28. In Which there is a Wedding Night – Ashbourne Park, Derbyshire
IN WHICH THERE IS A WEDDING NIGHT
CHARLOTTE & EDWARD
ASHBOURNE PARK, DERBYSHIRE
The difficulty with being married during a house party given at one’s childhood home, I discovered, was that nobody left.
At a proper London wedding, the guests departed.
They climbed into carriages and were borne away, and the married couple was permitted to begin married life in something resembling privacy.
At Ashbourne Park, in August, with a house party in full residence, the guests simply...
migrated. From the wedding breakfast to the drawing room.
From the drawing room to the music room, where Aunt Caroline wept through three songs.
From the music room back to the drawing room, where Papa proposed a toast that began as two sentences and concluded, some eleven minutes later, with him embracing Edward and abandoning ducal dignity altogether.
By the time the candles began to be trimmed, I had received farewell embraces from persons who were not, in any sense, going farther than the east wing.
“You do realise,” I murmured to Edward, as Grandmama Marguerite surveyed the proceedings with the satisfaction of a general whose campaign had concluded precisely according to plan, “that every person in this room will be sleeping under this roof tonight.”
“I had noticed.”
“Our entire family. Grandpapa and Grandmama Marguerite, all of your sisters. The vicar.”
“The vicar is staying?”
“I don’t know why, but the vicar is staying.” I accepted a kiss on the cheek from Mama, who held my face in her hands for a long moment and said nothing at all, which said everything. “I am informing you now, before you commit yourself further, that this is what you have married into.”
“I committed myself this morning,” Edward said. “Before witnesses. There were documents.”
“Then it is too late for you, and I am sorry.”
“I am not,” he said quietly, and the look that accompanied it did something complicated to my breathing.
And then — gradually, mercifully, with two more rounds of tears and one final speech — the house quieted.
Edward found me in the corridor outside the drawing room as the last doors were closing. He held out his hand without a word.
I took it.
The chamber Mama had prepared was in the south wing.
Not my childhood bedroom — which I found both entirely logical and faintly amusing, as my own room three floors above still contained the desk where I had composed my first matchmaking schemes at the age of eight, and a wardrobe with my name written in ink on the inside of the door.
It would have been, I told Edward as we climbed the stairs, profoundly odd to begin married life in a room with one’s name on the furniture.
“The south wing,” I said, when the door had closed behind us, and we were, finally, blessedly, alone. “The best guest suite. This is where Grandpapa and Grandmama Marguerite always stay. I wonder where they have been put tonight.”
“Should I be flattered or alarmed?”
“Both, I think.”
The room was handsome — dark blue silk hangings, a fire lit for ambience, candles arranged on the dressing table with what was unmistakably Mama’s touch. White roses on the windowsill. A decanter of wine that neither of us moved toward.
I crossed to the window. Below, the Ashbourne gardens lay in the dark, the shapes of the formal beds as familiar to me as my own hands.
I had looked down at them from different windows my entire life.
Never from this one. Behind me, I heard Edward remove his coat, and the small, domestic sound of it — my husband, taking off his coat, in our room — made my pulse do something I had no system for.
That was the thing I had been circling all evening, in fact. The absence of a system.
“Edward, I should tell you something.”
“Mm.”
“I have a notebook for most things.” I turned to face him.
He had shed his coat and was working at his cravat, and the sight of his bare throat emerging from the linen was unaccountably riveting.
“Weddings. Seating arrangements. The romantic prospects of everyone I have ever met. I find I am entirely without a system for this particular occasion.”
Edward set the cravat down on the back of a chair. He crossed to me slowly — unhurried, the way he did everything, giving me time to think and breathe and settle — and stopped with barely a foot of space between us.
“Charlotte.” He tipped my chin up with one finger, so I had to meet his eyes. “May I tell you something in return?”
“Please.”
“I don’t have a system either.” A pause.
The firelight caught the line of his jaw.
“I am aware that men of my position are meant to arrive at this moment with — extensive expertise.
I have not lived as a monk. But neither have I —“ He stopped.
