Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Ididn’t want to disappoint you like this,” Annabelle said.
They were standing at the foot of St. George’s steps, ten yards from the door, close enough that the sound of the organ inside had grown distinct. Lucien had not moved since the carriage stopped. His hat was in his hand, and he turned the brim once between his fingers before he answered.
“You haven’t disappointed me.” He looked at her, and the light off the steps was very white; she could see he had tried to shave twice that morning, there was a small nick at his jaw he hadn’t noticed. “Not once in your life. I want that said before we go in.”
“What?” Annabelle blinked, and her brother returned his attention to the door.
“He’s trapped you,” Lucien said. “I know what he told Lady Rosenhall in that garden. That he couldn’t, wouldn’t, marry you.
And then the license, the letter, all of it arranged before anyone had the chance to ask you what you—” He stopped and looked down at the hat in his hands.
“I can hold both. Being angry at him and not at you.”
“He will be kind to me,” Annabelle said. She had decided this before she got into the carriage, had decided it and then held it for the duration of the ride, and it was still what she believed. “I am certain of it.”
Lucien grunted. “Being kind is not enough. You deserve—”
Annabelle felt the warmth of her brother’s affection for her in those cut-off words, even though he had spent the better part of the last week grouching his way through the house.
“And there is James.” She said the words and knew they were true, even as she used them to head him off. “He is a lovely boy. I am very fond of him.”
Lucien looked at her for a beat too long before he made a sound she recognized as one that meant he had run out of argument and knew it.
So, he pulled her in close: his chin against her hair, both arms, the way he’d held her the winter after their father died, when she was thirteen and had not known how to be less frightened by the world.
“I only wanted to be the one,” he said, into her hair. “To find you someone you truly wanted. Someone worthy of you.”
She closed her eyes and wanted to tell him. She wanted to say: I do want Dominic, even though I do not know what I am to him, and that is the one thing that makes all of this frightening.
But she pressed her palm flat against his lapel instead, once, and pushed away from him. “You’re a good brother, Lucien. You always have been.”
Lucien’s jaw tensed, then he gulped.
“I love you,” he told her.
“I love you, too,” she replied.
Then, he straightened his hat, offered his arm, and walked her up the steps.
The church was St. George’s, and nearly empty, which was the only version of this morning Annabelle could have borne.
On the right side of the nave, Helena and Lady Rosenhall occupied the front pew, Helena with her chin up and her eyes already bright, Lady Rosenhall holding her prayer book flat in both palms with the composure of a woman who had navigated considerably worse and intended to still be standing when it was over.
On the other side: Lord Keldwick, in a coat new enough to still be holding its crease, sitting very still and straight about it, and Elinor, who had James beside her on the pew.
James had his hands folded in his lap. He was watching the vestibule. He saw Annabelle the moment she appeared, and his gaze went to her and stayed there while Lucien walked her the full length of the aisle.
She gave him the smallest nod with a smile tugging at her lips. He returned it, very seriously.
Dominic stood at the altar.
He had not looked toward the doors when they first opened.
He looked when the organ shifted key, and his eyes found her at once and held there.
He wore dark blue, his cravat tied without ornament, his hair combed back save for one piece that had come free at his right temple.
His hands were clasped in front of him. The knuckles were still faintly bruised at the edges from the morning Lucien had arrived at his door.
Lucien placed her hand on Dominic’s arm reluctantly; he did not want to relinquish and stepped back one pace.
The vicar began.
“Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s holy ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
Dominic’s eyes had not left her face. “I will,” he said.
The vicar then turned to Annabelle.
“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s holy ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”
She had heard those two syllables at half a dozen weddings. She said them now and found they weighed considerably more on this side of them.
“I will.” She said, staring at the man standing opposite her as she said it.
Then the vicar nodded to her, and she turned to Dominic, and she said her vows.
“I, Annabelle, take thee Dominic, to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.”
She said to obey without stumbling, but Dominic’s expression did not change while she said it. His eyes were on her face, and his hands were clasped, and he waited until she had finished.
Then it was his turn, and her heart was pounding in her chest, anticipation licking flames inside her veins.
“I, Dominic, take thee Annabelle, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.”
He said each clause in a low and unhurried tone, and when he reached till death us do part, he did not look away. Annabelle did not know what to make of that, so she focused on the
Then came the ring. He took it from his breast pocket and his fingers—still cold, still faintly bruised at the knuckle—found her hand.
“With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow,” he said.
The gold was warm, and Annabelle couldn’t help but think that he had kept it close to his body all morning.
Mrs. Howell had done the house correctly, and that was clear from the moment they came through the door.
Flowers in the hall, white and ordered. The long dining room table laid with the china Annabelle had watched being uncrated and polished the day before.
It had the look of an occasion that warranted celebration, which was a strange quality for a room to carry under the circumstances, but Mrs. Howell was not to know the circumstances, and the flowers were very fine.
