Chapter 9
Chapter
Julianna stared at her reflection in the looking glass, her fists clenched in the folds of ivory muslin that made up her wedding gown. Fred had done a competent job of pinning it and the alterations thereafter were not difficult. It fit now, physically at least.
“It’s my wedding day, Mama,” she whispered to her reflection. “How different from yours.”
For a moment, she let the memories take her and she was once again in the cottage of her youth, where she could smell baking bread and jam, the faint scent of grass and mown hay on a summer evening.
Where she could hear her father’s pianoforte in the next room, his melodies always so bright and clear.
She could see her mother, Eliza, at the table with pins in her mouth, eyes shining as she fussed with a ribbon she was attaching to the sleeve of her best gown.
“Listen to that—he’s almost got it,” Eliza had whispered affectionately, while Julianna’s father played the same phrase again and again, building it into the sound that was his own: romantic and melodic and perfect.
Julianna had been small then, barely tall enough to peer over the tabletop. Thomas had been making faces at her and grinning in the corner like the jester he’d always been. And Fred—he was there too. Lounging in the doorway with his muddy boots and sun-tipped hair, a biscuit half-eaten in his hand.
Her father had looked up from the keys and said, “What do you think, darling girl?” and her mother had only laughed, soft and delighted, because they had both answered him at the same time.
“I fell in love with him through my ears,” her mother had whispered to her as she so often did.
According to Eliza, Ignatius Farrow, the rising composer of melodies, had made music so lovely she had never been able to forget it. His music, and the man himself, had beelined straight for her heart and colonized it forever after.
Although my eyes didn’t object in the least, Eliza sometimes added, which made the young Julianna clap her hands over her ears and run shrieking from the room.
Her parents had been a love match. Nothing could have stood in sharper contrast to her own wedding but there was nothing more to be done.
Julianna had given her word. She’d altered the dress.
She’d go through with the wedding. The fact that she didn’t care to become the Countess of Chester was of little importance to anyone except herself.
She stared at her own throat in the mirror, at the pulse beating there, enclosed in its lace. It went too fast, and for one panicked second she thought: I can still run.
Or, she could simply…sit down. Like an ornery mule might. Refuse to finish buttoning her gown. Refuse to stand in a chapel and say vows she did not mean. Let Fred rage and Thomas rail and the whole county talk.
Her fingers tightened in the muslin until it wrinkled beneath her hands. Then, carefully, she let it go.
No. She would not be the one to run away. Not today.
“Do you need a hand, dear?”
Julianna turned, frowning at the sight of the nurse. “That would be lovely, yes.” She had failed to fasten the final pearl button at her nape and had resigned herself to hoping Thomas could manage it.
The woman crossed the room and with deft fingers secured the clasp. “There. Beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Julianna said.
“Such a lucky woman you are, marrying the Earl of Chester. The odds of the Darling of Dorset settling down—” The nurse trailed off and shook her head.
Yes, Julianna thought. Imagine the odds, indeed.
She hadn’t studied mathematics but if asked before today the odds of her and Fred marrying, she would have sworn they were less than none. And yet here she stood in her wedding gown.
“This marriage is a kindness, Julianna,” Thomas said, squeezing himself into her space beside the nurse.
His cheeks were flushed, his chest heaving from the exertion of having taken the stairs.
But the nursing must have been some sort of boon to his health that he’d even attempted, much less successfully navigated them. “Be grateful for it.”
Gratitude was the last thing she felt toward Frederick Sedgewick. “Come. I won’t be late for my own wedding, no matter how much I detest the notion of it.”
“It may not be so terrible, sister. You will have more security afterward than you could even imagine. And you look beautiful. Mother’s gown suits you.”
Julianna’s throat tightened as she stepped forward to fold her arms about him. Security was far less important to her than it was to Thomas but she could give him this; she could ease his mind, just as the physician had suggested.
He was so light in her embrace, all gaunt angles and fragility. Yet he held her tightly, pressing his cheek to her hair as if she was the one who needed steadying and not himself.
“Let us go,” she said, quieter now, refusing to let him see her cry. “The carriage must already be outside waiting.”
