Chapter 8
St. Wilfrid’s Chapel
Acklan Castle
The family chapel was small enough that it held no secrets, something of which James had always been keenly aware.
Every sound carried. Footsteps on the flagstones. The silence of a congregation that had settled and gone still. The way a single cough from the back could travel the length of the nave and arrive at the altar with perfect clarity.
James had stood at this altar before, on a morning very like this one but also nothing like it at all, and he’d been aware of all the same things.
The cold air that no amount of spring warmth ever quite dispelled.
The smell of beeswax and old stone. The east window throwing pale light across the flags.
He had thought, then, that he’d have all the time in the world. He hadn’t, of course. Not in the end.
Daniel stood beside him now. His brother was serious in a way James hadn't seen before and suspected he might not see again, or at least not often.
Not the solemnity the occasion demanded.
Something quieter than that. A man who knew exactly what he was doing and had chosen it completely, standing very still in the weight of that.
James hadn’t expected to be moved by it, but he found that he was, and something lodged in his throat.
He looked at his brother's profile, at the set of his jaw, the way his hands were clasped in front of him with a stillness that was not Daniel at all, but was, today, entirely Daniel. He was here for the occasion. He was here for his bride.
The doors at the end of the chapel opened.
He heard Daniel draw a breath.
James didn’t look at the doors. He looked at his brother instead, because Daniel's face when Miss Beckett finally appeared at the end of the aisle was the kind of thing a man should witness if he had the opportunity. James had the opportunity, and he did not intend to waste it.
Daniel's face, in that moment, had nothing in it that was not completely his.
No humor held in reserve. No deflection.
Just Daniel, looking at his soon-to-be wife, with everything he had kept carefully managed for twenty-seven years suddenly visible at once.
James finally looked away. Some things cost something to witness.
Thomas Fairleigh officiated with a unique warmth that was rare among clergymen and made the ceremony resonate even deeper, somehow.
The words were the same words. James had heard them before, in this same chapel, in this same stone-smelling air.
But they had meant one thing then, and they meant something else now, or perhaps the same thing but differently weighted.
“I, Daniel George Westham, take thee, Caitrin Moira Beckett.”
James kept his eyes forward while memories of Alice settled quietly over him.
Not with the weight he had carried for three years, the grief that sat in his chest like something solid and immovable.
This was quieter. More like the memory of warmth than the absence of it.
She’d stood where Miss Beckett stood now, in this light, with this same east window behind her, and she had looked at James with her steady eyes and said the same words, and he’d believed absolutely that he would grow old beside her.
He had been wrong to believe it, but not wrong to wish it was so.
To love and to cherish, till death us do part.
The words landed differently than they had before. James supposed they always would from now on.
He was aware, without deciding to be aware of it, that Cori was on the bride's side, two rows back, beside Lady Darling. He hadn’t looked at her. He was aware of her the way he was aware of the east window, peripherally, constantly, without looking directly.
Daniel finished his vows in a voice that did not waver.
Miss Beckett said hers in a voice that did not waver either, which James had expected, because she was, as he’d told Laura, genuinely remarkable.
Thomas Fairleigh pronounced them man and wife with a quiet tone that resonated through the chapel.
Daniel turned to his wife.
And James, who had been holding himself very carefully still for the better part of half an hour, allowed himself to look...
Miss Corinna. Cori.
She was watching her sister, and her eyes were bright with tears she seemed determined not to shed, but she was smiling anyway.
She was lovely.
The thought arrived the way it always did, without permission, and sat in James the way it had done since he’d met her, with a yearning for something he couldn’t act upon. He was fairly certain he didn’t even have the right to feel such a thing.
Daniel took his wife's hand, and a brightness radiated from her. Then the chapel filled with the warm noise of a congregation releasing the breath it had been collectively holding. James looked away.
He stood in St. Wilfrid's Chapel, where his family had worshipped for centuries, where he had buried his father, married Alice, and had baptized Hannah. And he couldn’t help but wonder about his uncertain future.
He thought about what it would mean to want something again. To want someone.
He thought about whether wanting that, wanting more, made him a fool or simply a man.
He didn’t arrive at any useful conclusions before the congregation began to move.
Great Hall
Acklan Castle
The great hall at Acklan had not seen a wedding breakfast in years, and it showed in the best possible way, opened wide for the occasion and catching what thin August light there was through its long windows, holding it the way old stone held warmth, reluctantly and thoroughly.
The table was full and the feeling of celebration permeated the hall.
Daniel, it seemed, had left his uncharacteristic solemnity at the altar.
He was already holding court at his end of the table, his glass raised and looking as if he’d just been given everything he’d ever wanted and was determined to enjoy every moment.
James was genuinely glad for his brother.
It was, he discovered, possible to be genuinely glad for someone and to feel, underneath the gladness, the weight of his own situation pressing quietly against it. Not envy. He was certain it was not envy. No, no. Something more complicated and considerably less comfortable.
He ate. He spoke when spoken to. He made the toast that was expected of him, which said the things that ought to be said about his brother and his new sister and the future they were beginning, and he meant all of it, every word.
He watched Cori further down the table.
Not obviously. Not in any way that invited remark. She was three seats away and slightly across, enjoying a conversation with Arch Atherton, laughing at something the young buck had said. James watched her laugh. He knew he should look away but he couldn’t.
He thought about Daniel's face when the chapel doors had opened.
He thought about his walk with Cori along the north boundary. The way she'd crouched in the wet moorland grass with no awareness whatsoever that she'd just done in twenty minutes what three years of looking hadn't managed.