Miles was on his feet before the table was cleared, glass raised high, with the bearing of a man who had composed his remarks in the carriage and was rather pleased with them.
“To His Grace and the new Duchess of Silverford,” he said.
“May she accomplish what the rest of us have failed to, which is at minimum keeping him from frightening the staff on a Tuesday. I am told the number of footmen who have given notice in the past year is not quite as high as the year before, so progress has been made, and perhaps there is hope for us all.”
Helena laughed from across the table, genuine and bright. Lady Rosenhall pressed two fingers to her lips with the expression of a woman who found something amusing and was not yet prepared to admit it. Elinor made no effort to suppress her smile.
Dominic said nothing for three full seconds, then: “Thank you, Miles. Very affecting.”
“I worked at it for three days,” he said, and sat.
Lucien raised his glass last. He raised it by an inch, toward Annabelle and not toward the room, and held it there a full two counts, his gaze on her face, before he drank.
From the far end of the table, Annabelle saw Dominic look at Lucien.
She saw it from the corner of her eye, but her brother’s gaze had already moved elsewhere, and then returned to his plate.
He did this three more times across the length of the meal, and each time she noticed. She did not think she was the only one.
Lucien was civil throughout. He answered direct questions with full sentences. He refilled Lady Rosenhall’s wine when the footman was occupied elsewhere. He laughed once, briefly, at something Miles said. He did not, across the full two hours they sat at that table, address Dominic.
James, beside Elinor on the left, had been conducting a census of the centerpiece since they sat down, a cluster of white roses he examined at intervals with the attention of a man whose accounting was not yet finished.
“Sixteen,” he announced, apparently concluding.
Miles, who was nearest to him, looked up. “Sixteen what?”
“Roses.” James pointed. “There are sixteen.”
“Are there?” Miles studied the arrangement with the gravity of a man undertaking a second opinion.
Newton had installed himself somewhere under the table near James’s chair, which Miles had been informed of and had elected not to investigate.
“And is sixteen the correct number of roses for a wedding, or merely the number present?”
James considered this. “It is the number present,” he said. “I don’t know what the correct number is.”
“Nor do I,” Miles replied, surrendering. “No one has ever told me.”
James accepted this as a reasonable answer and returned to his examination.
Lady Rosenhall leaned toward Annabelle’s ear. “I will own it has ended better than I expected.” She was watching James tally the roses. “We shall say no more about the garden.” She picked up her wine and did not elaborate.
She looked up. Across the table, Dominic was talking to Elinor, his attention on her face, fully present.
Then his eyes moved down the table to Lucien again, the same check he’d been running since the meal began, and the line of his shoulders held where they were, and then he returned to Elinor’s conversation.
By four o’clock, the drawing room had thinned, and the afternoon was going gray. Newton had migrated to the window seat where James had gone to observe the street below.
Helena found Annabelle near the mantelpiece and positioned herself close enough that the conversation was private.
“He hasn’t looked at you like you’re a problem he’s solving,” she said. She did not say who, because she really did not need to.
Annabelle turned her cup in its saucer. “We’ve barely spoken since the church.”
“He looked at you when you came up the aisle,” Helena said.
Annabelle did not refrain from rolling her eyes. “Everyone looks at the bride.” She said.
“Not the way he did.” Helena’s cup was at her lips, blinking at her friend over the rim. “I was watching him very specifically.”
Annabelle said nothing.
Lady Rosenhall was the first to reach for her shawl; as that was the signal, and the room arranged itself accordingly.
Lord Keldwick clapped Dominic on the shoulder, said “Felicitations, Silverford!” and turned to leave.
Lady Rosenhall embraced her last, firm and brief, one hand pressing at the back of Annabelle’s head. “Write to me,” she said, and nothing further.
They filed out. The door was down to Lucien.
He had reached the threshold and then turned back, and he came to her in the entrance hall and took both her hands in his, which he did not do in company as a rule, and held them.
“You know how to find me,” he said. “Next door. Any hour. I mean that as a fact and not a comfort.”
“I know,” she said. “I will be all right.”
He looked at her hands in his. Then at her face. “I know you will.” He pressed her hands once, released them, and went.
The door clicked shut.
The house settled around the sound of it.
Annabelle stood in the entrance hall of Silverford House, which was hers now, hers along with the furnishings and the walls and the locked room at the end of the east wing, and she turned, because she heard footsteps behind her, and Dominic was there.
His coat was still on. His cravat had come slightly loose over the afternoon, and the piece of hair at his right temple had not been fixed at any point in the day.
He was looking at her the same way he had looked at her in the church, and at breakfast, and across every room she had been aware of him in since morning.
He had not looked away from her first, all day.
“I have been trying,” he said, “to find the right time to say something to you…since this morning.”
She looked at him, at the way his eyes shifted inside their sockets, at his unwillingness to look her right in the face. The entrance hall was warm, and he was four feet away.
Ask him. Ask him now.
“Then say it.”