But his arms tightened around her again, almost possessively this time. “What if I don’t want you to leave?”
All she could do was swallow hard and say, “I won’t. It’s a marriage, not an emigration.”
“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear before he let her go.
As he drew back, she wondered if he regretted it, this plan of his to have her marry Fred. If he hadn’t truly thought through what it might mean for either of them when he’d devised it. But there was nothing either of them could do about it now. She could hear the coachman outside.
The chapel Fred had chosen was discreet, tucked behind a quiet square. Bishop Ellicott had not deigned to officiate, although he must have granted the license, or she wouldn’t be marrying today. And his surrogate would make their vows just as legally binding.
There were no flowers. Nor music. Only the polished stone floor, the pale shafts of light filtering through simple stained glass, and Thomas and the nurse as witnesses.
Julianna walked slowly down the aisle, her gaze flicking toward her brother, seated in the front pew. He was thin as a reed, but upright, his cheeks flushed by his efforts to remain so. Mrs. Sykes sat beside him.
It was generous of Fred to have engaged the nurse and Julianna recognized it as such.
But she still hated him for it. Because none of this would have been necessary had Fred not been so reckless to begin with.
Her parents would still be alive. Her brother would not be dying.
She would not be forced into marrying him.
She closed her eyes and took another step forward.
Fred stood at the altar, the line of his shoulders tense and hard.
She could tell even from the back that his suit was exquisitely cut.
Elegant but cold, like the man himself. And yet, when she advanced, her ivory muslin skirts rustling, and he turned toward her, something in his face shifted.
His blue eyes swept over her, and for an instant that icy mask cracked.
A tide of emotions swept across those classical features.
His eyes, always so glacial, nearly burned with some emotion she could not recognize.
For one breathless second it looked almost like…pride? Regret? Anger?
She couldn’t tell.
It didn’t matter. The mask dropped back into place again, blanketing whatever emotion she’d just seen there.
When she reached his side, the surrogate spoke the rites, and she repeated the vows. Her mouth formed the words well enough but halfway through, her voice faltered—just a hitch, a traitorous tremor she could not help.
She felt Thomas’s gaze on her and the nurse’s quiet attention.
Fred’s stillness as he stood beside her, rigid as if he’d been carved from stone and set there like some glacial erratic.
And the single tear that slipped out before she could blink it away, then the soft fabric of Fred’s handkerchief as he reached up and briskly wiped it from her face.
Then Thomas coughed, as he always, always did now, and she finished her vows.
When the time came to slip the ring upon her finger, Fred drew a short, audible breath that he quickly mastered. He clenched his jaw, making his dimples appear and she knew he wanted this no more than she did. And yet, here they stood. The Earl and Countess of Chester.
She looked down at the band of gold on her finger. It felt more like a shackle than a wedding ring.
“There,” Fred said, his voice strained. “It’s done.”
He turned at once to stride down the aisle, his long legs keeping a brisk pace that forced her to all but jog after him.
“Will you slow down?” she hissed.
He halted at once. “As you wish, Countess.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It is your title now. Come, the carriage awaits.”
He was first out of the chapel doors but it was the coachman who helped her into the carriage. And, she noticed, her husband only deigned to seat himself next to her once she’d pushed herself as far against the opposite side of the squabs as she could get.
All for the best. She didn’t particularly care to touch him either.
“And Thomas?” she asked, when the carriage began to move without her brother or Mrs. Sykes inside.
“I’ve sent a second carriage for him and the nurse. I thought he would be more comfortable that way.”
“Hmmmm. And to keep up appearances, I imagine. The Darling of Dorset cannot be so obviously hated by his bride.” He stiffened but she went on. “You don’t like that name? How about the Local Adonis? They still call you that, do they not?”
She was needling him and she probably ought to stop. This marriage would be hell if they couldn’t even be civil to one another on this of all days.
He turned his blue eyes on her, startling in their intensity and framed by thick lashes. His skin was still inexplicably sun-kissed despite the long English winter. “I don’t know which ‘they’ you mean, Countess,” he said curtly.
She let it drop. She didn’t have any desire to discuss the scandal sheets any more than he did. They both knew well enough how their wedding would be treated in the papers.