CHAPTER THREE #2
Theodore dressed without speaking and breakfasted alone with the newspaper held open before him.
He read three columns twice without taking in a word, noticed the failure, and declined to examine it.
The carriage was at the door at the proper hour.
He did not rehearse the morning in advance.
To dwell perpetually upon an unalterable fate is but to practice a cowardice that serves no purpose.
Lady Augusta was already inside the church when he arrived, installed in the front pew on the bride’s empty side as though she meant to chaperone the ceremony itself.
She rose and came to meet him at the head of the aisle, her gloved hands clasped and her chin held at the angle he had known since boyhood.
“Theodore.”
“Aunt.”
“I have not met her.”
“You will meet her in a quarter of an hour.”
“I am told she is twenty.”
“So I have been told.”
Lady Augusta’s eyes went down the church and came back to him. “Do not be glib with me in a church. It gives the Almighty too much assistance in judging you.”
“I would not presume to deprive Him of the pleasure.”
“You may be amusing when you have done something less offensive.” She lowered her voice and stepped nearer, the silk of her gown whispering against the pew. “I am told a great many things. I find most of them vulgar, and I find this arrangement the most vulgar of them.”
Theodore’s expression did not change. “You have come to say so.”
“I have come to say so once, in a low voice, and never again where anyone can hear me.” Lady Augusta glanced toward the empty space where the bride would soon stand. “She is about to be my niece. She did not ask for any of you.”
“No.”
The single word seemed to cost more in the church than it would have cost elsewhere.
Lady Augusta studied him closely. “I mean to be kind to her.”
“I expected nothing else.”
“Do not evade me with compliments.”
“It was not a compliment.”
“Then take it as a warning.” Her gloved fingers tightened around the little prayer book in her hand. “Do not make me ashamed of you in front of the child.”
Theodore had replies prepared for most people. His aunt had always possessed the inconvenient ability to make silence more honorable than victory.
“I will try,” he said.
Lady Augusta heard the size of the concession and held his gaze for a moment longer. Then she stepped aside. “See that you do.”
The congregation was small, as he had wished it. A few necessary witnesses. A little curiosity restrained by good breeding. Nothing more. Henry sat in the second pew with his head in his hands, drunk at half past ten in the morning of his own sister’s wedding.
Lady Augusta saw him and drew in a careful breath. “Is that Lord Middleton?”
“Yes.”
“At this hour?”
“Apparently.”
“How very enterprising of him.”
“He will recommend himself no further this morning.”
“Theodore.”
“I am merely agreeing with you.”
“You are never merely doing anything.”
Theodore looked at Henry once and then did not look again.
The west door opened.
Miss Middleton came in.
She came down the aisle on the arm of the Middleton cousin who had been pressed into the office, and Theodore had only one likeness to set her against, the woman moving away from him down a passage with a vase against her hip.
Against that likeness, she was pale. Pale, and undeniably pretty.
The thought arrived uninvited. Her features were delicate, her carriage graceful despite the strain she was plainly under.
Theodore dismissed the observation at once.
What unaccustomed madness was this?
He had not come here to admire his bride. He had come to wed her.
She kept her eyes forward, fixed on the altar or the window above it, and when the cousin gave her hand into the clergyman’s keeping, the prayer book in her grasp trembled with a small, steady motion she neither stopped nor hid.
Lady Augusta spoke softly beside him. “Poor child.”
Theodore heard her, though he kept his attention on the woman approaching him.
The clergyman began. His voice moved through the church with practiced solemnity, and the service unfolded in the proper order, each word ancient enough to make private misery feel briefly irrelevant. Theodore answered where he was required to answer. Ellen did the same.
Her voice was low and even and clear.
When the moment came for the vow, the clergyman turned to her. “Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband?”
The prayer book trembled once.
Ellen lifted her chin, and her answer came without a break. “I will.”
The words were steadier than Theodore had expected, steadier than any sold woman’s voice at the altar beside a stranger had any business being. Somewhere in the locked room of his estimates, a figure adjusted itself a fraction upward, and he permitted the correction.
The clergyman turned to him. “Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?”
Theodore looked at the woman beside him.
For the first time since she had entered the church, her gaze turned briefly toward him. Only for an instant. Long enough for him to see fear there, carefully mastered and not quite concealed.
At twenty, she ought to have been standing beside a man she had chosen. Instead she stood beside him.
“I will,” Theodore said.
The ring came next.
Her hand was cold when he took it. Cold even through the glove. As he slid the ring into place, her fingers tightened around his, not from affection, nor even trust, but the way a person braces before stepping into deep water.
Theodore held her hand a moment longer than the ceremony required.
Her pulse fluttered beneath his touch.
Then she seemed to realise he had noticed, and her fingers withdrew at once.
The clergyman pronounced them man and wife.
Lady Augusta lowered her head.
Henry did not lift his.
A strange stillness settled over the church.
Theodore released his bride’s hand.
His bride. The word was heavier than he had bargained for.
They walked back down the aisle together as the Duke and Duchess of Rosanne, past Augusta, who observed the bride and not the groom, past Henry, who remained bent over his own disgrace, and out into the grey morning where a small knot of the curious had gathered to see a duke enter into matrimony.
The murmurs began at once, nothing loud enough to be improper, nothing quiet enough to be missed.
Ellen kept her eyes forward, and Theodore wondered whether she heard them. He suspected she heard every word.
They had not exchanged one word since the altar steps, and they did not exchange one now.
The carriage door closed behind them with a solid click, and silence followed.
Theodore sat opposite her and watched her profile reflected in the glass. Ellen had not once looked at him directly, neither at the altar, nor on the church steps, nor now.
Then, as the carriage rolled away from St George’s, her eyes moved to the window.
She was searching.
The movement was slight but unmistakable, a glance toward the street, another toward the crowd they were leaving behind, one final look before the church disappeared from view.
The face she sought was not there.
Theodore understood whom she had hoped to see without being told. He found himself irritated, which was not jealousy, whatever it wished to call itself, only the dislike of being measured against a man who had abandoned her once already.
Ellen’s hands folded more tightly in her lap as the carriage turned a corner and the church vanished from sight.
At last she stopped looking.
The silence stretched.
Theodore turned toward his own window, prepared to grant her the privacy of disappointment.
Then her voice broke the quiet.
“So this is to be my life now?”