Chapter 4 #2
She picked up her gloves and put them on, and told herself she was quite certain of it again, for good measure.
The thing about walking down the aisle, Euphemia thought, was that from the outside it looked serene.
She knew this because she had watched other women do it.
They floated. They glided. They moved gracefully…
like women who had arrived at the happiest moment of their lives and knew it and wanted everyone present to understand that they knew it.
They looked at their grooms and their grooms looked at them and the whole business had a quality of rightness to it, a sense that the universe had arranged itself into the correct configuration and everyone in the room was simply bearing witness.
Euphemia was not floating.
She was genuinely terrified that she was about to trip over her own hem and face-plant directly onto the stone floor, and it was entirely the Duke’s fault.
Nathaniel was staring straight into her soul.
The sheer intensity of his gaze was staggering.
He stood at the altar, looking exceptionally handsome in a perfectly tailored dark coat and a crisp white cravat, but his expression was entirely unyielding.
Euphemia tried every trick she could think of to break the tension.
She looked away, she focused on a stained-glass window, she stared down at her bouquet, and she glanced at the small gathering of guests…
yet no matter where she shifted her attention, she could still feel the heavy, burning weight of his eyes on her.
‘Why…’ she thought. ‘…is he looking at me like that?”
She could not understand why he was looking at her with such relentless focus.
Was he angry because she hadn’t swooned with gratitude when he offered her his hand?
Was he trying to read her face to see if she was currently regretting her decision?
Or perhaps he was the one regretting it?
Was he simply trying to intimidate her into submission before the vows even began? It was completely unnerving.
She silently pleaded for him to look away, even just for a second, but his gaze never wavered. Not when she reached the halfway point, and not even when she finally took the last few steps to stand directly in front of him.
Up close, it was considerably worse. She was aware of the height of him, the stillness…
the air between them felt charged and too thin.
Euphemia desperately wanted to lean in and whisper a sharp jab under her breath, perhaps demanding to know if he intended to blink at any point during the ceremony.
But she restrained herself. She recalled the last time that they spoke. How they immediately ended up arguing about everything, and standing before the clergyman on her wedding day was definitely not the correct time to start another verbal sparring match.
So, she forced a tiny, compliant breath into her lungs and decided she would simply have to deal with the scrutiny.
“Dearly beloved…” the vicar started. “… we are gathered here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
Euphemia tried her best to focus on the clergyman, but Nathaniel’s eyes simply would not leave her. He was still staring. It was a relentless, unwavering gaze that made the small hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
She could feel it. She refused to turn her head, refused to acknowledge it, kept her eyes fixed on the vicar absolutely listening to every word and pretending to not be aware of the person standing in front of her.
“…Which is an honorable estate…” the vicar continued. “…instituted of God in the time of man’s innocence.”
Euphemia forced her gaze ahead, but her mind began to run completely wild.
As the vicar’s voice droned on and Nathaniel remained locked in a silent, tense staring competition.
She began to wonder if her conclusion from earlier that morning had been dangerously naive.
Living with this man was not going to be easy at all.
The dark, intense way he was looking at her suggested that he might have specific plans for her existence that she had entirely failed to anticipate.
‘I should have asked more questions,’ Euphemia thought, a sudden spike of panic piercing through her stomach.
She shouldn’t have just accepted the marriage proposal with a submissive nod.
What if he was far worse than a cold, work-obsessed recluse?
What if he was like the dark, manipulative characters she had read about in her novels?
She recalled a particularly terrifying story where a brooding nobleman married a woman entirely to isolate her at his crumbling northern estate as punishment for a family slight.
Had she rushed into a trap? Was this rushed marriage the greatest mistake of her life?
She had read a considerable number of books. It was generally considered a virtue. What nobody had mentioned was that a well-stocked literary mind in a state of moderate panic was a liability of the first order.
Mrs. Radcliffe had a great deal to say about powerful men and remote estates. Dark, intense men with significant looks, large houses with locked wings and portraits that watched you. Euphemia had read all of Mrs. Radcliffe with great enjoyment and the comfortable certainty that it was fiction.
She was now standing next to a dark, intense man who was given to significant looks. Since she was about to move to a large estate she had never seen, she found herself revising that certainty with some urgency.
He was a widower. His wife had died under circumstances nobody had explained to her because she had not asked, because she had been too busy being practical about her own scandal to enquire into the details of his.
There was the Gothic novel Seraphina had spoken about in which the husband had locked the heroine in a tower.
Euphemia had said at the time that seemed an overreaction.
She was not sure she thought that now.
The staring was doing this to her. If he would simply stop looking at her she could be rational, but he would not stop, and her mind had been alone with the collected works of Gothic fiction for too long, and —
“Miss Vane?”
The vicar’s soft voice broke through her spiraling thoughts, pulling her back to the altar. Euphemia swallowed hard, the words of the vow washing over her. When the clergyman finally paused and gave a gentle nod, indicating it was her turn to answer, she had to force the air back into her lungs.
“I will,” she whispered.
After that, the rest of the ceremony passed in a complete blur. She vaguely felt the cold metal of the ring being slid onto her finger, heard the final blessing, and signed her name in the registry with a hand that shook so violently she could barely recognize her own penmanship.