Chapter 9
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“You are vibrating,” Marina said around three pins. “Emily, isn’t she vibrating?”
“She is.”
“I am getting married in an hour,” Leonora reminded them, “in a chapel, in front of my entire family and a great many people who read newspapers, to a man I have spoken to on four occasions, one of which involved my wrist. I believe I am permitted to vibrate.”
“Nobody said you weren’t permitted,” Emily said comfortably from the window seat. “We only need you to do it in a fixed position.”
There were five of them in the room, and it was much too small.
Marina was at the hem. Emily had taken possession of the best chair and had her feet tucked under her, married dignity having lasted her the better part of a year.
Sybella was at the dressing table with the flowers, sorting them by stem length, because Sybella sorted things when she was worried and had never once admitted to being worried in her life.
Ellen was doing Leonora’s hair. And Lady Huntington was everywhere at once.
The gown was ivory silk with a little silver at the hem. It had been made in six days by four women working in shifts, and it was the loveliest thing Leonora had ever put on her body.
She had also not laid eyes on the man who had sent it for five days.
He had sent four nightgowns and a card with seven words on it, and then he had vanished as thoroughly as if the ground had swallowed him. No call. No note. Nothing on Thursday, when her mother had spent the entire afternoon arranging herself in the drawing room just in case.
Leonora had told herself on Sunday that he was a man with a great deal to arrange, and on Monday that he was not a man who wrote well. By Wednesday, she had stopped making up excuses on his behalf and started being angry, which was at least more comfortable.
“You look like the frontispiece of something,” Emily remarked.
“That’s not a compliment.”
“It is entirely a compliment, and you know it. You’ve read books that have frontispieces more than any of us.”
“Sybella reads more than I do.”
“I read about volcanoes,” Sybella piped up, without looking up. “It isn’t the same, and it isn’t as much fun, but I have been telling myself otherwise for four years.”
“Out,” Lady Huntington suddenly said. “All of you. Out.”
“Mama.”
“Out, out.” She was making shooing motions with both hands and turning pink. “I must speak to my daughter, and I cannot do it with three young women in the room and one of them a duchess.”
Emily went out grinning. Marina walked out backward, making a face. Sybella put the last flower down, squeezed Leonora’s shoulder once as she passed—which from her was a full embrace—and shut the door behind her.
Lady Huntington sat down on the end of the bed. “Now…”
“Mama.”
“Now, Nora, this is a thing mothers must do. My mother did it for me in a back kitchen in Leeds with a rolling pin in her hand, and I have never gotten over it. I intend to do it properly.” She took a breath, turned a deeper pink, and said, “Tonight, your husband will come to your chamber.”
“Mama.”
“There is nothing in it to be frightened of. It is not what the maids say, and it is not what your novels say, and if a man is a decent—”
“Mama.”
“I am speaking.”
“I know, and I love you,” Leonora said in a strangled voice from behind her hands. “But I cannot survive it. If you say one more word, I shall go down to the chapel the color of a beetroot, and that is what the newspapers will publish on Thursday.”
Lady Huntington stopped. Then she laughed, which was what she always did. She reached over and pulled Leonora’s hands down from her face, holding them.
“Very well,” she relented. “Only this, then, and then I’ll stop.
He is not a comfortable man, that one. I saw it at his table, and I have thought about it every night since.
But he read that column and rode twenty-two miles for you before he had eaten a mouthful, my girl, and an unkind man finishes his breakfast.”
Leonora looked at her mother’s hands round hers.
“Are your valises packed?” her mother asked.
“Yes.”
“Are they? Truthfully? Because Ellen said there was still one open on the—”
“They’re packed,” Leonora insisted.
Her valises were packed. They had been packed since ten o’clock last night. The last thing she had put in, folded in its tissue at the very top where she could reach it without anybody seeing, had been a nightgown of black gauze.
She felt heat crawl up her neck.
Her mother, mercifully, decided to believe it was the wedding jitters.
“Then it’s time, sweetheart,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He was standing at the chapel door.
Leonora saw him the moment the carriage rounded the curve of the drive, before the step was even down, a black figure against the gray stone, standing perfectly still.
He had not gone in. There were forty people inside the chapel, and her groom was standing outside it in the wind, watching the road.
Her father handed her down. Her mother straightened a seam at her shoulder that did not need straightening.
And then Leonora was walking, with her hand on her father’s arm and the grass wet beneath her slippers.
She watched Colin watch her come. He did not move at all, and he did not look away once all the while.