Started again, with the careful honesty I had loved in him from the first. “I have never done this with anyone who mattered. I find that changes the mathematics considerably.”
I considered this. “So, we are both of us unprepared.”
“Catastrophically.”
“No notes. No precedent.”
“None worth consulting.”
“Well.” I reached up and took his face in my hands and felt him go very still under my touch. “Then perhaps we might discover it together.”
He kissed me.
He had kissed me before — in the orangery, in the rose garden, once, scandalously, in the library at Pemberton House with the door imperfectly latched, and the British Museum — but those had been kisses with endings built into them, kisses that knew they would have to stop.
This one had no ending in it at all. He kissed me slowly, thoroughly, one hand sliding into my hair and ruining an arrangement that had taken Mama forty minutes, and I discovered that a kiss without an ending was an entirely different category of thing, and that I had been wildly undervaluing the whole enterprise.
When we parted, we were both breathing as though we had been running.
“The buttons,” I said, somewhat unsteadily, “are at the back.”
His mouth curved. “I had hoped they might be.”
I turned. He found the first button at my nape, and undid it, and pressed his lips to the skin beneath — and continued in that manner, button by button, kiss by kiss, down the length of my spine, until I was gripping the bedpost and revising every estimate I had ever made about my own composure.
By the time the gown loosened around me, I was trembling, and not from an August chill.
“You are shaking,” he said against my shoulder.
“I am aware.”
“Should I stop?”
“If you stop,” I said, “I shall write you up in the notebook under grievances, with cross-references.”
His laugh was warm against my neck. “Heaven forbid.”
The gown fell. The petticoats followed, and then his fingers were at the lacing of my stays — not quite steady, I noticed, which I found enormously reassuring — and then those too were gone, and I stood in my chemise in the firelight while my husband looked at me as though I were something he had been promised long ago and had not quite believed he would receive.
“Now you,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Fairness, Edward. I am standing here in next to nothing while you remain fit to receive callers. The arrangement is inequitable and I mean to correct it.”
So I corrected it. I had never undressed a man — had never, in point of fact, seen one undressed — and I went about it the way I went about everything, with attention and thoroughness and a running commentary that grew gradually less coherent.
The waistcoat. The shirt, drawn over his head, which left his hair disordered in a way I immediately resolved to cause as often as possible.
And then the rest, until there was nothing between us but my chemise and the firelight, and I looked at him — all of him — and forgot entirely what I had been planning to say.
“Charlotte?”
“I am revising several assumptions,” I managed.
“Favourably?”
“Significantly.”
He drew the chemise over my head, and then there was nothing at all, and the look on his face — reverent and hungry and wholly undone — was one I had never seen on it before and intended to keep.
“You are beautiful,” he said, low. “I have wanted to tell you since the Pemberton ball. It seemed forward, given that you were lecturing me at the time.”
“I was advising you.”
“You were magnificent.” He drew me to him, and the first full press of skin against skin pulled the breath out of me entirely. “You still are.”
He laid me down on the bed — Grandpapa’s bed, a fact I resolved never to think of again as long as I lived — and then he began, with the same patient, devastating thoroughness he had shown the buttons, to learn me.
I had imagined, insofar as I had permitted myself to imagine, that the marriage bed was a thing that happened to a wife.
Mama’s pre-nuptial counsel, delivered three days earlier over tea with much throat-clearing, had implied as much.
Nobody had suggested that it could be a thing done with such attention — that a man might map the curve of my waist as though committing it to memory, might find with his mouth the precise spot beneath my ear that made me gasp, and then return to it, deliberately, because he had noticed.
He noticed everything. Every hitch of my breath, every place my fingers tightened on his shoulders, every sound I had not intended to make — he gathered them all like evidence and acted upon his findings with a scholar’s rigour, and I, who had spent my entire life being the one who noticed things, came entirely undone beneath the unfamiliar luxury of being the thing noticed.
His mouth travelled lower. My breath went ragged.
“Edward —“
“Mm.”
“What are you — oh.“
“Shall I stop?” he murmured, against my thigh, in a tone that suggested he knew the answer perfectly well.
“Grievances,” I gasped. “Cross-references. Appendices.”