She stood in front of them with Ambrose beside her and Henderson a respectful distance behind with the expression of a man who considered himself responsible for this on some level and was not wrong. "You were right," she said. "Henderson is usually right," he said. "I implement his conclusions." "I meant about the light," she said. He looked at the peonies in the June morning and then at her, and the lines around his storm blue eyes were doing the thing they did now with increasing frequency, which was what they had always been built for.
They married in September in the church nearest Alifford Court, in the manner of two people who know what they want and have no particular interest in making a theater of knowing it. Constance cried, which surprised her and didn't surprise anyone else. Henderson gave them a cutting from the south-wall peonies with instructions he delivered at length and with the conviction of a man who trusts no one else to follow instructions correctly. Mr. Holt organized the household's response to the occasion with the same professionalism he had organized everything since the pond incident which he never mentioned directly and which could be observed on careful occasions to have made him quietly and permanently fond of the new duchess.
Alifford Court opened its east wing for the first time in seven years. Mrs. Apprentice organized this with her usual genius and an expression that suggested she had been waiting for the opportunity. The portrait gallery, when Felicity passed through it on a morning in October of the following year, looked different from how she remembered it. Not changed, but settled, as if the rooms had remembered what they were for. The woman in the portrait with the storm blue eyes was still trying not to laugh.
Felicity thought she looked rather pleased. Dioynes was given his own pond constructed at Felicity's specific request on the east side of the Alifford grounds in a location Henderson selected for optimal appeal to a philosophically inclined duck. Dioynes visited it occasionally with the polite acknowledgement of something that has received a gift and recognizes the intention. He continued to prefer the original pond which had been his position all along and which everyone had eventually understood was not negotiable. Some things require patience.
Some beginnings require the right kind of interruption. They both happened in the end at the same pond on the same cold October morning because a duck called Dioynes had decided he knew where he wanted to be and had simply gone there with a conviction that turned out to be entirely correct.