“I don’t know, bouche. There are those of us who are untainted. My father. His father before him. Myself. Even Eleanor, because, although her mind may be childlike, her heart is pure and untouched by evil. But we can’t know for sure what the next generation of Jagos will be like.”
An image of a boy playing on the sand, his clear, blue eyes crinkling into a smile and his ready laughter ringing out across the bay reached me then. Perhaps “healing” was the right word, after all. “Maybe we can,” I said, tucking my hand into Cad’s arm and turning our footsteps away from the house. I led him back toward Port Isaac. “There is someone I would like you to meet…”
Epilogue
August 1888
“The nurse said she is a little better today. I will take a light breakfast up to her shortly,” I say as I enter the parlour. Cad lays his newspaper aside and rises from his chair, coming forward to draw me into his arms. “You are insatiable, sir!” I pretend to protest as his arms tighten around me and the kiss deepens into something more than a greeting.
“As always with you, bouche,” he murmurs, his lips sliding down to linger at the hollow of my throat.
We draw apart as Eleanor enters the room, casting her shy, apologetic smile our way. She takes her usual seat by the window and gazes out, with unseeing eyes, across the cliff top to the roaring ocean beyond. Trapped forever in the childlike innocence I failed to recognise when we first met, she has not spoken a word since the night Eddie died. I sit with her for a while and she leans her head against my shoulder companionably. Summer scatters bright jewels over the scene. The English weather has its own vocabulary, one that I have painstakingly learned. I have grown to love my adopted land, although, to the world I now inhabit, I will always be an exotic creature. My mind flies back to the hushed conversation I overheard between two society ladies, not long after my wedding twenty years ago.
“Darling! How delightful. It’s been too long. Now, do tell, who is that positively ravishing creature in turquoise?”
“I can’t quite—oh, you mean the future Countess of Athal?” The voice was lowered dramatically. “Cad Jago married a foreigner, you know.”
“Did he really? How very odd of him, to be sure.”
“Well, quite! His wife is dazzling, of course, but why he couldn’t have chosen a nice English gal, I’ll never know. Still, it was a dreadful time for the family, what with his brother’s death, so I expect he wasn’t himself. The marriage appears to be a success. Indeed, he is rumoured to be quite devoted to her!”
“Cad Jago? Devoted?” An incredulous titter punctuated the words. “My dear, I give it a year at most. But foreigner or not, I am quite determined to discover the name of her dressmaker before the night is out!”
And, as easily as that, Dita Varga disappeared. In her place was Bouche Jago. Fashion plate, society hostess, beautiful darling of the English press. No one would ever know, or could begin to suspect, the secrets of my past. Hungarian bandits, Sandor Karol, stripping off my clothes and striking sultry poses in Parisian garrets were all remote echoes now. As if they had happened to someone else. I only wished that murdered girls, dark, forbidden love and the tortured decline of a dear friend’s sanity could be so easily banished to distant memory. The thunderbolt of love and belonging I experienced when I first saw Tenebris still endures. The ghosts do not, perhaps because I now sleep each night in the arms of my beloved Cad.
I return to join Cad, and we chat idly about everyday matters. The west lawn is overrun with moles, and one of the footmen has broken his ankle. Tristan has written from Manchester about a problem in one of the factories. He plans to travel down to discuss the matter with Cad and spend a few days with his mothers. The mother who lives in the cottage in Port Isaac, and the one who lives here at Athal House. Our two sons are due home from school for the summer in a few days, and we have vague plans to go to Paris now that they are old enough to appreciate its beauty. Cad suggests we take them to Budapest—Buda has now been united with its twin sister, Pest—so that they can learn more of their Hungarian heritage, but I am not so sure. He tries to bribe me with the offer of a detour to Vienna, and, tempted, I promise to think about it.