Chapter 23
The doctor came every other day. He was a small, precise man named Fellowes who had the particular manner of a physician accustomed to patients of rank, which was to say he delivered his pronouncements with enough authority to discourage argument while remaining carefully non-committal about timelines.
“The wound is clean,” he announced, on his fourth visit to her bedchamber at Newbury House. “The shoulder will be stiff for some weeks yet. You are not to lift anything heavier than a teacup with that arm, my lady.”
“And if I do?” Megan asked.
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“If I lift something heavier. What precisely will happen?”
Dr Fellowes glanced at Oliver, who was standing near the window with his arms folded, not daring to say a word.
“You risk tearing the healing tissue,” the doctor said, recovering himself. “Which would set your recovery back by several weeks, cause scaring, and lead to considerable pain.”
“Then several weeks it will be,” Megan said pleasantly. “Thank you, Dr Fellowes. I shall endeavor to disappoint you as little as possible.”
After he had gone, Oliver turned from the window.
“You are the worst patient in England.”
“That is an extraordinary claim. Have you met many?”
“I’ve met Webb.”
She considered this. “All right. Second worst.”
From the corridor came Webb’s voice, raised in mild indignation. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to,” Oliver called back. He came and sat in the chair beside the bed, the one he had occupied so regularly over the past days that she suspected it had begun to conform to him. “How does it actually feel?”
“Like someone put a bullet in it,” she said. “But less so than yesterday, which I understand is progress.”
“That is progress.” He was quiet for a moment. “Fellowes says another fortnight before you can think about resuming normal activity.”
“Fellowes says a great many things.”
“Megan.”
“I know.” She met his eyes. “I know. I am being patient. I am simply very bad at it.”
“You are extraordinary at it,” he said, which was different from what she had expected him to say. “You have been patient for fourteen years. You are allowed to find this particular patience difficult.”
She looked at her hands.
“What happened to Penharrow’s men?” she asked. “The ones from the house.”
“The two who didn’t run have been questioned. Carmichael is satisfied that the magistrate has enough to proceed with. Between Webb’s testimony and the solicitor’s accounts, the whole of it is being unpicked fairly efficiently.” He paused. “You don’t need to worry about any of it.”
“I’m not worrying. I’m asking.”
“I know the difference,” he said. “I’m telling you anyway.”
* * *
It was her mother and Dorothea who arrived together one morning in the second week, which Megan had learned to recognize as a sign that something had been arranged without her knowledge.
“We’ve been discussing the wedding,” her mother said, settling into the chair near the window with the serene authority of a woman who had spent decades managing large households.
“Have you,” Megan said.
“St George’s, we think. Hanover Square.” Dorothea seated herself on the edge of the bed with the ease of a woman who considered formality optional in private.
“Christmas Day would make it a special occasion and Oliver can never forget your wedding anniversary as it’s also your birthday and Christmas.
Your shoulder will be fully recovered, the weather may be a problem but I’m hoping snow stays away, and it gives us adequate time to arrange everything without rushing. ”
“You’ve already spoken to the bishop,” Megan said.
Dorothea’s expression did not change. “I have spoken to the bishop’s secretary.”
“Dorothea.”
“He was very accommodating.”
Margaret Fairfax, Duchess of Newbury, hid a smile behind her teacup. “The dressmaker has suggested ivory silk. Simple lines, which I think will suit you very well.”
“You’ve spoken to the dressmaker too,” Megan said.
“I asked her to put aside some fabric,” her mother said, with the tranquil reasonableness of a woman who saw no distinction between the two things. “You don’t have to use it.”
Megan looked at her mother, then at Dorothea, then back at her mother.
“Did anyone think to ask Oliver what he thought of the date?”
“Oliver,” Dorothea said, “said whatever you decide is agreeable to him as long as it’s soon, and then returned to his correspondence.”
“That sounds like Oliver.”
“It does,” Dorothea agreed, with considerable satisfaction. “He’s a sensible boy. He always has been, underneath the stubbornness.”
Margaret set down her cup. “Megan. Do you have any preference? Truly. Because if you want something smaller, or different, or later, that is entirely within your right to say.”
