Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Asimple wedding ceremony did not immediately change a man’s outlook on life.
Or at least, it hadn’t changed Roman’s when he said his vows and listened to Tamsin speak her own.
He had read through the entirety of the service before leaving for the church where her family attended services.
He had rehearsed his lines privately, in his thoughts, and did not stumble.
The ceremony was like all weddings he had attended, and when he left the old stone building with Tamsin on his arm, he handed her into the carriage the way he had handed other ladies into carriages.
Nothing in his life had altered yet, he supposed, as they entered her family’s house for the wedding breakfast.
Lyness arrived and clasped his hand. “Can you believe it, brother? Your wife is one of us now, an Eastwood. I promise I will be as true a brother to her as I am to you.”
He greeted Tamsin and kissed her cheek and Roman’s vision shifted. Cleared.
Wife. It wasn’t Tamsin beside him—well, it was. But she was not merely another lady to escort. She was his wife.
He could not focus on the other guests and family members as they came through the receiving line. It took moving away from the entry and into the drawing room for his thoughts to advance.
Roman had attended enough breakfasts, dinners, and assemblies to know precisely how a room ought to feel when things were going well. Sycamore Lodge, on the morning after his wedding, felt like a room going well in spite of itself.
Anne Mayweather had not stopped moving since he had arrived with Tamsin on his arm.
She corrected the placement of a chair, murmured something sharp to a maid about ham, and swept past him with a smile so bright it verged on a warning signal.
At some point, Tamsin slipped away to speak to her younger siblings.
He remained rooted to the spot, fascinated, as Mrs. Mayweather whirled about.
He understood now precisely why Tamsin had spent a decade running this household instead of enjoying it. Competence, in this family, was not a gift. It was a talent absolutely no one, save his bride, seemed to cultivate.
He found himself itching to take charge. No wonder Tamsin had. Once that thought struck him, he sought out his wife.
He found her near the sideboard, quietly redirecting a borrowed footman on his placement of fruits and tarts, and something in him went taut with the wrongness of it.
Roman stepped up directly behind her, nearly brushing her skirts. “You are not to do that today,” he murmured, voice low so only she would hear it.
She started. “Oh—Lord Hartwell. You startled me. I am not to do what, exactly?”
“Manage.” He nodded at the footman, already correcting course with red ear-tips. “Whatever needs doing, someone else will do it. That is the entire point of a wedding breakfast.”
“It is only the placement of a few—”
“Tamsin.” He said her name, the one he most preferred, the way he might address a point of order.
He regretted it instantly when her eyebrows shot upward.
No. He was not going to manage her. “My Lady Hartwell,” he said, and her chin tipped upward.
“Let them get it wrong. It will not matter nearly so much as you think.”
She stared, as if trying to form a counterargument.
His lips twitched. “I am told my skill at debate is quite high, my lady wife. Do you wish to test it today?”
Her dark eyes held his, then crinkled at the corners.
“I suppose I would prefer a fair showing of my own skills on another topic entirely.” Slowly she stepped back from the sideboard and let her hands fall still at her sides.
That lasted only a moment before she was gripping her skirts to give her fingers an occupation. “What am I to do, then?”
Roman wanted to disentangle one of her hands and give it the purpose of holding his own, an absurd notion. He shook his head. “You are to enjoy your family and friends who have come to wish us well. You are to rest, Tamsin.”
It was such a small thing to give her. He was faintly astonished by how much it seemed to cost her to accept it when her expression tightened rather than relaxed.
Across the room, he saw his mother watching the exchange without appearing to watch it at all—a skill the former Lady Hartwell had perfected decades before Roman had needed it himself.
He did not attempt to guess what she made of it.
He had long ago stopped trying to read his mother's conclusions before she offered them.
Mrs. Mayweather reappeared at his elbow with a strange, overly bright expression, delivering a complaint in a tone more suited to charming news.
“I do wish we might have asked more of our friends to come,” she said, “but one hasn't the room—still, I shall send cake round to all of mine directly. They will be so pleased to hear of the wedding and enjoy at least a small part of it.”