He thought about stumbling upon her in the garden at dawn. Her name in his mouth for the first time. The cabbage moth she had worn like a hairpin and the dignity with which she had borne it.
He looked at Cori again.
She had turned slightly in her seat and she wasn’t laughing now. She was looking out the long window at the moors beyond the glass. There was something in her face he recognized immediately. She was in the room but she was also, in some private way, elsewhere.
He understood that look very well.
The breakfast moved around him. Glasses were refilled.
Hannah, allowed to attend for the meal, was telling Fairleigh something of great importance about Butter the foal.
The Duchess of Hythe muttered something to Aunt Harriet that made her sit up very straight.
Hythe had somehow produced his gazette, which surprised no one.
James breathed out a breath.
He’d been careful for three weeks. Since that dinner at Linthorpe House. He’d been sensible and responsible and had kept his thoughts where they were supposed to be and had managed, on the whole, rather well.
He thought again about Hannah.
Hannah, who’d passed her Marmalade with the gravity of conferring an honor.
Hannah, who’d said she hoped Cori would stay, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to want.
Hannah, who’d been sitting on the floor of his corridor with Cori as though there were nowhere else either of them was supposed to be.
He thought about asking Cori to stay. Not a declaration.
Just asking her to stay a little longer, to find out if what was growing between them was as real as he suspected.
It wasn't much to ask of her. Except that it was, because asking her to stay meant asking her to wait, and waiting on him carried a weight she couldn't fully understand and a truth he had no right to tell her.
James set down his glass.
He pushed back his chair.
He wasn’t certain it was wise, but at that precise moment, he wasn’t certain he cared about being wise.
He moved to the empty seat beside her.
Cori smiled in the general direction of her newly married sister and brother-in-law at the far end of the table. The wedding had been beautiful and Cait was a breathtaking bride. But most importantly, she was a happy bride. The pair was well and truly in love.
She was still smiling when she noticed the moors had gone the color of pewter through the windows. Of course, the sky had been pressing down all morning, threatening to rain, and now it looked as though the weather intended to make good on that threat.
Wedding day rain was considered good luck for the marriage, wasn’t it? She was thinking about that when the seat beside her shifted.
Cori didn’t need to look to know who had taken the seat. She could sense it in every part of her being.
She looked anyway and James Westham nearly took her breath away. He was in his wedding finery, but it wasn't that. It was the way he’d settled into the chair beside her as though he’d decided to be there and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
He’d settled into the chair beside her, close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him, and he was looking at her with his searching grey eyes that were direct and steady.
Her belly flipped.
"Cori.” His voice rumbled over her.
She waited.
He drew a breath.
Then suddenly…
A crash of thunder echoed through the hall.
There’d been no warning, no low rumble in the distance.
Just a loud boom that cracked directly overhead, a single enormous sound that compressed the air in the great hall and released it all at once.
Every candle flame leaned sideways. Half the room startled.
Someone at the far end of the table knocked over a glass.
From a few seats away, Hannah let out a whimper. She’d gone rigid in her chair with her hands pressed flat on the table and her eyes very wide with fright.
James was at Hannah's side before Cori had even realized what had happened. He crouched beside his daughter’s chair and whispered something to her. After a moment, Hannah leaned sideways into his shoulder and closed her eyes.
Cori watched them and her breath caught slightly in her chest and the rest of the hall fell away.
She wasn’t aware of the commotion around her, or the rain beginning against the long windows, or the wedding breakfast carrying on without her.
She was aware only of James, still crouched beside Hannah, one hand on her back, his voice too low to carry.
And of the question that had not been asked, sitting in the space between them where his chair was now empty.
He'd said her name. Her name, not Miss Corinna, not the careful formality he used in public. Just Cori, quiet and direct, the way he’d said it that stolen morning in the garden at dawn. And then he hadn’t said anything else.
Goodness. She was a ninny.
She was probably reading too much into all of it. She had, after all, been reading into things since the Plumstead ball and it had not served her particularly well.
She looked at her hands in her lap.
She wasn’t going to ask. She was going to sit there and be perfectly composed and wait to see what happened next, which was the sensible thing, the reasonable thing, the thing Cara would absolutely advise her to do.
Cori managed to hold her tongue for approximately four minutes, until she couldn’t do so any longer. "Is she all right?"
Hannah had stopped trembling and was pointing at something in the sky, her earlier fright forgotten. James looked up and his eyes found Cori's.
Something moved in his face. There and gone before she could name it.
"She’s perfectly well," he said quietly. "She’s decided thunder is interesting rather than terrifying, which is an improvement."
“I’m glad,” Cori said.
“As am I.”
The rain was soft against the windows, and the breakfast carried on around them as though nothing of importance had happened.
"Cori," he said, then stopped again, the same way he’d stopped before.
She went very still because she was almost certain that whatever he was about to say mattered more than anything else that had been said all day.
Hannah tugged on his sleeve. “Lightning, Papa.”
James glanced down at his daughter.
Cori let go of the breath she’d been holding. The moment between them was gone, as though it had never happened at all.
James quietly rose, brushed a hand across Hannah's head, and walked from the hall without looking back. Not quickly, but deliberately. Cori watched him go, her heart twisting as she wondered if it was possible for her heart to actually break in two.
She sat there, dumfounded, completely uncertain what had even transpired. He’d come to her. He’d said her name. Twice.
Twice he’d started to say something and then stopped. Twice the world had intervened before he could tell her…something. Something that seemed of great importance.
But was it?
Or was it all just her imagination? She wanted him to tell her something important. She wanted to be important to him, but wanting those things would not make them true.