by Balogh, Mary
How dreadfully the mind babbled when one was nervous.
And she was very, very nervous.
Oh, Charles!
She straightened her shoulders, stepped out of her dressing room, and made her way downstairs and outdoors to the awaiting carriage.
Ten
Charles was resigned to his fate as he awaited the arrival of his bride at St. George’s. Behind him the pews had filled with family and the very crème de la crème of aristocratic society. At least, he assumed they had filled. He did not turn his head to look. But he could hear the rustling of silks and satins, the muted conversations, the cleared throats.
Given the choice, he would still opt for a quiet wedding. He was also still glad Matilda was to have her grand wedding at last. He sat in the front pew, wondering how her life would have proceeded if her father had not refused his suit quite so adamantly or if she had not refused to discuss the matter with him afterward. Or if he had had the gumption to fight for what he wanted instead of turning peevishly away to nurse his bruised heart by becoming one of England’s most notorious rakes and hellions. Would they have married? Would his children be hers too—but different children, of course? But children of her own—and his. Would she have been happy? Would he? Her life would certainly have been different. Would his?
They were pointless thoughts, of course. Ifs were always pointless when applied to the past. If the past had been different, then so would the present be. He would not now be sitting here on full display before the ton, awaiting the arrival of his bride. She would not be living through her wedding day now, today.
He was glad it was now. He felt suddenly happy even as a twinge of anxiety nudged at him lest she be going through one of her many doubting moments and would simply not come.
Impossible! Of course she would come.
“Nervous?” Adrian murmured from beside him. His son was his best man.
“Of course,” Charles murmured back. “Today is the start of a wholly new life.”
But before anxiety could take hold of him, he heard a stirring from the back of the church and guessed that it heralded the arrival of Matilda, who was apparently coming alone. Her mother had arrived earlier with Mrs. Monteith, her sister, and Miss Boniface, her paragon of a companion who also, according to Matilda, sniffed. They had come earlier than originally planned in order to take up residence with the dowager countess and console her for the loss of her eldest daughter to marriage.
The clergyman, fully robed, appeared from somewhere and Charles rose with the rest of the congregation and the great pipe organ began to play. Charles turned to look along the nave. And sure enough, she came alone, a straight-backed woman of middle years, proceeding with slow—but not too slow—dignity along the aisle, her eyes fixed forward until they found and held upon him. She was dressed decently, elegantly, almost severely in pale blue—as he might have expected had he given the matter thought—with an absurdly pretty straw hat tipped forward over her forehead and with her silver-gloved hands clasped before her. Her face was pale, her mouth in a prim line until she was a few steps away from him. Then, unseen by all except the closest of the congregation, she smiled at him with all the sunshine of a summer’s day behind her eyes.
He saw in that smile the vivid girl she had been. And he saw in the quiet poise of her demeanor the woman she had become.
He saw Matilda. His love. Always and ever his love.
She set her hand in his, giving herself to him because, as she had explained, she did not need any man to do it for her, no matter how closely related to her that man was or how well meaning. She let her fingers curl about his own in a firm grip.
“Here I am,” she murmured for his ears only.
“And at last,” he said just as quietly, “so am I.”
They turned together to face the clergyman.
“Dearly beloved,” he began.
And just like that, within a very few minutes, they were married.
Charles was after all glad they had done it this way, with all the pomp of a high church service, with all their family and friends and acquaintances in attendance. He was glad for himself, for he wanted the world to know that he married this woman from choice and from love. He was glad for Matilda, for she glowed from the moment she first smiled at him until the moment when the clergyman pronounced them man and wife. And even then she glowed as he led her to the vestry for the signing of the register. When Alexander, Earl of Riverdale, witnessed her signature and then hugged her, and Adrian witnessed his signature and hugged her too, she glowed at them. She glowed as they left the vestry and proceeded, her arm drawn through Charles’s, back along the nave, smiling from one side to the other as they passed the pews. It was impossible to see everyone who was there. But they would do that at the wedding breakfast in a short while.
She smiled still as they passed through the church doors and emerged into sunshine at the top of the long flight of steps down to their awaiting carriage—an open barouche decorated almost beyond recognition with flowers. She smiled at the crowd of onlookers that had gathered down there to applaud and even cheer. And she laughed when she saw her young nephews and his sons-in-law waiting farther down the steps to pelt them with flower petals before they could reach the dubious safety of the open carriage. And then, halfway down, when the petals were already raining about them in a brightly colored shower, she looked back up to where the congregation was beginning to spill outdoors after them and she lost her smile.
“Ah,” she said, and Charles had the curious impression that she saw something she had been looking for. He looked backward even as he laughed at another shower of petals that was fluttering from the brim of his hat.
Quite a few people had come outside, his daughters and grandchildren, Matilda’s mother and aunt and sisters among them. And one group a little separate from the others, three steps down from the top. A man and a woman, and a child between them, holding a hand of each.
When he thought about it afterward, Charles did not suppose that silence had really descended upon the congregation above, the gathering of the curious below, and the young people on the steps with their handfuls of petals. But it seemed to him at the time that they were suddenly cocooned in silence, Matilda and he, her arm through his, her face turned to look into his—with anxiety?
