Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Nicholas sat before the dressing-room mirror while Sophia worked at his cravat, her tongue caught between her teeth. She pinched one fold, flattened another, then drew back with a disgusted little sigh. “Too high,” she smacked her forehead.
“It has served me perfectly well where it is, you know.”
“It won’t in a minute.”
She loosened the knot with brisk little fingers, humming to herself. Seven neatly pressed cravats already lay abandoned beside her. Fletcher had long ago given up pretending they would need only one.
Nicholas handed her the next.
She snapped it smartly through the air to smooth the folds, then caught him watching her in the mirror.
“Don’t look,” she scolded. “You’ll make me muddle it.”
He grimaced. “My apologies.”
She rewarded the honesty with a tiny screwed face and set to work again. “Are you scared?” she mumbled.
“Am I scared? No.” The morning sun spilled across her pale hair. It never failed to catch him unawares, that color. Grace’s hair had gleamed just so whenever she stood by the nursery window.
She frowned at the linen, eased one fold flatter with her thumb, then looked up suddenly.
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“When she’s here...”
Her fingers stopped rummaging.
“...will Fletcher tie these instead?”
So that was it.
All this grave attention to linen, and she had been worrying over her place in his mornings.
This was their little tradition, a way that she could remain part of him when he left the house, and something that was utterly theirs. Of course nothing would ever change that.
Nicholas reached up and tucked the loose end of her ribbon beneath her plait. “Fletcher has tied my cravats for fifteen years, Sophie. You have not allowed him near one since your sixth birthday.”
She scrunched her nose. “He makes them too stiff.”
“He does.”
“And ugly.” Sophia’s mouth twitched, though she kept her eyes on the knot gathering beneath his chin. “Miss Fairbourne might think mine are ugly, too.”
He arched a dubious brow. “Then she will be mistaken.”
Her hands paused against his collar. “You would tell her? Though if she is to be my mother now, maybe we should be nicer.”
“As I’ve said, she shall merely be a friend,” he explained.
Sophia cocked her head, a mischievous spark in her gray eyes. “I know what marriage is, Papa. I’m not a child.”
He wanted to argue that at eight years old, she was very much still a child, but he knew she would take it deeply in offence.
Childhood sat strangely upon her these days, slipping away in one moment and returning in the next.
He couldn’t help but blame himself for how quickly she’d been forced to grow up.
“I hope you will like her,” he said instead.
“I shall. You picked her.” Shrugging, she stepped back with hands on hips, looking at him critically. “That should do. Now you look handsome at last.”
The corners of his lips curled. “High praise,” he said gravely.
He did not tell her that he had not picked Miss Fairbourne.
She had simply arrived at Winchester Manor at the exact hour when his resolve was weakest. This marriage had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, led largely by need rather than desire, and the knowledge that it would be good for Sophia to have a mother figure, too.
Perhaps after he had seen Miss Fairbourne’s home conditions, he had been especially happy to provide her with a way out. Penance, in a way.
He refused to think on for what.
She slid her hand into his. “Are you ready?”
Nicholas rose and closed his fingers around hers. “Let’s go and fetch Miss Fairbourne.”
For the second time in her life, Isadora found herself processing down a church aisle.
Her uncle had her arm, although she would have preferred to walk herself like the first time.
But the instant she crossed the threshold, Uncle Vernon, the crowded pews, and every whisper in York slipped from importance.
The Duke stood at the altar.
He had come early.
The sight of him loosened something inside her that had been drawn painfully tight since her first wedding morning.
And aside from his cravat looking a touch lopsided, he was impeccably dressed in his tailored obsidian coat.
She rather suspected it was a state of his being at this point, like one might breathe or need water.
The announcement had gone out in the papers a few days ago, and everyone who was anyone in York seemed to have chosen to attend the venue.
The days leading to the date had passed in a whirl of solicitors, contracts, and guest visits.
Nicholas’s man of business had spent an hour behind the study door with Uncle Vernon, after which her uncle emerged purple-faced and spoke to no one until supper, and her aunt had only consented to allow her to join them for dinner that evening because a seamstress had come to the house to dress Isadora, carrying silks fine enough to tempt a saint.
