Chapter Nineteen
“Well, that’s bad luck,” Libba said, frowning out the church window as dark clouds gathered in the sky for the third day in a row. “It had better not rain tomorrow too.”
“It won’t,” said Hattie from the vanity table, her hair half styled. “And it isn’t bad luck.”
“It isn’t?” Monica asked curiously from her position by the dress, which she was still fussing with at this late hour. “Rain on a wedding morning?”
“Rhys would know,” Ruby said, dropping the newest ringlet with a flap of her hand, as though her fingers had been singed against its perfect coil and then immediately moving onto the next strand. “But it’s all nonsense, anyhow.”
“It isn’t nonsense,” Hattie said placidly. “It just isn’t bad luck. Elias has always moved in tandem with the rain. I expected to wed beneath it.”
“Oh,” said Libba, blinking rapidly. “All right, then.”
A roll of thunder sounded immediately in the wake of her words, making Hattie smile at herself in the mirror.
“A flame in the storm,” Ruby mused, glancing at the dress. “You just need a bit of salt in your pocket and you’ll match the scent I made.”
“I haven’t given it to him yet,” said Hattie. “The charm, the number eight, the way you tied it to the top, makes it fall sideways. It looks like a symbol rather than a number.”
“Yes,” said Ruby wryly. “How unfortunate.”
The quarter hour sounded next, chiming against the thunder like a songbird answering a war horse.
“Hurry up,” Monica said. “She needs to be in the sanctuary by ten.”
“At the pulpit, on the gallows,” Libba intoned, pressing prayer hands over her chest. “Meeting her fate.”
“Stop that,” Ruby hissed. “You’re giving me shivers. Is your entire troupe attending today?”
“Of course,” said Libba with a tilt of her head. “You think that lot ever passes up an opportunity to dress up or eat free cake?”
“My seamstresses are coming too,” said Monica, shaking out the skirt one final time and watching with narrowed eyes to make sure it fluttered correctly in the air. “And Miss Boswell.”
“And the household staff,” Hattie said.
“And Mr. Harcourt,” Monica added in a soft, dreamy tone. “He’s going to wear the jacket I made him.”
“Ohh,” Libba and Ruby chanted, in mocking, simpering voices until Monica was as red as a berry.
Despite it all, they did manage to get Hattie dressed on time, and all of her hair into pins, which fell softly against her bare nape when she left the dressing room in her new, flame-born dress and dark-blue slippers.
“He has the rings?” she said, one last time to Libba, who rolled her eyes and nodded curtly, likely resisting the urge to shove her for good measure.
“Yes. You’re both bizarre enough to be well matched. He has them. For the love of God.”
“Libba!” Monica hissed, glancing nervously at an overly realistic depiction of Jesus, carved into wood and hanging over the vestry, whose expression seemed fairly offended by the outburst as well.
“Errol!” Ruby echoed in something that managed to both be a whisper and a shout. “The bouquet!”
“Right!” came Errol’s voice from seemingly the air.
He appeared a moment later with a bundle of bright-orange stargazer lilies, dotted throughout with bluebells, and proffered it to Hattie. “I wrapped them this morning,” he said. “You look beautiful. Good luck.”
And then they were all gone.
All of them.
And she was alone at the doors.
She swallowed, lifting the flowers to her nose and breathing them in as the thunder rumbled again outside.
It always storms in the summer, she thought. Flowers and sun, puddles and wind. They were all the things that made Brighton what it was, even beyond the shingles of the beach.
The flowers smelled like a duet to Hattie. Like pairs. Like two.
Like a wedding.
And then the music began.
She had expected an organ, deep and thrumming like a kitchen hearth, but to her surprise, the tune that spiraled out through the doors as they were pulled open on either side by Libba’s actors was in the tinkling, feather-light strains of a harp.
It seemed to touch her face and hair. Seemed to beckon her down the aisle in the voice of Joseph Haydn’s timeless composition.
Light glowed throughout the domed room, flashing in the windows as her steps were illuminated down the aisle toward her future.
Toward Elias.
And he turned to watch her arrive, a small, crooked smile sitting on his face, like the storm pleased him as well.
When she reached him, passing through the narrow route of all the people from her home, he held his hands out to her and helped her onto the altar, his eyes sliding over the details of her wedding gown.
“I hope you brought an umbrella,” she whispered, unable to think of anything else to say when one greeted her groom at the threshold of forever.
“I didn’t,” he said apologetically. “Mea culpa.”
It made her smile, an ease settling over her shoulders as the vicar pulled himself up to full height, cracked open his book, and began to recite the opening words to the marriage rite, silencing the harp in the process.
