Epilogue
Two days later, Alice was married, properly this time.
She walked down the aisle of the same chapel on the same warm stone past the same flowers, though there were a great many more of them now, and Joanna had insisted on cornflowers among the lilies.
Blue and yellow, the colors of the painted arrows, which no one but the bride and groom understood and which made Alice laugh out loud halfway down the aisle, a thing the ton would discuss for a fortnight.
She wore the same gown. At her throat, she wore the small gray pendant which had been restored to its place by her groom’s hand on the chapel steps not ten minutes ago.
And this time, she was attended not only by her sister but also by Joanna, who was walking solemnly behind them in apricot silk, carrying a white wicker basket trimmed with ribbon in which lay a small brown puppy who had been bathed against her will and who regarded the entire proceedings with deep suspicion and one chewed ear.
At the end of the aisle stood Cassian.
This time, he did not look like a man at a funeral.
Richard, who was standing next to him, had remarked on it in the vestry.
He had stressed that he had never in eleven years seen Cassian look like that, and Cassian had told him to be quiet and had not been able to stop the corner of his mouth from twitching.
Richard had laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and said nothing more.
On his other side stood Victor, sober as promised, holding the ring in a hand that was not entirely steady.
And behind him, in the front pew where the bridegroom’s family sat, Matthew leaned on his cane, his one good eye fixed on the doors.
His weathered face held a look of such open, unguarded pride that Cassian had to look away from him or risk losing his composure before the bride had even arrived.
The whole ton had come.
Cassian understood perfectly that they had for the spectacle, to see whether the Lockwood girl who had jilted the Duke of Langton in this very chapel a week ago would do it again.
They had come to witness either a triumph or a disaster, not greatly minding which so long as it could be discussed at dinner.
He found he did not care in the least what they had come for.
Let them watch. Let them see exactly what the Ice Duke looked like when the doors opened and the woman he loved walked down the aisle toward him a second time, choosing him with his pendant at her throat and her bright face turned up to his.
Let them write that in their scandal sheets. He hoped they would.
Daphne lowered her sister’s hand into his.
Alice felt his fingers close around hers, warm and certain, and she looked up into his face.
He looked down into hers, and there was a moment, before the vicar began, when neither of them heard a single word.
There were only the two of them, who had begun in a ballroom with an insult and a stolen kiss and who had hated each other thoroughly and on principle.
And who had, somewhere between an orangery and a studio, stopped lying to themselves and started being more true to one another than either had ever been to anyone.
“You came,” he murmured under the vicar’s opening words, so only she could hear. “You walked the whole way down. I confess I watched the doors.”
“There was no carriage this time,” she murmured back. “I looked. I was rather hoping to be difficult.”
“I gave the carriage to Joanna. She has plans.”
“God help us all.”
“Lady Alice.” His thumb stroked over her knuckles. “Eyes on me.”
She kept her eyes on him, on the gray eyes that were not cold and never had been, through the whole service, through the vows that they both spoke sincerely and wholeheartedly.
She kept her eyes on him when the vicar pronounced them man and wife and when he abandoned every rule his father had ever beaten into him in front of the whole ton.
He took her face in both his hands and kissed her, thoroughly and at length and with no dignity whatsoever, until the chapel rang with scandalized gasps and the puppy’s startled barks.
“I love you,” Alice said against his mouth with the whole world watching. “I love you, you impossible man. I have loved you since your dreadful scowl.”
“And I love you,” Cassian murmured.
He had not said the words aloud to a living soul in sixteen years, and now, he found, to his great surprise, that they cost him nothing at all, that they were in fact the easiest thing he had ever said.
“I have loved you since you rated those gentlemen with your fan and found them wanting. Or before that. Maybe since the night you threw pebbles at my window and told me, in the dark, that you did not care in the least what I believed. I decided then that you were nothing but trouble, and I have rarely been so right about anything. Come here, we are not nearly finished.” He kissed her again.
It was, by the unanimous and scandalized agreement of the ton, the most improper wedding kiss anyone present could remember.
It was discussed at dinner for a fortnight exactly as Cassian had hoped, and not one word of the discussion was unkind because there is nothing the world loves so much as two people who have stopped pretending.
Lady Westbury wept through the whole ceremony and well into the wedding breakfast. Lord Westbury stood at the back of the chapel with his arms folded and his jaw set and was seen by his younger daughter wiping his eye with the back of his glove which he later denied.
The puppy, freed at last from the basket, conducted herself disgracefully among the flowers.
And Daphne, watching her sister kiss the Duke of Langton with her whole heart out in the open, leaned toward Lord Dowton, who had asked for her hand two days ago in a fit of unaccustomed courage and been gladly accepted.
She whispered that she had never in her life seen anything so happy, and that she hoped very much that they would be half so happy themselves.
They would be.
But that, as they say, is another story.
The End?