第19章 The Spring

Spring came to Blackmore in April, painting the gardens in color and filling the air with the scent of blooming roses and the sound of birdsong. Eleanor walked through the grounds, her hand in Sebastian's, their children, yes they had children now, two of them, a boy and a girl, both with gray eyes and dark hair and the kind of laughter that filled a house with life. They reached the tower, and Eleanor stopped, remembering the woman who had died here, the woman who had chosen love over duty and paid the price. She placed her hand on the stone wall and whispered, Thank you. The wind blew gently, carrying the scent of roses and the sound of distant music, and Eleanor smiled. Marguerite was at rest. Blackmore was home. And Eleanor was finally, truly, free. Spring came to Blackmore in April, painting the gardens in color and filling the air with the scent of blooming roses and the sound of birdsong. Eleanor walked through the grounds, her hand in Sebastian's, and somewhere behind them their children laughed — yes, they had children now, two of them, a boy and a girl, both with gray eyes and dark hair and the kind of laughter that filled a house with life. They reached the tower, and Eleanor stopped, remembering the woman who had died here, the woman who had chosen love over duty and paid the price. She placed her hand on the stone wall and whispered, "Thank you." The wind blew gently, carrying the scent of roses and the sound of distant music, and Eleanor smiled. Marguerite was at rest. Blackmore was home. And Eleanor was finally, truly, free. The children had arrived in the autumn after the wedding, first a girl named Marguerite — after the woman in the tower, and after the woman Eleanor had come to love as a sister despite the century that had separated them — and then a boy named Elian, for the painter who had loved enough to die keeping his promise. They were born in the house that had once been a prison, in the bedchamber where Marguerite had dreamed of a child she would never hold, and their crying woke Eleanor from a sleep she had not realized she was having — a sleep without dreams, which was for her the same as no sleep at all. She sat up in the darkness and pressed her palm against the small warm body of her daughter and felt, in that brief contact, the whole lineage of women who had come before, each one holding a child she was afraid she would lose, each one whispering a prayer that the child would not inherit her fate but would instead be given a choice that she had not been given. Eleanor was twenty-nine when Marguerite Thorne was born. Her own mother had been twenty-eight. The line did not repeat itself out of malice. It repeated itself out of devotion. The garden in spring was a riot of color that Eleanor watched with the quiet intensity of someone who had learned, through fire and curse and rebuilding, that beauty is not a given but a labor, and that the labor is worth it even when no one is watching. She planted peonies along the far wall, where the shadow of the tower fell in late afternoon and the soil stayed cool enough for their roots to survive the summer heat. She planted violets along the path that led from the kitchen door to the herb garden, so that the cook could step on them barefoot and carry their scent into the kitchen with her every morning. She planted forget-me-nots beside the well, because the name suited the habit of the plant — small blue flowers that appeared everywhere and were noticed by almost no one — and she told the children, when they were old enough to understand the name and old enough not to, that some things are meant to be unremarkable and that unremarkableness is its own kind of grace. By May the cherry trees were in full bloom and the air above the lower meadow was thick with their falling petals, pink snowdrifts that collected in the gutters and along the stones of the lane and in the grass where the sheep lay down to rest. Eleanor sat beneath the largest of the trees — the one the village headman had delivered himself, wrapped in burlap, in the rain — and she read to the children from the journal that had been found in the hidden studio, the words of a man she had never met but whose handwriting she knew as well as her own, whose grief she understood more deeply than she cared to admit. She read until the children fell asleep against her shoulders, their breath warm on her neck, and she carried them inside, walking softly across the new oak floor of the east wing, through the corridor where the windows looked out onto the garden she had built and the tower that had watched her build it and the valley beyond it all, gray-green and endless and familiar, like a name she had almost forgotten and then remembered all at once. That night, Sebastian came to her and stood at the foot of the bed and told her, in a voice that was barely above a whisper, that he had dreamed of the painter — of Elian Vance, burned and broken and sitting at a window in Clerkenwell grinding pigment on a slab of stone — and that in the dream the painter had looked up and said nothing, had only nodded, as if to confirm that the story had been told correctly, that the child had come home, that the light had been kept burning. Eleanor did not ask what he meant. She only took his hand and squeezed it and told him that she was glad he had dreamed it, and that if he dreamed it again, he should ask the painter whether the light at Blackmore still burns, because the answer matters, and because the dream itself is a kind of keeping, a kind of love, a kind of memory that does not belong to the past but belongs to the future, to the child who has not yet been born but who will one day sit in this room and read these words and understand, without being told, that the story is not finished and never will be finished and that this is the greatest gift anyone can ever be given. ---