Chapter 9 #2
So she said nothing until she realized they weren’t headed to Sedgewick Manor. The carriage was turning down the familiar lane to Farrow Cottage instead. She wasn’t sorry—she had no desire to be ensconced in that dilapidated old house. And yet, a part of her balked.
“We’re to Farrow Cottage then?” she asked.
“You will be more comfortable there.”
That was true. Still, she could not help wondering whether, now that he had done his duty and married her, he meant to deposit her at the cottage without a second thought. As if he had paid his debt and was now filing the receipt away. She, naturally, being the unwanted slip of paper.
When the carriage stopped, and he again waited for the coachman to assist her instead of offering his own hand, she was certain that was correct. He wouldn’t even look at her. Fred was turned toward the drive, watching as Thomas’s conveyance approached.
She lifted her skirts and marched into the cottage alone. This must truly be the worst wedding day in history, she thought as she stepped over the threshold and stopped short.
The little table where they always took their meals, bare when they’d departed that morning, now stood laden with a full spread: cold roast beef, trout in aspic, spiced pears, game pie, buttered rolls, and a towering bride cake crowned with white sugar.
Julianna blinked though several very long moments of confusion. “What is all this?”
“I believe it is your wedding luncheon, sister.” Thomas entered the cottage behind her with the nurse’s support.
“Oh, how lovely,” Mrs. Sykes exclaimed. “It will do you good to eat, Mister Farrow.”
Julianna turned to Fred, now hovering in the doorway behind the entire wedding party, such as it was. He had one gloved hand braced against the doorframe, his jaw once again clenched tight enough that she could see the muscle jump beneath the skin. And his abominably attractive dimples.
“Eat. I brought my chef from London to prepare it.”
“Will you not stay?” Thomas asked.
Fred shook his head once. “No.”
“We are too lowly for you to break bread with?” Julianna asked, stiff with indignation and folded arms.
His gaze met hers. “No.”
She narrowed her eyes, readying her retort, but as before at the altar, some fleeting look crossed his features—something unguarded and gone almost at once.
She might have thought it was longing if she didn’t know better.
If Frederick Sedgewick wasn’t the Earl of Chester.
But she knew he wanted for nothing. And what was longing but wanting what you could not have?
“Sit and eat,” Thomas said to her. “Fred can go if he likes.”
She turned away from her husband, hearing him inhale sharply as if he meant to say something more. Something cutting, no doubt. But instead he swung his cloak about his shoulders and strode out, the door snapping shut behind him, as it always did.
“Running away, as ever,” she muttered.
“Would you rather he stayed?” Thomas asked.
“No. Of course not. But it’s no dream to be discarded like yesterday’s rubbish, either.”
“No, I suppose it is not. But look on the bright side, sister. You’re a Countess now. He will keep out of your way and your—” Thomas’s cheeks flushed and he didn’t finish that sentence.
“Keep out of my what?”
“Nothing.” He gave a rattling cough that Julianna almost thought sounded forced. As if coughing weren’t the one thing Thomas had in abundance.
“Tom?” she asked but when he turned away from her and coughed again, this time blood flecking the handkerchief he clutched in his hand, she said, “Take it slowly, Tom. It’s been a long day.”
That night, long after the dishes had been cleared and the nurse had coaxed Thomas back up the stairs, Julianna sat alone at the little table with the bride cake no one had eaten.
It was a tall monstrosity of a thing—surely overambitious for Farrow Cottage—iced with a thick layer of gleaming white sugar that had been worked into stiff peaks and scalloped borders.
Someone— Fred’s chef, no doubt—had brushed the icing with a faint dusting of gold leaf that caught the lamplight.
At the cake’s crown perched a pair of sugar figures, a bride and groom no bigger than her thumb.
The groom stood straight and impassive, one arm stiffly bent.
The bride’s face was smoothed into a pleasant, vacant smile, her painted eyes forever lifted up and gazing at her groom.
She plucked the woman from the cake and held her in her hands.
The rest of the cottage was quiet if not exactly peaceful. It had been too busy a day for anything as prosaic as peace. Upstairs she could hear Thomas turning in his bed and the nurse’s faint footsteps as she too readied herself for sleep.
She moved her hand to set the bride back onto the cake but at the last moment popped the woman into her mouth instead.
The rush of sugar made her teeth ache but she bit down anyway and tried to savor it.
Sugar was a luxury after all and not one she was accustomed to.
But it was too sweet, too much, and she swallowed it down rather than spitting it back out.
Outside, wind worried at the eaves and she feared a storm might be brewing. It was the middle of April and Dorset was located in the south of England along the coast, but still the weather would not let up.
Julianna rose at last and climbed the stairs, stopping at the narrow space outside Thomas’s door where she sometimes slept. She leaned her forehead to the wood, listening to him breathe, and let the exhaustion roll through her in a silent wave.
Married, she thought, and still alone.