Chapter 9
“That grimace does not suit you, Julian. You look as though you are about to be sentenced rather than married.”
“Thank you, Dominic. Immensely reassuring, as always.”
“I only observe what I see.” Dominic straightened Julian’s cravat with more familiarity than the moment strictly called for, standing beside him at the altar in the small space reserved for the groom’s closest friend. “Most men manage at least the appearance of pleasure on their wedding day.”
“Maybe because most men are not marrying a woman they met a fortnight ago for the sake of a mute eight-year-old and an infant not her own by blood.”
“No,” Dominic agreed, dropping his hands and stepping back to survey his work. “Though why I expected you to look considerably more terrified than you presently do, I do not know. I find myself almost disappointed by your composure.”
“I am not terrified.”
“You have checked that door four times in the last two minutes. Surely you are not about to flee.” Dominic leaned closer to him, and Julian wanted to shoo him away.
He did not check the door a fifth time, though the urge remained.
The church was small, chosen deliberately for its size, filled with perhaps thirty guests rather than the hundreds his rank might have commanded.
Louisa’s family occupied the front pew. Her friend sat beside her mother, twisting her gloves with poorly concealed excitement, while two others sat with teary eyes.
Piers sat two rows back, grinning at Julian with the delight of a younger brother who considered his elder’s discomfort the finest entertainment London currently offered.
“Kit is here,” Dominic said more quietly, nodding toward where the boy sat beside Piers, sketchbook closed on his lap for once, his dark head bent low.
“I know.”
“He came willingly. That is no small thing.”
“No,” Julian agreed. He felt something in his chest tighten at the sight of the boy, small and solemn in his good coat, present at a wedding ceremony he could not have understood the full weight of, and yet here regardless. “It is not.”
Is this the right thing?
The question arrived unbidden and unwelcome, exactly as it had arrived at intervals over the last week.
A marriage built on convenience, on a written agreement rather than any courtship a man might recognize. I know she is the best chance Kit has, but I do not know that either of us fully understands what we are binding ourselves to.
He had repeatedly told himself that it did not matter.
That the marriage required no more than what was written on the document they had both signed—protection for Eleanor, assistance for Kit, mutual respect standing in for whatever else other marriages were built upon.
He had told himself this so many times in the last week that he had very nearly believed it.
The organ began.
The doors at the rear of the church opened, and every head turned. Julian, despite his composure, turned with them.
Louisa walked toward him on her father’s arm, and every carefully ordered thought in Julian’s head simply scattered.
She wore ivory, simple, unadorned but for a scattering of small pearls on the bodice, her dark auburn hair dressed high beneath a short veil that did nothing to obscure her face.
She walked the length of the aisle with the same unhurried composure she had walked into his study, chin level, gaze steady, meeting the eyes of everyone she passed as though this were the most natural thing in the world rather than a marriage negotiated across a desk in the space of one conversation.
She is not what I expected.
Julian watched her come and knew distantly that he had thought some version of that same sentence every time he had seen her, and had not yet managed to arrive at a conclusion that satisfied him.
Lord Henswick delivered her to the altar with a final, lingering press of his hand over hers and stepped back. Then she was there, close enough that Julian could see the faint flush on her cheekbones, the only visible sign that she felt anything at all about the moment.
“You look as though you have seen a ghost, Your Grace,” she murmured, too quiet for anyone but him to hear.
“You look considerably better than that,” he murmured back, and watched with satisfaction as the flush deepened.
The vicar began.
Julian had attended enough weddings to know the words by rote.
He had expected to hear them today the way he heard most ceremony—present but somehow distant, saying the right words at the right intervals while his mind ran ahead to Kit, to the household, to the thousand practical arrangements still requiring his attention.
Instead, he found himself properly listening to every word as though he had never heard them before.
“Do you, Julian Alexander Cavendish, take this woman—”
“I do.”
His voice sounded steadier than he felt.
He had not expected the words to cost him anything.
He had rehearsed them the previous night with the same detachment he brought to reviewing a contract, certain they would land the same way when spoken aloud, two sentences signifying an arrangement rather than any deeper commitment.
They did not hit that way. They hit him, instead, with a weight he had not anticipated, settling somewhere beneath his ribs he had not known was waiting for them.
“And do you, Louisa Anne Everly, take this man—”
“I do.”
Her voice did not waver either. She spoke the words the same way she said everything, plain and certain.
Julian found himself watching her mouth form the words rather than listening to them, some part of him tracing the details he had not allowed himself to notice before now—the steadiness of her breath, the steady way her eyes held his and did not once drop away, even as the whole church watched.
“The ring, Your Grace.”
Julian took Louisa’s hand. Her fingers were cool, slightly trembling despite her composure, and he steadied them with his own before sliding the ring onto her finger, feeling the small catch of her breath as he did.
“With this ring,” he said solemnly, “I thee wed.”
Julian, standing at the altar of a church with thirty witnesses to a marriage he had entered for the most practical reasons a man could name, found himself entirely, inconveniently incapable of remembering a single one of those reasons.
