Epilogue
Rochelle
Barry and I clear the chairs in ten minutes to either side of the room as his men begin bringing the tables down from the house. Guests mingle on the lawn and terraces, drinking champagne and eating canapes from trays carried by the catering staff.
“That's the system,” he says, glowing when the first table arrives and we place it at the centre back of the marquee ready to dress for the bride and groom.
The linen goes on. The glassware comes out of the crates in the cold larder, and Elsie and two of the girls from the village work down the rows with cloths giving the silver one last polish before setting it out on the tables.
The flowers come last, out of the buckets in the north passage and into the low bowls, dark red and rust and that strange dusty pink that looks like a tropical sunset.
I go around with the place cards at a jog, checking them against the plan, and that's when I notice what Vivienne has done.
Table four is hers. Her own name at the head of it, Honora beside her, Peregrine on her other side, which is a mercy for everybody.
And then the Corvain’s. All three of them.
Delphine, her mother, her father, absorbed onto the Dowager Duchess's table like it was always the arrangement, and to fill it out she has taken four of the groomsmen, the four loudest, the ones who have been doing something with a hip flask behind the yew hedge since eleven o'clock this morning.
I stand there with a place card in my hand and read it twice.
She never said a word to me about it. She has simply taken the entire Corvain family onto her own table, given them the best company in the room, and put them as far from her son as the plan allows.
My name is now beside Lucas’s, in her handwriting, and sharing with the other groomsmen and the bridesmaids who I only just met for the first time this morning because most of them are Theo’s relatives.
I’m still holding it when he walks into the marquee and he says my name.
“Ten minutes,” I tell him, without turning around. “I have flowers and I have the cake to check and your sister's flat shoes are still in the morning room.”
“I just need you for one.” His hand closes around my wrist. “Rochelle. One minute, please.”
There's something in his voice, so I put the card down and let him take me out through the gap where the canvas is laced, past the guy ropes and the pegs and the churned bit of grass where the truck has been, to the old sundial at the top of the slope.
From here the marquee is a white shape with the sun coming through it and the noise of the terrace floats over from the other side of the house, thinned out by distance.
He puts his hand in his inside pocket, and then he kneels down in the dry grass in a suit that was tailored especially for today.
“You'll ruin your suit,” I say. My voice does something strange in the middle of it.
“I have others.”
He opens his hand. The ring is old, warm gold gone soft at the shank, and the diamond in it is cut in a way they don't do anymore, blunt and bright and slightly uneven.
“My mother came to my room at seven this morning,” he says. “She put this on the chest of drawers and she said she wore it for thirty-one years and she would rather see it on a bride than a widow.”
I press both hands to my face.
“I've had it in my pocket through the entire ceremony,” he says. “I stood at the front and gave my sister away with it against my ribs and I couldn’t hear a word the registrar said.” He looks up at me and he isn't controlled at all, not even remotely.
“I've spent four years being sensible about you.
I'm finished with it. Marry me. Live here, work here, fill this house with your lists and your dreadful highlighters, argue with my mother and aunt Honora, name the runt, have my children. I want the whole of it, Rochelle, and I want it soon, and I am not prepared to be reasonable for one more day.”
There's a wood pigeon cooing somewhere in the beeches. Down the hill the quartet has started up again for the drinks, and I can hear Peregrine's voice above them, telling somebody about Nester.
“Yes,” I say.
He shuts his eyes.
“Yes,” I say again, because the first one came out too quietly to count, and I get down into the grass with him because my legs have stopped being able to hold me up. “Yes. Obviously yes. Give it to me.”
He puts it on. It goes over the knuckle and settles like it has been waiting to be on my finger.
Then I remember where I am.
“Lucas.” I catch his lapel. “You can’t tell anyone.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not today.” I'm laughing, and my eyes are streaming, and I am absolutely serious.
“This is Cassia's day. She has waited for it since she was three years old and she has planned it down to the napkins, and I am not standing up in her marquee and taking one single minute of it. Not one. Promise me. Nobody hears about this until tomorrow, or maybe the day after.”
