Chapter Twenty-Two #2
There was a swell of sound and the clinking of glasses.
A few people were genuinely surprised, Winifred thought.
Others smiled knowingly and indulgently.
She did not believe that a single person at the table—except Nicholas himself—failed to hug her over the next several minutes while exclaiming with pleasure and offering congratulations and good wishes.
Nicholas did not hug her because he was too occupied with being hugged himself.
Papa was beaming at her, as were Mama and Sarah and even Robbie.
No one treated her as an impostor.
No one protested that she was not nearly gorgeous enough for Nicholas. Or not in any way worthy of him.
No one accused him of robbing the cradle.
Owen, whom both she and Nicholas had told before tonight, grinned at her and winked before he hugged her. “I am going to love having you as a sister-in-law, Winifred,” he said.
“And a friend too, I hope,” she said.
“Goes without saying,” he said.
…a lady who has burrowed her way into all our hearts, the earl had said.
How she hugged those words to herself. It was what she had tried and tried to do and failed to do when she lived at the orphanage. Now, when she had not even been trying, she had apparently succeeded.
She was not an impostor.
She was Nicholas’s equal.
So what if she was not gorgeous? She had never wanted to be. She had only ever wanted to be herself. And it was for that Nicholas loved her and the others had grown fond of her.
During that evening, she learned that the two families—the Wares and the Cunninghams—were really no different from each other in essentials. Family and familial love were more important to them than anything else in their lives.
Dinner was followed by an impromptu concert in the music room next to the drawing room.
Sir Ifor played a pianoforte solo with every bit as much skill as he played the organ at the church.
Stephanie sang a solo to his accompaniment.
Eluned and Idris Rhys sang a duet, also to Sir Ifor’s accompaniment, though Idris protested that the angel that distributed musical talent to every Welsh person at birth had inexplicably missed him.
The Countess of Stratton and Nicholas, those childhood friends, sang a duet to Nicholas’s accompaniment.
Owen proclaimed a soliloquy from Hamlet, claiming that he had been tortured at school by the necessity of having to learn it by heart and had been unable to forget it ever since.
“I tell you,” he said, “school can forever blight a fellow’s life. Whoever would choose to have Hamlet rattling about in his head for a lifetime?”
Kitty and George Greenfield played a duet on the pianoforte. They were not very good, but what they lacked in skill and coordination, they made up for in merriment. Everyone ended up laughing and applauding with far more enthusiasm than the performance strictly deserved.
Winifred recited William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” It contained her favorite lines of poetry:
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The daffodil was her favorite flower, though perhaps it had recently been challenged by the daisy. Before starting, she touched her hand to the daisy brooch pinned to her dress.
What a lovely evening it had turned out to be. But…there was only one more day before the long separation from Nicholas.
—
Winifred and Nicholas did not go to the birthday party, which was primarily for children anyway. Instead, they went into the courtyard, where they spent the afternoon strolling in the paved cloisters and sitting in the rose arbor. They had tea brought out to them there.
They had been busy during the morning with both families, waving Bertrand Lamarr on his way home from the terrace and then the Taylors, Matthew’s family, from the cottage and the smithy in the village. But the afternoon was for them alone.
Soon they would be apart for a while, for almost five months, in fact. But during that time there was a wedding to be planned and a house in the country to be searched for and purchased.
The wedding was to be at Bath Abbey just before Christmas. Nicholas suggested it. It was where the Cunninghams had married and where Winifred’s life as their much-cherished daughter had begun. Her face lit up at the suggestion.
“Christmas has always been a very special time with my family,” she said. “Will we be able to stay to celebrate with them?”
“It is why I suggested Christmastime,” he said, setting one arm about her waist as they walked.
“Such a long way into the future,” she said. “Have you heard of special licenses, Nicholas? I believe they can be procured in London. Perhaps—”
“You temptress, Win,” Nicholas said, cutting her off.
“A very firm no to that. You are almost irresistible, you know? Almost, but not quite. I want you to have a wedding you will always remember and one I will always remember. And weddings are, or ought to be, about families as well as just the bride and groom. They are about the love that binds two people together, but also the two people to their own families and each other’s.
