Chapter Thirteen
“Jane Rennet, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband?”
The village church was small and full and smelled of beeswax and summer flowers, and Jane was standing at the altar in a dress her mother had stayed up three nights to finish.
It was not a duchess’s dress. It was a baker’s daughter’s dress, white muslin with lace at the cuffs that her grandmother had worn, and Jane had chosen it deliberately because she intended to enter into the matrimony as herself, not as an approximation of someone more suitable.
Thomas stood beside her. He wore dark blue, not black, which Louisa had insisted upon because “are to be wed, Thomas, not attending a funeral, and the distinction matters.” His hands were at his sides.
His expression held the same careful composure she had seen a hundred times, except that today it was worn thin as old cloth, and what lay beneath it was visible to anyone who cared to look.
The church was filled with a vast assemblage.
Mrs. Croft sat in the second row with her hands folded and the look she kept for occasions when her duties and her affections happened to point the same direction, and Whitlock stood at the back, cheerful and damp from the walk, grinning with the open delight of a man who had hoped for exactly this since the afternoon Jane set herself alight and who felt, with some justice, that his custard-safety campaign had played its part.
Mrs. Vale had stayed at Aldermere to prepare the wedding breakfast she had insisted on contributing, and her absence was its own form of attendance, given the extraordinary quality of what she had sent.
In the front row Louisa sat beside a professionally neutral Philip and smiled with the brightness of a woman who had spent months pushing her brother toward a decision and was now watching the decision stand at an altar in dark blue and promise to cherish a baker’s daughter before the whole county.
“I will,” Jane said.
The vicar turned to Thomas. The church went silent, and the silence had a quality Jane recognised.
It was the kitchen silence, the Aldermere silence, the silence that fell when Thomas Bennister was about to speak.
Every person present understood that what happened next was not ordinary.
A man who had not spoken freely in four years was about to say the most binding words in the English language.
Thomas looked at Jane. His mouth opened, and for one terrible, suspended moment, Jane thought the words would not come. That four years of practised silence would hold even here, with the vicar waiting and the county watching and her hand already extended.
“I will,” Thomas said.
His voice was clear. Not loud, because Thomas was never loud, but clear in the way that still water is clear, carrying to every corner of the church without effort.
The county heard the Silent Duke claim Jane Rennet as his wife, and the sound of it, two syllables spoken without hesitation, settled into the stone walls and the wooden pews and the memory of everyone who witnessed it.
Jane’s mother was crying. Her father was not, but his jaw was set in the particular way it set when he was managing an emotion he considered too large for public display.
Lottie was holding Sam’s hand and beaming with an intensity that could have lit candles.
Margaret stood straight-backed and dry-eyed and watched the ceremony with the focused attention she gave to everything that mattered, which was her way of showing feeling without surrendering to it.
The ring was plain gold. Thomas placed it on Jane’s finger with hands that were steady and warm.
When the vicar pronounced them wedded, Thomas did not kiss her.
He did not do things in front of audiences that he had not yet done in private.
The restraint was so perfectly like him that Jane nearly laughed.
They turned to leave the church. Thomas paused at the door. He reached into the interior pocket of his coat and withdrew something folded, something soft.
Jane watched his hands. She had learned to watch his hands over months of kitchen proximity, because Thomas’s hands communicated things his voice did not.
The way they held a cup. The way they placed a spoon beside her station.
The way they removed Piers Garrick’s fingers from her arm with controlled precision.
His hands were his truest language, and they were now unfolding something that Jane did not recognise until it settled across her shoulders.
It was a shawl.
Fine wool, cream-coloured, the same weight and cut as the one that had burned in his kitchen on the afternoon they met.
The fabric was soft against her neck and her wrists and the backs of her hands, and the weight of it sat exactly right across her shoulders, the weight of a shawl made by someone who had studied the original and reproduced it with a care that bordered on devotion.
Jane's hands went to the fabric before she quite knew what she held, but comprehension followed fast upon the touch, and the entire reality broke upon her at once.
He had kept the burned one, all this time, and had this one made to match it, which meant the afternoon her shawl caught fire was the afternoon, in his private reckoning, when everything had begun.
He had been carrying the proof of it folded in wool for months, waiting for the right moment to lay it across her shoulders, and the right moment was now, in a church doorway with summer light on the stone and her family watching and his composure trembling at the edges as it did whenever a thing mattered more than his ability to contain it.
He said nothing about it at first, because he did not need to.
“You kept the other one,” Jane said softly, her fingers still in the wool. “The burned one. All this time, you kept it.”
“It seemed wrong to throw away the thing that began everything.” His voice was very low, pitched for her alone in the doorway. “I had it copied when I understood I meant to ask you. I have been carrying this one a good deal longer than I carried the question.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, and her voice cracked on it, and his composure shifted at the sound, and for a moment they stood in the church doorway with the shawl between them and the whole history of fire and silence folded into a piece of fine wool that weighed almost nothing and meant very nearly everything.
***
The wedding breakfast was held in the bakery, because Jane had insisted and Thomas had agreed immediately.
The bakery was the only place in Millcombe large enough to hold the Rennet family, the Aldermere household, and the assorted neighbours who had been invited on the grounds that not inviting them would generate more gossip than including them.
Margaret had arranged the tables. William had baked since dawn.
Jane’s mother had produced enough food for approximately twice the number of people present, because Rennet hospitality did not believe in adequacy.
It believed in abundance, and the abundance was visible in the towers of bread and the rows of preserves and the centrepiece, which was a three-tiered cake that Jane and her mother had made together two days before the wedding while Lottie sat on the counter and offered commentary.
Thomas sat with Jane’s family. He ate the bread William had baked, tasted the marmalade Jane’s mother had made, and complimented the cake with two words that her mother would remember for the rest of her life.
Lottie sat across from Thomas and studied him with the focused attention of a sister who had been proved right and intended to enjoy the experience. “Your Grace, may I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When you were asking Jane all those questions about cold stores and sleeping patterns, did you know you sounded like a magistrate, or was that an accident?”
“Lottie,” Jane said.
“It is our wedding breakfast, Jane. I am entitled to interrogate your husband.”
Thomas looked at Lottie with the expression Jane had come to recognise as his thinking face, concentrated rather than blank, as if every response required the same deliberation he gave to estate decisions. “I did not know,” he said. “Until my sister told me.”
“Louisa told you?”
“Louisa used the phrase ‘quarterly review of household expenditure.’ I understood the criticism.”
Lottie laughed. The laugh was loud and genuine and turned heads at three tables. “I like him, Jane. You may keep him.”
“Thank you, Lottie. Your permission was the one thing missing from the occasion, and I had begun to despair of receiving it.”
“You may mock me, but I am the one who told you he had taken a liking to you before you would admit it, and I intend to remind you of that fact at every Christmas for the rest of our lives.”
“I do not doubt it for a moment, since you have never once let a vindication go unmentioned.”
“It is one of my better qualities,” Lottie said, entirely unrepentant, and reached across the table to steal a corner of the cake Jane’s mother was at that moment carrying toward Thomas.
Jane’s mother appeared with a second slice of cake that nobody had requested and set it in front of Thomas with the quiet determination of a woman who had decided her son-in-law was too thin and intended to correct this immediately.
“Thank you, Mrs. Rennet,” Thomas said.
“You are family now, Your Grace. Family does not leave the table without a second slice.”
“I had not finished the first.”
“That is not relevant.”
William, who had been watching the exchange from the head of the table with the steady attention of a man evaluating the structural integrity of a new arrangement, leaned forward. “Your Grace.”
“Mr. Rennet.”