Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
The seed pearl buttons began at the small of Rachel’s back and climbed in a line so fine that Alice’s fingers found each one by feel rather than by sight, the cool spheres catching the morning light from the casement window as she worked them through their loops, unhurried, precise, because this task would not come again.
The gown was cream silk, high-waisted in the fashion of twenty years ago, with sleeves that the maid had taken in the previous evening and a hem let down to accommodate Rachel’s height.
It had lain at the bottom of a trunk that arrived at Bearmoor House in the weeks following Alice’s wedding, packed by someone at Peltbury House who had either not known what the tissue wrapping contained or had known and had not troubled to remove it.
It was their mother’s wedding gown.
Alice had kept it, for no reason she could have defended and for every reason she did not need to.
Now, she and Rachel stood in one of the guest rooms in Bearmoor Castle because both Alice and Kenneth thought it best for the wedding to take place out of London. And Rachel was finally marrying a man she loved.
“It fits,” Rachel said.
Her reflection in the mirror watched them both, her blue eyes wide, her hair pinned in a loose arrangement that was more practical than ornamental. It suited her, Alice thought, considerably better than the elaborate style she would have worn for a duke’s wedding.
“Nearly.” Alice smoothed the silk across her sister’s shoulders.
The waist had required nothing. The swell of Rachel’s belly pressed against the fabric in a way their mother could not have foreseen and which Alice found, against all propriety, rather beautiful.
“She was smaller in the shoulders than you. Or I imagine she was.”
“I was five when she died. You were four.” Rachel’s hand found the edge of the mirror frame. “I remember this gown. She wore it in the portrait Father moved to the attic.” A pause. “I wonder if he remembered it was there.”
“He remembered nothing he was not obliged to remember.”
Alice stepped back to study the full effect.
Rachel, standing in the morning light in cream silk with her chin raised and her hands hanging at her sides, looked nothing like the woman who had arrived at Kenneth’s study before dawn in a borrowed dress with months of hiding scored into the hollows of her face.
She looked like someone who had arrived somewhere.
“You look like her.”
Rachel’s composure held for two breaths.
Then her mouth pressed flat, her eyes went very bright, and she turned from the mirror and put her arms around Alice.
Alice held her and felt the swell of her belly and the tremors in her shoulders and the silence that preceded the admission no one wished to make.
“He is not coming,” Rachel whispered.
Alice had received the letter that morning.
Three sentences in their father’s precise, economical hand.
He wished Rachel well but could not attend.
He did not explain, because explaining would have required admitting that his absence was a choice and that the choice had a reason and that the reason was smaller than the occasion.
“No,” Alice said. “He is not.”
“I told myself it would not matter.”
“I know.”
“It does matter.” The words came muffled against Alice’s shoulder. “I am furious with myself for wanting him here, and I want him here regardless. I cannot reconcile the two.”
Alice smoothed her sister’s hair with an instinct she could not have learned from the woman whose gown Rachel was wearing, because there had not been time, and yet the gesture arrived with the certainty of inheritance.
“You do not have to choose between them.” Alice tightened her arms around her.
“You carry both, and you walk to the chapel. George will be standing there, the same George who slept on other people’s floors and took pupils for sixpence because you were worth more to him than comfort.
” Her voice caught, propriety failing mid-thought as it always did when she forgot to watch it.
“Kenneth and I will be there today and after. That is not sentiment. It is a fact.”
Rachel pulled back. Her face was blotchy, and her lashes were damp. She looked at Alice the way Alice had spent twenty-one years looking at her.
“When did you become like this?” she asked.
“I have always been like this.” Alice adjusted a pin at her temple that had slipped during the embrace. “You were too occupied being the exemplary one to notice.”
Rachel laughed, the sound uneven and damp, and Alice held it inside the small bright room for as long as it would stay.
A knock sounded at the door. Alice opened it.
Kenneth stood in the corridor in his dark coat, his cravat tied with the precise symmetry that meant he had done it himself rather than wait for his valet, his shoulders filling the doorframe.
Alice’s throat tightened before any sensible thought could arrive to govern it. She was accustomed to this by now, or she should have been.
His gaze found hers and held it for a beat longer than the errand required, and the heat of it settled low and steady beneath her ribs. Then his eyes moved past her to Rachel, and his expression resolved into grounded calm.
“The chapel is ready,” he said. “Whenever you are.”
Rachel looked at Alice. Alice looked at Kenneth.
“We are ready,” Alice said.
Alice had not been inside the chapel before.
It occupied the east corner of the grounds, older than the castle itself, its narrow windows admitting light in long pale shafts across a dark oak altar.
The air was cool against her bare arms and carried the scent of old stone, and the quiet pressed close around them as they entered, close enough that she felt Kenneth’s sleeve brush her wrist and did not step away from it.
The pews held few enough people that their faces were distinct across the distance. Jonathan sat near the front with one ankle crossed over the other and an expression of careful warmth he would have denied if anyone had been ill-mannered enough to name it.
Lucy, who had arrived the previous afternoon with her parents in a flurry of embraces and questions Alice had not yet finished answering, sat in the second row with her gloved hands folded and her eyes already bright.
