Chapter 30 #3
Their friendship, it turned out, was the perfect foundation for the life they were about to spend with each other.
Having survived the storms of youth and war, they had come back to each other as they had always meant to.
And suddenly, all the hardships and heartache of the past several years began to melt away.
When George suddenly rose from his seat and offered her his hand, she almost jumped right out of her own.
“It's time,” he told her, his smile so brilliant that Cecelia had to return it with one of her own.
As she placed her hand in his, she felt the warmth of his palm against hers, and it sent a violent rush up into her chest, making her weak at the knees.
It was only his grip on her, urging her out of her seat, that allowed her to stand.
“Will you still not tell me where we are going?” Cecelia whispered as George led her from the room, followed by yet more cheering and applause.
“Must you really always insist that I ruin every surprise?” George demanded, his fingers squeezing hers.
Cecelia nudged him with her shoulder. “It is so difficult not to when you make every surprise feel like a damning secret.”
George chuckled and took a moment to brush back a loose lock of her black hair before he asked, “Do you remember when we were children and you spent hours and hours trying to convince your father to let you join him on one of his business tours because I was always invited and you weren’t?”
Cecelia’s heart skipped a beat, and all she was able to do was nod, fearful that if she spoke her words of hope, she might be wrong.
“Well, let us just say that I have booked us a tour of our own,” George told her, and Cecelia blinked in astonishment.
“I … I thought perhaps we might just take our honeymoon in Cornwall,” she admitted, blushing when she saw George roll his eyes.
“How could you think so small?” he demanded playfully.
It wasn’t until they were back in the barouche that George finally said, “I will give you one clue and tell you that we will begin the tour in Dover before we set sail.”
Cecelia blinked at him in surprise. Somehow, she felt as though that could only mean one thing. “You … you wish to take me to France?”
George gripped her hand, and the continued cheering of their friends and family started to fade as the horses pulled them away from her childhood home.
George nodded, his hand squeezing hers as he explained, “It was there that I first found my courage. It was there that I survived the years of the war in the hopes that I might one day make it back to you. It is there that I wish to start making new memories, happier memories, with my beautiful wife.”
His words struck her so emotionally in the chest that she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks.
Instinctively, she raised her free hand to the pendant at her throat, her fingers stroking the cool metal as she attempted to compose herself.
“You know,” George said, watching her fingers for a few seconds before he wiped away her tears with his thumb, “I think that all those years ago, when I gave you that pendant, I was really giving you this.”
He raised her hand and pressed her palm over his heart, the gesture causing Cecelia to sob even harder. “Oh, Georgie!”
“Cece,” George returned with affection, brushing her hair back once more to kiss her with a thousand unspoken words of affection.
Chapter 30
The sway of the ship drew Cecelia closer beneath George’s arm as he held her, standing upon the deck as they looked out over the white cliffs of Dover.
With the gulls flying in a powder blue sky overhead, the wind caressing loose strands of Cecelia’s dark hair across his cheeks, George breathed deeply the sea air with the realization that there was nowhere else on Earth he would rather be.
For the three months they had travelled: from Dover to France, from France to Austria, Austria to Italy, Italy to Spain, and finally Spain to Portugal before making the return journey via ship to England.
And what a journey it had been, gone in the blink of an eye, but with so many precious memories that he was certain would remain with him for the rest of his life.
“It feels good to be home,” Cecelia said, nuzzling into him, her arm wrapped affectionately around his waist. The way she played with the gold-threaded hem of his britches, as she so often did, made him smile as he remembered how she had once told him that it was because she simply loved to be close to him, because she simply loved to be in contact with him.
“It certainly does,” he agreed, breathing a sigh of relief as he remembered the last time he had come home on a ship.
Then, the day had been miserable. The weather had been poor, a storm having passed in the night, with drizzle still pouring. It had been frigidly cold, so cold that his hands and feet were numb, and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering.
But the worst part of it all had been the moaning and the cries he had heard from below deck all the while they sailed. The sounds of injured and dying men, some of them who would never set foot on English soil again.
