The dormitories of the Marchand Academy would be decorated very like the rooms at the Grand Palace on the Thames, they decided together. A home should feel like ahomefor the children. The common areas, too. The days after their wedding were full of plans and preparations, exhilarating progress, laughter, and enjoyable clashes of will they always sorted with more laughter or passionate kisses.
Their nights were torrid.
Together they learned to play with the elasticity of desire. To master everything from a long, slow build to shattering crescendos to swift ferocious bonfires of lust. Every curve, angle, and slope of their bodies was explored, claimed, and savored with fingers and palms and tongues and lips. They reveled in the infinite ways in which sex was a language to express every gradation of their love for each other.
Ginny was quite surprised and delighted to learn that a variety of positions could be employed. This was very useful in the instances she wanted to be taken swiftly and immediately,skirts hiked, her bare arse pressed against a wall, her husband thrusting expertly as he murmured filthy endearments in her ear. And during occasions when they found themselves with a few minutes to spare, she would surprise him by dragging him into an empty room at the former Lucifer’s Fall, lock the door, reach for the fall of his trousers to tug it open, and drop to her knees before him. With her mouth and hands she would make him moan. “God, Ginny, just like that, don’t stop.”
Sometimes they sprawled nude on Marchand’s comfortable bed on a velvet counterpane like a pair of pashas and simply luxuriated.
He never did do anything with ropes. But now and again they liked to do fancy things with a cravat.
The lust, like the love, only seemed to replenish a thousandfold.
Six months after they were married, she discovered she was pregnant.
They were ecstatic. But as the months went on and her belly swelled and the baby thumped about in there, Marchand grew quieter, beset with a sleepless, nervy tension and an almost overwhelming possessive protectiveness.
And she knew old fears had him in their grip.
“Listen to me,” she whispered to him, stroking his forehead one night. “I am never, ever leaving you. Ever. And neither will the baby.”
But they both knew love itself was no protection. Just look at Apollo and Eros and Daphne.
On the most harrowing and miraculous night of their lives, Gabriel St. James Michael Marchand arrived.
He was named for his father, for the place where Gabrielhad found a heart-shaped stone to give to Ginny, and for the brother he would never have a chance to meet. He was a staggeringly perfect baby, probably the best one ever born. And he proved to be a funny, enchanting, willful, mischievous child.
Marchand held his baby and his wife and wept at the miracle that allowed him to love and protect them for the rest of his days.
Gabriel soon had another brother. And then a sister, and then another sister.
And they eventually had lots of cousins, too.
Hogarth’s sensitivity, intelligence, and kindness turned out to be precisely what a vivacious, beautiful, very confident, and very wealthy American heiress yearned for. He married her four years after Ginny married Marchand. Hogarth blossomed in his wife’s company; the new Countess of Highgrove melted in his.
And after years of torturous uncertainty, the Woodville finances not only recovered, but became positively robust, and would remain that way for generations to come.
Politicians. Printers. Poets. Blacksmiths. Farmers. Silversmiths. Sailors. Teachers. Scientists. Doctors. Explorers. Shopkeepers. Husbands. Wives. Artists. Factory owners. Bankers.
Over the next several decades, many of them began storied careers and happy lives at the Marchand Academy. There was also one highwayman, but the people he robbed always remarked that he was very well spoken and possessed considerable dash.
Children at the Marchand Academy were taught to read and write English, French, and Latin. They were taught manners and deportment and etiquette, and to think critically and to debate effectively. Fed, clothed, housed, protected, and respected, they flourished. They were given opportunities to learn trades and to meet people who would help them prosper far, far away from places like St. Giles. Though many returned to extend a hand to others there, too.
Where Gabriel had once imagined a gaming hell on every corner, within a decade, there were three Marchand Academies in England rescuing children from workhouses and funneling dazzling little citizens into English society. Gabriel and Ginny presided over all of them. Mr. Ogden became a beloved headmaster of one of them. The Earl of Highgrove remained a fencing and mathematics tutor many years after his debt was paid, because he was good at it and the children loved him.
And courtesy of the Michael Marchand Memorial Scholarship, every year at least one student from the academy was sent to Oxford or Cambridge.
It was everything Ginny and Gabriel loved: a vast canvas upon which to fling passion, care, ingenuity, and bossiness. People struggled to say no to either of them, and they lost all reticence when it came to asking for things for the children in their charge. They worked in tandem with politicians like Lord Dominic Kirke and Mr. Jonathan Redmond to protect the rights of the most vulnerable. They entertained in their London home frequently, inviting their friends from the Grand Palace on the Thames, who were less surprised than either Ginny or Marchand expected at the news of their marriage. As Delacorte had mentioned, men often left there with a wife.
And when, after fifteen years of marriage, Gabriel was awarded a baronetcy for his exceptional public service, he finally joined White’s, because it ironically amused him to do so. But he could scarcely have a drink there without critically assessing how much better he and Ogden could have run the place.
When Mr. Peck returned to collect his little family—Mrs. Peck, Daniel, and baby Roger—to bring them back to Northumberland, everyone actually watched them go with some degree of misty-eyed fondness. (Mr. Delacorte’s degree was admittedly slightly less misty.)
The week prior, Captain Hardy, Lucien, and Delacorte had taken Daniel down to the docks. While the two ships in the Triton Group’s fleet were still undergoing repairs at the shipyard in Dover, there were plenty of others just offshore to admire.
They found Daniel’s unbridled, giddy delight in all of it—the sights and sounds, the seagulls, the ocean—exhilarating.Everythingwas new to him and it made all three of the men feel brand-new, too, as if the world was just beginning. As if it still contained wonders.
It also made them feel old and learned.