Chapter 24
It was only a short walk, but everyone insisted they take the carriage. It had been waiting there for the bride and groom specifically, after all, and, Beck reasoned, it was also loaded with Hannah’s things from Clerkenwell.
It took them almost as long to get from the door of the church to the door of the carriage itself as it had taken to get out of the assembly hall, with everyone who had attended intercepting them with congratulations and well-wishes every step of the way.
It was, without question, the most affection he had ever received in his entire life. Not the most he’d received in a single day or a single moment. The most in total, compounded, ever.
It had made him rather sleepy, truth be told.
Visions he’d spent weeks having of throwing Hannah over his shoulder and sprinting up the stairs of the Tod & Vixen, directly to his bedchamber, still floated hazily in his mind’s eye, but they were battling a feeble and unconvincing melee against the simple invitation of the bed itself and the stifled yawns his little wife kept trying to hide in the arm of his jacket.
“I am not sleepy,” she lied every time she yawned, burrowing her face deeper into the hollow between his arm and his ribs. “I am not tired.”
“No, you’re perky as a march hare,” he’d chuckled, stroking the loose tresses of her copper waves that fell over his arm and into his lap. “Despite your vim, you’ll still have to permit me to carry you over the threshold.”
“Carry,” she’d mumbled. “Yes.”
He paid the driver extra to cart the trunks into the foyer of the Vixen the instant they arrived, and asked him to keep the door propped open so he could carry his wife inside.
Wife.
Every time he said the word, his heart stopped for a moment, as though he could not quite believe it was allowed to leave his lips and that no one at all was emerging from the shadows to correct him.
The lingering members of his household staff that he’d set about preparing the apartments for their arrival were ready to receive both the luggage and the Becks themselves, with silent hands accepting trunks and valises as they milled about quietly up and down the stairs.
Beck personally half climbed back into the carriage, with one foot braced on the cobbled street, and gathered Hannah into his arms. She tumbled easily into his grasp, her wedding dress fluttering in the cool wind and her hair weaving around both of them as she nuzzled into the crook of his neck, looping soft arms around his shoulders, and attempted to stifle another yawn.
“Not sleepy,” she murmured again. “Too many buttons.”
He chuckled and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “I love you,” he said into her hair. “I love you.”
She nodded and held him tighter. She mumbled something as he began to scale the stairs that sounded suspiciously like “Finally.”
He supposed that was fair.
He deposited her carefully on his bed, directly in the center of the large four poster, all the linens and pillows brand new and pressed for their wedding night.
She didn’t see any of their fine presentation, of course, already half to the land of dreams, curled on her side in a sea of gauzy skirts and loose copper waves.
He promised her he would be right back and retreated back down to the club a final time to ensure all her belongings had made it inside and check with the remainder of the staff in his employ that arrangements were still underway for the evening.
Hannah might already be half asleep, but in the event she did wake, he wanted his wedding gift to her to be ready and perfect, all the same. If he had to pay to do it again tomorrow, he would. He would do it every night for the rest of his life if he had to.
Climbing those stairs a second time was almost surreal, knowing what awaited him at the top.
He paused, looking around the darkened gleam of his club, of this den he’d built from nothing, this thing he had long believed to be his only legacy.
He looked at the trunks piled near the bar, the delicate, stamped leather and fine brass fittings gleaming against the polished oak and brass and glint of liquor bottles.
He had always thought that anything he ever aspired to have must be built brick by painstaking brick.
How had a flowerseller’s son ever become so shortsighted?
How had he forgotten that beautiful things grew wherever they wished sometimes as well?
How had he forgotten that his mother stacked the wildflowers right next to the garden blooms, and often they sold just as fast?
He smiled to himself and turned his back to the Vixen, climbing the stairs to the private rooms above, stepping around the quiet line of servants as they milled back and forth with heavy armfuls, nodding respectfully to him as he went. The private rooms were the only place he wished to be tonight.
He found her sprawled on her stomach, her face so firmly planted in one of his pillows, he wondered how she was breathing. Her hair was fired out around her in a wild halo, and her arms were thrown wide.
