Seven Minutes in Heaven(116)

“That’s actually the second one,” he said. The exasperated tone in his voice startled a laugh from her. “The first one shriveled to the size of a walnut. I left Marcel back at Fawkes House because he won’t speak to me any longer, so I had no help.”

“I love it,” she said, cradling it in her hands. “And I love you.” She came up on her toes and kissed him. His big hands circled her waist, steadying her.

Their kiss was open-mouthed and open-hearted, the kind of kiss that lays people bare and vulnerable.

“You are the most witty, beautiful, and warm person I know,” Ward said at length, and his words went straight to her heart. “Lizzie gave up her veil for you, and Otis would have given up Jarvis. We love you, Eugenia. All three of us love you so much. Without you, we’re a family without a heart.”

He shook his head. “I have to warn you: if you say no to marrying me, you will have to say no again tomorrow, and the day after. I will come back with Lizzie and Otis and Jarvis. You’ll have to say no to Jarvis.”

“Not Jarvis!” Her fingers traced the classically square shape of his jaw.

“Will you marry me, Eugenia? Will you be my bride?”

“Yes,” she whispered back, her voice shaking a bit. “Yes, I will.”

“Will you promise not to be ladylike?” He was holding her tightly, his face buried in her hair.

“Not all the time,” she said, unable to stop smiling.





Epilogue




Eugenia schooled her expression to the polite curiosity that anyone might feel on encountering a pack of two-legged Dalmatians. Or, to look at it a different way, four spotty children ranging in age from three to fourteen.

“I can guess that you’ve used India ink to create the dappled effect,” she said to Otis’s best friend, Marmaduke, “but how did you turn your face that sickly white?”

“Cornstarch mixed with rose water,” he said. “It’s what my nanny uses when she has an afternoon out.”

“Mama!” Sally was so plumply adorable that Eugenia couldn’t stop herself from bending over and picking her up, despite having already dressed for the evening.

Sally giggled and rubbed their noses together.

Eugenia hitched Sally higher on her hip and turned back to Lizzie, Otis, and Marmaduke. Sally laid her head on Eugenia’s shoulder and began sucking her thumb. “Lizzie, I suspect you were the genius behind this.”

“We were practicing for the event of an infectious disease,” Lizzie replied. “England has been visited by waves of disease for centuries. If we’re caught unprepared, we might all succumb.”

“I fail to see how drawing spots on everyone’s faces will prepare for a wave of the measles.”

Otis and Marmaduke, bored of playing at plague, dropped onto the floor and began playing spillikins instead. Sally was blinking, about to fall asleep, her face now mostly clear of cornstarch as it had transferred to Eugenia.

“I had in mind something rare, not the measles,” Lizzie said, not at all bored. “Something more like the Black Death. An epidemic—that’s what you call it when a great many people die.”

Sally gave a little sigh and snuggled closer.

The brilliant intelligence that had made Ward into one of the most successful inventors in England had turned up in a vastly different form in Lizzie.

As if that thought had drawn him, the nursery door opened and her husband walked in. There was a smile in his eyes when he looked at Eugenia . . . a smile that told her just how much he had enjoyed their morning.

Sally had been born seven months after they married, leading Eugenia to decide that French letters—no matter the color of ribbons—were clearly not always effective.

“How wonderful,” her husband had told her, his eyes shining when she told him she was carrying a baby.

“It would have been a disaster if I hadn’t married you!” she had retorted.

“I was planning on kidnapping you,” her husband had said unrepentantly. “If you hadn’t succumbed to all those cakes, I was going to toss them in the carriage so I could feed you on the way to Gretna Green.”

Now he strolled over and kissed his daughter’s cheek. “Generally, this child looks as clean as a newly shelled egg. Not at the moment, though.” He surveyed the speckled crowd. “So who is responsible for all the spots?”

Eugenia sank into a rocking chair, holding Sally’s warm body tightly against her. Ward had woken her twice the night before—no, that wasn’t fair, because she had turned to him one of those times, waking out of sleep with a desperate hunger for him.

She closed her eyes, allowing the sound of Ward’s laughter as Lizzie explained the epidemic that had struck the nursery to settle about her like a warm blanket.