God. Oh good God.
Neither group moved for what was perhaps a second or two but seemed far longer at the time. Then the woman took a step down, impelling the child and the man to descend too. And Matilda took one step back up, forcing him to do likewise. Who descended or ascended the other steps between them Charles did not afterward know, or who first extended a hand. But suddenly he felt the warm, firm clasp of his son’s hand even as he gripped it in return.
His elder son, that was.
Gil.
“Congratulations, sir,” he said stiffly.
“You came,” Charles said foolishly. “We came.”
And then Matilda was hugging first his son’s wife and then his son and was then bending down to smile at the child—Katy—and say something to her. And Abigail was hugging Charles and lifting Katy to say how do you do to her grandpapa, and somehow—oh, somehow his son was hugging him too. Briefly, awkwardly, improbably, surely unintentionally, unforgettably.
“Congratulations, sir,” he said again.
“You came,” Charles said, just to be original.
After every wedding Charles had ever attended, the bride and groom left the church and ran the gamut of mischievous relatives who went out ahead of them in order to decorate their carriage with noisy hardware and throw flowers. The carriage was always on its way by the time large numbers of the congregation left the church behind them. All the greetings and congratulations, all the hugs and kisses, and slapping of backs, and laughter, came later as the guests arrived at the venue for the wedding breakfast.
This wedding was the exception to that tradition. It was too late to escape. Within moments they were surrounded by wedding gue
sts. Matilda was being hugged and kissed and wept over by her mother and her sisters and sister-in-law and cousins and nieces and aunt. She had children about her—most of them, he believed, the offspring of her niece Camille from Bath—all trying to tell her things in piping yells while brushing at the flower petals with which she was strewn. His own daughters and grandchildren were soon gathered about her too. She was bright eyed and rosy cheeked and laughing and lovely. Her brother-in-law and nephews and cousins meanwhile were pumping him by the hand and slapping him on the back, as were his sons-in-law, having abandoned their petal throwing for the moment—or perhaps they had no more to throw. Adrian and Charles’s daughters and grandchildren were hugging him. Other people were calling greetings.
Matilda, some little distance away from Charles, turned to find him and smiled at him in a way that would put sunshine to shame.
She was, he realized, elbowing her way closer to him until she could take his hand in hers, utterly happy.
As was he.
“We had better leave while we still may,” he said, laughing.
“Oh, must we?” But she slid her arm through his and allowed him to lead her down through the path that opened for them and hand her into the barouche.
“I have just one wish remaining,” she said as he sat beside her and took her hand in his, lacing their fingers. “I hope the young people tied a whole arsenal of pots and pans and old boots beneath the carriage. I want to make an unholy din on the way to Westcott House. I have always envied—”
But what or whom she had always envied was drowned out as the coachman gave the horses the signal to start and the barouche rocked into motion. So was Charles’s laughter. And so were the church bells pealing out the good news of a new marriage.
Matilda’s one remaining wish had come true.
She turned her face toward him, and he saw that she was laughing—until the laughter faded and her eyes became luminous beneath the brim of her hat.
Matilda.
What part had she played in bringing his elder son to him today of all days? What part had his younger son and his daughters played in it? Surely they had been consulted. What on earth had persuaded Gil to come for the wedding of the father he had not wanted to know? What did it mean exactly that he had come? Would he also come to the wedding breakfast?
It was impossible to ask any of these questions. The noise coming from beneath the carriage was deafening.
And the answers would wait.
He smiled at his bride, and her eyes filled with tears even as she smiled back at him.
“I love you,” he said, and her eyes lowered to read his lips.
“I love you,” her lips said in return.
And he dipped his head and kissed her. Propriety be damned. If he must suffer this din, which proclaimed to the world that a newly wedded couple was on its way through the streets of London, then at least he was going to let the world know that he was happy about it.
He lifted his head and grinned at her. Her eyes brimmed with tears and laughter.
He kissed her again. Or she kissed him.
They kissed each other.
READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM THE
FIRST NOVEL IN THE WESTCOTT SERIES,
Someone to Love
AVAILABLE NOW FROM PIATKUS
Despite the fact that the late Earl of Riverdale had died without having made a will, Josiah Brumford, his solicitor, had found enough business to discuss with his son and successor to be granted a face-to-face meeting at Westcott House, the earl’s London residence on South Audley Street. Having arrived promptly and bowed his way through effusive and obsequious greetings, Brumford proceeded to find a great deal of nothing in particular to impart at tedious length and with pompous verbosity.
Which would have been all very well, Avery Archer, Duke of Netherby, thought a trifle peevishly as he stood before the library window and took snuff in an effort to ward off the urge to yawn, if he had not been compelled to be here too to endure the tedium. If Harry had only been a year older—he had turned twenty just before his father’s death—then Avery need not be here at all and Brumford could prose on forever and a day as far as he was concerned. By some bizarre and thoroughly irritating twist of fate, however, His Grace had found himself joint guardian of the new earl with the countess, the boy’s mother.
