Mine already is. He laughed. A real laugh.
The full version of it. The one she had been waiting since 1800 to hear again. It filled the entrance hall and she felt it settle in her chest like something finally placed exactly where it belonged.
He released her hand. She went back up the stairs. At the top, she turned.
Because some things are worth the repetition across decades. Your Grace.
He looked up. You should have a hat made for waiting in. You’ll catch a chill.
He looked at her. This woman of 20 who had carried a 10-year-old’s declaration across a decade and offered it back to him.
True and whole and unhurried. And his face was open in a way it had not been in many years.
Possibly ever. I’ll have several made.
He said. They were married in August.
A quiet ceremony in the chapel at Ashvale Park. Maximilian’s country estate in Wiltshire where the wisteria on the south wall had been climbing the stones since 1743 and showed no signs of stopping.
The Dowager Duchess cried, which she would have found undignified if she had been less pleased. Ada’s mother cried louder and with considerably more volume having long ago decided that she was entitled to.
Lord Edmund Hereford sent a very gracious letter of congratulation which Ada read and set aside with a respect for him that had not diminished. He was, she thought, exactly what he appeared to be and that was more than most people managed.
She hoped sincerely that he found someone who deserved him. The ton talked as the ton always talks.
They said it was the strangest match of the decade. The Duke of Ashvale who had declared himself too old to choose a bride.
Married to a girl 20 years his junior. The niece of Lady Whitmore of all people.
A Bath Seminary graduate with no particular fortune and no particular connection beyond the one she had apparently been quietly building for 10 years. They said it quickly.
And then they said it less. And then they stopped saying it.
Because every person who encountered the Duke and Duchess of Ashvale together in a room reported the same thing. The man who had built composure into an identity was in the presence of his wife.
Entirely and permanently at ease. He laughed differently. He occupied rooms differently.
He had stopped building walls and started opening windows, which is a thing that happens to people when they finally permit themselves to want what they want. Ada did not need anyone to report this.
She had the original in front of her every day and every day she found it exactly as true as the night before. They were in the library at Ashvale House in September.
She reading, he at his correspondence. Both of them in the familiar quiet that had become the texture of their days together.
When he looked up without preamble and said, You were 10 years old. She looked up from her book.