Ordinarily, the bride’s family paid for the bride’s clothes, but considering Isadora had turned up to the duke’s house in his late wife’s gown, she could hardly blame him for hoping to prevent that eventuality again.
In the end, however, in the privacy of her room that morning, Isadora had chosen instead to wear her mother’s old wedding dress, made up by Isadora’s own hand.
She had spent months mending the old ivory satin in secret after having Unity send it over, strengthening seams worn fragile with age and lifting the lace from the brown box that still carried the faintest breath of her mother’s citrus.
The dress may be old-fashioned. But at least it belonged to her.
As she walked up the aisle, step by precious step, she felt the duke’s gaze on her and wondered if he would be angry that she had shunned his gift. No doubt it had been expensive.
But when she reached him, feeling out of place in this old gown beside his new, fashionable clothes, he took her hand and squeezed it briefly.
“No need to look as though I’m shackling you to a life of misery,” he murmured under his breath.
She glanced at the rector, the same kindly old man who had failed to marry her to Mr. Windham. He beamed at her, not seeming at all concerned by the fact that she was attending her second wedding in two weeks. “You dressed it up well enough for me to ever think it, Your Grace.”
He shrugged a single shoulder. “I suppose I did. We are marrying. Call me Nicholas.”
“Nicholas.” She tasted the word on her tongue, and to her surprise, a shiver ran through her. How intimate it was to say another man’s Christian name. Not having a brother, she had scarcely taken such liberties with other gentlemen.
And the way he looked at her now, as though the gown had slipped his notice altogether, or mattered nothing against the woman inside it.
For a moment his composure thinned, and she glimpsed the man beneath it—startling in eyes the cold blue of a January morning.
It kindled something under her ribs that had never been lit, and the warmth of it spread all the way down.
The ceremony passed in a blur of judgmental faces and her own scattered thoughts.
Married. The start of my very own life. The words refused to attach themselves to anything real, so instead she anchored herself to her husband, who stood beside her, solid as the church stones.
Nothing at all like the flighty Mr. Windham.
When the moment came for the ring, he lifted her bare hand in his gloved one. It was not customary for a gentleman to receive a ring, nor to remove his gloves, yet she found herself wishing for his bare skin against hers all the same.
Intimacy. Now, there was a side of marriage she had not permitted herself to consider too closely. He had never spoken a word of it, but then, would a gentleman raise such indelicate matters with a lady before their wedding? Perhaps that conversation came after.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” announced the rector, and she turned to Nicholas in time to catch his gaze dip to her lips.
Her breath hitched. She was staring at his mouth now, too. Surely he would not kiss her in front of half of York?
A smirk tilted one corner of his mouth, as if he had heard the thought aloud. His fingers caught her chin, and he bent and brushed his lips over hers, so brief and light it scarcely deserved the name of a kiss. A heartbeat. The pass of a feather.
And yet, it made her heart pound in her chest, her head floating somewhere above the congregation when he rose to his full height and tucked her hand into his arm.
We’re married, she thought dazedly. This is it now. I’m married. I’m a duchess. More than that, I belong somewhere. To someone…
It took everything in her not to squeal and make a ninny of herself in front of the first person to look at her as though she was more than merely a tedious responsibility.
They emerged in the sun together—the same May sun that had failed to bless her previous attempt at marriage. Nicholas helped her into the waiting carriage, white ribbons bouncing merrily in the breeze, and they rode back to his estate.
This time, as they approached, far quicker than she had the first time, she had the strangest sensation of being entirely outside her own body. That magnificent facade, that glittering lake, those lime trees, the countless windows—everything now belonged to her, too. Of all this, she was mistress.
“What do you think?” he asked quietly.
She could not tear her eyes from the house. “I can’t quite believe this is happening to me.”
He gave a low chuckle. “You’ll believe it soon enough. The servants have been polishing the silver since dawn in anticipation of your arrival.”
Oh, heavens. The servants. There must be a number beyond comprehension to keep a place like this running.
And indeed there were, all lined up on the gravel before the front door in a line straight enough to please Napoleon.
None of the guests had yet arrived, meaning she was granted a small mercy to greet the servants and become accustomed, very faintly, to her new home before the wedding breakfast began.