Chapter 23 #2
“I have wasted enough time being uncertain,” she replied. “I find I’ve lost the taste for it.”
He was quiet again. The street sounds drifted up through the window, and somewhere below them the house was settling into its evening stillness.
“All right,” he said at last. He reached out and took her hand, briefly, and then let go in the way of someone who was not yet entirely practiced at the gesture. “All right. I will hold you to that.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” she said.
* * *
The wedding was on Christmas day.
It was, as these things went when a duke’s sister married a marquess who was heir to a dukedom, somewhat inevitable that it would become a society event of some scale.
Megan had tried, once, to suggest something smaller.
She had observed Harry’s expression and Oliver’s expression and her mother’s expression and Dorothea’s expression, and she had not tried again.
She was experienced enough in the navigation of unavoidable things to recognize one when she was surrounded by it.
They wanted to put all rumors to rest and have her take her rightful place in society no matter how much of a fraud she felt.
The church was St. George’s in Hanover Square.
The guest list was precisely as long as it needed to be and not a name longer, which had required Oliver to spend considerable time in negotiation with Harry’s social secretary.
The flowers were white roses and lilies from the Duke’s heated winter orangery, filling the interior of the church with a sweetness that caught in Megan’s throat when she walked in on Harry’s arm and stopped being preparatory and became real.
She wore ivory silk, simply cut, in the style that the dressmaker had noted suited her best, though she was honest enough with herself to know she would not have cared very much what she wore as long as it did not hinder her walking to the front of that church to stand beside Oliver as her legs shook.
She wore her mother’s pearls. She carried the ring Oliver had given her, transferred to her right hand for the ceremony, because she had told him she did not want to remove it and he had, without any particular fuss, arranged for it to stay.
She had thought, in the weeks of planning, that she might be frightened.
She had spent so many years afraid of men, afraid of what compliance produced and what refusal cost, that she had constructed an expectation of fear as the appropriate response to any moment of significance in her life.
She was not certain she knew how to move toward something rather than simply endure it.
She was not frightened.
She was aware, as she walked down the aisle on Harry’s arm, of the sheer implausibility of it.
Of the congregation rising to its feet for a woman who had arrived in London a few weeks ago with a bullet wound and a dead earl and no public identity.
Of the flowers and the light and the approving or merely curious faces arranged in their pews.
Of her mother, in the front row, who had been crying quietly since the organ began and was making no attempt to stop.
Of Dorothea, beside her, entirely dry-eyed and looking fiercely, precisely satisfied.
Of Oliver.
He was standing at the front of the church with Webb at his shoulder, which Megan gathered had required its own set of negotiations, and she could see from the top of the aisle that he was watching her with the same expression he had worn in the Welsh forest when he had first begun to look at her as something other than a complication to his plans.
The expression she had catalogued before she had names for what it meant.
She was rather better at reading him now.
Harry placed her hand on Oliver’s arm at the altar, and she felt the moment Oliver’s hand covered hers, steadying, certain, and she looked up at him and thought, here you are. Here we are. As we should be.
“Happy birthday,” he said, low enough for her alone.
“Thank you,” she said. And then, because she had learned in the past weeks that she was allowed the luxury of honesty with this man, she added, “I’m looking forward to receiving my present—you.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “As am I.”
The ceremony was conducted by a Bishop who was clearly delighted by the social eminence of the occasion and rather less clearly cognizant of the fact that the two people before him were not particularly attending to his observations on the sanctity of matrimony, being occupied with looking at each other in the way that people did who had arrived at something important by an improbable route.
Oliver’s voice, when he made his vows, was steady and direct. It was how he always spoke when the thing he was saying mattered most. She had learned that about him, that he stripped away all decoration when he meant something absolutely.
She said her vows clearly, which surprised her, because she had half-expected her voice to fail at the last moment. It did not. The words came out steady, and she was glad of it, because they were words she had not said before and did not intend to say to anyone else, and they deserved to be heard.
The ring went on her finger.
The bishop said the necessary words.
Oliver kissed her, with rather more feeling than was perhaps strictly required, and behind them in the pews something that might generously be described as restrained applause broke out, which Megan suspected owed something to the Dowager Duchess’s evident approval of the scene.
The light outside was subdued but the sun was poking through the grey cloud.
December in London was inconsistent in its generosity, but today had elected to behave itself, and the sun was warm on Megan’s face as they came down the steps of St George’s to the waiting carriage and the crowd of curious onlookers who had gathered to observe the occasion even on this frosty day.
Oliver handed her in and followed, and the door closed behind them, and they were alone for the first time all day.
“Lady Astor,” he said.
It landed differently than she had expected. She looked at her hands for a moment, at the ring on her left hand now, at the pale silk of her dress. Then she looked at him.
“Is it strange?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Or rather, yes, but not in the way I anticipated. I thought it would feel like an ending of something. It feels rather more like a beginning.”
Oliver took her hand, which he had a habit of doing in carriages, she had noticed, as though the motion of the vehicle excused it. She had never once discouraged him.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“A little.” She leaned her head back against the seat. “But it is a good kind of tired. The kind that means something was worth the effort.”
The breakfast reception at Newbury House was everything it needed to be and lasted three hours, which Megan felt was roughly two and a half hours longer than it needed to be, but she managed it with the grace.
She drank champagne and spoke to people she had only just met and thanked the ones who wished her well and responded with polite vagueness to the ones who were more interested in examining her than celebrating with her, and at no point in any of it did she forget, not for a single moment, that Oliver was in the room.
He appeared at her elbow at intervals. He did not hover.
He was simply, reliably, there when she needed him, with a glass precisely when she was thinking about wanting one, or a quiet word that gave her something to smile genuinely at when she had been managing smiles for too long.
Thirty years old and he had already learned to read her with a precision that she found more extraordinary the more she considered it.
The carriage left at six o’clock.
They would stay overnight at a posting inn north of London and continue through the following days at whatever pace was comfortable given the weather, which Oliver had decreed with the same matter-of-fact authority he applied to most arrangements, and which Megan had not argued with because she had looked at the distance on the map and thought, it’s a long way to Scotland.
She thought it the way she had thought it during her years of captivity, which was as a word that meant somewhere else.
Somewhere vast and indifferent and wild, where the sky was enormous and the land did not care who you were or what had been done to you. Somewhere she could hide.
She didn’t need to hide now.
She had put it in her mind at sixteen, when Penharrow had first begun to make her understand what the shape of her life would be. She had taken it out and examined it in the very darkest times. She had never quite been able to kill it.
Scotland. The place she thought would mean safety for her.
They cleared London’s edges as the light began to dim, the city giving way gradually to roads flanked with hedgerows, farms, the wider sky of country. Megan pressed her fingers to the carriage window and watched it happen.
“You’re thinking,” Oliver said.
“I’m always thinking.”
“You’re thinking about something specific.” He had been watching her, she knew, in the comfortable way of a man who had stopped pretending he wasn’t. “You have a particular expression.”
“And what expression is that?”
“The one where you are somewhere else and also entirely here.” He paused. “You had it occasionally in Wales. Usually before you said something that upended one of my assumptions.”
Megan turned from the window and looked at him properly.
The light caught the edge of him, his profile, the line of his jaw and the scar at his temple and the particular quality of patience in how he sat, waiting for her to say whatever she was going to say.
He was so handsome that she couldn’t reply for a moment.
“I used to think about Scotland,” she said.
“Tell me.”