It was all remarkably ridiculous in light of Avery’s notoriety for indolence and the studied avoidance of anything that might be dubbed work or the performance of duty. He had a secretary and numerous other servants to deal with all the tedious business of life for him. And there was also the fact that he was a mere eleven years older than his ward. When one heard the word guardian, one conjured a mental image of a gravely dignified graybeard. However, it seemed he had inherited the guardianship to which his father had apparently agreed—in writing—at some time in the dim distant past when the late Riverdale had mistakenly thought himself to be at death’s door. By the time he did die a few weeks ago, the old Duke of Netherby had been sleeping peacefully in his own grave for more than two years and was thus unable to be guardian to anyone. Avery might, he supposed, have repudiated the obligation since he was not the Netherby mentioned in that letter of agreement, which had never been made into a legal document anyway. He had not done so, however. He did not dislike Harry, and really it had seemed like too much bother to take a stand and refuse such a slight and temporary inconvenience.
It felt more than slight at the moment. Had he known Brumford was such a crashing bore, he might have made the effort.
“There really was no need for Father to make a will,” Harry was saying in the sort of rallying tone one used when repeating oneself in order to wrap up a lengthy discussion that had been moving in unending circles. “I have no brothers. My father trusted that I would provide handsomely for my mother and sisters according to his known wishes, and of course I will not fail that trust. I will certainly see to it too that most of the servants and retainers on all my properties are kept on and that those who leave my employ for whatever reason—Father’s valet, for example—are properly compensated. And you may rest assured that my mother and Netherby will see that I do not stray from these obligations before I arrive at my majority.”
He was standing by the fireplace beside his mother’s chair, in a relaxed posture, one shoulder propped against the mantel, his arms crossed over his chest, one booted foot on the hearth. He was a tall lad and a bit gangly, though a few more years would take care of that deficiency. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed with a good-humored countenance that very young ladies no doubt found impossibly handsome. He was also almost indecently rich. He was amiable and charming and had been running wild during the past several months, first while his father was too ill to take much notice and again during the couple of weeks since the funeral. He had probably never lacked for friends, but now they abounded and would have filled a sizable city, perhaps even a small county, to overflowing. Though perhaps friends was too kind a word to use for most of them. Sycophants and hangers-on would be better.
Avery had not tried intervening, and he doubted he would. The boy seemed of sound enough character and would doubtless settle to a bland and blameless adulthood if left to his own devices. And if in the meanwhile he sowed a wide swath of wild oats and squandered a small fortune, well, there were probably oats to spare in the world and there would still be a vast fortune remaining for the bland adulthood. It would take just too much effort to intervene, anyway, and the Duke of Netherby rarely made the effort to do what was inessential or what was not conducive to his personal comfort.
“I do not doubt it for a moment, my lord.” Brumford bowed from his chair in a manner that suggested he might at last be conceding that everything he had come to say had been said and perhaps it was time to take his leave. “I trust Brumford, Brumford & Sons may continue to represent your interests as we did your dear departed father’s and his father’s before him. I trust His Grace and Her Ladyship will so advise you.”
&nbs
p; Avery wondered idly what the other Brumford was like and just how many young Brumfords were included in the “& Sons.” The mind boggled.
Harry pushed himself away from the mantel, looking hopeful. “I see no reason why I would not,” he said. “But I will not keep you any longer. You are a very busy man, I daresay.”
“I will, however, beg for a few minutes more of your time, Mr. Brumford,” the countess said unexpectedly. “But it is a matter that does not concern you, Harry. You may go and join your sisters in the drawing room. They will be eager to hear details of this meeting. Perhaps you would be good enough to remain, Avery.”
Harry directed a quick grin Avery’s way, and His Grace, opening his snuffbox again before changing his mind and snapping it shut, almost wished that he too were being sent off to report to the countess’s two daughters. He must be very bored indeed. Lady Camille Westcott, age twenty-two, was the managing sort, a forthright female who did not suffer fools gladly, though she was handsome enough, it was true. Lady Abigail, at eighteen, was a sweet, smiling, pretty young thing who might or might not possess a personality. To do her justice, Avery had not spent enough time in her company to find out. She was his half sister’s favorite cousin and dearest friend in the world, however—her words—and he occasionally heard them talking and giggling together behind closed doors that he was very careful never to open.
Harry, all eager to be gone, bowed to his mother, nodded politely to Brumford, came very close to winking at Avery, and made his escape from the library. Lucky devil. Avery strolled closer to the fireplace, where the countess and Brumford were still seated. What the deuce could be important enough that she had voluntarily prolonged this excruciatingly dreary meeting?
“And how may I be of service to you, my lady?” the solicitor asked.
The countess, Avery noticed, was sitting very upright, her spine arched slightly inward. Were ladies taught to sit that way, as though the backs of chairs had been created merely to be decorative? She was, he estimated, about forty years old. She was also quite perfectly beautiful in a mature, dignified sort of way. She surely could not have been happy with Riverdale—who could?—yet to Avery’s knowledge she had never indulged herself with lovers. She was tall, shapely, and blond with no sign yet, as far as he could see, of any gray hairs. She was also one of those rare women who looked striking rather than dowdy in deep mourning.