Chapter 31
The first marriage, forged as it had been under a name that had never once truly belonged to her, proved in the end only paper, and paper, however tangled its history, was a small enough thing for a man of Adrian’s rank to quietly set right.
A private word exchanged with a sympathetic bishop, an old acquaintance of his father’s who asked the questions needed and no more.
A page seen to, properly and legally, by his own solicitor.
Within a fortnight, the whole irregular business was tidied away into something no future clerk would ever have cause to question.
A clergyman, an old family friend who had known the Ashcroft’s since Adrian’s own christening, married Adrian’s own parents in that very chapel decades before, was glad enough to oblige the Earl.
He asked no questions about why a second ceremony should be wanted for a marriage the whole county already believed perfectly settled.
Let them assume that we are wildly in love. Perhaps we are, Adrian thought.
The wedding was held in the same small chapel, on a bright morning in early autumn.
The light came through gold and clear through the old stained glass windows.
A handful of witnesses gathered close, Mrs. Scott dabbing at her eyes before the ceremony had even properly begun, Betsan standing near the back with her hands clasped tight in evident excitement.
Cassandra sat beaming in the front pew through the whole of it, radiant and happy.
She was dressed in her favorite blue shade, her color high and her balance entirely her own.
She needed no arm to steady her through the whole long ceremony, and Tristan remained beside her, at last, with Adrian’s blessing given freely now, and without a shadow of the reservation he had once shown him.
“You must be glad to be at this wedding,” Tristan said to her, and Adrian overheard.
“That was not a true wedding,” Cassandra whispered back, dabbing at her eyes, entirely unbothered by being caught out in her own sentiment. “This one is.”
“I begin to suspect you’ll weep at our own wedding twice over, once for happiness and once out of habit.”
“I begin to suspect you’d like me better for it.”
“I like you well enough already, my Cassandra, whatever state your eyes happen to be in on any given day.”
Adrian watched the two of them from the altar, so plainly and entirely happy together.
He found he could not remember why he had ever thought to refuse Tristan’s honest request in the first place, why he had once stood in his own study and driven off the one friend who had never failed him over nothing more than an old fear dressed up in judgment’s borrowed clothes.
Whatever fear had driven that refusal seemed now to belong to some other, colder man entirely, a man he no longer recognized in the mirror.
He found himself grateful, watching his sister’s face, that Tristan had the patience and the generosity of spirit to forgive him for it as thoroughly as he had. His mind drifted more as he stood there, waiting for his beautiful bride.
He had cleared, in the months since Greaves’s arrest, every last debt that had never truly been his wife’s to owe, settling the whole tangled business with the late viscount’s various creditors so thoroughly that not a single further letter or lawyer ever again darkened his door.
He had made his peace, slowly and with effort, with the terrible night his own parents had died, speaking of it now, on the rare occasions it came up between himself and Cassandra.
He did so without the old flinch that had once closed the subject before it could begin, able at last to sit with his sister and grieve together properly.
He realized it was as they ought to have grieved together from the very start, four years earlier, had he only possessed the courage then that he had since found.
He had become, slowly, and entirely by his own choosing rather than by any obligation forced upon him, the brother he had always meant to be.
Somewhere deep down, he was so grateful to have a sister who was walking, even dancing, at the small local assemblies she had once believed forever closed to her.
She scandalized at least one dowager by remaining on the floor through every set of an evening, which reminded him of himself when he was younger.
Living, fully and joyfully, a whole life that not one physician in all of London had ever once believed possible for her, four long years of dark rooms and darker prognoses undone at last by patience, and by love, and by a woman with a surgeon’s steady hands and a surgeon’s stubborn refusal to accept a diagnosis simply because a dozen learned men had already pronounced it final and moved on to their next unfortunate patient without a backward glance.
What he could not get over, and did not once try to, standing now at that altar for a second time, with the whole small congregation of people who actually knew and loved her gathered close around them, was the sight of the woman walking down the aisle.
She wore an elegant ivory gown, adorned with lace and beading.
It hugged her curves and splayed out at the ends in rich chiffon fabrics. Her hair was pinned up elegantly, with a few curled tendrils framing her face. She was a vision to behold, and she was his.
“Nell Frayne,” the vicar said, spoken plainly and without a single note of apology in his steady voice, in a small chapel with no one present left to perform for but the handful of people who already loved her entirely for exactly who she truly was.
For her calluses and quick hands and all, the whole of her laid bare with nothing left hidden.
Say it again, the sound of her name settling into him like a stone finally finding the bottom of a well. Say it a hundred times more, until I have heard it enough to make up for every day you could not say it at all.
“Do you, Adrian Thorne, Earl of Ashcroft, take this woman, Miss Eleanor Frayne, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part?”
He heard the familiar words differently this time, standing there with her hand steady and warm in his own, no falsehood folded anywhere between them now, nothing hidden, nothing borrowed, nothing left for either of them to confess in some later, harder conversation held by candlelight with the whole weight of a secret still pressing between them.
“I do,” he said, and found he meant it more completely than he had ever meant anything in his whole careful, guarded life.
The clergyman turned to Nell next, and asked the same question form, and she answered without a single hesitation this time, no half-beat pause over a name that had never quite fit her, no small betraying stillness for Adrian to notice and set carefully aside.
Only her own voice, clear and certain in the quiet chapel, claiming him as plainly and as completely as he had just claimed her.
“I do.”
“You may kiss your bride,” the clergyman said at last, closing his book with evident satisfaction, and Adrian did, gently, before them all.
Cassandra already wept again in earnest, Tristan’s hand steady at her back, Mrs. Scott dabbing furiously at her own eyes with a handkerchief she had plainly brought for exactly this purpose.
They walked out of the chapel together afterward into the bright autumn morning, the whole small wedding party trailing behind them in high spirits, already discussing the breakfast Mrs. Scott had spent the better part of two days preparing.
Nell paused at the chapel door, looking back once at the small stone building where she had first stood as a stranger wearing a stolen name, and now stood as entirely herself.
“What are you thinking?” Adrian asked, watching her face and taking a stray hair and tucking it behind her ear.
“That I came into that building the first time believing I would soon disappear entirely. Vanish somewhere no one would ever think to look for me, once my part in the whole business was finished.”
She turned back to him, something soft and wondering in her expression. “I did not imagine, standing at that altar the first time, that I would ever stand at it a second time, under my own name, married to a man who knew the whole truth of me and wanted me still.”
“I find I am rather glad the world did not go according to your original plan.”
“So am I.” She giggled. “Though I would not have believed you, that first terrible night, if you had told me so.”
“I would not have believed it myself,” Adrian admitted, “not that first night, watching a stranger sign a false name in my family’s register and thinking I had merely acquired one more duty to be managed and set carefully aside, the way I had learned to manage everything else in those years.”
He had taken a wife once, by cold arrangement, to be rid of a duty he had not wanted and had not believed himself able to refuse.
It was a matter of settlements and solicitors and a debt owed to his own family’s fortunes rather than a love match.
He hadn’t thought twice about the person, just the outcome. It was business, plain and simple.
He kept this one now entirely by choice, mending what needed mending in his weary soul.
He imagined growing old together, having children, and enjoying the things that men and women are meant to.
He looked at his bride once more, and tears threatened to pour from behind him, though he held them back.
I will spend the rest of my life adoring this woman.