EPILOGUE

Four months later

Lucianna smiled at the tiny fingers that wound around thumb. She could not seem to calm the fluttering of her heart. It had been a very long time since she had held a babe—twenty-three(?) years, in fact, when she had cradled Siri in her arms. It thrilled her that she had not forgotten how to rock an infant to still her cries, or kiss the rosy cheeks to win a tiny chortle, or hum a tune that made the wee eyes softly close in sleep.

“She is your image, carissima,” Lucianna murmured.

Siri yawned and stretched, arching her back from where she sat in her tall chair in her workshop. Perrin had begged her to resume his painting lessons, whining that it had been a whole month since his sister had been born. But Siri had spent so much time yawning and struggling to hold her eyes open, that Perrin had finally wandered away from the desk to study his new sibling.

“She is very loud,” he pronounced. “I can hear her crying at night all the way in my bedchamber.”

“Then imagine how Lady Siri must feel with the babe’s cradle right beside her bed. It is no wonder she is half asleep. I should not have let you plague her into taking up her paints when I allowed you to cajole me into letting you to eat your breakfast with her. Go away,” Lucianna said, “and let me put her and your sister back to bed.”

There was a time when Lucianna’s curt rebukes had intimidated the boy, but he had grown regrettably impervious to them as his precociousness had coaxed a maternal affection in her and softened the force, if not the frequency, of her chastisements.

“Can’t you leave the baby?” he said. “I can watch her while you take Siri away to sleep. I need to study her to understand why you keep saying she looks like Siri. Because I don’t see it. She just looks fat and pink to me, and Siri isn’t either anymore.”

Siri trilled with laughter from her chair. “Thank you, Perrin. I am not as slender as I was when I married your Papa, but I am trying very hard to restrain my craving for sweets.” She slid from the chair and came to stand beside Lucianna and the babe. “You think she looks like me?”

“She will be your image,” Lucianna repeated. “Well, nearly so. I am certain eyes as blue as hers will remain unchanged. She has your little nose and your round, rosy cheeks, and I am sure her hair will come in fair.”

She permitted Perrin to run a light finger over the baby’s head.

“There’s hardly any there,” he said. “You can’t even see it, you can only feel a little fuzz.”

“Si, and that fuzz would be dark, not white, if she was meant to have your papa’s black curls.” Lucianna was certain of it. She tilted her head in consideration. “But she will have Triston’s firm/stubborn chin, I think.” The baby gave a little gurgling sigh and snuggled deeper into Lucianna’s arms. Another quiver wove through her. She wondered if Siri saw it.

“What shall I call her when she grows up?” Perrin asked. “Elisabetta or Isabelle?”

“Elisabetta,” Lucianna said firmly, but a strong voice from the doorway contradicted her.

“Isabelle. Here in Poitou, at least.”

Lucianna sent a challenging glower at Triston as he entered the room with her husband. Then she caught Sir Balduin’s glance at the babe before his gaze lifted to hers.

Siri comforted Lucianna with a tender smile. “It is all right. You and I shall call her Elisabetta.”

She bent down to kiss Lucianna on the cheek just as Sir Balduin’s grin brought a rush of warmth to Lucianna’s face.

Siri startled away, laid an anxious hand to Lucianna’s brow, then appeared to catch her mistake. She laughed again. “Oh, you are only blushing.” Her jewel-blue eyes narrowed. “Why are you blushing?”

The question so heated Lucianna’s cheeks that she knew they must be scarlet. Sir Balduin did not help matters by glowing so proudly as he strolled across the room to her side that she knew he must either blurt out their secret or burst.

“Shall you tell them, or shall I?” he asked his wife, leaning over to tickle a finger beneath the baby’s chin, provoking Elisabetta into stirring with something very like a sleepy chuckle.

“It—it is the silliest thing, carissima,” Lucianna stammered. “At my age—! I was sure it was only a jest when I made my husband swear to the third clause of our marriage bargain.”

She remembered how drowsily he had done so, holding her fast in his embrace, her ear nestled against his beating heart as they had drifted asleep together in the soft afterglow of love.

