Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
The breakfast was thinning.
Not quickly—these things never moved quickly, in Tristan’s experience, and he had sat through enough of them to know that the last guests always departed at least forty minutes after the last guest believed themselves to be departing.
There was always one more toast, one more reminiscence, one more elderly relation who had not yet said everything they wished to say to the bride.
His great-aunt Cordelia was currently saying a great deal to his bride.
Imogen, to her considerable credit, was listening with every appearance of genuine interest, her head tilted at precisely the angle of a woman who found the speaker charming. It was markedly different than how she’d held her head earlier while enduring a story from Lord Willbanks.
He was not certain whether the distinction was genuine or performed. He was finding, with increasing frequency, that he could not tell, and that this uncertainty occupied more of his attention than he wished to spare it.
The room had shifted into its later configuration—the men who had drifted briefly toward the port now drifting back, the women collecting shawls and gloves, the general quiet reconfiguration of forty-two people who had eaten and drunk and congratulated themselves on bearing witness to something rather extraordinary, and were now preparing to go home and tell everyone they knew about it.
Flynn had gone to speak to the bishop. The bishop, Tristan noted with relief, appeared to be leaving.
He turned to his wife.
She was still half-angled toward Cordelia, but her eyes slid to his with the immediate, peripheral awareness he had already come to expect from her—as though some part of her was always tracking him. Noticing him.
He’d be a damned liar if he said having her eyes on him wasn’t an enjoyable experience.
Cordelia patted her hand, rose with some ceremony, and was immediately intercepted by a nephew.
The space beside him settled into quiet.
“She told me,” Imogen said, reaching for what remained of her wine, “that your mother cried at every wedding she ever attended, including your cousin Gerald’s second one, which apparently nobody cried at, because nobody liked Gerald’s second wife.”
“Nobody liked Gerald’s second wife,” Tristan confirmed. “She put the fish course before the soup at every dinner for eleven years and refused to be corrected about it.”
Imogen pressed her lips together. “That is a very specific grievance.”
“I am a very specific man.”
She smiled at that, not the performed smile, not the calibrated bridal expression. A smaller thing, more involuntary, quickly suppressed.
He watched it happen.
“I find,” he said, after a moment, tilting his wine glass with a slight, idle motion, “that I have a question.”
She looked at him. “Only one?”
“The rest can wait.” He set the glass down. “This one has been with me since the carriage.”
Something in her posture adjusted almost imperceptibly—not quite a brace, but a preparation. He was coming to recognize that too. The small, internal gathering of herself that preceded any exchange she suspected might require her defenses.
“Ask it, then,” she said.
He looked at her directly. “Why?”
She waited.
“Not the explanation you gave me in the carriage,” he said.
“I understood the mechanics. Eliza wanted to run off with her clerk and required a body at the altar to smooth the path. What I find I cannot reconcile—” He paused, selecting his words with care “—is you. Specifically, the part of you that agreed to it.”
“I told you. She is my dearest friend.”
“Yes.” He turned the stem of his glass once between his fingers.
“And I believe you. But friendship is not a sufficient explanation for what you did this morning. Friendship might lead a woman to lend her gown, to keep a confidence, to sit with someone through the night before they flee to Gretna Green. It does not, as a general rule, lead a woman to stand at an altar and commit matrimonial fraud.” He regarded her steadily.
“You gave something up today, Imogen. I am asking whether you know what it was.”
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, a carriage rolled away on the gravel—the bishop departing, by the sound of it—and the room shifted again, lighter by two or three people.
“You are asking,” she said slowly, “whether I wanted love. For myself.”
She was clever, he would give her that. “I am asking whether it occurred to you to want it. Before you decided to hand the opportunity to someone else.”
She looked at her wine glass. Not evasively—she was not, he had established, a woman who evaded—but with the particular quality of attention that indicated she was considering how honest to be.
She decided on quite honest.
