” Winifred said. “I think.”
“You think?” Ivan said.
“I am not quite sure. I was an orphan before Mama and Papa adopted me,” she explained. “I was in an orphanage. Papa grew up there before me. And Cousin Anna.”
“Really?” Ivan’s interest had been caught, and Viola went back to the drawing room to speak with her mother.
Most of the other guests arrived before dark—and an unexpected one in the middle of the evening, long after dark.
“Whoever can that be?” Matilda asked when they heard the unmistakable rumble of wheels on the terrace below the drawing room.
“I hope it is not Anna and Avery and Louise,” her mother said. “The baby should be in her bed already.”
“And it is never safe to travel any distance after dark,” Matilda added. “Surely it is not them. Louise is far too sensible. Or perhaps they were afraid it would snow and so pressed onward.”
Alexander laughed. “There is one way of finding out,” he said, getting to his feet. “I shall go down.”
He came back less than five minutes later with a single traveler, a young man who strode into the room one step behind him, looked about him with eager good cheer, and went striding off toward his mother, arms outstretched.
“Hired carriages are an abomination,” he said. “I am convinced every bone in my body is in a different place from where it was when I started.”
Viola was on her feet without any awareness of how she had got there.
“Harry!” she cried before she was enfolded in his arms and hugged tightly enough to squeeze all the breath out of her.