Chapter 7
The chapel was small. Rosamund did not know what she had expected—something vast, perhaps, something proportioned to the name she was about to take, with marble columns and gilt and the crushing grandeur that seemed to follow Tristan Rathbourne like weather.
Instead, the building sat on a quiet Mayfair street, built of pale stone that the morning light touched gently, as though even the sun understood that what was about to happen here required softness rather than spectacle.
Four witnesses occupied the front pews. A clergyman stood near the altar with his prayer book already open.
A single arrangement of white flowers had been placed on the chancel rail—simple, unshowy, chosen by someone who understood that excess would have been an insult to the woman walking through the door.
And at the altar, Tristan.
He stood proudly, his lips a thin line. Dark wool, no ornamentation, his hands clasped behind his back.
His gaze was fixed on the middle distance, seeing nothing, or seeing too much and refusing to let it register.
Rosamund couldn’t help but wonder if this was as difficult for him as it was for her.
And again, she wondered about his true motivations.
What if… She swallowed. What if he wanted more than she was willing to give?
Then he looked at her.
Rosamund felt the impact of it in her chest, her heart fluttering in a treacherous way.
Something in his eyes was… intimidating, was the only word she could think of.
She suddenly felt quite uncomfortable in the simple dress and hair.
As though even her wedding attire was telling the truth: I come to you with nothing, and you know why.
His gaze moved over her slowly. It caught on the lace at her collar. Dropped to the hands clasped at her waist. Rose again to her face, where it stayed a fraction longer than control should have permitted. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly and she wondered.
Was he satisfied with his bride? Or disappointed by his sacrifice?
She lifted her chin and walked forward.
Clara held Eleanor’s hand, her rag doll wedged under her opposite arm.
She had been instructed, in gentle but emphatic terms, to remain quiet and still during the ceremony—instructions Clara appeared to regard as advisory rather than binding.
She surveyed the chapel with open curiosity: the stained glass, the candles, the clergyman’s vestments.
Then her attention fixed on Tristan as though she had identified the most interesting object in any room and intended to investigate.
“Eleanor,” Rosamund whispered, “please hold her —”
Alas, it was too late.
Clara released Eleanor’s hand and crossed the aisle with the unhesitating only a child could have. She stopped directly before the Duke of Rathbourne, tilted her head back to look up at him and regarded him with a frankness that would have made diplomats weep.
“You’re very tall,” she announced clearly.
Tristan looked down. Whatever composure he had built for this morning cracked ever so slightly, as a smile pulled at the corners of his lips.
“I am,” he said.
“Are you cross?”
“No.”
“You look cross. Your face is doing this.” Clara pressed her lips together and drew her brows down in a scowl of such devastating accuracy that Eleanor made a strangled sound from the front pew. “See? That’s what you’re doing.”
Again, his lips twitched—as though he was doing his best to hide a smile that threatened to break open the granite of his face.
“I am not cross,” he repeated, kneeling down. “Are you not afraid of me?”
Clara’s face scrunched up in confusion.
“Why?”
“Most people are.”
There was a strange tone to his voice—as though it did not entirely please him to know that people were afraid of him.
Clara’s nose wrinkled. “You’re not frightening. You’re just big.” She reached up and tugged his cravat. “This is too tight. That’s why you look cross. My sister says when things are too tight they make you grumpy. She says that about her shoes.”
The silence in the chapel had taken on a quality that Rosamund could only describe as held breath.
The clergyman had frozen with his prayer book half-raised.
Eleanor’s hand was pressed over her mouth.
Adrian Beaumont, stationed near the altar as Tristan’s witness, wore an expression of such barely contained delight that he appeared to be shaking.
Tristan looked at Clara, and whatever he saw—the rumpled pinafore, the crooked stockings, the rag doll crushed against her chest —did something to the architecture of his face.
The severity softened. The expression of a man standing at the edge of a country he had been told did not exist, discovering that it did, and that it was populated by a six-year-old girl with a crooked collar who had decided, without consulting anyone, that he was worth approaching.
“May I?” He reached toward the rag doll cautiously.
Clara considered. Then, with the gravity of a queen bestowing a favour, she held the doll out.