Lord and Lady Barlington sat beside their daughter, benevolent, unhurried, long since resigned to the fact that Lucy’s attachments governed their calendar.
The twins sat in the front pew. Freddie wore his good coat and had been persuaded, through a campaign of negotiation that consumed the better part of the morning and required the full measure of Miss Leyton’s diplomatic reserves, to keep his boots on the floor.
Charlie sat beside him, hands in his lap, his green eyes cataloging the chapel stone by stone, already composing the drawing he would make of it later.
Kenneth walked Rachel down the aisle.
He moved as he moved when something mattered, unhurried, his arm firm beneath her hand, his pace matching hers.
Alice watched from the front pew and felt the whole of it gather behind her ribs: Kenneth, who had been jilted at the altar by this woman not five months ago, was walking her toward another man, steady, unshakeable, certain.
He delivered Rachel to George, who stood at the altar in a coat that was not new but had been brushed and pressed until it yielded everything it had to give. George’s hands were steady. His eyes, when they found Rachel’s, held nothing in reserve.
Kenneth took his seat beside Alice. His knee settled against hers through the layers of wool and silk, and the warmth of it arrived at the base of her spine and spread upward, the low persistent pull she had stopped pretending she could govern.
She thought, not for the first time and not for the last, stay.
The ceremony was brief. The curate spoke as someone who had said these words for decades and still believed them. Rachel’s voice was clear. George’s was quiet and direct and carried the weight of a promise made by someone who had nothing to offer except the promise itself.
Freddie maintained his silence for the duration of the vows. Alice considered this privately, and decided to acknowledge the achievement later.
Charlie’s head tilted during the exchange of rings, studying the gesture with careful attention, and when the curate pronounced them husband and wife, he reached over and tugged Alice’s sleeve without looking at her.
“She is smiling,” he said very quietly. “With her whole face.”
Alice looked at Rachel. Indeed, she was.
The wedding breakfast was laid in the long dining room.
Mrs. Finch had arranged the table with the dahlias and copper chrysanthemums Alice had mentioned in passing two days ago.
Candles burned despite the morning light filtering through the tall windows, and the whole effect was warm and bright and looked like something more than one pair of hands had shaped.
The food was plentiful and included, at Freddie’s emphatic and loud request, the currant rolls.
“Mr. Mercer.” Freddie had claimed the seat beside George and had been conducting a thorough interrogation since the soup. “Is the school in Dorset very large?”
“Reasonably,” George answered with contained amusement, still learning that mealtimes at Bearmoor operated by their own principles. “I’ve heard the grounds are extensive. There are playing fields.”
“Is there a lake?”
“A pond, I believe.”
“Ponds are inferior to lakes.” Freddie considered this with visible disappointment, then recovered. “Can we visit?”
“You would be most welcome.” George glanced at Kenneth, who inclined his head once. “The cottage is not grand, but there is room.”
“I do not require grand. I require interesting.” Freddie reached for another roll. “Charlie, the school has a pond.”
“I heard.” Charlie was watching Rachel, who sat with one hand resting on the swell of her belly and her head inclined toward Lucy, the two of them deep in a conversation Alice could not hear from her end of the table. “Will the baby like music?”
The question was directed at George, and it arrived with the quiet weight of something Charlie had been turning over for some time.
George set down his knife. “I hope so,” he said. “I should like to teach it, when the time comes.”
“You ought to begin early,” Charlie said. “Before it can decide against it. That is the advantage of infants. They have not yet formed objections.”
Jonathan’s laugh carried from the far end of the table, where he had been engaged with Lord Barlington in a conversation that appeared to involve a wager, a horse, and a great deal of hand gestures.
“I agree, Charlie. Objections are a dreadful affliction. I have spent thirty years accumulating them and regret the majority.”
Kenneth’s hand found Alice’s beneath the table.
The contact was unhurried and deliberate and carried nothing urgent in it, only the steady warmth of a gesture that had become, over the previous months, its own language.
His thumb pressed once against her knuckles and held, and she felt the imprint of it in her hand and her wrist and the quiet place beneath her breastbone where three words she had not yet said to him lived undisturbed.
She looked down the table. At Lucy, who was making Rachel laugh with a story that involved a botanical mishap and a viscount who should have known better.
At Jonathan, who had commandeered the bread basket and seemed to be losing his negotiation with Lord Barlington about the horse.
At Freddie, who was explaining to George, armed with seven years of strongly held conviction, why ponds were structurally inferior to lakes.
At Charlie, who had produced a pencil from somewhere and was drawing on the back of the menu card, utterly absorbed.
At Kenneth, whose hand had returned to his glass and his gaze was sweeping across the table, his composure thin enough that she could see through it.
At Rachel, who was wearing their mother’s gown and carrying their mother’s grandchild beneath the cream silk, seated beside George, who loved her in the plain and uncomplicated manner that Alice had once believed existed only in the books she read by firelight when the rest of the house was sleeping.
The candles burned in their holders. The autumn light came through the windows and fell across the table in gold and amber, across the currant rolls and the scattered crumbs and the menu card where Charlie’s pencil was still moving.
Alice sat inside it all and did not move.