Chapter Nine
Rochelle
The coffee pot is still in my hand when the door shuts behind them. I set it down on the trivet with both hands and frown into my cup.
Theo, who has said perhaps forty words to me in the two years I've known him, clears his throat. “For what it's worth, I think you're the only reason there's going to be a wedding.”
“There was always going to be a wedding,” I tell him. “You'd just have had it without any chairs.”
Honora snorts.
Peregrine finishes his toast and claps his hands together to shake off the crumbs. “Yes. Well. Is nobody coming to see these puppies?”
***
The registrar calls at ten and I confirm that he has the vows, and that the ceremony is on the grounds not at the chapel. He asks me if I’m certain that’s what the bride and groom want, and I assure him, for the gazillionth time, it is.
Lucas finds me in the morning room a little before noon. He shuts the door and says my name in the voice he used on the laundry floor last night. I don’t know why that feels like it was already a hundred years ago.
“I'm going to speak to her,” he says.
“You already did.” I don't look up from the file. “You did it beautifully. You stood next to me and you said loud and clear that you choose me. It meant a lot.”
He nods. “I do choose you, but I’m worried of what that means for you.”
I shrug. “It means we take whatever gets thrown at us together, side by side.” I look at the time. “I need to find Cassia,” I say. “Do you think she has had long enough to process?”
“Only one way to find out.” He drops a kiss on my forehead. “She'll be at the lake.”
The path down to the lake goes through the beeches and comes out where the ground flattens and the reeds start.
The bench is on the west side, facing the water, and it's been there since two months after their father died.
Somebody keeps the grass cut back around the legs of it.
The little brass plate on the top rail has her father's name on it, and I know for a fact that Cassia chose the wording herself.
She's sitting in the middle of it with her arms folded, looking out of the water like she is waiting for it to tell her something.
I sit down beside her.
“Why?” she barks.
I take a breath. “Which why?”
“Any of them. Pick one.”
A moorhen makes a great deal of noise from somewhere in the reeds. I consider one of the many ways I’ve thought of telling her, then I decide to just start from the beginning.
“He kissed me in the library four years ago,” I say. “The night after Christmas. It lasted about six seconds and then he stopped and walked out and passed me the toast rack the next morning like it hadn't happened.”
Cassia turns her head slowly. “The Christmas with the goose?”
I nod solemnly and suppress the smile that’s trying to spread at the memory. “The Christmas with the goose.”
“That was four years ago.”
“I'm aware.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She looks at me now, incredulous that I could have kept something like this from her.
“You told me about the man at the conference with the wife he'd forgotten to mention. You told me about the one who cried at the aquarium.” Her voice is climbing.
“You told me you had a verruca from that spa we went to!”
“You'd have been furious with him, and he'd have known you were furious with him, and it would have gone through that house like damp. So I didn't tell you, and I stopped coming.”
She goes very still.
“The spa,” she says, the realization of it making her sink back onto the seat.
“The spa,” I agree.
“And the bed and breakfast by the lake with the scones.”
“Yep,” I admit.
Cassia looks out at the water for a long time. When she speaks again it's quieter, and there's something underneath it that isn't anger.
“I put you next to him at my engagement dinner.”
“You did.” I nod.
“He didn't come.” She pushes her hair back off her face with both hands and holds it there.
“He didn't come to my engagement dinner. He sent that ridiculous decanter. And I remember standing in the hall thinking, how could he be so busy as to miss my engagement dinner.” She lets her hair go.
“I think part of me knew. I just ignored it because that was easier than thinking of my best friend with my brother. Urgh.” She scrubs her hands over her face.
“I’m sorry, Cassia. I think we both tried really hard to pretend we didn’t have feelings. It was easier when we weren’t around each other. We didn’t plan it. I barely said two sentences to him since that first night in the library…”
“Don't be nice to me, I'm working up to something.” She wipes her face with her sleeve. “This morning, when Mamma said all that, do you know what the worst part was? For about two seconds I thought, oh, that would explain it. That would explain why you’re friends with me.”
My mouth drops open. “Cass, don’t ever think I’m your friend for any reason other than the fact that I absolutely adore you.”
She looks at me. “You wouldn’t be the first, Ro.”
That’s the moment I decide to tell her.
I tell her about the meeting on Friday afternoon in Nigel's office, and the phrase strategic review, and how they framed it as mutual.
How I said thank you at the end of it because apparently that's what I do when the rug gets ripped out from under me.
I tell her about the letter that arrived on Tuesday morning and is still lying on my kitchen table because I couldn't make myself put it in a drawer.
I tell her about the boiler, and the two months' pay, and my grandparents, who ask me every Sunday how work is going, and how my gran tells the whole of her Thursday club that her granddaughter is a senior project manager.
Then I tell her why.
“It’s because they wanted access to you and your brother, and I kept saying no.
At first, I was polite about it, and I’d say ‘they’re too busy,’ or ‘No this wouldn’t be in their interests.
’ But they kept pushing and pushing so I finally told them that they hired me for me, not my connection to you and Lucas… ”
I pinch my mouth closed and chew the inside of my cheek.
“And…” Cassia probes.
I shrug. “And they found a way to get rid of me. Because they didn’t hire me for me at all, they hired me to get to you.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, picking at the bobbles on the knee of her leggings.
“When you rang,” I add, “I'd been sitting there for four hours not knowing how to tell anyone. And I realized I could have five days of being with you, helping you with the wedding, spending time with you. I didn’t even think Lucas would be here...” I trail off and look over the water.