England had looked like a bleak and bitter place back then, a place that he knew held only duty, responsibility, and the constant reminder that no matter what he did – fighting for his country included – it was never good enough.
He looked upon his homeland now with entirely new eyes, not returning as the battle-weary soldier about to pick up his father’s title, but as the newlywed husband who intended to create the perfect wife for his new bride to show her just how much he truly loved having her by his side.
Placing her palm upon his chest, she looked up at him, her large blue-green eyes reminding him of the crystal-clear shores they had just left as she said, “Are you certain? We can always charter another ship out again?”
George tickled her playfully as he said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Keeping me away from all my duties and responsibilities back home.”
He pulled her around to face him, gripping her hips with both his hands until she pressed her body against his, their frames fitting together as if they had been moulded from the same clay.
“If it means getting to keep you entirely to myself,” Cecelia said, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck, “then yes, and I shall not be sorry for saying it.”
She pushed up on the tips of her toes at the very same moment he leaned down, nuzzling his nose against hers, and she smiled at him before giving him a quick peck on the cheek.
“Though, I know I must reconcile myself to the knowledge that I shall soon be inundated with questions from my positively peevish sisters on which country was the best and which they should visit first when they are on their own honeymoons,” she said, twisting in his arms and clasping her hands over his at her waist to look out over the bay the ship was beginning to sail into.
“Don’t forget your mother insisting to know whether you have done your wifely duty correctly, or not,” George said, squeezing her hips.
Cecelia clucked her tongue against her teeth. “If you mention anything towards her on that, I swear, I shall strike you with the hardest thing I can find and make sure you never know the answer to that question or not either.”
George feigned offence at that, gasping in her ear before he nuzzled his face into the side of her neck and whispered, “You wouldn’t truly hurt me, would you?”
“How could I?” she demanded, and George’s insides flipped as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Then you shall never get to meet this little one, shall you?”
The way she moved his hands to her lower abdomen, her words, made George’s heart skip a beat. He was almost certain that all the colour had drained from his face, not out of fear but shock at what he suspected she was telling him.
What if he was wrong? What if, in his hope of their starting a family together, he had misinterpreted her words?
He struggled to loosen the clenching of his jaw enough to ask, “Do you mean what I believe you to mean?”
Cecelia half twisted in his arms to look him directly in the eye as she said, “Yes, Georgie, I do.”
Still unsure, he gulped. “I … I need to hear you say it.”
Cecelia laid her hand upon his heart once more as she said, “I may well be carrying the next heir of Cumberland.”
“Oh, Cecelia! Do not believe that I care whether or not it is a boy!” George exclaimed, pulling her around to face him. He laid his hand on her stomach once more.
“You do not mind if it is a girl?” Cecelia asked, her smile broadening as tears started to streak down her face.
George pulled her close then, lifting her chin to make her look right into his eye as he said, “I do not give one fig what sex this baby has so long as he or she is healthy. Though, if it is a girl, I do hope she shall not have your eyes.”
Cecelia scowled at him then, those eyes darkening. “Why ever not?”
“Because I never could say no to you whenever you give me that look,” George said, and Cecelia began to laugh as he added, “if she too shall have them, then how shall I be able to get my own way ever again?”
“I think perhaps she and I might be willing to give you one day off,” Cecelia suggested playfully, tickling his chin where he had grown a short, well-groomed beard during their travels – George’s excuse that it protected his face from all of the sun while Cecelia insisted he ought to keep it because she liked it – and said, “perhaps your birthday?”
“And what of Christmas and New Year?” George said, tickling her gently just above her hip.
“I suppose we shall have to ask the boss when she arrives,” Cecelia said, laying her own hand upon her stomach once more.
George slipped his hand behind her ear, his fingers dancing in the roots of her hair as he held her head and kissed her with all the joy and happiness that she had just placed in him.
And when he pulled away, he realized that Cecelia was not the only one weeping.
A single tear rolled down his own cheek, and he quickly wiped it away, glancing down at the heart-shaped pendant that still sat around her neck.
“Who would have thought that little thing would have survived all of these years?”
Cecelia raised her hand to the pendant, as she so often did, and said, “People might say the same of us.”
THE END