All of her friends? Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue. Surely, Tamsin had a list of people she would wish to share her moment with.
“I am certain they will,” Roman said, and watched her sail off entirely satisfied by his agreement.
Kettlewell materialized at his elbow. “I have found the good drink hidden away in a room full of stuffed birds.” He shuddered.
“I braved the feathers to avoid whatever potion is laid out as the wedding punch.” He sipped a glass decidedly empty of the pink-ish-hued punch the other guests were sipping.
“Longest ceremony I have sat through since my cousin's, and hers had a bishop.”
Roman’s lips twitched upward. “The vicar felt strongly about thoroughness.”
“The vicar felt strongly about the sound of his own voice. Small mercy the Marriage Act didn't require a second reading or more scripture.”
“Small mercy indeed,” Roman agreed, and found he meant that, too—some low, private relief that the whole business of getting married in England had not been made any more complicated than it already was for men with less patience than he possessed.
It was some time later, the room comfortably loud with Nelsons and Mayweather children and his mother's low conversation with Mrs. Holly, that Roman found himself watching Tamsin from whatever side of the room he was on throughout the festivities.
When the meal was called at last, he sat beside her at the dining table.
Already, he wondered if he had miscalculated in at least one respect.
He had expected competence. He had married her, in part, for her ability to care for her entire household and recognize when she needed assistance.
What he had not expected was the ease with which she'd absorbed an entire room of people, those who came as his guests as strangers, in under an hour.
She was already remembering names, deflecting Mrs. Holly's more pointed questions with a lightness that cost her nothing, drawing Kettlewell into a conversation about the Christmas assembly even though he detested such topics of conversation.
Her siblings deferred to her, her father appeared proud, her stepmother breathless. His friends all had worked to put her at ease only to find her already quietly calm.
She was better at this than Roman was, and he had been bred for it.
He waited until there was a lull and gained a moment alone with her near the window, before he revealed what he'd been turning over.
“You are doing this all very well.” He heard the stiffness as the words left his mouth and could do nothing to call it back.
“The people. My friends. All of it. I had not—that is, I do not think I anticipated how well you could move through a crowd. I did not presume you would manage so well.”
Tamsin blinked. “That is either a compliment or an insult, and I find I cannot tell which.”
“A compliment,” he said, apologetic and quickly. “Badly delivered.”
“Very badly.” Her lips turned up a little more.
“I'm aware.” Roman adjusted his cuff nervously, a habit he was aware of and could not seem to break. “I am better at delivering remarks in the Guildhall than I am at telling my own wife she impresses me.”
Something in her expression shifted—amusement to surprise, he thought, though he could not have sworn it yet.
In time, he would come to know all her expressions.
At present, he did not examine it further.
He was too occupied with a small, unwelcome discovery of his own: that he had rehearsed political speeches with less difficulty than he'd just managed a few honest sentences to Tamsin, and that the difficulty had nothing to do with words and everything to do with the fact he had wanted, quite badly, for her to believe him.
He did not have a name yet for wanting something to land with honesty for one specific person.
Roman tucked the discomfort away with the vague, uneasy sense he would be revisiting it later, and went to find his mother before he muddled another conversation with his wife.
Tamsin had never imagined her own wedding breakfast, though she had attended others over the years.
She had experienced such events as a thing which happened to other women, within other families, where someone else arranged for the ham and the seating, and it fell to her to look after the small catastrophes of too many children in one room.
She had not even had much time, since her engagement a mere two weeks before, to think about what her wedding breakfast might be like.
Perhaps she should have known she would spend the first hour of it fighting the urge to manage it.
It was Roman who had stopped her. She considered the moment more than once through the morning—his body warm behind hers, his voice pitched low enough to make her shiver. You are not to do that today.
She had spent more than a decade being the sole person in the house who noticed when something needed doing. To be told, gently, that it was no longer her job…it felt less like relief than like standing on a floor she wasn't certain would hold.