I do not want just to marry you. I want to wed you.
Is there a difference? To me there is, but—”
“Yes, there is,” she said with an audible sigh. “And I want that too. I want to wed you in Bath Abbey. And I want everyone there. Will they all come? But they surely will. My family all love me, and yours loves you. Christmas it will be, then. But how am I to live between now and then?”
“As you usually do, by inhaling and then exhaling, one breath after another,” he said. A trick he had learned during the wars. “One breath at a time and one day at a time. Five months does sound like forever, though, does it not? In the meantime, you must dress hunt, and I will house hunt.”
“How trivial you make me sound,” she said. “As though choosing a dress is the only thing I will need to do. I daresay I will be so rushed off my feet that I will have to beg you to postpone the wedding until Easter.”
He laughed. “Please do not,” he said.
They lapsed into silence for a few minutes while he contemplated almost five months without a sight of her.
“I will write every day,” he told her.
“Is that possible?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“In my experience, men are not letter writers,” she said. “I do not picture you as being one.”
“What do you picture me as, then?” he asked her.
“I will write to you every day too,” she said without answering the question.
He stopped to pull her into his arms. He touched his forehead to hers and kissed her—cruel lips to soft, slightly trembling lips. He smiled against them, amused by the image of himself as some sort of ruthless, dangerous rake.
She had not been totally distracted by the kiss.
“Almost five months to choose a dress?” she said, drawing back her head and frowning up at him. “And to write invitations? And help Mama with all the rest of the planning. Five months?”
“And to write to me,” he said meekly.
Her eyes narrowed. “I will have my revenge for your saying no to a special license,” she said. “In my letters I will describe each dress I so much as look at—or think of—in minute, excruciating detail.”
He grinned at her. “I will look forward to it,” he said. “But no description of the dress you finally choose, if you please, Win. That is supposed to be a wedding-day surprise for the groom.”
“Oh, Nicholas,” she said, suddenly sagging in his arms. “May we talk about something else? Something to take my mind off the fact that I will be in Bath tomorrow, and you will be in London before the end of the week?”
He kissed her again.
Then he took her hand, lacing their fingers as they strolled onward.
And they talked—and talked and talked. He spoke of his years in Spain and Portugal.
She wanted to know all the details despite her disapproval of warfare and the fact that a gentleman never spoke of such things to a lady.
He told her of Devlin and Ben being there for a few years, though not in his regiment, but how comforting it was to see them occasionally.
He told her of those long, bleak years for Devlin while he grappled with his estrangement from the rest of his family.
And he told her about Ben, who was never a military man himself but who excused his presence in the Peninsula with Devlin by claiming to be his batman.
He told her about Ben’s unlikely relationship with a Cockney washerwoman and his insistence upon marrying her when he learned she was with child.
He told her how they had named their daughter Joy, because that was what she was to them.
And of what a joy she had been to him, a newborn niece in the middle of warfare. Life continuing.
She spoke about her childhood at the orphanage, of how she had tried so hard—and failed—to be perfect and therefore loved until the teacher who became her mama loved her anyway, though Winifred had done nothing particular to deserve it, and how her mother and father had lived up to their promise always to love her.
She spoke of her grandmother and uncle and aunts on her mother’s side, who had been disinherited when the discovery was made that their father, now dead, had married their mother bigamously, and of how the Westcott family had absolutely refused to let them go even though her grandmother had resumed her maiden name and gone to live with her brother in Dorsetshire for a while after taking her daughters to live with her mother in Bath.
She warned him that he would never be able to work out all the intricacies of the Westcott family, and he was beginning to half believe her.
They sat among the roses while they had their tea, largely in silence and eating with diminished appetites.
“Such beauty,” she said, gazing about. “And it will all disappear within the next month or so, the roses to wither and die, the fountain to be turned off for the winter.”
“But everything will return with spring in the eternal changing of the seasons,” he said.
“Something that can always be relied upon,” she said. “And you will come back to me before spring.”
“In the meantime, I will write to you every day,” he said, reaching for her hand.
“I will hold you to that,” she said.
“Even if it is just a word or two?” he asked.
She laughed.