Chapter 1
Chapter One
“We’re here today to honor this beautiful union.”
The groom had not looked at Amelia once.
Bethany, the bride’s sister, had been watching him since the processional, counting his glances the way one might count storm clouds, and the number had not improved.
He had looked at the vicar. He had looked at his cuffs. He had looked twice at a woman in the third pew whose bonnet was trimmed with yellow ribbon. He had not looked at his bride.
Amelia stood beside him in ivory silk with her hands folded at her waist and her chin lifted at exactly the angle their mother had practiced with her that morning. She was the most beautiful and most miserable person in the church.
Bethany knew her sister's face as well as she knew her own handwriting. The slight tension at the corners of her mouth was not nerves. The fixed quality of her eyes was not sentiment.
It was a woman standing very still because she did not trust what she might do if she moved.
Bethany shifted in the pew.
Beside her, the twins were sharing whispered commentary about the yellow-bonneted woman, and their mother sat on Bethany's other side with her back straight and a look of gracious maternal pride. Their father was at the end of the row, examining his program.
"She does not want this," Bethany said quietly.
"Hush," her mother said, without moving her lips.
"Look at her."
"I said hush, Bethany. This is a church."
Bethany looked at Amelia.
Amelia, as if sensing the attention, turned her head the smallest degree, and for just a moment their eyes met across the aisle. There it was. Bethany had been hoping she was wrong.
She had been telling herself for three days that Amelia had come to terms with it, that she was simply nervous, that twenty-four was not so young to make peace with a sensible match. She had been telling herself quite a lot of things.
Amelia's eyes said otherwise.
The vicar cleared his throat and adjusted his spectacles, arriving at the portion of the service Bethany had heard at enough weddings to know was coming.
"If any person here present knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage, let them speak now, or forever hold their peace."
Silence settled over the church. The yellow-bonneted woman fanned herself. One of the twins coughed.
Bethany stood up.
She was not entirely certain, in the moment she rose to her feet, that she had made a decision in the conventional sense of the word. It was more that her body had reached a conclusion slightly ahead of her mind, and her mind was now simply obliged to follow through.
"I object," she said.
The silence that followed was of an entirely different quality than the one before it.
The vicar peered over his spectacles. The groom turned. Several dozen heads rotated toward her with the unified precision of a flock of birds startled from a wire.
Her mother made a sound beside her that Bethany had never heard a human being produce before and hoped never to hear again.
"I object," Bethany said again, because no one seemed to have heard her the first time, or perhaps they had heard her perfectly well and were simply hoping they had not. "To this marriage. On the grounds that my sister does not wish to enter into it."
"Bethany."
Lady Shirley's voice was barely above a whisper and contained within it the full force of a woman who had been pushed past the outer boundary of her composure.
Beside her, the twins - Louiza and Olivia, seventeen and identical, with their mother's fair coloring and their father's stubborn chins–had gone completely silent for the first time all morning.
"Sit down this instant."
"I am quite comfortable standing, thank you."
"Young woman." Lord Featherby looked her over with the displeasure of a man unused to being challenged. Taking in, presumably, the dark brown hair escaping its pins, the hazel eyes that were meeting his without apology, the height that meant she did not have to look up very far to hold his gaze.
He was perhaps fifty, with grey at his temples and the ruddy complexion of someone who spent a great deal of time being annoyed. "I do not know what you believe you are doing."
"I am objecting to a wedding," Bethany said pleasantly. "As invited. The vicar did ask."
"The invitation," the vicar said, with some delicacy, "is generally considered a formality."
"I see. Well, I am afraid no one told me that."
"She is ill," her mother announced to the assembled guests, rising to her feet. "She has been unwell. Bethany, sit down and we will say no more about it."
"I am perfectly well, Mama."
"You are clearly not in your right mind."
"My mind is entirely right. It is this ceremony that is wrong.
" Bethany looked at the groom steadily. "My sister has known you for eleven days. She has spoken to you on four occasions, two of which were in the company of our mother. She agreed to this marriage because she was told she had no other choice.” She paused.
"You have not looked at her once this morning. I counted."
Something moved through the church, a low ripple of murmuring that spread from the front pews to the back like a tide coming in.
"This is outrageous," the groom said. "I have never in my life been subjected to this manner of insult."
"I am sure that is true," Bethany agreed. "You have the look of a man who is rarely disagreed with. I imagine it is quite a new experience."
"Bethany!" Her mother was gripping the back of the pew in front of her with both hands.
"I am so deeply sorry," she said to the groom, pivoting toward him with the kind of desperate social grace that only mothers of unmarried daughters truly mastered.