Hattie thought it odd that she could not quite parse the words and their meanings as he spoke. She heard them. She repeated the bits she was meant to and must have understood them because her tongue followed their sounds.
But it was perhaps the first time in her life that she said words and did not listen to them as she did so.
And it was because she could not look away from Elias Selwyn.
She could see his name spelled in the air between them. Could feel the shapes of the syllables as warm and soft as his hands holding her own.
Wasn’t that funny? To keep those words and not the others.
And to not feel any of them as she spoke until at the very end, when she said, “I do.”
And then they spoke the silent language because Elias kissed her. He kissed her in front of all of them, and they cheered as he did so.
It was not like their other kisses.
It was not burning and desperate and dizzying. This was sweet and gentle and somehow refreshing, like a little splash of water on the face after one has concentrated too hard for too long on one thing.
When they broke apart, Hattie blinked, and it was as though she could see and hear the world again, as she always had.
And the world was smiling.
It was smiling for one more blissful moment, one more roll of the thunder and flash of light, before it had to come apart again.
“Congratulations, Lady Selwyn,” Elias said in her ear, his hand sliding along hers as his fingers laced through her own.
Before she could respond, the doors were thrown open again, and the storm blew in.
Not the raindrops. Not the light or the sound.
But two people she had not seen in many years. People she’d met the day of the funeral and the burn, a lifetime ago.
Elias tensed immediately next to her, a curse leaving his mouth in a sharp, little whisper.
His mother and stepfather had come.
And their arrival dissipated the rain, the showering pattern ending with an abrupt, howling emptiness.
“Elias!” his mother cried, openly horrified. “Tell us we aren’t too late.”
“‘Too late’?” Elias repeated, deceptively soft, as though his entire body hadn’t tightened against Hattie’s side like a copper coil under too much weight. “To congratulate me?”
“Boy, tell us you did not just wed a scullery maid!” his stepfather said, bristling to his full height. “You are a Selwyn! You are the Selwyn name, for God’s sake!”
They were a handsome pair. A little grayer than she remembered them.
He was Wallace and she was Catriona. She remembered the spelling of the name on a letter she’d seen once.
With more vowels than sounds. How odd it must have been, she reflected, to have married a man and then his cousin. Did she ever get them confused?
“Ugh, and it’s the simple one as well,” his mother said with a wrinkle of her nose. “At least it isn’t … well …” she said, casting a glance at Libba and Malcolm with a meaningful raise of her thin, black brows.
“Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn,” Mr. Harcourt said, popping up from the middle of the pews like a daisy, hair just as white and disposition just as sunny yellow.
“What a pleasant surprise. You’ve unfortunately interrupted the end of the ceremony.
Would you care to come and chat with me while we await the procession? ”
Wallace Selwyn gave a humorless, bombastic laugh. “Harcourt. Been enjoying sitting on our allowance this last month? You greedy toad.”
Harcourt was still wearing a forced smile, beginning to wedge his way through the crowd to get to the couple.
Elias still had not moved.
“‘Greedy’?” Elias repeated, so softly, only Hattie could hear him, could hear the way his voice trembled.
“I bet you’ve been paying the Widow Starling in good time, haven’t you?” Wallace was continuing to say as Harcourt stumbled out onto the aisle runner and made a pleading little gesture with his hands clasped together.
“We can discuss this outside,” he said again urgently.
“Are you going to drag us out, Harcourt?” Mr. Selwyn demanded.
“Be reasonable, sir,” Harcourt said desperately.
Elias’s mother sighed, taking a step backward. “Elias, wrangle your servants, if you please!”
Elias only blinked.
“Is this how you treat the mother of the groom?” The stepfather barked. “Elias! What is this? Have some pride!”
“‘Pride’?” Elias managed, still too quietly to be heard by anyone but his new wife.
“Just outside, if you could,” Harcourt said one last time, with what sounded like his final thimble of resolve.
“Why don’t we take you back to the Rest?” Monica said, her hair glinting golden in the sunlight as she also stood. “Ruby and I? And you can have a seat of honor for the breakfast?”
“Well,” said Wallace Selwyn, eyes flicking in quick assessment over Monica’s form. “At least he didn’t marry the fat one.”
Hattie blinked. She blinked and she missed the crack of bone to flesh.
It seemed to her only that she was watching a verbal horror tableau one second, and in the next, Harcourt had flattened the late baron’s cousin and bloodied his nose for good measure, Elias’s mother was screaming, and somehow half of Brighton was swarming into the aisle to meet them.