Chapter Twenty-Seven
They were wedded on the last Thursday of July, at ten in the morning, with the church so full the late-comers stood in the porch, and the porch’s overflow stood among the graves in the sun.
It was not a grand wedding. That was the deliberate architecture of it: Robert had proposed London and a bishop, once, with a straight face, purely for the pleasure of watching Jane weigh the suggestion and decline it, and what they built instead was this, the parish church, and the vicar.
The village that had clapped them down the middle of its own green now packed into its own pews.
Hamish standing up with Robert, and Eleanor with Jane, the second couple’s banns already twice-read and the whole church enjoying the symmetry, Adelaide in the front pew in dove-grey silk, not black, and the county noted it, with the garnet brooch at her collar, Mrs Brooks beside her, promoted to the family pew by an argument she had lost with great satisfaction, and Miss Charlotte Moorfield, in white with a blue sash, performing the office of flower girl with the gravity of a coronation herald and a wicker basket clutched in both hands.
Jane came up the aisle on no one’s arm; she had no one, and had said so plainly when the question arose, and had been ambushed entirely by the answer the household assembled without consulting her.
Travers, in his best blacks, offering his arm at the church door with a bow that had thirty years of the family in it.
“If you would do the house the honour, miss,” was the whole of his speech, and Jane, who had walked into Moorfield alone off a carrier’s cart, walked up the aisle of its church on the arm of its butler, past the pews of its village, and was given away, the register would say by the household of Moorfield Manor.
The vicar, possessing a character both gentle and artful, set it down in his own hand.
The sun streaming through the east window imparted a floating lightness to the stone.
Robert uttered the vows in the plain, unvarnished tone of his youth, devoid of all wit, while her own voice proved far steadier than she had reason to expect.
In the front pew, Charlotte leaned blatantly into the aisle to observe the proceedings, so unabashed in her scrutiny that half the congregation soon turned to watch her.
At last, the ring was placed upon her finger.
At the signing of the register. Jane wrote her name, Jane Prescott, the last time in this world, and watched the new one waiting for her on the line below, and her hand paused, and Robert, beside her, said nothing at all, and it was Charlotte who solved it, as Charlotte solved things, by leaning in at her elbow and whispering, a whisper now by choice, the luxury of a girl with a whole voice to ration, “It’s not losing the old name.
It’s hide-and-seek. It knows where you are. ”
Jane signed, and the bells took the news up the valley.
The wedding breakfast overran the Manor’s lawns; Adelaide had commanded the arrangements and had, characteristically, planned for the entire parish while announcing a small family party, and it was there, among the trestles and roses, that the county was given its final text for the season.
Lady Fenwick, glass in hand, was heard to declare to a circle of bonnets that she had seen it coming from the festival, “the way he looked at her down that dance, my dears, I said to Sir Giles that very evening, there is the future Lady Moorfield”, and Adelaide, passing behind her at the precise moment, paused, and said, pleasantly, at a volume measured to reach the entire circle to the whole circle.
“How singular, Augusta. To Sir Giles, you say. One wonders what you said to everyone else.” And moved on, serene, leaving the circle to itself and Lady Fenwick to her glass, and that, the county agreed later, was the truest entertainment of the day.
***
Robert found Jane at the lawn’s edge in the middle of the afternoon, where the trestles gave out and the limes began, and for a moment they stood together looking back at it, the parish eating his food and rewriting its own history in the sun, the house standing open-doored and golden, Eleanor and Hamish being toasted by the smithy’s entire family, Mrs Brooks directing the champagne with the field-marshal’s baton of her folded hands, all of it improbably holding.
“Lady Moorfield,” Robert said, trying it aloud.
“It will want practice,” said Jane. “I answered to it four times today as though it were someone standing behind me.”
“It was. She’s been standing behind you since May.
” He looked down at her, and the wit went the way she now knew it went when the true thing was coming.
“I have no speech. I spent it all in the hall, and you wedded me anyway. A shocking disregard for the sums. I have only the one entry left.” He took her hand, turned it over, and pressed his lips to the palm, to the hand that had read the ledgers, the hand that had lain flat against a door in the dark, and said, against it.
“Paid in full. And the account never closes.”
From the lawn came a shriek of joy. The village children had discovered the game, or the game had discovered them, and Charlotte, white dress, blue sash, coronation gravity abandoned entirely, was leading a hunt through the rose borders, seeker, loudly, her voice carrying over the whole company as though it had never been anywhere at all.
They were still standing so, her hand in both of his, when the hunt swept round the lime-walk’s turn and found them, and Charlotte pulled up short, and looked at the two of them together in the falling gold light, and delivered the day’s verdict with the ancient satisfaction of a sovereign whose borders are secure at last
“There you are.”
“Here we are,” Jane agreed. “Both found. Nobody lost.” And the hunt swept them up, and the three of them went back across the lawn together into the middle of the bright noise, the master, the mistress, and the sovereign of Moorfield, under the flags of a summer evening, in front of the whole assembled county, hiding from no one.