Chapter Four
“A duke?” wondered Lady Foskett. “You, of all the women in London?”
She had come to the doorway of Cecilia’s room uninvited, as she came everywhere, and she stood looking at the open trunk on the bed as though it were a sum that refused to come right.
“So it would seem,” Cecilia said, and went on folding her second-best dress carefully, having never owned enough dresses to be careless with one of them.
The trunk contained the whole of her worldly possessions. Two dresses, a winter pelisse, four changes of linen, a small box of letters she kept only because they were her one proof that anyone had ever thought her worth writing to, and a book.
“What he can possibly want with you,” Lady Foskett said, “unless the man is truly desperate, I am sure I cannot imagine.”
She never said cruel things cruelly. That was the whole of her art. She said them as plain facts already known to the room, and a fact was a great deal harder to argue with than an insult.
“I imagine his reasons are his own,” Cecilia said, with the composure eight years had made very nearly involuntary, and laid the dress in the trunk.
“You will write to me, I expect, when it comes apart. Arrangements of that kind always do.” Lady Foskett made her small survey of the stripped room, the bare dressing table, the window loose in its frame.
“A man does not marry a portionless companion for the pleasure of her conversation, whatever he tells you on the way to the church.”
“Then it is as well I was promised no pleasure, only employment.”
“You have grown a tongue this morning.”
“I have always had one. You preferred it kept behind my teeth, and I was grateful enough for the roof to oblige you.” Cecilia pressed the second dress flat. “I find I am a little less grateful this morning, and a great deal less obliged.”
For a moment, Lady Foskett seemed almost to respect that, though she would have died before she said so. “Well. One would hope you have learned something useful in eight years under my roof. I should hate to think the whole of it wasted on you.”
Then she went down the corridor, certain she had carried the last word, which she had not, though Cecilia saw no profit in disabusing her of it.
Who else would have you? The question trailed her about the room while she closed the trunk, and she let it come, because the answer had changed inside a single week, and Lady Foskett did not yet know it.
She was leaving. She set the Cowper on top of the pelisse, worked the stiff lock home, and there was the whole of eight years, shut up in a box with a worn handle.
***
The carriage Gideon had sent carried no crest on its door.
She had half expected something grand, without ever quite asking herself why, and the plainness of it told her that someone had thought about what an unmarked carriage would mean to a woman leaving a house that was closing, and had chosen it on purpose.
She approved of that a great deal more than she had any business approving of a carriage.
She kept her eyes forward as it pulled away. She had tried looking back once, at twenty, leaving her father’s house, and had found nothing behind her worth watching. Forward, then, whatever forward turned out to be.
***
Everything happened very quickly. The chapel was small and cold and smelled of candle smoke and old stone, which she preferred to flowers and performance.
There were only four of them: Gideon and herself, Lord Vane, and Phelps, the duke’s man of business, spare and precise, who had plainly seen enough of human arrangements to be surprised by none of them.
He inclined his head to her with something close to respect.
Vane crossed to her at once. “You came. I will confess I had laid myself a small private wager that you might not, and I have never been so pleased to lose money in my life.”
“I had nowhere else pressing to be this morning,” she said, “and I have always held it poor manners to leave a man waiting at an altar.”
“He would have waited regardless, which is just as well, for anyone unacquainted with him might take him for a man perpetually measuring the distance to the door.”
Gideon stood near the altar in dark clothes, very still, and looked up when she came in.
She had worn her best dress, green wool three years old, brushed and pressed into a respectability it did not quite manage on its own. She had done her own hair, having had no maid in years. She had made the most of what she had, which was a fair enough summary of a good deal beyond her appearance.
“Miss Wren,” he said.
“Your Grace.” It struck her as precisely the kind of absurdity that wanted naming aloud. “In ten minutes or so, that will be a different form of address entirely.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth, the barest suggestion that a smile existed somewhere as a possibility he had heard of.
“Indeed, I suppose it will,” he said.
