Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The house on Curzon Street was quieter than usual, with no gathering scheduled that night, only a low fire in the private sitting room and the three men who knew him better than anyone else in London.
Tristan was the first to see him. He stopped halfway through pouring himself a drink.
"Good Lord."
Sebastian removed his gloves. "What?"
"You look dreadful."
Nathaniel glanced over from the sofa. "That is unusually direct."
"He appreciates honesty."
Julian looked up from the book in his hand.
"What happened?"
Sebastian crossed the room.
Tristan started to pour him a drink without being asked.
"The wedding is arranged."
The room went quiet.
"How soon?" Nathaniel asked.
"One week."
Tristan slowly lowered the bottle. "One week?"
"Yes."
Julian closed his book. "And Amelia?"
Sebastian looked at him.
"She agreed."
Tristan frowned.
"That doesn't sound like good news."
"It isn't."
Nathaniel leaned forward.
"What did you say to her?"
"That I would marry her." Sebastian took the glass and did not drink from it, turning it instead between his fingers.
"Only that?"
Sebastian was silent.
Tristan groaned.
"Sebastian."
"I told her it was the honorable thing to do."
All three men stared at him.
Finally, Tristan said,
"You absolute idiot."
Sebastian glared. "I took responsibility, and I…I protected her."
"You did."
"I ensured her reputation would be protected. Then what exactly have I done wrong? She would not even look at me the entire ride to the clerk’s office. Not properly. Not the way she used to."
"You did propose to her the morning after a public scandal," Nathaniel observed, settling into the chair opposite with his usual measured calm. "I would not expect enthusiasm, under those particular circumstances."
"I proposed because it was the right thing to do."
"No one doubts that it was the right thing to do." Nathaniel's tone stayed even, though something in it carried real weight. "Duty rarely comforts an injured heart, Sebastian. It settles the ledger. It does not heal what the scandal actually cost her."
"I told her I was not marrying her only from duty."
"Did you tell her before or after she had already decided you were?" Julian asked quietly, from his place near the window, and Sebastian felt the question land exactly where it was aimed.
"After."
"Then it landed as an argument, not a comfort.
" Julian turned from the window, his expression carrying none of Tristan's teasing or Nathaniel's precision, only a quiet, careful sympathy that somehow cut deeper than either.
"She did not want to be rescued, Sebastian.
She wanted to be chosen. There is a considerable difference, and I suspect she has spent every hour since waiting to discover which one she actually received. "
"I chose her."
"Did you say so. Plainly. Before the scandal made the choice for you?"
Sebastian said nothing, because there was nothing honest to say that did not confirm exactly what Julian had already guessed.
“She asked me not to see her again until the wedding.” Sebastian confessed.
"There it is," Tristan said, gently, none of his usual mischief in it now.
"You did the honorable thing, Sebastian.
No one in this room disputes that. But honorable and romantic are not the same coin, and I suspect she noticed the difference rather more sharply than you did, standing in that drawing room hearing you announce your intentions as though reading out a verdict. "
"I do not know how to undo it."
"You do not undo it," Nathaniel said. "She has asked for a week, you give her the week.
And after that, you make certain your acrions sat what you failed to say this morning.
Words alone will not convince her now. She has already decided what your proposal meant.
You will have to prove otherwise, in whatever manner she will actually accept. "
Sebastian set his glass down, untouched, and stared into the low fire, turning the whole of it over in his mind: the wedding one week hence, her face at the bottom of the Doctors' Commons steps, the week of distanced she asked of him, the brief pressure of her gloved hand in his before he had forced himself to let her go.
I did what society demanded of me. He thought it plainly, without flinching from it, because flinching from it would not change what he'd done. And in doing it, I may have cost myself the one thing I never meant to lose.
"I have a week," he said finally, quietly, more to himself than to any of them.
"You have a week," Julian agreed. "I would not waste a single day of it."
