Chapter 20 #2
This, its stone walls and high windows seemed to acknowledge on a bright February morning, was something else entirely.
The pews were full. Anthony sat in the front with the expression of a man trying very hard not to look as pleased with himself as he felt, and failing completely.
The Earl sat beside Lady Eleanor, who had wept quietly since the processional and made no apology for it.
Jack occupied a place near the back at his own insistence, in a coat that Margaret had selected for him and that fit him considerably better than anything he had owned in the previous decade.
He sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes bright and said nothing to anyone, which was precisely right.
Margaret sat in the front pew on the groom's side and held herself with the composure she had maintained through everything — through eight years of grief and two years of widowhood and the long, improbable miracle of her son's return — and if her hands were not entirely steady in her lap, there was no one sitting close enough to see it.
Lady Beatrice Ashworth sat three rows back in a dress of deep charcoal silk, her silver hair immaculate, her grey eyes carrying the expression of a woman who has lived long enough to know that moments like this one are not guaranteed and should be received accordingly.
◆◆◆
Alexander stood at the altar and did not fidget, which Anthony later described as the single most remarkable thing he witnessed all morning, given the circumstances.
He heard the doors open behind him. He heard the shift in the room — the collective intake of breath, the rustle of people turning — and he turned too, because he had no intention of waiting and looking forward like a man who could bear the suspense.
He could not bear the suspense.
Catherine came down the aisle on her father's arm in ivory silk, simply cut, with her golden hair dressed with small white flowers and her blue eyes finding him before she had taken four steps.
She was not performing composure. She simply looked at him the way she had looked at him from the very beginning — directly, without pretense, as though she had decided some time ago that he was worth looking at honestly and had not revised the opinion since.
Alexander looked at her and felt, with complete simplicity, that everything that had happened — every mile of ocean and every year of absence and every careful, costly step of the long road home — had been in the service of this moment.
Not as reward. Simply as the place all of it had been heading, whether he had known it or not.
The Earl placed Catherine's hand in Alexander's with the gravity of a man fulfilling an obligation he had come, despite everything, to feel genuinely good about.
He held his son-in-law's gaze for one brief moment — a look that said a great deal that neither of them would put into words, and did not need to — and stepped back.
The ceremony was everything it was supposed to be, and both of them were present for every word of it.
◆◆◆
When they came out into the winter sunlight, the crowd that had gathered outside — not the managed, railed gathering of the trial, but the informal assembly of a city that had followed this story from the beginning and felt, collectively, that it had earned the right to witness the ending — greeted them with a warmth that had nothing ceremonial in it.
Alexander handed his wife into the carriage and paused on the step, and the crowd said what crowds say when they mean it, and he received it with a gravity and a gratitude that were entirely genuine.
Then he got in, and the door closed, and it was only them.
Catherine looked at him across the carriage, and he looked at her, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
Then she laughed — the real laugh, the one that arrived before she could compose herself, the one he had been collecting since the first time he heard it in a candlelit ballroom what felt like a lifetime ago.
"We are actually married," she said.
"We are," Alexander agreed. "It only took three attempts at setting a date."
"Worth it," Catherine said.
"Considerably," he said, and took her hand, and did not release it for the remainder of the journey.
◆◆◆
Harrington House received them quietly. The staff had been given the evening, Margaret having organized this with her usual efficient tact, and the great rooms were warm and still and lit with the soft light of fires that had been tended and left to burn.
Flowers everywhere — white roses, Catherine's favorites, which Alexander had remembered and arranged for without telling her and which she noticed immediately upon crossing the threshold, because she noticed everything.
She turned to look at him.
"The roses," she said.
"Margaret helped," he said. "Marginally."
"She helped considerably, I suspect."
"She helped entirely. I provided the instruction and she executed it with improvements." He looked at his wife in the candlelight of his entrance hall — their entrance hall — and felt the word settle over him with a warmth he had not known he was capable of. "Do you approve?"
"I approve of everything," Catherine said simply.
◆◆◆
They came together that night as people come together when they have waited for the right moment and the right moment has finally, irreversibly arrived — not with urgency, but with the deep and unhurried certainty of two people who have nothing left to hide from each other and nowhere else they are required to be.
Alexander was gentle, as he had always been with her — not with the carefulness of a man uncertain of his welcome, but with the deliberateness of someone who understands that the things worth having are worth taking time over.
His hands knew her now, and hers knew him, and what had begun in the candlelit sanctuary of a borrowed sitting room was here completed in the proper light of a home that belonged to them both.
Catherine had thought, in the weeks of waiting, that familiarity might diminish it.
She had been wrong. What familiarity had done was remove everything that was not essential, leaving only what was real — the warmth of him, the steadiness, the way he looked at her as though she were the fixed point by which he oriented everything else.
She understood, lying beside him in the quiet afterward, that this was not the feeling of a chapter beginning.
It was the feeling of having arrived somewhere that had been waiting for her without her knowing it.
Alexander lay with her head against his chest and his hand moving slowly through her hair, and the fire burned in the grate, and the house held them in its old, deep quiet.
"Well," Catherine said at last, against his chest.
"Well," Alexander agreed.
She tilted her head to look at him. "No poetry? No grand declaration?"
"I used everything I had at the altar," he said. "You will have to allow me some recovery time."
Catherine laughed softly and settled back against him. "I think," she said, "that this is enough. Precisely this."
Alexander pressed his lips to the top of her head.
"Yes," he said quietly. "It is."
Outside, London went about its dark and indifferent business, as it always had and always would.
Inside Harrington House, the eighth Duke of Wexford and his Duchess lay in the firelit quiet of their first night together, and neither of them needed anything beyond the walls of that room, and the world could wait until morning.