This is a practical marriage, he told himself, the thought arriving with considerably less conviction than it had when she sat in his study. Nothing about this moment need be anything more than what we agreed to on paper.
Nothing about the moment felt practical at all.
“You may kiss your bride, Your Grace.”
Julian felt Louisa’s hand tense slightly in his and understood in that instant precisely what she expected to happen next, and precisely why some contrary instinct in him refused to let it.
This is a contract, he reminded himself, the thought arriving fast and hard, cutting through whatever had briefly clouded his mind during the vows. Mutual respect, nothing more. I will not begin this marriage by promising in front of witnesses something I have no intention of offering in private.
He lifted her hand instead, the one now wearing his ring, and pressed his mouth briefly to her knuckles, formal, correct, the sort of gesture a man might offer any lady of his acquaintance. Then he stepped back before the moment could ask anything further of either of them.
Something flickered across Louisa’s face, there and gone too quickly for the congregation to have caught it, though Julian did. It was not hurt, not really. It was something closer to recalibration.
“Your Grace,” she murmured, for his ears only, “you needn’t have looked quite so alarmed at the prospect. I was hardly going to insist.”
“I was not alarmed.”
“You very much were. I felt your hand go rigid the moment the vicar said the word.”
“I merely thought,” Julian said, keeping his voice as even as hers, “that we had agreed in writing on the nature of this arrangement, and I did not wish to begin our marriage by contradicting the terms in front of your entire family.”
“How very thorough of you.” A dry note entered her voice, though whether it disguised amusement or something less comfortable, Julian could not immediately determine. “I’m beginning to think you incapable of taking a single step without first consulting the document.”
“It has served us well thus far.
“So it has.”
She said nothing further on the matter, straightened her veil with a brisk, unbothered motion, and turned to face the church before he could examine her expression for whatever else it might have held.
The church erupted into the low murmur of a congregation released from ceremony, and Julian turned with his new wife on his arm to face the small crowd of well-wishers, distantly aware of Piers grinning like a fool three rows back and his wife’s friend pressing a handkerchief to her eyes with theatrical enthusiasm.
But Louisa did not go to her mother first, nor to her father, nor to her friend, who was already advancing with clear intent to embrace her. Instead, she went to Kit.
She knelt before him, right in the middle of the aisle, heedless of her ivory skirts. Julian watched her do it with a small jolt of surprise.
Kit lifted a folded piece of paper toward her, torn from his sketchbook, the corner still slightly crumpled from where he must have carried it in his coat pocket throughout the ceremony, and stretched it towards her.
Louisa took it and unfolded it slowly. Julian, standing close enough to see, found himself looking at it too.
It was a drawing, careful and precise for a child of eight, rendered in charcoal, of a woman, a boy, and something small cradled in the woman’s arms that could only be Eleanor.
All three were standing together beneath what looked like the outline of Ashvale House.
“Kit.” Louisa’s voice had gone soft, unguarded in a way Julian had not heard before. “This is beautiful.”
Kit did not answer, of course. His eyes, fixed on her face, said everything his voice could not. When Louisa reached out and gently touched his shoulder, he did not pull away, did not flinch or retreat the way he retreated from every hand that reached for him.
“Thank you,” she said, and folded the drawing carefully, tucking it against her heart as though it were the finest gift she had received that day, which Julian suspected it was.
Then her friend approached and pulled her into an embrace that nearly upended them both, and Lady Henswick burst into tears against her husband’s shoulder, and the church filled with the ordinary noise of a wedding concluding, congratulations and laughter and the vicar attempting and failing to usher everyone toward the door.
Julian watched it all from a small distance: Eleanor now settled into Louisa’s arms, handed off from the nursemaid who had minded her throughout the ceremony, and Kit standing close beside them, his hand finding a fold of Louisa’s skirt and holding on.
The three of them together, framed in the church’s afternoon light, looked like a family.
The thought should have reassured him. After all, it was the entire point of the arrangement—a household reconstructed around Kit and Eleanor, a stable permanent home for a boy who had known too little of either.
He should have felt satisfied, watching it take shape so naturally, so soon.
Instead, something in his chest went tight and unsettled, watching his new wife laugh at something a lady next to her said, watching Kit’s hand stay curled in her skirts as though he had no intention of letting go, watching Eleanor’s small fist close around a strand of her hair with the same fierce trust.
I promised her a marriage of convenience. Mutual respect, and nothing more. I did not account for how difficult it would be to keep a proper distance from a woman who builds a family out of thin air within the space of a single afternoon simply by kneeling down and meaning every word she says.
Since Daniel’s death, he had built his whole life on the careful conviction that loving deeply only invited the kind of grief he had watched consume Daniel’s wife, Elizabeth, till she died.
He had entered this marriage certain that conviction would hold, that an arrangement built on paper and practicality could not possibly ask more of him than he was prepared to give.
Watching Louisa at the end of the aisle with his ward’s hand in her skirts and her ward in her arms, Julian found himself, for the first time since he had signed his name on that document, uncertain whether he would manage to keep his distance from his wife and whether it would prove nearly as simple as declining a kiss at the altar.