Miss Jennings never did quite return to her previous employer. In fact, the lady was astonished to receive a quiet offer of marriage from a very respectable physician. She and Mr Albert Lowe had a wedding in the country, far away from sharp tongues and miffed matrons who gasped over the indiscretion of a well-bred gentleman marrying the chaperone of the woman he was meant to be courting. Mr and Mrs Albert Lowe were not ever invited to any respectable parties outside of those thrown by Lady Carroway, which did not seem to dim their happiness even by a bit. Mrs Henrietta Lowe did spend quite some time helping with the new orphanage, however, which meant that Dora had the pleasure of spending far more time with her as the years went on.
England did not, alas, become a better place for the orphaned, the poor, or the infirm. In fact, contrary to all protests by Lord Carroway and the Lord Sorcier, laws were passed to make the workhouses more punishing than ever, on the assumption that the poor were naturally lacking in virtue. But there were two orphanages in London, at least, which solved some of the small evils—and as the workhouse masters grew ever more cruel and punishing, children began to murmur that a faerie lady with two mismatched eyes sometimes came to steal away the worst offenders, who were never seen again.
One day far in the future, Elias and Dora visited their closest friends and family in the manner of a final farewell. The next morning, England discovered that the Lord Sorcier and his wife had both quite disappeared, never to be seen again.
But somewhere off in faerie, it is said that Lady Hollowvale finally fixed her mismatched eyes—and she and her husband rule there to this day, from their place in the Hollow House.
THE END
Thanks for reading Half a Soul! Don’t worry—there’s more Regency faerie tales to come! You can pre-order the sequel, Ten Thousand Stitches, scheduled for release in October 2020.
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Afterword
There is an apocryphal story about fishes on the beach that has stayed with me my entire life. I do not remember where I first heard it, but I have always been able to recall it to mind with absolute clarity. It goes like this:
A great number of fish had washed up on the beach; there, they flip-flopped, gasping for breath. A little girl had taken it upon herself to walk up and down the beach, however, picking up fishes and throwing them back into the ocean. A bystander marvelled at this, and headed out to talk with her.
“Why are you throwing these fish back into the ocean?” he asked the little girl. “It won’t even matter, in the end. There are so many of them! You cannot possibly hope to save them all!”
The little girl frowned at the bystander and held up the fish that she currently had in her hands. “It matters to this fish,” she told him. And then, she turned herself back down the beach and stubbornly continued throwing fish back into the ocean.
The story normally ends there—but I like to think that the bystander then joined the little girl, and that a great deal more fishes were saved as a result.
I have often found myself in despair at how nonsensically awful other human beings can be. As much as we like to believe that we are capable of learning from history, I’m afraid that we are very prone to repeating the exact same mistakes as a society, time and time again. But every time I am confronted with some inescapable proof of the lowness of human nature, I am also reminded that I have within me the power to improve my own nature. There are plenty of fish upon the beach who would be grateful for a bit of kindness—and if you take the time to rescue even one, then perhaps you may even convince a bystander to join you and rescue another.
I do not mean to say that we should ever stop trying to solve the big problems in the world. But—as Elias would say—sometimes, when you cannot force the world to come to its senses, you must settle only for wiping away some of the small evils in front of you.
Every fish you throw back into the ocean is a triumph of the idea that human beings can be better. I do my best, every day, to throw at least one fish back into the ocean. I hope that you will join me.
With regard to this particular book, I must thank my husband for his constant love and support—and most especially for the coffee. I would like to thank my alpha readers, Laura Elizabeth and Julie Golick, for their boundless enthusiasm and occasional nitpicks. I must surely thank Sophie Ricard for her help with the French in this book, however few the phrases might have been—truly, Sophie, you are the Albert to my Elias when it comes to French grammar. I must give heartfelt thanks to Tamlin Thomas for numerous historical corrections. Without any one of them, this book would not have been nearly as good as it is.
I would like to thank you as well,
