Epilogue
Sommersgate House
Julia Ashton, Baroness Blackbourne, finally bested Douglas in the present giving stakes.
That evening they arrived at The Ritz (several hours earlier than expected) for their wedding night.
Their honeymoon flight to Fiji would leave early the next morning.
Sometime deep into the night, when the room was dark and they lay na**d and replete in each other’s arms, in a low voice, Douglas explained his arrival during her wedding preparations. He expected her to have cold feet and was going to warn her that if she left him, he’d find her and drag her home. Upon her announcement that he should buy them a small island where they could live in sin, he realised she wasn’t going to leave him.
Julia rewarded him for this admission by giving him his wedding present.
She shared her secret with him and informed him she was pregnant.
He was, for Douglas Ashton, beside himself with delight.
They named their daughter Margaret Tamsin Fairfax Ashton.
* * * * *
A great number of happy years later, Douglas insisted to Roddy Kilpatrick that they lay his wife to rest in the family plot on the grounds of Sommersgate House.
No one, really, could think of anywhere more appropriate for Mrs. K to spend eternity.
Roddy joined his wife there shortly after.
Flowers were delivered to their graves, as well as the graves of Tamsin and Gavin Fairfax, on a weekly basis for as long as Douglas was alive.
Unfortunately, Margaret and Roddy’s version of heaven meant that their ghosts, forever, benignly and often hilariously haunted Sommersgate and all of its inhabitants.
* * * * *
Many, many, many years later, Sommersgate was inherited by William Fairfax as Douglas’s only male heir and because Douglas wanted his sister’s beloved home to go to her only son.
Will kept his father’s mellow, friendly ways but, after years spent with Douglas, acquired more than a hint of his uncle’s arrogance and commanding authority.
Will eventually married a beautiful woman named Rebecca (under rather romantic circumstances) and sired three children of his own.
* * * * *
Elizabeth Fairfax married for love, the son of some friends of her Aunt Jewel’s who had survived leukaemia many years before. Lizzie moved to Indiana and hosted the family Christmases there every third year and brought her ever-increasing family to Sommersgate for the other two.
Lizzie became a social worker, specialising in helping others to survive loss.
* * * * *
When she was in her teens, Ruby Fairfax helped Nick to investigate the murder of Lady Ruby Ashton (the children were eventually told of the lovers’ release but that was the only thing they were informed about regarding that night) and the Sommersgate House Curse.
As the trail was cold, they found very little but both agreed that it had something to do with a woman whose cottage was burned down with her in it. The townspeople thought she was a witch and police suspected arson but the inquest was inconclusive. Her son, however, was discovered to be serial murderer who strangled his victims. Most of those victims were unveiled at the trial but in his dying moments he hinted at another, the first woman who didn’t want him and, therefore, had to die.
* * * * *
In adulthood, Ruby followed (unknowingly) in her uncle’s footsteps, a noted clairvoyant and a very clever girl, she worked for MI6 (though never told her aunt and uncle, siblings, Ronnie or the Kilpatricks) and she did a variety of other things that would have caused distress or, indeed, heart failure.
After some rather significant troubles with a dashing agent, she married him and spent a great many years driving him delightfully mad.
* * * * *