The vows were short, a licence marriage quickly done, the full weight of the law with none of its pageantry, and she had no objection to brevity.
They gave the responses the form required of them, his voice low, steady and meaning every word in the saying of it, which steadied her rather more than any softer thing could have.
When the ring came, plain gold and unexpectedly warm from his closed hand, she put out her own, and her fingers chose that moment to betray her with a small tremor she had not sanctioned and could not call back.
His hands closed about hers, large and careful, steadying without gripping.
His thumb pressed once at her knuckles, brief and firm and without a word to draw attention to it, and the trembling stopped.
She looked up to find him already looking at her, grey eyes level and attentive, and for two seconds, perhaps three, she was held there entirely, until the ring settled home with the small final click of a thing that had found its place.
He let go of her hand, and she managed to breathe.
Vane produced champagne from somewhere, having plainly been planning it longer than the morning warranted, and poured with all the ceremony the vows had gone without.
Phelps took a glass, unused to drinking before noon but willing to make an exception for the day.
Gideon declined and stood with his empty hands at his sides, faintly uncertain what to do with them at his own wedding.
“To the Duke and Duchess of Aldenmere,” Vane said, raising his glass, “and to an arrangement of the most practical character, with which I personally had nothing to do.”
“You had everything to do with it,” Gideon said.
“I have chosen to remember it otherwise, and I will thank you not to correct me over my own champagne.” Vane turned to her, the dimple in evidence. “Your Grace. It is a very great deal of pleasure to me to call you that, and I intend to do it often, and entirely without his leave.”
“Then you and I shall get on admirably,” Cecilia said, “for I expect it will take me a fortnight to answer to it without looking over my shoulder for someone more deserving.”
“You will grow into it within the week. I have an eye for these things.”
Cecilia drank. It was very good champagne, chosen with the same quiet exactness as the carriage and the ring, and she told herself to stop taking note of such things, but with no success.
The carriage to Aldenmere held the two of them and some four feet of careful, strangers’ silence. He sat across from her, filling the whole of the opposite bench without sprawling, and for a good mile, he said nothing at all, until it seemed he had decided that silence was its own discourtesy.
“The children come on Thursday next,” he said. “Phelps will bring them down from town. I thought it better you had a few days to find your feet in the house before three strangers were added to it.”
“That was considerately done. Will they have been told what I am meant to be to them?”
“They will have been told the truth. That I have married, that you have come to keep the house and to stand as their mother before the court, and to be whatever else the three of them will permit, in their own time. I will not have them lied to. They have had a great deal of that already.”
“Then we agree on it. A child smells a lie out before any grown person does, in my experience, and resents it a good deal longer.” She studied him a moment. “What is it you will want of me, in plain terms? I would rather know the shape of a post before I am standing in the middle of it.”
“Mrs Fenn keeps the house, and has done so for many years. She will not thank you for taking it from her, and I would not advise the attempt.” Something close to dry humour moved beneath the words.
“Beyond that, the house is yours to set right as you see fit. I ask only two things of you: that the children are happy, by whatever road you can find to it, and that when we are observed, by the court or by anyone who carries word back to Mrs Norwood, we are seen to be exactly what we swore this morning to be.”
“A husband and wife.”
“A husband and wife.” He said it level, looking at the window. “I am aware it is a great deal to ask of a stranger I have known the better part of a week.”
“You keep saying so, Your Grace, and I should warn you it will not be a problem, for I have made up my mind, and a made-up mind is the one possession of mine no one has ever managed to repossess.”
He said nothing to that, which she was learning to read as its own kind of answer.
The carriage came round the last bend, and Aldenmere stood up grey and enormous against a low winter sky.
She looked at it for a long moment at the dark windows and the great closed face of it.
Then she looked at the man beside her, who was not, on closer acquaintance, ugly at all.
He was only sad, which was a different thing, but a mendable one, given time and someone who minded to mend it.
“Thank you,” she said. And she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she meant it.