"She is the younger sister, she has always been impulsive, it means absolutely nothing, please, the vicar can simply continue the wedding. "
"Continue?" The groom turned from Bethany to her mother with the expression of a man who had arrived expecting a pleasant afternoon and found himself in the middle of something he had no vocabulary for.
"Madam, I have been standing at this altar while your daughter informed an entire congregation that I have never looked at my bride.
That I am a man unaccustomed to disagreement.
" His voice had risen. "I have never been insulted so thoroughly in my life, and in a church, no less. "
"She did not mean it."
"I meant every word," Bethany said helpfully.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Amelia, who had turned from the altar and was watching the proceedings with an expression that Bethany could not quite read from across the aisle.
Though she thought she detected, beneath the shock, the faint and incredulous beginning of relief.
The groom said nothing further.
He straightened his coat, offered the vicar a stiff nod, and walked back down the aisle with the rigid dignity of a man who intended to be very angry about this somewhere more private. The doors of the church opened and closed behind him.
The murmuring swelled to a considerably louder level.
Bethany smoothed her skirt and sat back down.
Her mother lowered herself into the pew with the careful movements of someone who was not entirely certain her legs would support her.
She did not speak for a long moment. Across the church, Bethany met Amelia's eyes, and Amelia mouthed two words with tremendous feeling. “Thank you.”
Bethany smiled.
She became aware, then, of being watched from a different direction. It was not the staring of the assembled guests, which was general and indiscriminate. This was more deliberate.
She turned her head toward the left side of the church and found a man she did not immediately recognize looking at her from three rows back with an expression that was not quite a smile and was not quite not one either.
He was tall even seated, dark-haired, and regarding her with the focused attention of someone who had found something genuinely interesting in an afternoon they had not expected much from.
She had not seen him at many social events, which was itself informative. There were perhaps a dozen men in England whom one never saw at social events, and they all had titles and reasons.
People talked about them in the way reserved for those who were too significant to ignore and too reclusive to know. She searched her memory.
The Duke of Mansfield.
She held his gaze for a moment. He tilted his head very slightly, as though in acknowledgment, and the almost-smile deepened just enough to confirm it was intentional.
Bethany looked away first, something she immediately resented.
The guests were filing out in clusters, their voices overlapping, and her mother had recovered sufficient faculty to begin saying goodbye to people with the practiced brightness of a woman determined to pretend that nothing of significance had occurred.
It was not working especially well.
When the church had emptied enough, Lady Shirley turned to her daughter.
"Two seasons," she said. Her voice was the quietest it had been all morning, which was far more alarming than shouting.
"Two seasons, Bethany. Your older sister threw herself into a lake and ruined Amelia's first engagement.
Today you have ruined her second. I would not have thought anyone could outdo what Marina did.
Yet, between the two of you, you have reduced this family to a laughingstock. "
"Amelia did not want to marry him."
"Amelia does not always know what is good for her. That is why she has a mother."
"Aunt Harriet would never have forced her."
The quiet shifted into something colder.
"Your Aunt Harriet," her mother said, "has been dead for six years.
I am your mother. I am the one who is here, and I am the one who must manage this family's future, and I will thank you not to use a dead woman to reproach me in a church.
" She drew a breath. "The verdict, since you seem to require one, is this: You will be married before this season ends. I will see to it personally."
The threat settled in her chest like a stone. Not because she feared it, exactly, but because she knew her mother meant it.
Her mother's version of arranged meant a carriage, a country house, and a man who had not been consulted about her opinions. It was, she thought, almost funny.
She had stood up in that church to save Amelia from exactly that, and had only succeeded in moving herself to the front of the queue.
"Mama."
"That is all I have to say on the subject."
The church doors opened, and their father appeared at the end of the pew, his hat in his hands, wearing the expression he always wore when he had been waiting somewhere comfortable for the trouble to resolve itself.
"No need to fuss," he said, with the cheerful confidence of a man who had not been present. "I have just had the most interesting conversation outside. We have received an offer, my dears. One that rather changes the picture entirely."
Lady Shirley looked at him. Bethany looked at him. Even Louiza and Olivia, who had been whispering in the corner, went still.
Her father was smiling.
It was the smile he wore when he believed he had solved something, which in Bethany's experience was reliably the moment things got considerably worse.
A cold feeling moved through her stomach, formless and sharp, the kind that arrived half a second before bad news and could not be reasoned away.
"It seems," he said, "that the Duke of Mansfield would like to discuss a proposal."