By the time she reached him, she could not have said a single word if the Crown had asked her for one.
“Lady Leonora,” he greeted.
He took her gloved hand and bowed over it. He pressed a kiss to the back of it, which he had not done at Thorton, and she felt it through the kid leather.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, as though he were reporting the state of a road, then turned and walked her inside.
She remembered the chapel afterward in pieces.
She remembered that it was full of people, Belmonts on one side in a great warm untidy crowd and a dozen of his tenants on the other, and Mrs. Pike in the second row in black bombazine with the baby on her lap in a white gown.
She remembered Augusta craning her neck.
She remembered her father’s hand shaking when he gave her away, how furious he was about it, and how he glared at the altar rail for a full minute afterward.
She remembered the cold ring sliding on her finger.
And she remembered Colin’s voice saying I will without any hesitation whatsoever, as though somebody had asked him whether the tide came in.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Leonora looked up.
He turned toward her and raised his hand, but it did not go where she had expected. It slid under her jaw and around into the hair at the nape of her neck, warm and unhurried, and tilted her face up toward him. He leaned in, and she stopped breathing.
He leaned in so slowly that she had time to see the scar peeking out from beneath the black silk and the color of his eye, and to feel his breath on her lips.
Her hands curled at her sides, and somewhere far away, her mother caught her breath.
But then he turned his head at the last second and pressed his lips to her cheek.
It lasted perhaps two seconds.
It was entirely proper. Sixty people saw it, and nobody could have objected to a single part of it.
Leonora Belmont, now Leonora Walford, the Duchess of Thorton, stood at the altar with her heart pounding and understood that she had just been very deliberately not kissed in front of her entire family.
“Duchess,” Colin murmured, before taking her hand and turning them both toward the door.
The wedding breakfast lasted four hours.
She thanked him for the gowns somewhere in the middle of it, when the noise was at its worst and nobody could possibly hear. She was proud of herself for getting it out in one piece.
“It was very generous, Your Grace.”
“It was as much for me as it was for you, wife.”
Leonora put down her glass and picked it up again.
After that, they talked about ordinary matters, because there were sixty people in the gallery and ordinary matters were what one spoke about in front of sixty people.
“They have brought a cake,” he said.
“Who have?”
“The tenants. Four of them carried it in on a board. It is on the sideboard at the end of the room; it weighs as much as a small dog. I have also been informed that a second one is coming from the Hartley farm this afternoon.”
“You’ll have to eat both.”
“I’ll have to be seen to eat both.”
“Then you had better begin, Your Grace. Mrs. Hartley has been looking at the back of your head for twenty minutes, with the expression of a woman keeping accounts.”
He turned and looked down the gallery. Caught staring, Mrs. Hartley dropped into a curtsy so low that she nearly fell over.
“You’ve been watching the room,” he remarked.
“I’ve been standing in the corners of rooms for four Seasons.
It’s the only accomplishment I have that Mama has never once boasted of.
” Leonora turned her glass by the stem, exactly as he was doing, and discovered she was enjoying herself, which seemed an outrageous thing to be doing at her own wedding.
“My brothers have a wager on you, since we are speaking of accounts.”
“On me.”
“Alexander has bet Evan five pounds that you would not speak to more than nine people today. Evan accepted it because Evan accepts everything. Alexander is going to lose.”
“How many people have I spoken to?”
“Twenty-six,” Leonora replied. “I have been counting since eleven.”
He looked at her. “Why?”
“Because it was that or thinking about the rest of it,” she said, before she could stop herself.
Colin did not comment on that.
Mrs. Pike came up on his other side at that moment and spoke close to his ear. He nodded, and she went away again.
“Katherine’s asleep,” he said.
“Already?”
“She had a great deal of cake put in front of her by your mother, and she has been carried about by nine separate Belmonts. She has had an excellent day.” He turned his glass by the stem. “Are you tired?”
Leonora was so tired that the room had begun to hum.
“A little.”
“Then I expect you upstairs in ten minutes.”
Everything in her went still.
“I…” she stammered. “There are sixty people here.”
“Indeed.”
“I ought to say goodbye to them. My family. Your tenants. It would be very rude to—”
“Ten minutes.” He stood up and set down his glass.
Leonora looked up at him, her mouth dry, and said the first thing that came to her mind. “What about you?”
Colin looked out over the length of the gallery, at sixty people eating his food in a house nobody had entered in six years.
“Not one of them is here for me, Duchess,” he said.