Megan thought about it. She thought about what she had wanted, in those long years in Wales, when imagining a future had been an act of private rebellion rather than genuine expectation. She had not, in truth, imagined a wedding at all. She had imagined only afterwards. A life that was hers.
“Christmas Day would be lovely,” she said. She also didn’t wish to wait any longer. She wanted to be with Oliver—in his bed. “St George’s is fine.” She paused. “I would like the ring I already have to stay on my right hand during the ceremony. Oliver said it could.”
Her mother’s eyes softened. “Of course.”
“And I would like the reception to be no longer than two hours.”
Dorothea looked briefly as though she might argue. Then she looked at Megan’s face and evidently thought better of it. “Two hours,” she said. “We shall manage.”
* * *
Harry came to find her the evening before the wedding.
She was sitting in the window of her room, reading, or making the motions of reading while actually looking at the street below.
He knocked and came in without waiting for an answer, which she had noted was characteristic of him, and sat down on the window seat opposite her with the particular set to his jaw that meant he was preparing to say something he had been assembling for some time.
She knew the look because it was her look.
Her heart bloomed as she took in her brother. She loved him more than she could say.
“Well?” she said, closing the book.
“I have something to say,” he said.
“I gathered.”
He looked at her. The evening light was coming in at an angle that caught his fair hair, and she thought, not for the first time, how astonishing it still was to have a brother. To look at someone and see yourself in the angle of the jaw, the line of the brow.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I give you away.”
“You do.”
“I have had you for a few short weeks.” His voice was even. It had cost him something to make it even, she could tell. “Six weeks, Megan. I have been looking for you for many years and I have had you for six weeks and tomorrow I hand you to someone else.”
“You’re not handing me to someone else,” she said gently. “You’re setting me free to live my life with the man I love. It will never mean I don’t love you or want you in my life. But soon you’ll marry and have a family of your own too.”
“It feels very like the same thing from where I’m standing.”
She studied him. He was not a man who showed distress easily, her brother.
He had her father’s dignity, her mother said, which Megan understood to mean he had learned very early to hold difficult things at a distance.
But he was not holding this at a distance.
He was letting her see it, which she thought probably meant more than he knew.
“Harry,” she said. “I am not going anywhere.”
“Scotland,” he said. “You are going to Scotland.”
“For a short period of time—two months at the most. And then we come back, and we are very likely to be in London for a significant portion of every year, because Oliver’s grandmother will insist on it and she is approximately twice as determined as either of us and we have both already established that arguing with her is a waste of energy.
” She leaned forward. “You are not losing me. I have only just found you. I am not remotely interested in being lost again.”
He was quiet for a moment. “He’s a good man,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her. “I didn’t want to think so, initially. But he is.”
“He is,” she agreed.
“He would walk through fire for you.”
“He more or less already did.”
“Yes.” Harry looked at his hands. “Yes, he did.” A pause.
“It’s only that I keep thinking about all the things I don’t know.
Years of you that I missed. Things I should have been there for.
I don’t know what frightens you or what you love or what makes you laugh.
I am still learning who my sister is and you are about to go and be someone’s wife. ”
Megan felt the tightness of it in her chest. The particular ache of things that were irretrievably true.
“You will learn,” she said. “We have time, Harry. That’s the thing I had to learn, when I first came here. That time actually exists for us now. We are not going to lose it.”
He nodded, slowly. Not entirely convinced, but trying.
“Besides,” she said, keeping her voice light, “you are going to need me when you find the woman you want to marry.”
Harry looked up. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’ll want a second opinion. Someone who can tell you if she’s worth you. I intend to be extremely useful in that capacity.”
He stared at her with an expression of such pure affront that she nearly laughed.
“I have absolutely no intention,” he said, “of getting married.”
“How fortunate,” she said pleasantly, “that no one has yet asked you to.”
“I’m serious.”
“You are twenty-five years old and deeply serious about nearly everything, which is in itself a recommendation for finding someone who isn’t.” She looked at him steadily. “You will meet someone, Harry. And when you do, I will be there. I give you my word on it.”
Harry was quiet for a moment. Then he made a sound that was somewhere between scorn and resignation and possibly something warmer than either.
“You are very certain about everything,” he said.