Chapter Five #2
“Then I accept.”
Nathaniel did not move, though something in his expression altered.
“I suspect your family will be less composed about it,” Selina continued. “Particularly whichever of your relations considers herself responsible for preserving the Sinclair name.”
“My aunt, Lady Helena Sinclair. She will be appalled, and she will come at once. She has never missed an event she could disapprove of in person.” He almost smiled. “You will not like her. No one does.”
“That may be the first difficulty you have mentioned this morning which does not alarm me.”
***
After breakfast, Nathaniel wrote to a former Oxford acquaintance who now practised as a proctor at Doctors’ Commons. The man owed him an old and considerable favour, and possessed sufficient influence to obtain a special licence without the usual delay.
Early the following morning, a private messenger delivered a sealed packet while Nathaniel and Selina were in the breakfast room. Nathaniel opened it at the table. Inside lay the licence and a folded note in his friend’s hand.
He read the note twice, then carried it into his study. When he returned, the note was gone, and the licence remained in his hand.
“You called in a favour,” Selina said. “A considerable one, judging by your expression.”
“An old one.”
“And the note?”
“Belongs to the man who wrote it,” Nathaniel said. “It concerns a confidence which is not mine to disclose.”
He passed her and continued towards the stairs. A confidence was not a lie, Selina knew. Neither could she know whether one concealed the other. She remained in the hall and let him go, leaving the distinction unresolved.
***
They married on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of May.
The ceremony took place in the smaller drawing room, among flowers Selina had not ordered and knew at once had been chosen by Georgiana.
They were precisely the wrong flowers: too numerous, too bright and selected by a girl determined that the day should be more than the occasion permitted it to appear.
The chaplain was elderly and discreet. Georgiana served as one witness, while Petherick stood as the other and read the register before signing it with the care of a man examining a deed of transfer.
Their names were entered side by side in a clerk’s precise hand.
Selina looked at them and found that she had nothing at all to think.
Lady Helena Sinclair had arrived that morning and proceeded directly from the hall to the drawing room without removing her gloves.
“You are the Calvert girl.”
“I am, ma’am.”
“Your father was hanged.”
“He was, ma’am. It is the most memorable fact about my family, and I find that admitting it at once saves everyone a great deal of time.”
“Most young women would deny it. Or weep.”
“I have no leisure for either, ma’am, and yours is not a face that invites tears.”
Lady Helena regarded her for a long moment. The frost behind her pale eyes shifted by a fraction; not towards warmth, which would have been too hasty, but towards attention.
“Hmm.”
She entered the drawing room, claimed the best chair and disapproved of the flowers.
The service was brief and old, its promises extending considerably beyond the private terms Nathaniel and Selina had arranged between them. Selina made them in a steady voice because a steady voice was something she owned outright.
Nathaniel’s voice remained steady as well, until the ring.
He took her hand to place it upon her finger.
His own hand, which had remained steady at the carriage door and throughout every hour of their carefully negotiated arrangement, trembled once as the gold passed over her knuckle.
It was a single, fine tremor, there and gone.
Only Selina stood near enough to perceive it.
She looked up. He met her gaze. Neither acknowledged what had passed between them, and the chaplain continued to the end.
It was done.
The woman rejected for insolence in a grey gown was now the Duchess of Wexford. The distance had been crossed in a matter of days, yet nothing within her answered to the title. She had signed an excellent lease upon a house she was afraid to love.
Georgiana embraced her fiercely, wept and apologised once more for the masquerade. Selina informed her that a girl who had provided the occasion for her brother’s marriage could not reasonably be blamed for it in the same breath. That set Georgiana laughing through her tears.
“You are my sister now,” she said, holding both Selina’s hands. “Truly my sister, with nothing about companions or keepers anywhere in it. Nathaniel said so this morning, in words, which he never does, and I made him repeat it in case I had imagined the first attempt.”
“He said it because I made him promise to speak the important truths aloud where you could hear them.” Selina tightened her hold upon the girl’s fingers. “Keep him to that promise.”
Lady Helena offered one gloved hand and the single word “Duchess,” pronounced as though she were testing the weight of a coin from a doubtful mint.
“You disapprove of me, ma’am,” Selina said, accepting the hand.