"His Grace has already sent word, Miss Hartwell.
" Madame Girard spoke around a mouthful of pins, adjusting the drape of ivory silk at Amelia's shoulder with brisk efficiency.
"He instructed me most particularly to spare no expense.
Every yard of lace, every fitting, every alteration, all to be settled directly with him.
I have never in twenty years of dressmaking received quite so generous an instruction. "
"How thoughtful of him." Amelia kept her voice even, though her chest went tight and cold at the news.
"Thoughtful is precisely the word. His instructions were most particular." Madame Girard straightened, studying the fall of the fabric with a critic's eye. "You are a fortunate woman, Miss Hartwell."
"Yes." Fortunate. The word sat oddly in her mouth.
A man who could not bring himself to say he wanted her had apparently found it easier to pay for whatever she required instead.
As though the whole difficulty between them might be settled the way he settled his tailor's bill, promptly and without further discussion.
She held her composure through the remainder of the fitting, and lost a fair portion of it the moment she reached home, dropping onto her bed amid a spread of ribbon samples with a sigh that had very little to do with fatigue.
"That bad?" Mary settled beside her, already sorting through a box of trim with the single-minded focus she brought to anything involving fabric.
"He has instructed the modiste to spare no expense. Everything billed directly to him."
"That sounds very generous."
"It sounds like a man settling an account, Mary.
Not a man marrying a woman he actually wants.
" Amelia picked up a length of pale blue ribbon and set it down again.
"I cannot tell what he wants from any of this.
Whether he wishes for a wife, or whether he simply wishes for the scandal to disappear, and a wedding happens to be the fastest way to manage it. "
"Perhaps it is both."
"That is precisey the problem."
"Only because you seem determined to believe one must make the other untrue.
" Mary held up two ribbons side by side, considering them with a seriousness entirely disproportionate to the question.
"People are not always able to say the true thing plainly, Amelia. Sometimes it’s easier to show what one feels than to put it into words.
Papa has never once told Mama he loves her outright in my hearing, and yet he has brought her the same bouquet of white roses every anniversary for three and twenty years, and I have never once doubted what he meant by it. "
"White roses are not the same as settling a modiste's bill."
"No. But they are both a man saying something he cannot manage to say with his mouth.
" Mary set the ribbons down and took Amelia's hand instead, squeezing it once, gently.
"I do not know what is in his heart, dearest. I only know that a man who did not care at all would have left the arrangements to your father and thought no further about it.
He did not do that. Whatever it means, it is not nothing. "
Amelia said nothing to that, turning the thought over long after Mary had gone to bed, and found no comfort in it strong enough to outlast the week still standing between her and an altar she was no longer certain she wanted to reach with quite so many unanswered questions still hanging over it.
The church was full by the time Amelia arrived.
Apparently, neither family had seen any advantage in pretending the wedding was something to hide.
Every pew was crowded with faces she recognized from a dozen ballrooms, familiar mouths that had smiled at her over champagne glasses and eyes that had watched her dance, flirt, stumble, and, most recently, become the subject of London's favorite scandal. They turned as one when the doors opened.
For one strange moment, Amelia wanted to laugh.
Of course they had come.
London had been fed this story for a week. It had dissected every rumor, embroidered every detail, and invented whatever pieces it had not been given. Now they had gathered to see how it ended.
Only Amelia was beginning to realize that it was not ending at all.
It was beginning.
She tightened her fingers around her father's arm.
The realization made her stomach twist.
She was not merely walking down an aisle. She was walking toward a man she had once thought she would never marryand a life she had never imagined for herself, a future decided so quickly she had scarcely had time to understand that it was hers.
And yet, beneath the fear, there was something else. Something she had been trying very hard not to name.
Sebastian.
She looked toward the altar. He was waiting there in dark blue, tall and composed, his shoulders straight and his expression carefully arranged into the calm dignity expected of a duke. Anyone looking at him would have seen a man entirely certain of himself.
