Instead of saying anything, she threw her arms around the old man and hugged him tightly, resting her face on his shoulder. After a moment, Valentine stood and joined them, hugging the two of them equally tightly.
It was perhaps past all reasonable supposition to imagine that, after this small display of human affection, Beckett himself might actually raise his arms-such as he could raise them, given the circumstances-and return the embrace. Certainly, any man or woman observing the scene who had even a passing familiarity with Beckett and his life would be forgiven for believing that no such thing was possible.
The natural world, however, is full of surprises.
Some time passed before Skinner finally spoke. “So. Now what do we do?”
“My nose is still bleeding,” offered Valentine. “I think I should probably take care of that.”
“Yes,” Skinner allowed. After a moment, she asked, “Valentine. Just…just how much money did I make?”
Epilogue
Emilio Vie-Gorgon became Emperor Emilio VI Vie-Gorgon at the end of that year, without raising any particular commotion. The throne of the Trowth Empire had, by long tradition, generally been passed back and forth between the Gorgon-Vies and the Vie-Gorgons whenever one or the other suffered from an insufficiency of heirs, and parliament’s approval had been long accepted as something of a rubber stamp. Emperors, it was understood, behaved according to the nature of their office, rather than the nature of their families, and so aside from certain pointed changes in civic architecture, one emperor could be relied on to be as good as the next.
During his coronation, Emilio treated his subjects to a speech that was so widely-praised afterwards as to have fallen almost immediately into the collective of quotations that mediocre men used to bolster their positions in tavern arguments.
Said the Emperor: “The days of dread and sorrow are now behind us. With bold hearts and omnipotent industry, Trowth shall stand astride the world, shall cross the oceans, shall rule a kingdom upon which the sun shall never set. Let no man say it cannot nor it should not be, for we say that it must be. If there is any passion that will deter us, it is fear. Fear of the magnificent destiny that awaits the great people of this rugged isle, this seat of power, this glorious empire.”
Neither at the time, nor ever after, did more than three people in the world realize that this speech drew quite liberally on an early, unperformed draft of Theocles.
Following his coronation, the Emperor first immediately dismissed the Committee on Moral Responsibility. He secondly reinstituted the Estimation of the Comstock Vie-Gorgons, returned their property to them, and permitted them to reopen their printing houses, after making it quite clear that the press was only free so long as it served the pleasure of His Majesty. He thirdly declared that it pleased His Majesty to remove certain pieces of literature from the Black List, among them the aforementioned Theocles.
Finally, Emperor Emilio VI Vie-Gorgon, by imperial decree, lifted the ban on the employment of women by industry in Trowth. He did not go so far as to grant the suffrage that was still in high demand among fairer sex, but it was widely accepted that this was a positive first step. And among those in the know, who suspected that Emilia Vie-Gorgon might have an unusual amount of influence over her sibling, it was considered an extremely optimistic sign.
During the following Armistice, Valentine Vie-Gorgon married Elizabeth Skinner. While it was a great disappointment for Valentine’s mother, father, brothers, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins to see the youngest scion of the Comstock Vie-Gorgons marry so far below his station, it certainly came as no surprise. Indeed, upon great reflection, they allowed that marrying a lovely, intelligent, and professional woman was probably the most sensible thing Valentine had ever done. Elizabeth Skinner Vie-Gorgon was welcomed into the family, and if she was welcomed with some certain caution, rather than the customary joviality bespoke by such an arrangement, she was welcomed nonetheless.
Elijah Beckett, after many persuasions both tender and severe, surrendered finally to his retirement, and adjourned to the small village of Kyloe on Stark, and there kept to a small but well-appointed manner house subsidized by monies from Comstock Street. Finally relieved of the tedious weight of his lifelong burden, he listened to his old-fashioned music, snapped irritably at the young indige woman who had been employed to look after him, complained about the moral decay of the Empire and the strange fashions and disrespectful behaviors of the young people of the village, and otherwise engaged in all manner of similar pursuits peculiar to retired old men.
This state continued for some time until, during the deep and dreamy sleep brought on by the veneine, Elijah Beckett very quietly, very peacefully, very painlessly, slipped off his ravaged mortal flesh, and died.