“You should have told me,” she says. “You could have told me.”
“Which part?” I ask.
“All of it. I feel like you don’t trust me or something.”
I snort. “Of course I trust you, Cass, you know all my secrets. I just didn’t want to risk spoiling your wedding.
I know how long you’ve been planning it.
” I mean it so completely that my voice goes strange.
“I got in the car and I stopped being a woman who'd been fired and had no idea what to do next and started being a woman with a plan.
You have no idea what you did for me by calling.
So don't sit there feeling sorry for me, because I've had the best time sorting your wedding out and I got to spend it with you.”
Cassia sniffles into her sleeve.
“You're in love with my brother.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I'm getting there at an alarming speed.” “Which is why I'm going to say the next bit properly, and I want you to actually hear it, and then I want you to take some time and not answer me by the end of the day.”
She sits up. Her face is a mess but she is still so vibrant and beautiful it makes me chest ache.
“If you don't want this,” I say, “I'll stop.
I'm not going to pretend that it would be easy, because it wouldn't be.
I'd probably be unbearable about it for a good while.
But you were my friend first. You've been my friend since we were nineteen and you'd never used a launderette or cooked a potato.” Cassia makes a noise.
“I'm serious. If you tell me you can't have your best friend and your brother together, I'll stop.
But I'd need you to be okay with never seeing me in this house again, because I can't do the version where I come at Christmas and eat goose opposite him for the next thirty years. I've tried it. It's horrible.”
Cassia stares at me.
Then she says, with enormous scorn, “You absolute idiot.”
I bow my head. “That's not one of the two options.”
“He's been unbearable for four years.” She's laughing and crying at once.
“And now I know why. Do you know what he's like?
Do you know what it's like having any kind of function with him? He sits in the library like a Victorian ghost.” She grabs my hand hard enough to hurt.
“You're not allowed to give him up for me, that's the stupidest thing anybody's ever said to me.
I'd have been okay with it. If I'd been asked, four years ago, I'd have said get on with it, just don’t tell me the details.” She shudders.
We sit there a bit longer. She puts her head on my shoulder and tells me the runt has a white foot, and that Theo has rewritten his speech again, and that she doesn't care where anybody sits anymore, and would I mind terribly if she went and shouted at her mother a second time.
“Does she really think I’m a gold digger?” I ask, scrunching my face in disgust. “Because seriously I’d rather be a celibate spinster for the rest of my life than know someone thinks that of me…”
“She knows you’re not,” Cassia says. “She was probably just shocked.”
We hear the car while we're coming back up through the beeches.
It comes around the front and stops with that expensive crunch beneath the tyres, and Sanderson gets out.
Delphine Corvain gets out of the back once he has opened her door for her, and stands looking up at the west face of the house with her sunglasses pushed into her hair.
She's lovely. Beautiful even, and yet when I look at her, I don’t feel anything. I thought I might be insecure or jealous. But I’m just happy my best friend is okay.
“Right,” Cassia says, wiping her face on her sleeve one last time. “Watch this.”
She goes down the steps at a jog with her arms already out and her voice at full carrying volume, and inside of thirty seconds she has Delphine by the elbow, has told her she looks divine, has apologized for the state of everything, and is walking her toward the house.
She says something about the puppies and Delphine laughs lightly.
The chairs come at twenty past one. Barry's men bring them down from the fountain in stacks of six on a sack truck, and I take the last of them by hand because the truck can't do the step at the bottom of the terrace and I'd rather move a chair than stand still.
I'm halfway across the grass with one under each arm when Vivienne says my name.
She's on the gravel path, her hands folded in front of her, and she looks, for the first time since I've known her, like a woman who has had to walk somewhere on purpose.
“Miss Gallacher. Might I have a moment.” I cringe internally at the use of my title and surname again. She was fine calling me Rochelle before this morning. Now I feel like she is reminding me that I’m a nobody.
I put the chairs down and turn to her.
“I was unforgivably rude to you this morning,” she says.
“In my own dining room, in front of my family, to a guest. My daughter has since explained her feelings on the subject at some length and with a great deal of volume, and she was right.” Her chin lifts a fraction.
“That is not why I'm here. I would have come anyway. It might have taken me until this evening.”
“Lady Vivienne.”
She shakes her hands, “Let me finish, please.” She looks past me at the marquee for a second.
“You have been coming to this house for seven years. You sat up with Cassia the entire night before her father's funeral and you didn’t come down to breakfast, which meant nobody had to be brave in front of you. You have never once asked me for anything. Not an introduction, not a weekend, not a name. I knew that this morning, and I said what I said regardless, because I was frightened. I was frightened for Lucas but I was also frightened for you. But then you’ve been part of our lives for long enough now to know what it would mean to be Lucas’s wife.
” She stops. “That is the whole of it. I would like you to forgive me.
I'm aware I haven't given you a reason to.”
The marquee canvas cracks in the breeze behind me. A hundred and sixty chairs are stacked in the grass, and there's a woman in front of me who has apologized perhaps four times in her life.
“I forgive you,” I say. “I'd like it on the record that it was a horrible thing to say.”
“It was a horrible thing to say.”
“Then we're square.”
She inclines her head, which I suspect is as close as she comes to relief. Then she looks down at the two chairs sitting on the grass between us, and she does a thing I will be telling people about for the rest of my life. She bends, takes hold of the one nearest her by the back rail, and lifts it.
“Well,” she says. “Where are they going?”