Chapter Eleven
In the east room, on the morning of the wedding, Lady Matilda worked a pin into the grey shoulder of Elizabeth’s gown while Elizabeth held herself still beneath her hands.
“Hold still, or I shall pin you to the gown itself, and you may explain to the parson why the bride has arrived fastened into her own dress.”
Lady Matilda had relieved Sally of the task a quarter of an hour earlier on the grounds that the girl’s fingers shook, whereas her own had stopped doing so somewhere near the turn of the century.
“It is a grey gown, my lady,” Elizabeth said. “There is not a great deal to arrange.”
“It is an excellent grey, which is more than most brides contrive. They deck themselves out to satisfy every aunt, cousin, and neighbour with an opinion, and arrive looking like a family committee has dressed them. You, at least, look like yourself.”
Sally, still holding the gloves, ventured, “Shouldn’t a bride wear something brighter, Your Grace?”
“A bride should wear what allows her to stand upright through the ceremony,” said Matilda, setting another pin. “Mrs Mercer looks like a woman who has chosen her own future instead of being dressed for someone else’s. I’ll take that over satin every day of the week.”
She held out her hand.
“The other pin, Sally. And stop looking as though you mean to cry. One of you weeping is plenty, and it will not be the bride.”
“It will not be the bride,” Elizabeth said, with the ghost of a smile. “She exhausted her allowance of tears some years ago.”
“You are very calm for a woman who will be a duchess by noon,” said Matilda.
“I have been married before. The second time is a little like the second battle. One stops expecting glory and gives one’s whole attention to keeping one’s feet.”
“He will say nothing today that you want to hear,” Matilda said. “You understand that. He will give you the words from the book in the voice he keeps for the accounts, and you must supply the music yourself or go without it.”
“I am not going down for music.” Elizabeth looked at the gloves in Sally’s hands.
“I am going down because the alternative is to be hunted through every drawing room in the county. Because Iris needs steadiness. Because he offered terms, and wrote mine without rounding them smooth. That is not nothing.”
“No,” said Matilda. “It is not.”
“And if a name and a duke come fastened to the bargain, I shall manage the name and learn what may be done with the duke.”
“You may find more may be done with him than endurance.”
Elizabeth’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “You have observed a great deal, my lady.”
“I have had little else to do in this house but observe, and a great deal too much reason to care what came of it.” Matilda gave the grey shoulder one last smoothing touch, then stepped back. “There. You look exactly as a bride ought.”
“How is that?”
“As though she has made up her own mind.”
A knock sounded at the door.
Briggs waited at the foot of the stairs in his old regimentals, brushed within an inch of their life, the red faded to the colour of brick. He stood the way a man stands who has not come to attention in a decade and finds his spine has kept the knack of it unasked.
“You look very solemn, Mr Briggs.”
“It is a solemn business, ma’am.”
“I had hoped for something more encouraging.”
He offered his arm. “Then I shall say you look fit to walk in as you are.”
“As I am?”
“Chin up, eyes forward, and not a particle meek. I would not advise mending any of it.”
She slipped her hand through his arm.
“I shall take that as praise.”
“It is meant for it.” He glanced down at her hand on his sleeve.
“That is the kindest thing anyone has said to me this morning. Thank you.”
Together they crossed the hall.
The long drawing room had been cleared, the chairs drawn into two short ranks with an aisle of bare floor between. A table stood at the head with the register and the licence laid square upon it, and the Reverend Mr Coombe waited beside it with his book.
Elizabeth counted the room from where she stood and found it the size she had asked for.
Then the far door opened and made the count one larger.
Selina March came in on the stroke of the half hour.
She wore unrelieved black from bonnet to gloves, the dress of a woman determined to advertise a grief that belonged more properly to someone else.
She took a chair at the back with measured care, as though she had arrived not for a wedding, but to ensure she could later give the fullest account of it.
“She was not invited,” Elizabeth said under her breath.
“No,” Matilda murmured. “She invited herself on Helena’s behalf, which is exactly the sort of courtesy Selina prefers.”