“My parents,” she said, “had eight daughters.
After my father had already secured his heir.
Despite that perhaps indicating they shared a passionate union…
“ She paused. “They were not unhappy together. I do not mean to suggest that. But they were—arranged. They were a match of family and fortune and mutual convenience, and they managed it with perfect civility and absolutely no evidence of anything warmer than a cordial mutual regard.”
“Many marriages are the same,” he said.
“Yes.” She glanced at him briefly. “I am aware.”
A beat, in which that landed between them with a softness that was somehow sharper than any pointed remark.
“But,” she continued, “they had eight daughters, and the thing about eight daughters is that you spend your childhood watching your parents’ arrangement and you find yourself—” She paused again, choosing.
“—fascinated. By the other kind. By people who choose each other. You read about it and observe it and turn it over in your mind the way you might turn over a very beautiful object that belongs to someone else. Something you admire completely and touch very carefully and never quite believe is meant for your shelf.”
He said nothing. He was watching her profile—the small, decided set of her jaw, the way the candlelight moved across her temple.
“Eliza and her Mr. Ashworth,” she said. “The first time I saw them together—at a garden party, two summers past, and he was no one particularly, a friend of someone’s brother, there by accident—she looked at him as if the rest of the party had gone slightly out of focus.
And he looked at her as though he could not believe his own luck.
” She stopped. “I knew immediately. And I thought—” A breath, very faint.
“I thought that was the thing. That was the thing I had read about all my life, and there it was, and it was real, and she had found it.”
“And you helped her keep it,” he said.
“I could not have done otherwise.”
“No,” he said. “I believe you.” He was quiet a moment. “But I notice that you have not answered the question.”
She met his eyes. “Which was?”
“Whether you wanted it for yourself.”
She lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug.
“I am the sixth of eight daughters,” she said, and her voice was even, entirely matter-of-fact, the way one stated the price of coal or the distance to the next town.
“My older sisters have been quite fortunate to find themselves blessed with unions of great affection. Statistically speaking, by the time you arrive at the sixth, expectations have shifted.” She turned her palm up slightly, a small, eloquent gesture.
“The sixth is not expected to make a brilliant match. The sixth is expected to make a match. Something respectable, something solvent. The sixth does not hold out for love because no one has suggested that is an available option for the sixth.”
He studied her. “And yet,” he said, “the sixth could have refused. Any number of times, presumably. Held out for the other kind, whatever the expectation.”
Something crossed her face—brief, and complicated, and not quite grief.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But it is rather difficult to hold out for a thing you are not quite certain you believe in. For yourself, I mean. I believe in it for other people. I believe in it for Eliza, very sincerely. For myself—” She stopped.
“I am not sure I ever managed to make it feel entirely real. As a possibility. For me.”
She had composed herself again—that rapid, practiced re-assembly he was becoming fluent in reading—and was reaching for her wine with perfect equanimity, as though she had not just said something that he suspected she had never said aloud before.
The room had thinned considerably while she was speaking. Another carriage, and then another—the sound of departure becoming the dominant note beneath the conversation and the clink of glass. Tristan became aware, distantly, of Mrs. Richards moving with quiet efficiency near the door.
He looked at Imogen beside him.
“Please rest assured, Your Grace, that I am not expecting you to fall head over tea kettle in love with me. Perhaps in time you can come to forgive my transgression and find some measure of affection for me.”
“Tristan,” he corrected. He didn’t offer her reassurances of the rest because he wasn’t quite certain what to say. This woman had already proven to him to elicit more feeling than he’d thought himself capable.
“There was also,” she said, after a brief pause, in a slightly altered tone, lighter, more careful, “the matter of the envelope.”
“The envelope.”
“My father’s will.” She set her glass down. “He wrote personal letters to each of his daughters. Left them sealed, to be opened after his death. A final instruction. An—” She seemed to search for the word. “An assignment. For each of us.”
“And yours was?”