by Mary Balogh
Elizabeth Overfield was going to be his wife. If anyone had told him that six months ago, even one month ago, he would not have considered the prediction even worthy of comment.
But tomorrow she was going to be his bride.
* * *
• • •
Viola and Marcel, Marquess of Dorchester, had arrived in London in time for the wedding. But they had indeed been bewildered to discover not only that it was to be somewhat sooner than they had expected but also that the groom had changed.
“So you traded Codaire for a younger model of manhood, did you, Elizabeth?” Marcel said when she arrived at his home the evening before.
Viola tutted and the young people who had come into the hall with them to greet their visitor burst into peals of merriment.
“A vastly younger model,” Elizabeth agreed. “Eighteen years younger, in fact.”
“May I be permitted to hug the happy bride?” he asked.
“I will not be a bride until tomorrow,” she told him. “This evening you may hug the bride-to-be.”
Viola hugged her too. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” she said. “I was very prepared to be pleased for you, Elizabeth, for I remembered Sir Geoffrey Codaire as a very worthy gentleman—”
“As dry as dust,” Marcel said, interrupting her. “You would have been having a coughing fit every time he moved, Elizabeth.”
“—but not as a man of any obvious attractions,” his wife continued with a speaking glance at him. “Now, Lord Hodges! Well, my dear, I did not see that one coming from a million miles away.”
“I told you, Mama,” Abigail said with a smile and a hug for Elizabeth, “that I did. While Jessica and Estelle and I were admiring Lord Hodges for his good looks and his lovely smile, I was fully aware that he sought out Cousin Elizabeth’s company whenever he had the opportunity. And remember how gorgeous they looked when they were waltzing together on Boxing Day?”
“I believe your mother was too busy on that occasion noticing how gorgeous I looked waltzing with her, Abby,” Marcel said while Viola tossed her glance at the ceiling and ignored his grin.
“I am very pleased for you, Lady Overfield,” Estelle Lamarr said, offering Elizabeth her hand. “And I think it was very spiteful of the man to whom you were betrothed to embarrass you by accusing you in public of indecorous behavior. I cannot imagine anyone who is less capable of behaving indecorously.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, smiling at the girl.
“Congratulations, ma’am,” her brother, Bertrand, said as he shook Elizabeth’s hand.
“Do come up to the nursery,” Abigail said, slipping a hand through Elizabeth’s arm. “Camille and Joel are up there with the children. They may not have heard your carriage arriving. Did you know there is another child now in addition to Winifred and Sarah and Jacob? They have just recently adopted Robbie from the orphanage. He is four years old and was a dreadful behavior problem. But Joel refused to believe he was a hopeless case, and then Camille refused to believe it and they are subduing him with love—with a great deal of help from Winifred, who keeps telling him that she will not under any circumstances call him a dreadfully naughty boy even if he keeps rolling his eyes at her forever and poking out his tongue as he pulls out the sides of his mouth.”
“Oh dear,” Elizabeth said.
“He is a sweet child, my newest grandson,” Viola said. “And they went ahead with his adoption last week even though Camille had just discovered that she is with child again. Whoever could have predicted all this for Camille of all people, Elizabeth?”
Lady Camille Westcott had been the most humorless of high sticklers before the discovery was made that her parents’ marriage had been bigamous and she was therefore illegitimate. Her world had been shattered, especially as it had included a broken engagement. But she had changed—by sheer grim grit, Elizabeth had always thought—until by last Christmas she had become a young matron with three children, two of them adopted, always a little disheveled in appearance, slightly overweight, totally in love with her family, especially her husband, Joel, and as happy as a spring day when the sun was shining.
And her mother, Viola . . . Her world of quiet, humorless dignity as the loyal wife of a blackguard whom everyone had despised, had changed too beyond recognition. Her household now, even though she had the excuse that they had only very recently all arrived in town, seemed noisy and a bit disorganized and brimming with family warmth and affection and happiness. Who could ever have predicted it just a few years ago? And what a family. It included Viola’s offspring and Marcel’s and adopted children as well as those born to one or other of the family members.
Even Viola’s younger daughter, Abby, seemed more cheerful than Elizabeth had seen her in the past three years.
Children came dashing and crawling toward them when they stepped into the nursery, all talking at once. But Elizabeth did notice one child at the far side of the room who was lying on his back and drumming his heels on the floor while Joel sat cross-legged beside him, talking to him with quiet unconcern. He waved cheerfully to Elizabeth.
What a wonderful way to spend her wedding eve, Elizabeth thought without any trace of irony, though it had become obvious that the dinner hour she had been quoted when she was invited had been a very rough estimate indeed.
She was spending it with family. Only a part of the whole, of course, but a very precious part all the same. And the rest of it had been busy for half the spring, it seemed, plotting and planning and scheming on her behalf because she was one of them.
“What have you heard of Harry?” she asked Viola.
