And so we did. Later, Luc sent a good haul of jewellery, plus a “will” bequeathing them to me by my fictitious Regency ancestress, along with the deeds to a certain small moated manor house in Buckinghamshire which he had swapped with Matthew for another property with a lake – and a boat. Frank was around to witness me opening the box, which was quite enough for the local high-class jewellers to give me valuations on the gems, and for when I auctioned them off, piece by piece.
Owning Rook’s Acre was a dream, but it wasn’t the right place to bring up two small persons on a daily basis, not with that moat, so I planned to use it as a holiday home for all my family until we had some vaguely responsible teenagers.
As it happened, rather sadly, I didn’t need to spend the money on a house in Welhampstead because darling Mr Grimswade died, quietly reading an auction catalogue by his fireside. He left everything to me, so I am having the shop and residential part converted back into a house as it once was. I’m keeping the stuffed bear, of course.
My parents and Sophie adore Luc. They don’t know who he is, only that he has to travel a great deal and can?
?t talk about his work. They have decided that he is a spook – MI something or another – and have cautiously accepted his word that he doesn’t get involved in dramatic car chases or gun fights with foreign agents.
The twins – my set – are gorgeous and female. Maddie (Madelaine for Luc’s mother) and Jamie (Jamesina, for their uncle) have Luc’s green eyes, my blonde hair and, naturally, all the best characteristics of both parents. Or so we think. Trubshaw has adopted them as his kittens.
Luc, of course, has to switch back and forth between times, but it seems to work, something I had never dared imagine before. We can’t take the girls to visit their paternal grandmother yet, not while they are so young, but an artist friend of mine does pencil portraits almost weekly for Luc to take to her. When they are rather older I will leave them with Soph, or my parents, to babysit while I go back to visit all my friends – I am itching to see Garrick and Carola’s baby, a little boy called Thomas. Eventually we will have to find a way of explaining to the girls that their father is over two hundred years old, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Luc is settling down very well as a part-time twenty-first century man, although it did take him a while to recover from a train journey to London, and he refuses point-blank to take driving lessons. We even visited Whitebeams with him bearded and wearing sunglasses. Seeing his own descendant from a distance shook him rather.
So there we are – a functioning dual-time family. I never thought we could have a Happy Ever After, but whatever the force that has been sending me back is, it appears to have decided that we can do very well without murders, kidnappings and drama now and appears quite content to let us be joyfully content.
Frank Ponsonby is the only person who appears to have the slightest inkling that Luc is not what he seems and, just sometimes, I wonder about our friendly junior solicitor. Is he who he seems? Or could he simply be a modern man who is attuned to the wavering threads of time that link Luc and me and, if Frank is to be believed, drift through other parts of this very ordinary little commuter town?
I am not going to probe – I am far too happy just as I am.
The End