Chapter 20
While Hannah was impatient to have things dealt with and filed away as quickly as possible so that she could simply jump the hurdle and begin her life as Mrs. Beck, Thaddeus appeared to have other plans.
First, he did not immediately arrive at her doorstep to charm and inform her parents of their impending union. Instead, he took over a week to put a variety of things into motion, some of which Hannah was privy to and some of which she was not.
She supposed he also wanted to spend Christmas with his sister. That was understandable.
In the days that stretched between that delicious caper on the floor in the office of the Flaming Fox and his long-awaited arrival at their doorstep, Hannah experienced many things.
She collected a beautiful and slightly scandalous order from the modiste.
She worked with the good Reverend Matthew to begin the process of securing new homes for the patients who had been living in the temporary rooms around London.
And on a clear night in Charing Cross, she looked through a tiny lens on a rooftop and saw Jupiter’s red blemish.
“It is a storm,” Abigail Murphy had told her quietly, like speaking too loudly might scatter the perfect clarity of the glossy blue night. “It is a storm that never blows out.”
Hannah could understand that perfectly well.
The night that their doorbell finally rang and Mr. Beck stood behind it, she felt such an absurd flutter of nervous agitation that one might think she had never even told the man she fancied him.
She hovered near the arch that led into their sitting room to watch him come through the front door, her heart thrumming like a hummingbird against her throat at the way his crimson overcoat glinted in the light.
Her father came forward with a big grin, his shiny bald head catching the patterns from that same coat. “Mr. Beck!” he boomed, as though they were old friends. “I have not seen you since Blackcove. You are looking very well, my fine young man. Very well indeed!”
“It is a pleasure, Mr. Lazarus,” Thaddeus replied, giving him such a warm smile, such an easy, warm smile. He handed her father a very fine bottle of pink gin and said, “I heard that you favored this one.” The little gesture very nearly made her faint. Wasn’t that silly?
“Chai v’kayam,” came her mother’s voice at her shoulder, making Hannah startle and turn. Martha Lazarus stood next to her, fanning her neck with her hand. “Such a man. I can see why you were so … so …”
“Mama!” Hannah hissed, already feeling the heat rise in her cheeks.
“Ferlibt?” Dinah suggested, materializing from behind their mother as though summoned by the opportunity to needle. “Is that how you say it, Mama?”
“It is, my daughter,” Martha breathed, nodding. “Is Esther here yet?”
“Esther is coming?!” Hannah groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. “With Mr. Esther?”
“With her husband, yes,” Martha said sharply, narrowing her eyes. “Be nice.”
The dinner itself unfolded perfectly well, with Beck seated across from Hannah as he fielded many questions from her family in every other direction.
When he could, he would quietly and carefully catch her eye over the light of the candle that burned between them, often before sipping his wine or tasting the morsel of food on his fork.
Hannah herself was unusually quiet, so taken was she by the impact of how he looked at her family dinner table.
It was impossible to explain, as though she had regressed back to that very first time she’d seen him in Cornwall and had been struck dumb by how badly she wanted him to turn around and see her there, except now all he could do was see her, and she couldn’t remember how to hold the power of it.
“And what about you, Mr. Beck?” Esther said with a raise of her nose as she lifted her own wine glass. “Do you find us much as you expected?”
He gave a short laugh, dabbing at his mouth with the napkin. “Well, I met your father at length some years ago, of course,” he answered, inclining his head at her, “but to tell you the truth, I expected some of you to have Hannah’s bright red hair. It seems only she has that feature.”
There was a pause, during which their very bald papa giggled and blushed as everyone turned to look at him.
“Well,” he said with a shrug. “She wasn’t always alone.”
“Oh!” Beck replied, immediately flushing.
“No, no, it is all right,” said Owen, waving his hand. “Truth be told, I’d still have a ring of it ’round my ears, but I take a razor to it in the mornings to keep things even. My wife likes a clean pate.”
“Owen!” Martha exclaimed, flapping her own napkin at him.
It had the effect of making certain everyone at the table was now blushing to some degree.
“Where will the wedding be held?” Dinah asked, always the fastest to recover from discomfort. “Not at synagogue, I hear.”
“No,” said Martha with a frown. “Sadly, that cannot be. Have you a venue in mind, Mr. Beck? Hannah?”
“We do,” Beck answered with a soft smile.
“Rabbi Hirsch and I have been planning with a friend of mine who has an Anglican parish near Covent Garden. It will take some time to file all the necessary legal documents, but I believe you all know Mr. Cresson, who is handling that aspect of it for us. I know it will not be a strictly traditional ceremony, but I hope you will be pleased with the ways in which we can honor your traditions.”
“Our traditions?” Owen Lazarus repeated with some surprise. “I didn’t expect you to follow any. I thought for certain a magistrate’s marriage would be the only way.”
“Not so,” said her Thaddeus with a happy lift of his glass. “We are building the chuppah at present from the materials your daughter has secured for the house of healing she has been erecting some blocks from here.”