Tristan accepted it. He held the thing—wool and cotton and the desperate repairs of a woman who had nothing else to give—with a carefulness that seemed to cost him more than the gesture warranted.
He straightened the doll’s arm where it had come unstitched at the shoulder, turned it right-side up, and handed it back.
“She has been well looked after,” he said.
Clara beamed. “Her name is Bess. She’s brave.”
“I can see that.”
“She protects me at night. From the bad things.”
Tristan’s hand, still half-extended, trembled slightly. He withdrew it and folded both hands on his bent knee with a precision that hid everything except the effort of hiding it.
“Then she is very good at her work,” he said quietly. “And I suspect she learned it from your sister.”
From the corner of the chapel, Rosamund watched.
She had steeled herself for this morning the way one steels oneself for surgery—numbness first, endurance after, and a resolution not to look at the wound until it was safely dressed.
She had rehearsed her composure. Had built it brick by brick during another sleepless night, mortaring every joint with the certainty that this was a transaction and nothing more.
She had not prepared for this. For the sight of the Duke of Rathbourne kneeling on a chapel floor, holding a rag doll, and handling it as though it were the most important object he had ever been given.
For one unguarded moment he did not look like the man who had ruined her life. He looked like a normal man, one who could be kind. Human. One who could care about a child, one who was worthy of being cared for.
She pressed her nails into her palms. Stop it. Stop it now.
The clergyman cleared his throat.
Tristan rose. Clara returned to Eleanor, apparently satisfied that the duke had been sufficiently inspected and found adequate. Adrian stepped forward, working rather hard to look composed.
The vows began.
Rosamund stood beside the man she was about to marry and listened to the clergyman’s words as though they were being spoken about someone else.
Dearly beloved. She was not beloved. Joined together.
She was being fastened, like a door to a frame, by the pressure of circumstance and the cold logic of a world that punished women for the sin of having no one left.
For better, for worse. She could not imagine better. Worse, she knew intimately.
When her turn came, she spoke the words clearly.
She had promised herself that much. She would not sound hesitant or broken.
She would be strong. Her voice held. Her hands held.
The chapel held its breath, and she said I will with the same steady precision she had used every morning for the past four years to tell Clara that everything would be all right.
Tristan spoke his vows with the deliberate gravity of a man signing a binding contract, each word weighted and measured and meant.
His voice did not waver. His gaze did not leave her face.
And when the clergyman asked for the ring, he produced it from his waistcoat pocket—a band of plain gold, unadorned, chosen with the same refusal of ostentation that governed everything about him—and slid it onto her finger with a touch so careful it might have been mistaken for tenderness by someone who did not know better.
She knew better.
The gold sat warm and foreign against her skin. She resisted the urge to twist it.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The words fell into the chapel and settled like dust after a detonation. It was final.
Duchess of Rathbourne. The title closed over her like borrowed robes.
She turned from the altar. Tristan offered his arm. She took it because refusing would have required an explanation she did not have the resources to construct, and the stiffness of his forearm beneath her gloved fingers told her that he had expected refusal and had braced against it.
They walked the length of the aisle in silence. Eleanor followed with Clara, and Adrian brought up the rear, his footsteps easy and unhurried, as though he were leaving a luncheon rather than a wedding that had reshaped three lives in the space of a quarter-hour.
At the chapel door, Clara broke free of Eleanor’s hand again.
She did not run to Rosamund. She ran to Tristan.
Her small fingers reached up and closed around his—the hand that was not holding Rosamund’s arm, the one that hung at his side, unguarded.
She gripped two of his fingers with unthinking possessiveness.
As though this man, who was apparently feared by all but her, now belonged to her as much as the ragdoll.
Tristan’s stride broke. A single misstep, barely perceptible, like a clock losing a gear.
He looked down at the small hand wrapped around his fingers.
Then he looked at Rosamund, and in his gaze she saw something she had never expected to see in the eyes of the man who had destroyed her world—the raw, exposed bewilderment of a man who had been chosen by a child and had no idea what to do with it.
He did not pull away.
Rosamund stared at their joined hands—Clara’s small fingers wrapped around the duke’s, trusting and absolute—and felt the ground shift beneath her. Marrying the duke was one thing. This… seeing him as so utterly human… was something she had not been prepared for in the slightest.