It was not very elegant, but it was perhaps the most charming thing he’d ever seen.
He eased the door shut behind him and shrugged out of his jacket, unbuttoning his waistcoat and untying his cravat as he ran his eyes over the disheveled, utterly disarmed state of her in his bed.
There were a lot of buttons, he realized, his gaze trailing down from the base of her neck to the small of her back. Tiny little buttons like halved pearls, one right after the other. There had to be a hundred of them.
He smiled again and turned to divest himself of his cuff links and belt before crawling carefully onto the corner of the bed next to her, sweeping what remained of her hair from the back of the dress and examining the buttons closer.
He realized quickly that he would need his spectacles for the task and retrieved them from the bedside table, wincing at the way the floorboards creaked when he leaned forward, though it did not cause her to stir.
He situated them on the tip of his nose and resisted the urge to trace the lines of her waist for his own personal indulgence, instead focusing on the careful task of freeing each little button from its eyelet, pausing only when the flame in the lantern jumped or flickered.
Once it was done, the soft fabric parting inch by inch, he loosened the stays underneath, tugging the knot free and gently threading his fingers through the individual ties until he could see her ribs expand a little more freely, could hear the little sigh of relief in her breathing.
Then, still half clothed himself, he curled around her, found his own way onto a pillow, and joined her in the escape of exhausted post-wedding rest, just for a little while.
He did not know how long he allowed himself to rest his eyes, only that eventually the footfalls beyond the door quieted and the smell of warm, fragrant steam began to permeate the air.
It was almost like she felt that the time had arrived to receive her final wedding gift when she stirred against him, whimpering like someone had forced her into rest and she was much distressed to find herself at its mercy.
“Thaddeus?” she said softly, lifting her head and all that hair from the pillow. “I fell asleep.”
He turned his head to look at her, unable to resist the smile that curved over his mouth at the rumpled state of her, all that hair piled around her pale face and pouting lips opposite the dented pillow.
“Did you?” he replied softly. “I hadn’t noticed.”
She narrowed her eyes, her own lips threatening to twist into their own begrudging smile. “I think you did,” she said, reaching up to rub the drowse from those big blue eyes. “I think perhaps you did.”
She pushed herself up to sitting, a little gasp of surprise escaping her at the way her dress sagged around her shoulders, her hands coming up to catch it as it fell down the soft curve of her arms. “Oh!” she marveled, blinking at him. “Did you undo all those buttons? Did you really?”
“Me? I suppose I must have,” he replied, fluffing the pillow behind him and sitting up to watch her as she peeled it down carefully around her waist, revealing delicate ivory stays over a dark blue satin chemise beneath.
His hands twitched with the urge to snatch her up immediately, but the desire to continue watching was also a powerful one.
“Your luggage is here, but it hasn’t been unpacked yet,” he told her, watching her step one foot and then the other out of his bed like she was disembarking a life raft directly into stormy waters.
“Shall I fetch you something to sleep in?”
She turned to watch him as she shimmied the dress over her hips and let it collapse into a rich puddle of fabric at her feet, leaving herself in that filmy satin layer and the criss-cross of the embroidered stays above it.
“What do you sleep in, Mr. Beck?” she asked softly. “I had never thought to consider it.”
“I sleep in pajamas,” he said with some amusement, “Mrs. Beck.”
She blinked, and then blushed in such a way that again he thought he might simply hoist her up and consider curiosity a lost cause.
He wondered if he ought to sit on his hands.
“You are not wearing your pajamas,” she pointed out, running her fingers through her messy hair and pulling it over one shoulder like it was a tether to safety.
“No,” he agreed. “I am not. I saw you there, sleeping in your wedding clothes, and could not resist doing the same, at least for a little while.”
“Thaddeus,” she said, pausing to take a sharp little breath and biting down on her lip.
“May I tell you something very silly? I feel so oddly full of nerves just now. It isn’t as though we haven’t …
that I haven’t been … that … Oh, this is ridiculous, isn’t it?
Just a few hours ago, in the church, I was … you were …”
She cut herself off, shaking her head and giving a dry little laugh, hugging her arms around herself. “I am sorry.”