He looks at me for so long that I think he's going to argue.
“You realize,” he says, “that I want to go down that hill and tell every one of them.”
“I know.”
“My mother, my aunt…Barry. I even want to tell Barry.”
“You can tell them all tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he agrees, and he kisses me in a way that makes me glad I’m not standing up.
I go back to the marquee and finish the tables with a diamond on my hand and my heart going like a bird, and if my face gives anything away, everyone is too happy to notice.
***
He keeps his promise.
He keeps it through the receiving line and through the photographs on the terrace, when the photographer puts him next to me twice and he doesn't say a word.
He keeps it through the meal, five courses out of Gloria's kitchen, salmon and lamb and a lemon thing in a glass that makes Honora close her eyes.
He keeps it while Delphine leans across table four to tell me the day has been simply extraordinary, and when Cassia looks over to him questioningly before the speeches.
He keeps it so thoroughly that when Theo's godfather asks him directly whether he is courting anybody at present, Lucas says, “I'm not at liberty,” and pours me a glass of water. I have to put my napkin over my face to hide my grin.
What he does not manage is his sister.
Cassia catches my hand during the photographs.
Just grabs it, the way she has grabbed my hand since we were nineteen, and I feel the exact half second where her thumb finds the ring.
She doesn't say anything. She looks at me and smiles with her whole face, and then she turns back to the camera like a professional.
I should have known then.
The speeches come with the coffee. Lucas’s is short, but poignant, and makes his mother dab at her eyes with her embroidered handkerchief.
Theo's is beautiful. He cries in the middle of it, and everybody loves him more for it.
The best man is mercifully brief. Then Cassia stands up in her dress, which nobody has told her to do, because there is no place for her in the running order at all.
“I have one more thing,” she says, “and it isn't in the plan, but it’s important.”
Under the table, Lucas's hand closes hard around my knee.
“At about one o’clock this afternoon,” Cassia says, “my brother took my best friend to the sundial like a man stealing apples, and he got down in the grass in his very posh suit, and he asked her to marry him. And she said yes.” She lifts her glass.
“And then she made him promise not to tell a single one of us, because it was my day, and she would rather die than have one minute of it.
Which is the most Rochelle thing that has ever happened in the history of the world.
So I'm telling you instead, because it's my day and I can do what I like with it.”
She raises her glass and cocks her hip. “To my brother and my best friend,” she calls out, and a cheer erupts through the marquee. “May your wedding day be almost as amazing as mine.”
A laugh ripples through the guests and the quartet starts up again.
I look across the tables and smile, not entirely comfortable with the attention.
Vivienne catches my eye and lifts her glass toward me with the tiniest inclination of her head. Her mouth is doing something she can't get under control, and Delphine, beside her, raises her own glass and mouths congratulations like she means it.
Lucas leans in against my ear. “I kept my promise.”
***
They clear the middle of the floor for the first dance while the coffee is still going around.
We stand at the edge of it together, out of the light, his arm along my back and his hand resting on my hip like it lives there now.
Theo puts his hand on Cassia's waist and says something to her that nobody else hears, and she laughs and puts her forehead on his shoulder, and they turn slowly on the boards under two hundred fairy lights while the quartet plays something old and slow.
“Look at her,” I say.
“I am.”
“You're not, you're looking at me.” I bump him with my hip.
“I can do both,” Lucas says. “I've had a great deal of practice at looking at you while appearing to do something else.”
I roll my eyes but can’t stop the grin that spreads over my face.
Halfway through, Cassia lifts her head and waves everybody in, impatient, the way she has always been about sharing anything good.
The floor fills. Theo's parents, and Honora with a groomsman who is far too pleased with himself.
Peregrine with Gloria, who has come out of her kitchen for the first time since five o'clock this morning.
I take my shoes off and leave them under the table, and Lucas looks at them, and then at me, and doesn't say a word.
“Come on then, Your Grace,” I tell him.
He takes my hand, the one with his mother's ring on it, and he walks me out into the middle of his sister's wedding where every single person in the county can see us, and he doesn't let go.
Thank you for reading Bred by the Duke.