“And the black?”
“Chosen to be noticed.” Matilda’s mouth thinned. “Do not give her the satisfaction of seeming to notice it.”
Elizabeth walked the aisle on Briggs’s arm at the pace he set.
She lowered her chin a little, not for Selina and not for the room.
Iris stood at the front, watching her come with the whole of her small still face, and a woman does not stride at a child who has learnt that the people she watches are the ones who go.
Gavin waited at the head of the room in dark blue. He watched her the length of it from a little distance, as though even looking were a privilege he had not quite been granted.
The words came as Matilda had promised. Mr Coombe gave them out, and Gavin returned them in the voice he kept for the accounts, level and exact, surrendering nothing he was not required to surrender. Elizabeth gave them back in the same coin.
The ritual felt like nothing, as the contract had trained her to expect, until the parson reached the part that used their names.
“Wilt thou, Gavin Harrow, have this woman, Elizabeth Mercer, to thy wedded wife?”
The sound of her given name, spoken with such solemn consequence, did something to him.
Elizabeth watched the small labour it cost him to give the answer the book required.
The words came out steady, and the steadiness was the most ruinous thing in the morning, for she could see now what it cost him to keep them so.
Then it was done.
The register was signed, his hand and then hers. The licence was folded away, and the small gathering began the slow business of becoming a wedding breakfast.
Iris crossed the bare floor of the aisle, the whole short distance of it, and put her hand into Elizabeth’s.
“She has decided you are hers,” Matilda said. “Children sign no contracts. It is their chief advantage over the rest of us.”
Elizabeth crouched to the child’s level, her grey skirts pooling on the bare floor.
“You came the whole way across by yourself,” she said softly. “That is a great deal of floor for a small person on a strange day.”
Iris said nothing but held on, which was not nothing at all.
The breakfast carried itself, as breakfasts do, on ham and other people’s relief. A footman brought a small card to Matilda midway through it, and she read it once, then again with her mouth gone flat.
“From the major,” she said, and went on reading.
With Major Renwick’s compliments to the happy pair, and his every confidence that this marriage will prove as devoted, and as faithfully kept, as the first one was. He looks forward to watching it.
“He looks forward to watching it,” Elizabeth repeated.
“Meddling people often do. It is the one thing they do purely for pleasure.” Matilda put the card face down beneath a dish.
“Leave it there,” Elizabeth said. “He has had enough of today already.”
“That,” said Matilda, reaching for the carving knife, “is your first sensible order as a duchess.”
The breakfast recovered by degrees. Selina left early, in her black, having watched precisely as much as she required.
The afternoon thinned towards evening. The long room emptied, the candles were brought, and Iris, worn past resistance by the strangeness of the day, fell asleep against Elizabeth’s shoulder.
“I will take her up,” Gavin said. “You have held her long enough.”
“I do not mind the holding. Little enough of it has been asked of me in my life.”
“She is too heavy for your arm by now.”
“She is heavier asleep than awake. They all are.” Elizabeth shifted the child carefully and did not give her up at once. “In a moment. She has only just stopped fighting it.”
He did not reach for Iris. He stood over the two of them in the candlelight, and what moved through him then was a thing for which the contract had made no provision.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For today. For the child. For staying.”
She looked up at him.
The last of the words had not sounded like gratitude. It had sounded like something laid carefully down because he did not know how else to set it between them.
“Your Grace,” she said quietly, “there is something else you mean to say.”
His eyes held hers for a moment.
“Yes.”
“Then say it simply.”
He drew a breath.
“Elizabeth…” The name came out as if it had waited years for the mercy of being spoken. “I am glad it is you.”
The words were not fine. They were not enough to break the contract, nor bold enough to frighten either of them from the room. But they were plain, and they were his, and for that reason they went deeper than they had any right to go.
Elizabeth looked down at Iris, because looking at him had become briefly impossible.
“So am I,” she said at last. “For her sake.”
“And for yours?”
Her hand stilled.
“I do not know yet,” she said. “Ask me again when the house has learnt the shape of us.”
“I will.”