“His regiment was sent off to America,” Viola said, “but he somehow missed going with them. I do not know how or why. I suspect he might have been wounded at Toulouse and has not told me about it, but Marcel keeps reminding me that even if he was, he is obviously not at death’s door. He is in Paris. Oh, Elizabeth, I do hope the wars are really and truly at an end. I hope these past wars were wars to end all wars. Do you think maybe they were? No other wars ever? No other mother or wife or daughter to have to go through what I and so many others have been going through? But enough of that. He is alive and in Paris. You ought not to have started me on that particular theme. Tell me about the courtship and the proposal. Was it on bended knee? With roses?”
“It was . . . lovely,” Elizabeth said.
But Sarah wanted to show her grandmama something and Winifred wanted to tell Elizabeth something else and Camille was coming toward them, the heel-drumming little boy astride one of her hips, scowling at Winifred, whose news was that she had a new brother whom she would never stop loving no matter how hard he tried to make her do it.
“For family is more important than anything else in the whole wide world, Cousin Elizabeth,” she said. “Is it not?”
“It is indeed,” Elizabeth said. She congratulated Winifred and smiled at Robbie and took the hand Joel was offering her.
Tomorrow was her wedding day, she thought. She could hardly wait to see Colin again.
To marry him.
* * *
• • •
Elizabeth wore a new high-waisted, cream-colored walking dress to her wedding. It was paired with a straw bonnet, the crown of which was trimmed with artificial primroses and tied beneath the chin with matching silk ribbons, and mustard-colored shoes and gloves. None of the garments were elaborate, and no one had influenced her choice, though Wren and her mother had tried when they went shopping with her. She had wanted to feel comfortable. She had wanted to feel like herself, as she had not at her betrothal ball to Sir Geoffrey Codaire in the gorgeous gold and bronze gown, her hair dressed more elaborately than she liked it. Today she had had her maid brush her hair smooth and knot it simply at her neck so that her bonnet would fit easily over it.
She picked up her reticule, took one last look in the mirror, glance
d at the clock—she was a little early, though not by much—and made her way downstairs.
It was her wedding day, she thought, as though realizing it for the first time.
Memory washed over her. Of Anna, in this very house not long after she had come from Bath, still new to her role as the very wealthy Lady Anastasia Westcott, newly betrothed to Avery, bewildered and dismayed as the family planned a grand society wedding for them at St. George’s. And of Avery arriving one morning while Elizabeth was sitting with Anna in the drawing room, and leaning over Anna’s chair to invite her to come with him right then to be married quietly by special license. His secretary would meet them at the church, he had explained, and Elizabeth was invited to go along as the second witness.
She wished for a moment that her wedding could be just like it. But it could not. They had a point to make. Besides, they owed it to her family not merely to slip off to marry privately.
And she remembered Alexander and Wren’s wedding last year. Wren had left for the church—also St. George’s—from this house while Alex had stayed with Cousin Sidney the night before. Viola and Abigail and Harry had been staying here.
Today it was her turn. Her mother and Wren were to travel to the church with her, at her request. And Alex too, of course. He would be giving her away. They were waiting for her in the hall, and all three looked up to watch her descend the stairs.
“You were quite right, Elizabeth,” Wren said when she was halfway down, “and Mama and I were wrong. You look beautiful as simplicity itself. You do it better than anyone else I know.”
“You do have a style all your own, Lizzie,” her mother conceded, “and are wise to insist upon keeping to it.”
“I believe, Lizzie,” Alexander said, “that despite my lukewarm response to the announcement of your betrothal, I am happy about it after all. I believe the two of you suit, and Wren agrees with me.”
“I do.” Wren had tears in her eyes. “I want the very best in life for Colin, and I want the same for you, Elizabeth. Why would you not find it together? It makes perfect sense that you would.”
“If you make me weep before I even get to the church, you two,” Elizabeth warned them as she joined them in the hall, “I will not speak to you for a month.”
The sun came out from behind a bank of clouds as the carriage approached Hanover Square and drew up before St. George’s. It was not by any means the largest or the most magnificent church in London, but it was the preferred venue for society weddings during the Season and always attracted a small crowd of the curious, who came to watch the bride arrive and, somewhat later, to see the newly married couple depart for the rest of their lives together.
“Five minutes late,” Alexander said as he handed her down onto the pavement and consulted his pocket watch. “Maybe four and a half. Just right. Mama and Wren, we will give you time to go inside first.”
Elizabeth could hear her pulse beating in her ears as she watched them ascend the steps and disappear inside the church.
“Nervous?” Alexander asked.
“But of course,” she said, smiling at him and taking his arm. “Weren’t you last year?”
“Of course,” he said, grinning back at her. “And I have had not a single regret since. I wish you the same, Lizzie.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I am not marrying Colin just because I believe I ought, you know.”
“I do know,” he said, covering her hand on his arm with his own. And they climbed the steps together and stepped inside the church.
Doubts assailed her anyway at this most inopportune of times. What if she had agreed only because the plans she had made for herself had been dashed and the future had looked bleak? What if he had offered only because he believed he had compromised her and brought the wrath of his mother upon her? What if the gap in their ages did make a difference and would make true happiness impossible? What if . . . ?
