Adela smiled. ‘I know. I know. I could see it in your eyes. It was why I encouraged Richard Manifold for a time, hoping to cure myself of loving you, which I have done almost from the first moment we met.’
I took her in my arms then and kissed her, and went on kissing her until I thought I should never stop. Nicholas must have thought so, too, and, annoyed at being ignored for so long, he came across and tugged furiously at his mother’s skirts. Adela broke free, laughing, and scooped him up into her arms. ‘Will you mind having a son as well as a daughter?’
‘No.’ I managed to embrace them both. ‘And I promise you, most solemnly, that Nicholas will be as my own son to me. You need have no fears on that score.’
She raised her mouth to be kissed again. ‘I haven’t,’ she answered. ‘If I had, as much as I love you, I wouldn’t marry you. But I’ve always known you for a good, kind man. And now,’ she added with a chuckle, ‘before all this flattery turns your head and makes you utterly unbearable, you’d better go back to Redcliffe and tell Margaret the news.’
* * *
Adela and I were married in the porch of Saint Thomas’s Church early in July, and received our nuptial blessing at the altar. Together with Elizabeth, I went to live in the cottage in Lewin’s Mead, leaving Margaret to enjoy the freedom of being on her own without the responsibility of a young child to look after. But, of course, we saw her every day, and she rapidly became grandmother to Nicholas as well as to my daughter. And as Adela was an orphan, I continued to think of, and refer to, Margaret as my mother-in-law, a title which she retained for me until the end of her life.
Alderman Weaver didn’t outlive his daughter, dying three weeks before her, at the beginning of September, which meant that all William Burnett’s evil scheming had been for nothing. Had he not believed in Imelda Bracegirdle’s ability to forecast the future, he would have inherited the Weaver fortune through Alison, and been a widower very shortly afterwards. But Margaret’s faith in horoscopes wasn’t shaken, as she argued that had Irwin Peto not been introduced into their lives, matters might have fallen out differently.
There was an odd postscript to the affair. One evening in August, when I returned home after a day’s peddling in the surrounding villages, Adela told me that she had had a visit from Dame Pernelle.
‘Poor soul! Now that John Weaver has inherited the Alderman’s fortune and sold the Broad Street house, she’s very lonely. She stayed talking for what seemed like hours. I think I listened to the whole of her life’s history, and the history of everyone connected with her, as well. Sometimes I had difficulty keeping awake. But one thing she did tell me which struck me as rather significant. Apparently, when he was younger, Alfred Weaver had a reputation amongst his family as something of a libertine. It wasn’t generally known, and I gather he didn’t visit the whore-houses here, in his own home town. But when he went to London on business, he used to frequent the Southwark stews. He confided this information to his brother, who, in his turn, told his wife, who passed it on to her sister, Dame Pernelle.’ Adela leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, where she had spread our supper. ‘Do you think it possible that he and Morwenna Peto, once … a long time ago…?’ She didn’t finish the sentence.
We looked at one another, a long, speculative stare. At last I said, ‘Perhaps. Who knows? After all, it would explain Irwin’s likeness to Clement. And didn’t Alderman Weaver always declare that a man couldn’t fail to know his own son?’