“We have,” Hannah managed to say, her throat dry. “Thaddeus has been doing the work with his own hands. I have only been scratching a quill to paper.”
“Ah, but we disagree,” he said fondly, shaking his head. “The idea was the rabbi’s. He is a man with quite a lot to say.”
At this point, they had to take a brief intermission for Martha to excuse herself under the pretense of going to stare at dessert. It took exactly as long as one might need to dry an unexpected arrival of tears and splash cool water on a red face.
While she was gone, Esther sighed and said, “Well, then, I suppose you’ll be wanting Mama’s veil,” with a tone that maintained just enough affectionate acid to balance the smile that had found its way onto her usually haughty face.
“I had hoped to hoard it for a while longer just because I like looking at it, but I suppose I can give it back.”
“You are too kind,” Dinah said solemnly, placing a hand over her heart. “A true north star in the dark night.”
“Well, Dinah,” Esther said, cutting her eyes downward. “It isn’t as though you will ever need it.”
Dinah grinned, fluttering her lashes at Esther. “I know it keeps you up at night. I suppose I could always take poor Nelson. He’ll be grieving, you know.”
“Dinah!” Hannah spat, shooting her foot out to smash her sister’s smallest toe. “Don’t talk about Nelson right now. Gracious!”
Mercifully, their mother then returned, blissfully unaware of how uncivilized her offspring were being, and Owen Lazarus was wise enough not to inform her.
Hannah glanced up at her groom-to-be only to find him exchanging bewildered, sympathetic eyes with Esther’s husband. She whipped around to look at the other man, then at Esther, who raised her eyebrows in a silent acknowledgement that both men should be spoken with later.
“Where do you live, by the by?” Martha asked as slices of mince pie were being distributed around the table, absolutely drowned in powdered sugar. “Are you here in Clerkenwell?”
“I am in St. James,” Beck replied, blinking himself back into the mindset of polite dinner conversation.
“I currently live in the apartments above my club, but I have been looking into larger properties now that I am seeking to be wed to your daughter. It wouldn’t do to raise a family in such a small home. ”
“Lovely environs, though,” said Esther a little dreamily. “St. James is so very pristine.”
Beck cleared his throat, as though this amused him. “It is very often swept, yes.”
“Perhaps you will find a house nearby,” Martha said hopefully as she took up her spoon, her eyes gleaming. “I suppose the first days of your marriage will be in the apartments, though. That has a touch of romance to it as well, though, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” he said with half a smile. “Though I am currently hosting my sister while she hunts for a husband, so less idyllic than I would have wished.”
“Hannah, you will need to go see your future home before the vows,” Martha instructed, “so that we can choose some things for you to bring to warm it. You’ve never decorated so much as a room before, so I would be happy to guide you.”
Hannah blinked, her mind’s eye filled with a clash of fabrics and colors in garish tragedy if she was left to her own devices. “Oh,” she said with a wince. “I don’t know that I should be trusted with that.”
“Nonsense,” said Esther. “Nonsense.”
After they had eaten and everyone was preparing to migrate into the next room for conversation and digestifs, Thaddeus slipped her little silver ring into her hand, the one he had taken from the floor of the Fox that night some weeks prior.
“Thank you,” he said softly, “for letting me borrow it. I think you will be happy with the new one.”
She stared at him, wanting nothing so much as to kick the door to the sitting room shut and steal him for a single, isolated moment. She did not know particularly what she would do with it. Perhaps she would only embrace him silently.
Instead, she gripped the ring, took a big breath, and smiled at him as bravely as she could.
Surely he should be the one turning to pebbles inside. This was her lifelong home. Her domain. Her family milling about, making conversation. So why did he seem so very at ease while she thought her very core had splintered?
He gave her a soft look and squeezed her shoulder. “You’re doing beautifully,” he said, soft enough not to be overheard. “Everything is going well.”
And then she could breathe again.
He was right. Everything went exactly as well as it possibly could.
They all tried the very fine pink gin, made to Owen Lazarus’s favorite specifications, with a twist of lime and a splash of bitters, while the family took turns telling absolutely humiliating stories about Hannah’s upbringing, all seemingly to Thaddeus’s delight.
When they sent him on his way at the end of the night, it was with many promises toward the wedding planning, toward the good works of the clinic, and toward building the family relationships that would come from this union.
Hannah felt through much of it as though she was watching from the outside, dazed and awed and more than a little humbled.
In the end, it was Dinah who took her hand, squeezed it, and said, “Aren’t you a lucky one?”
“What do you mean?” Hannah asked, looking at her sister in surprise. “Esther’s married too.”
Dinah nodded, sighing. “Esther married properly. You do everything messy. Messy seems so much better.”
She’d skipped away before Hannah could reply.
So all she could do was accept that Dinah was right. Hannah did like to do things in a great, messy, chaotic fashion.
And perhaps that was very well, in the end.