Angelique went still. She exchanged glances with Delilah.
Very few people knew her real name was Anne. She’d called herself Angelique some years ago; it seemed to fit. She would not abandon it for the world, especially given how Lucien could turn every syllable of it into sensual music when he whispered it into her ear, in longing, in pure awe.
“What does she look like, Dot?”
Dot cleared her throat. “She looks very much like you, Mrs. Durand, but there is a good deal more of her, if you take my meaning. She has blond hair but some of it is gray and her eyes are blue with gold in them. She has a kind face and there is a small bird on her bonnet. And she looks worried.”
Angelique went still.
“Delilah... oh, my... I think I know who that is.” Angelique’s heart lurched. But it was hope, a painful hope she hadn’t even known she truly harbored. Nervously. Her palms were damp.
“Shall we go down and see together?” Delilah suggested gently.
“She’s in the reception room,” Dot said brightly, in a normal voice. “I’ll bring in tea.”
Angelique paused on the threshold of the drawing room.
The woman was turning this way and that, admiring the reception room, a little wondering, bemused smile on her face, the way most people looked about the reception room of The Grand Palace on the Thames. She was indeed wearing a bonnet decorated with felt cherries and a small bird.
“Annie?”
“Aunt Lizzie?” Angelique’s voice was a thread.
“Oh, my little Annie. Itisyou!” Her aunt’s face suffused with a wondering light. She pressed her palm against her mouth and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, my goodness. You are so lovely. Your mother would have been so very proud. How I miss her! And you!”
Angelique yearned to move closer, and closer, and then to launch herself into the arms of her mother’s sister. She’d once been like a second mother to her. But she’d been hurt so gravely when everyone had turned her away when she’d needed them most.
She could not, she could not bear another heartbreak. She could not bear to reach out if she was pushed away yet again.
Aunt Lizzie understood. “Anne, my dear, my husband, that supercilious, hypocritical old toad, forbade me to write to you or to take you in. How I wish I’d the courage to stand up to him or for you, but I’d children to raise and I depended on him. And then I did not know where you had gone, and I was so very worried. He died last year, rot his soul.”
She said this with surprising equanimity. Not one woman in the room blinked. Both Delilah and Angelique had learned the kind of liberation that could be had when a such a man dies.
“Your charming husband wrote to me and I came straightaway, without even a reply. I had to see you. I hope...” she paused to whisk out a handkerchief and aggressively dab at her eyes, which sent the felt bird on her bonnet bobbing merrily “...oh, my dear, you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
Angelique swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, while behind her Delilah and Dot did the same thing. “Auntie Lizzie. Of course. Of course I forgive you.”
She did not step forward. Not just yet.
“My dear, I understand full well the kinds of decisions women are compelled to make. There is a good deal of our family history I daresay you know nothing about. I have always loved you and wanted the best for you. I can see from your very radiance that you have that. And I am so glad.”
Angelique glowed clear through to her soul, and some lingering weight she hadn’t known she was carrying detached like a fall leaf and sailed away.
Was it possible to love her husband even more than she did? She imagined there were no boundaries to it. It was like the very air she breathed, this love for Lucien.
“I am indeed happier than I have ever been.” Her voice trembled. “But you have made my happiness even more complete, Aunt Lizzie. Thank you for coming.”
And then she did step toward her aunt, who was moving forward, and they fell into each other’s arms and hugged and wept a little.
Angelique, however, was never going to love histrionic displays. She stepped back and cleared her throat.
“Allow me to introduce you to my dear friend and partner, Mrs. Delilah Hardy. And this is our maid Dot, who is very important to The Grand Palace on the Thames, and who almost never forgets to bring in tea.”
Dot gave a squeak and scampered off, sniffling and beaming. She did love a happy ending.
Angelique proudly took Aunt Lizzie for a tour of The Grand Palace Annex, as they’d decided to officially call it. Lucien had had no objection to her straightaway putting the building in both her name and Delilah’s. It only seemed fit, since Delilah had done the same with The Grand Palace on the Thames when it was virtually the sole possession either of them had. She had given Angelique hope and a future.
They hadn’t a vast store of savings, so they’d used the same ingenuity—begging, bartering, sewing, repairing—to hire a crew to do the most difficult parts of the cleaning, the vanquishing of spiders and the like, and to replace rotting boards in the floors, and to scrub, polish, and oil them once they were whole again, to peel old paper from walls and paint and put up new paper, to hang curtains and repair sconces and hinges and doorknobs, to polish the ballroom until it glowed like a golden sea. But all of the men in their lives had thrown themselves handily into the process, too, seeing an opportunity to get dirty, make noise, and hit things with hammers. Mr. Cassidy was particularly helpful in that regard; he’d helped build his family home from timbers, he said, beginning with when those timbers had been trees. He knew a fine building when he saw one.