Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Don't fall, Emily. Don’t do it. Calm down. Breathe. It’s only a wedding.
That was the single, crystalline line of thought running through Emily's mind as she stepped through the doors of Saint George's Church in Hanover Square, her father's arm beneath her hand, the morning light coming through the high windows in long pale columns that illuminated everything with the particular, merciless clarity of a day that had decided to be beautiful regardless of what was happening inside it.
Do not fall. Do not trip. Do not do anything that will give anyone in this building something to talk about. You have given them enough already.
She had been preparing for this morning for days. She had told herself she was prepared. She had sat with Yvette and Rose the night before, drunk tea, said all the right things, gone to bed at a reasonable hour, and lain there for four hours in the dark being entirely, completely unprepared.
The church was small by grand standards.
Only the immediate family and closest friends attended, which was entirely customary.
She could see them now in her peripheral vision as she walked, faces she knew and faces she did not, all of them turning as she passed, but she kept her eyes forward with the discipline of a woman who had been keeping her eyes forward her entire life.
Her gown was white muslin, simply cut, with a gauze overlay that caught the light as she moved.
Flowers had been woven into her hair by Peggy's careful hands that morning, pale roses, their petals already beginning to soften in the warmth.
She carried a small bouquet of the same, tied with white ribbon, and her gloves were long and immaculate.
Her hands inside them were not entirely steady.
Theodore stood with military precision, his dark hair brushed back. He was wearing a deep navy superfine coat that hugged his broad shoulders perfectly, paired with a cream silk waistcoat and a cravat tied in a crisp, intricate mathematical knot.
Emily had seen Theodore Merrick in evening clothes.
She had seen him in riding clothes and morning clothes and the comfortable dishevelment of a man at ease in his own conservatory.
She had looked at him across dinner tables and ballrooms, and she had always.
.. always been able to find something to be annoyed about.
She looked at him now and could not find it.
He looked, she thought, with a clarity that arrived entirely without her permission, extraordinarily good-looking.
She kept walking. For a man she had spent weeks bickering with, a man she had intentionally kept at a distance… he was devastatingly handsome.
She shook the thought away for the second time.
The guilt arrived somewhere around halfway down the aisle, settling alongside the nerves.
She looked at him standing there, this man who had never wanted this, who had agreed to Julia's list as a performance and found himself here, and she wondered, not for the first time and not without some discomfort, whether she had asked too much.
Whether any of this was fair to him. He had lived his entire life on his own terms, had moved through the world with a freedom that she had envied and found exasperating in equal measure, and now he was standing at an altar in his best coat because a scandal had closed around them both and he was too honorable to walk away from it.
She wanted Frederick safe. She wanted a powerful name and a household that could not be questioned and a future that Charles Pierce could not dismantle. She had gotten all of it. She was walking toward it right then.
It simply felt, in that moment, with the morning light falling across his face and his eyes steady on hers, less like a plan and more like something else entirely. Something she did not have a clean name for. Something she was not entirely sure she was ready to have.
She reached the altar.
Her father placed her hand in Theodore's.
Theodore's fingers closed around hers, and he looked at her, and she looked back at him.
The clergyman opened the Book of Common Prayer, and the ceremony began.
Emily Pierce stood at the altar and decided, with the finality of someone who had run out of time for anything else, that she was simply going to live in this moment.
Whatever it meant could wait.
The clergyman's voice was calming, filling the small church with the familiar words... words that had been spoken in this same order, in this same language, for longer than anyone in the building had been alive.
“Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
Theodore looked at her.
“I will,” he said.
He will?
His voice was even. Entirely certain. Emily had half expected him to stumble on it, or to say it with the slightly ironic quality he brought to most things he said, but he did neither. He simply said it, looking at her, and she thought that even performing, Theodore Merrick did things properly.
“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”
“I will,” Emily said and immediately took in a sharp breath, pleased that she too had not stumbled. Her voice did not shake. She had been afraid it might.
“I pronounce that they be man and wife together,” the clergyman announced.
As the final blessing was spoken, a sudden, profound sense of calmness washed over Emily.
She had not realized, until that precise moment, how much of herself she had been holding in suspension for the last several weeks, pulled taut between what she needed, what she feared, and everything in between.
Now it simply, quietly let go. The tension left her shoulders.
The cold settled weight of it all, the planning and the pretending and the walking on ground she could not trust, lifted in a single exhale.
It was over.
They were married.
Frederick was safe.
She looked at the ring on her finger and felt, with a clarity that surprised her, something very close to peace.
Theodore leaned slightly toward her as they turned to face the small gathering of guests, and said, quietly enough for only her to hear. “You make a beautiful bride, Emily.”
She looked at him.
At the blue eyes and the slight, genuine warmth in his expression, and she felt something move through her chest that was not the peace of a moment ago but something adjacent to it, something that sat closer to the surface and had considerably more warmth in it, and she wanted to say something back, something equal to it.
But she looked at him, and the words did not come because he was looking at her in a way she did not quite know what to do with yet.
She smiled instead.
Then she looked away, and the moment passed.
The clergyman was speaking again as they walked.
People were saying things to them, her mother was pressing her hand with bright eyes, and her father was shaking Theodore's hand.
.. all of it moved past Emily in a warm, gentle blur, like watching a river from the bank.
She said goodbye to her family. It was not the wrenching thing she had steeled herself for.
Her mother held her a moment longer than usual and said nothing, which said everything.
Her father cleared his throat and told her to write, and that was the whole of it.
Her bags were already at the Carrowell Manor.
Everything she was taking with her had been packed and sent ahead two days ago.
She climbed into the carriage beside her husband.
Her husband.
Emily sat with that word for a moment as the horses moved and London began to pass by the window. She thought that of all the things she had imagined feeling on this particular day, the quiet, settled, inexplicable sense of having arrived somewhere she had planned to be had not been among them.
“We should reach the estate by nightfall,” Thoedore noted. “The staff has been prepared for our arrival.”
“That is good to hear, Your Grace,”
Something was different with Emily.
He noticed it before the carriage had cleared the first street. She was sitting beside him with her hands folded in her lap, her face turned toward the window, and she had been facing the window since they left the church, which in itself was not unusual.
What was unusual was that she had not looked at him for longer than a second.
He tried to think of a single occasion in all their years of acquaintance when Emily had not looked at him.
Even when she was furious with him... especially when she was furious with him, she looked.
Those steady brown eyes had been trained on him across dinner tables and ballrooms. It was one of the things that had always, quietly and without his permission, kept him interested.
She was not looking at him now.
He turned to look at her instead. At the white muslin and the roses woven into her hair.
Some of them were loosening now in the warmth of the carriage.
At the ring on her finger, his ring, plain gold, catching the light each time the carriage moved.
At the line of her profile, the freckles, the jaw, the mouth that was not doing anything in particular at the moment except existing in a way he was finding distinctly inconvenient to ignore.
He turned back to the window on his side.
He was a married man.