But the arrival of her mother and sister-in-law must have been taken as a signal, and the great pipe organ had begun to play, and the congregation—looking larger than she had expected—was standing and turning to look back to watch her progress along the nave on Alex’s arm. She saw friends and acquaintances and family, all smiling their encouragement. And . . . ah! She saw Lady Hodges, all in dazzling white with a delicate veil covering her face, Lady Elwood beside her with Sir Nelson, and Lord Ede on Lady Hodges’s other side, next to the aisle.
They had come.
And she saw Colin, standing before the empty pew in front of his mother and sister, resplendent in fawn and dull gold, tall and slim and lithe and handsome, watching her come. He looked anxious and a bit pale, and then her eyes met his and he smiled. But how did she know that when she was still some distance away from him and the rest of his face was not smiling? But she knew. His eyes were smiling, and her own smiled back into them.
And suddenly all seemed right and she forgot doubts about the past and fears for the future, and everything became here and everything became now. It all turned magical, though that must be entirely the wrong word to use of solemn nuptials conducted within a consecrated church. Mystical, then. It all turned mystical—warm and intimate and wonderful and the rightest of right things she had ever done in her life.
The same conviction surely looked at her through his eyes.
Alexander gave her into Colin’s keeping, and they stood before the clergyman in his formal vestments, and they were married. Just like that. In what seemed an extraordinarily brief span of time but with an eternity of consequences.
They were man and wife.
Oh surely, she thought, they had done the right thing. He had married her because he wanted to—he had said so and she trusted him. And she had married him because she wanted to. She had told him so and he knew he could trust her. What could be more perfect?
They were married.
His face beamed at her even though he was still not actually smiling. She smiled fully at him with all the power of her conviction that this was right, what they had just done.
It was time then to move to the vestry to sign the register, and Wren and Alexander rose to accompany them. Elizabeth signed the register as Elizabeth Overfield for the last time, and first Wren and then Alex hugged her while Colin signed his name. Wren hugged him tightly and held him close for several moments before relinquishing him to Alex’s firm handshake and slap on the shoulder.
And then they were face-to-face again as man and wife, and he offered his arm to lead her from the vestry into the church and back up the nave. They bowed and smiled to family and friends and all who had come to celebrate the day with them—all except his mother and Lord Ede, who had left, it seemed. Sir Nelson and Lady Elwood had not, however, but were still seated in the second pew from the front.
A few moments later they emerged into sunshine to the applause of the people gathered outside. And to a few familiar faces—those of Mr. Parmiter and Mr. Croft and Mr. Ormsbridge, as well as Cousin Sidney and Bertrand and Estelle Lamarr and Winifred Cunningham.
“They left early for a purpose,” Colin warned, turning a grinning face toward her. “Shall we make a dash for it?”
“They would be disappointed if we did not,” Elizabeth said, setting her hand in his and running down the steps with him while they were showered with a veritable barrage of flower petals and the crowd applauded again and laughed. Someone whistled.
They were both laughing and breathless by the time they reached his carriage, though it was no sanctuary. It was an open carriage. Colin handed her in and took his place beside her a few moments before the vehicle rocked on its springs and moved forward.
The church bells rang a merry peal behind them, but the sound was all but drowned out by the ugly metallic rattle and screech of all the hardware that had been tied to the back of the carriage. They drove out of Hanover Square in all the din, their hands tightly clasped, their persons and the
carriage seats and the horses’ backs and the coachman in his immaculate livery liberally strewn with bright flower petals.
“If we look unconcerned,” Colin yelled, “do you suppose no one will realize that we have just been wed?” They laughed into each other’s eyes and she marveled yet again at the reality of it all. Her wedding day. Their wedding day.
They were married.
“Lady Hodges,” he said.
“Yes.”
And he leaned toward her and kissed her on the lips just before the carriage turned out of the square and disappeared from the view of those at the foot of the steps and spilling out of the church onto the square.
They could not hear the cheers and applause. Or even the whistles.
Twenty-one
The word breakfast as it applied to a wedding feast was always a misnomer. For one thing, the food that was served was anything but what one would normally expect of breakfast. For another, the celebrations continued for most of the day, for several hours in the ballroom while toasts and speeches were dealt with in addition to the meal, and then for a few hours longer in the drawing room, with a somewhat smaller gathering.
It was during the move from the one room to the other that Colin singled out his sister, who he sensed was about to take her leave with Nelson.
“Blanche,” he said, touching her elbow, “come and stroll in the garden with me for a short while?”
She glanced through a window of the ballroom, but there was no excuse to be found there. The sun was still shining from a cloudless sky, and warm air was wafting through the open French windows. Nelson had been drawn into a conversation with John Croft and Sidney Radley. Elizabeth was being borne off to the drawing room by her friend Miss Scott on the one side and the Dowager Duchess of Netherby on the other.
“For a very short while, then,” Blanche said, taking his offered arm. “We are expected back.”