Chapter Seventeen #2
She left him in the gallery with the seating plan, and did not weep on the stairs, but lay awake the whole of the night beside the question, the way she would learn to lie awake beside him.
***
“Hold still, Your Grace, or I shall pin you into the wedding, and the gown to your arm, and a bride bleeding at her own rail is a thing this county would tell its grandchildren about.”
“I am holding still, Mrs Garnett.”
“You are holding still the way a soldier holds still before a thing he does not expect to walk away from. I have dressed many brides to know the one kind from the other.” The housekeeper worked a pin into the grey silk at Elinor’s shoulder.
The gown was plain, made up in three weeks from a length Mrs Garnett had been hoarding against an occasion she would not name, and it was beautiful in the way plain things are beautiful when they fit.
“There. Now the sapphires, and you are a picture.”
“No sapphires.”
“Your Grace. There is a parure. The Rothmere sapphires. A duchess wears the sapphires on her wedding morning. It is not done, to marry a duke in a string of seed pearls a governess might have owned.”
“Then it shall be the first wholly honest thing about the whole arrangement.” Elinor fastened her mother’s pearls at her own throat, the one valuable thing she had carried out of her father’s wreck, and they sat there small and plain and entirely hers.
“I will not go to the altar disguised as a thing I have not yet been told I am.”
Mrs Garnett went still with the pins in her hand, and when she spoke again the briskness had gone out of her voice.
“You are not happy. A bride should be at least nervous, and you are not even that. You are off somewhere in yourself that I do not care for. Has he done a thing to you?”
“He has done nothing but arrange a wedding.”
“Then hear an old woman this once, for I have served that family many years and earned the liberty. That man has not looked at his own correspondence in three weeks, for thinking of Thursday, and I have watched him do it. Whatever notion you have got into your head about the boy, or the talk, or his reasons, you have hold of the wrong end of it entirely.”
“Do not.” It came harder than she intended, and she gentled it, but did not take it back.
“Please, Mrs Garnett. I cannot be reassured this morning. A reassurance is only another sort of arranging, and I have had three weeks of arranging, and I cannot bear another kind sentence built to settle me down. Pin the gown. Let me get through the day on my own two feet.”
The housekeeper pinned the gown and said nothing further, and her silence was its own grieved opinion, and Elinor wore it down the aisle along with all the rest.
By her own choosing, the church was cold and half empty.
The Marchioness’s and Lady Cassandra’s pews stood empty, and Elinor read the two of them as she read everything, a sentence in a language learned young and never quite unlearned.
Mrs Garnett wept from the second row with the abandon of a woman who had waited seven years to weep at something that was not a funeral.
Theo stood up beside his father in the complained-of coat and did not complain.
“I have not dropped it,” Theo whispered the instant she reached him, the ring strung on a ribbon round his neck. “I have been not-dropping it a whole hour. It is the most important thing I have ever not done in my life.”
“Then we are a matched pair this morning,” she whispered back, “for I am about to do the most important thing of mine, and the trick of it is the very same, which is to do the right thing and not the wrong one by the smallest margin in the world.”
The boy took it for the high solemn compliment it was, stood the straighter for it, and the service began.
The duke made his vows in a voice that did not stumble on a single syllable.
“I take thee, Elinor, 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.”
Every word was distinct. Every word was meant.
He was a man who would not say a thing twice, and so he weighed each one as though it were the only time he would be given the saying of it, and it was the most beautiful thing she had heard in the whole of her life.
But it was still, even here, even now, only arranging.
He vowed her the entire of what a man may promise and gave her not the one thing a man can only feel, because no liturgy had thought to write that down, and a man who never said things twice was not going to add it unprompted.
The gap between the promise and the feeling was exactly the width of the rest of her life.
She signed the register in the cold vestry afterwards, her hand quite steady.
Elinor Wrenfield, in the bride’s place, the last time she would ever write it.
And beneath, where the clerk’s finger pointed, the new thing, the thing she was now.
She wrote it out in full and watched the ink dry on the cream paper, black and final, the very name Lady Cassandra had handed her through a cracked door three days before and called a vacancy.
Elinor, Duchess of Rothmere.
A second duchess, in a borrowed church, in her mother’s pearls, married to a locked room.
She had got everything she had refused to let herself want, and she did not know, signing her own new name, whether she had been chosen or merely filled in.
Not-knowing was the thing she carried out under the cold bells, on the arm of her husband, into the rest of her life.