Triston joined the circle around his new daughter. “Your marriage bargain?” he asked. He looked only half-alert to an answer, watching in a thoroughly besotted manner as Elisabetta stretched and waved her little arms.

But Lucianna saw that Siri now stood wide awake with a mischievous smile twitching across her lips.

“You told me about the other clauses,” Siri said. “The needles and the nagging and the singing and the cessation of the Italian lessons, and all of us are glad for the vow never to speak Serafi—” She slapped her hand to her mouth, but the sapphire eyes danced merrily. “I mean your brother’s name again. Three promises from you and two from Sir Balduin. I did not think it like you to agree to stand so uneven in the marriage. What is this mysterious third promise Sir Balduin made?”

She scooped Elisabetta out of Lucianna’s arms, ignoring Lucianna’s protest, and handed their daughter to Triston.

Lucianna sprang up from her chair, hiding her embarrassment by scolding Triston for waking the babe as Sir Balduin announced far too loudly, “To name our firstborn son Panfilo.”

Triston looked so startled he nearly dropped Elisabetta. Lucianna squealed and caught the infant back to her own embrace.

“You are having a baby?” Triston exclaimed to Sir Balduin.

“Imbecille!” Lucianna cried. “I am having a baby. Now look what you have done!”

Elisabetta had begun to wail, which turned into an earsplitting keen when Siri flung her arms around both her and Lucianna in a fearsome hug.

“Be careful, carissima,” Lucianna chided.

“Oh, she is fine,” Siri said. “She is amazingly sturdy.” But she took Elisabetta and bounced her gently against her shoulder until the keening turned to charming hiccups. “Lucianna, I cannot tell you how happy I am for you! But what if it is a daughter?”

Perrin piped up. “If it is, then we can call this one Isabelle and I shan’t have to be confused.”

Lucianna feigned indifference. “If it is daughter, then my husband may choose.” But she remembered her dream of so long ago. She thought Serafino had destroyed it, but perhaps this had been its meaning all along? Not a father, but a son. She moved her hand protectively, caressingly to the life growing inside her, and saw Siri smile with her.

“Panfilo?” Triston said to Sir Balduin. “You agreed to that?”

Siri’s smile vanished and she snapped, “Cosimo would have been a perfectly good name for a boy, and there is nothing wrong with Panfilo,” revealing that the mood swings preceding Elisabetta’s birth had not entirely subsided.

Sir Balduin’s shoulders half-lifted in a shrug. He caught Lucianna’s glare and swiftly resumed his normal posture. “I am a man of my word,” he said, “and I gave it to her with all my love.”

He crossed the room to take his wife’s hands and gaze deeply into her eyes. He paraphrased the words he had said to her when her past reared up again the day before their wedding, dismaying her at what name she should give the priest on the morrow.

“She came into this home as Lucianna Fabio, it was Lucianna Fabio I married, and,” he added with the insight neither of them had possessed that day, “it is Luicianna Fabio’s father we will honor at our son’s birth.”

An illusion, perhaps, conjured by a lost, lonely girl in an abbey, but one that had brought her incomprehensible comfort before Serafino. Sir Balduin had convinced her with that tenderness he only exposed to her that it would bring the heavens joy to wrap her in that comfort again. Now heaven had set the seal on his words with a child.

Her hands shifted nervously within her husband’s grasp, betraying the worry that recurred with disquieting frequency through her shining bouts of happiness. “You do not think I am too old to be a mother?” she asked.

Siri hrmphed her opinion of Lucianna’s fear, while Sir Balduin said, “No more than I am too old to be a father. We will find our way through parenthood together.”

He paused as Perrin begged Siri to sit down and show him the baby again. When Siri obliged and Triston moved away to join them, Sir Balduin drew Lucianna close to him and kissed her. Then he nuzzled her ear until she thought she might suffocate from smothering her giggles.

“Old,” he scoffed softly. “You and I?” His eyes twinkled down at her. “This child will keep us rooted in spring for a very long time.”