But he waited. Had there been an observer standing in the ditch, that observer might have found his face impassive, unreadable. But to Philippa, his eyes spoke of deep love, a fierce passion, and just the tiniest amount of uncertainty.
She fell to her knees and wound her arms around his neck. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come!”
His arms were warm and strong about her. He kissed her ear and whispered something, but she was sobbing too hard to comprehend. At last he tenderly picked her up and carried her into a field of buttercups, well away from the road. There he sat her down and began kissing every part of her face he could reach until she simply had to stop crying.
When he reached her mouth, he kissed her until her breath was quick, not with sobs but with a quite different emotion.
Finally, he pulled back and said, “May I ask you again?”
“Of course I will marry you,” she said, turning to catch his mouth again. “Yes, yes, yes!”
“My name,” he said, sometime later, “is Jonas. Jonas Berwick.”
“My husband, Philippa said with great delight, “is a man named Jonas Berwick.”
He shook his head.
“No?”
“He’s a future doctor named Jonas Berwick. And he owns an estate called Yarrow House, which was the gift of his brother.”
Philippa swallowed. “Oh, Wick.”
“Jonas,” he said. “Wick was a majordomo at a castle once upon a time. Jonas is a gentleman of unknown birth but obvious gentility, who lives in England with his entirely English and altogether beautiful wife. He is apparently connected to a royal family, but because they are from a strange and small country, no one pays much attention to that.”
Tears were again sliding down her face, not from fear but from the deepest happiness.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you so much, Philippa, my future wife. The imprint of you is on my heart and will be there the day I die.”
“You sound like a doctor, diagramming your body,” she whispered back.
“I think you will not complain when I diagram your body,” he said, soft and low. The flame rose between them instantly, and when Jonas rolled his future wife over, sinking into a patch of buttercups so they couldn’t be seen from the road, indeed there were no complaints.
Epilogue
Several months later
Wick looked down at his bride with a surge of joy that came to him every time he saw her face.
Philippa was supine on their bed. They had retired to their bedchamber after luncheon, and now she lay in a patch of sunlight, her cheeks pink and her chest still heaving.
“I like our house,” he said, picking up a few strands of silky hair and curling them around his finger. “I like this bed. I’m sorry we’re leaving for Edinburgh.”
“I’m not sorry,” Philippa said, squinting at him. “You’re driving our poor butler out of his mind. I know you were an astonishingly competent majordomo, Jonas, but you can’t expect the poor man to ascend to your heights.”
“All I asked was that the silver be thoroughly polished on a regular basis.”
Philippa closed her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you did all that you claim a butler should manage in one day, and neither can poor Ribble. At this rate, you will know all there is to know about medicine in six months rather than a year.”
“Did you see that your father sent another letter?” he inquired.
She nodded. “He has launched into a ferocious battle with a benighted professor from Cambridge who had the temerity to disagree with his reconstruction of Napoleon’s first campaign.”
“I like your father,” Wick said. “He is a model of perseverance.”
“He’s too rigid,” Philippa said. “He will never accept that anyone else is right, even about the trivial detail.”
Wick grinned down at her. “And yet . . . here I am.”
“Well, that’s true,” Philippa said. “He did change his mind about you. And I still smile every time I think about his insisting that I go to the village merely to return that silly book. It was very unlike him to participate in your charade.”
“What you should smile about is the image of me practicing that horse business,” Wick said. “I could have been at your side a full two days earlier had it not been for the hours and hours I lost, sweeping the knife boy up before me in the saddle.”
“Oh dear,” Philippa said sleepily. “I hope you didn’t drop him.”
“Often,” Wick said. “But he didn’t break anything. I came to you the moment I felt reasonably certain that I wouldn’t drop you.” He touched her nose lightly. “You are the most precious thing in the world to me.”
The corner of her mouth quirked, and she whispered, “Love you,” then she was asleep.
Wick lay beside her, watching as the sunlight shifted across the bed, making stripes over the bare skin of his exquisite wife. The doctor side of him cataloged the tiny swell in her stomach, and the way she dropped asleep at any time of the day. The man side of him noticed that her bosom was even more enthralling than it had been when they married, three months ago.
And the child side . . . the small boy inside, who was never quite sure of his place in life . . . That small boy had vanished.
He belonged here, next to a woman whom he loved more than life itself.
Though how that happened he didn’t know. In fact, he didn’t really understand his own luck until years later when his eldest daughter Clara grew old enough to discover fairy tales. Then, with stories of knights, dragons, lovely maidens, and magic beans swirling through the house, Wick realized who he was. Not an illegitimate son of a grand duke. Not the best doctor in the country. He was the stable boy who won the princess.
The stories never said much about the stable boy’s birth. They just said that the princess was as beautiful as the sun and the moon.
But most importantly, those stories all end the same way.
They lived happily ever after.