Amelia knew better.
She had learned his silences.
She had learned the small tightening of his jaw when he was troubled, the way his fingers became still when he was holding back words, the look in his eyes when something mattered more to him than he wished anyone to know.
She saw all of it now.
He was nervous.
The knowledge should have comforted her.
Instead, it made her heart beat faster.
"You need not do this if you have changed your mind," her father murmured, low enough for only her to hear, his arm steady beneath her hand. "It is not too late, even now."
Amelia swallowed. For one treacherous second, she allowed herself to imagine turning around. She could walk back through those doors.
She could go home. She could remove the gown, send away the guests, let London talk until it found something else to occupy itself with.
The thought brought relief. And then, unexpectedly, grief. Because she did not want to leave him. That was the truth she had been avoiding.
Not because she was frightened of scandal. Not because circumstances had forced her into this.
She wanted Sebastian.
Perhaps not in the simple, uncomplicated way she ought to want her future husband. Perhaps wanting him was precisely what frightened her most.
"It is rather too late, Papa." She kept her eyes forward, on the altar, on the tall, composed figure waiting there his eyes serious and considerably darker than usual. "But thank you for offering."
Sebastian watched her the entire length of the aisle. He did not look away. And as Amelia drew closer, the carefully composed expression on his face began to fracture, not enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps, but enough for her.
There was tension in his jaw and uncertainty in his eyes. And when their gazes met, Amelia felt the strange sensation of being seen.
She reached him. For a moment neither spoke. Then Sebastian's eyes moved over her face, lingering just long enough to make her suddenly conscious of her own breathing.
"You look well," he said quietly, when she reached him, the vicar already opening his prayer book, the whole congregation settling into the hush of a room about to witness something it had been anticipating for days.
Amelia almost smiled. Of all the things he might have said.
"You sound surprised."
"I am not surprised. Merely grateful I managed the words before the ceremony required something more formal of me."
A ghost of warmth crossed his face, quickly smoothed away as the vicar cleared his throat, and the ceremony began in earnest. Amelia had always imagined that when the moment came, she would feel certain.
Instead, she felt everything at once. Her heart pounded so violently she was certain someone must hear it.
Her palms were warm despite the coolness of the church.
Every word the vicar spoke seemed to carry an unbearable weight.
She said her vows when it was her turn, her voice steadier than she expected, and heard Sebastian say his in a tone that carried more than the words alone required, something underneath the formal language that she could not entirely name, though she felt it land close to her heart regardless.
They signed the register side by side, her hand not quite steady on the pen, his signature beneath hers bold and certain in a way his voice had not quite managed to be.
"I now pronounce you husband and wife."
The words settled over her strangely, final in a way the whole preceding week had somehow failed to prepare her for, and when Sebastian turned to her, something raw moved briefly across his face before he mastered it back into composure, and she wondered, watching it happen, whether anyone else in that crowded church had seen it too.
They walked back down the aisle together to a wave of murmured congratulations, her mother dabbing at her eyes, Mary grinning outright despite the whole complicated mess of how they'd arrived here.
Tristan was calling out something teasing that she didn't quite catch over the general noise, and Julian, near the back, offering her a small, private nod that felt, somehow, like the truest congratulation of the entire church.
Outside, the afternoon light hit them both at once, and the crowd gathered on the steps to watch them emerge, husband and wife, the scandal of the Season concluded properly, exactly as society required.
"It is done," Sebastian said quietly, beside her, watching the same crowd she was watching.
"It is done," she agreed.
Neither of them moved to take the other's hand, not yet, both still too careful, too uncertain what the gesture might mean or fail to mean, and Amelia stood there on the church steps in her wedding gown, married to a man she was no longer entirely sure she understood, and thought, with a clarity that startled her, that whatever scandal had brought them to this moment, the far harder work of actually knowing each other as husband and wife had not yet even begun.