by Mary Balogh
“But not for at least three hours yet,” he said, turning to Lydia after the dog had returned from a leisurely frolic in the garden and was noisily lapping water in the kitchen. “That is a wicked smile, Lydia.”
“And is that a leer I see on your face?” she asked him.
“It is,” he said.
They were in each other’s arms then, laughing and kissing—until they were doing neither, but were simply gazing into each other’s eyes, their foreheads touching.
“Mrs. Westcott,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
“I like the sound of it,” he said.
“Because you now own me?” she asked.
“I positively refuse to quarrel on my wedding day,” he said. “Ask me again tomorrow.”
They both laughed.
“Lydia.” He rubbed his nose against hers. “I did not rush you too much?”
“Rush?” she said. “Harry. This has been the longest week of my life. Someone must have stopped all the clocks. I thought today would never come.”
“I wish someone would stop the clocks for the next three hours,” he said. “But since no one is going to, why are we standing here? Could we not find something better to do?”
“I will leave you to answer that,” she said. “I might blush.”
He drew back his head a little. “You are already doing it,” he said, smiling slowly at her.
She proved his point.
“Lydia.”
But he could find no words to express the feelings that were welling up inside him. He scooped her up in his arms instead and carried her through to her bedchamber—their bedchamber for now and tonight and perhaps the next few nights until their house guests had returned to their own homes. He had no idea what would happen to the cottage then. They had not had a chance to discuss it. But that discussion could wait. They had a lifetime in which to decide.
For now—for this moment and the next three hours—there was only one thing that mattered.
“Home,” he said, setting her down on her feet beside the bed. “Here. Hinsford. You. Me. Do you wonder I can never remember a whole speech?”
She laughed softly. “And very thankful I am for it at the moment,” she said. “Make love with me, Harry.”
He did that for the next three hours. Or, rather, they did.
With me, she had said.
Not to me, but with me.
Twenty-five
The morning of Harry’s birthday, which was to have been filled with all sorts of frenzied last-minute preparations for the birthday ball, was given over instead to the totally unexpected matter of a wedding to attend. The Westcott ladies might have been forgiven if they had thrown up their hands in despair as they contemplated disaster to their carefully crafted plan B. They were, however, made of sterner stuff and adapted.
The cold luncheon that had been planned for the noon hour was replaced by a grand wedding breakfast. Heart palpitations had been averted, however, when Elizabeth had suggested that they simply move the preball banquet forward by a few hours. The champagne that would have been used to toast Harry would now be used to toast the newlyweds and Harry.
“Alexander and Avery make speeches in the House of Lords all the time,” the dowager countess had reminded them. “They can make speeches at the breakfast. Gil too, since he is to be Harry’s best man. And Marcel or Joel might wish to say a few words too.”
“Or Viola or Camille or Abigail,” Wren had added, a twinkle in her eye. “Or Anna.”
The wedding cake, magnificently iced, had been purely the initiative of Harry’s cook and had taken them all by surprise.
Plans for the evening had been changed too. Harry was to have stood in the receiving line with his mother and his three sisters, greeting the outside guests as they arrived and allowing them all a moment to wish him a happy birthday. Harry and Camille were to have led off the dancing with a country set. There was to have been another toast to Harry at the late supper and the cutting of the birthday cake.
Harry was no longer to be in the receiving line. He was, in fact, to be nowhere in sight until after everyone else had arrived. The entry of the new Mr. and Mrs. Harry Westcott was to be an Event in itself—Matilda wrote it on her new planning list with a capital letter. And the dancing was to begin not with a country set but with a waltz—to be danced for the first few minutes by the bride and groom alone.
“Could there be anything more romantic?” Mary Kingsley had asked with a sigh.
“Nothing in the world, Mary,” Viola had said, and looked dreamy-eyed for a moment until Matilda brought them back to order by asking who should announce the arrival of the bridal couple.
Alexander had been appointed in his absence.
And so it was that well before the middle of the evening, the small ballroom at Hinsford Manor, decorated to resemble the most lavish of gardens, was packed with family, house guests, villagers, neighboring gentry, and tenants. Viola and Marcel and her daughters and Anna and their husbands no longer stood in the receiving line. But the dancing had not yet begun, for everyone still awaited the arrival of the bride and groom. The orchestra, instruments tuned and ready, awaited instructions.
“And so,” Estelle Lamarr said to her twin, “the last of our stepsiblings is married. And that leaves only us, Bertrand.”
He draped an arm loosely about her shoulders and grinned at her. “Do I detect a wistful note in your voice, Stell?” he asked.
They were in their middle twenties, both still single. They had mingled with society for a number of years, both of them with a great deal of success—they were, after all, the children of the Marquess of Dorchester, and both were darkly handsome. But two years ago they had decided to retire together to the country home where they had grown up with an aunt and uncle; no one lived there now but the two of them and their servants. Both felt the need to do some reflecting before moving on with their lives.
“You must admit,” Estelle said, “that there is something very . . . affecting about a romance. And a wedding.”
He chuckled. “I admit nothing.”
Camille, half hiding behind Joel in order to push back into her elaborate and very elegant coiffure an errant lock—the usual one—that had broken ranks with its fellows to fall down over her shoulder, sighed audibly.
“Can we possibly have been married for nine years?” she asked him.
“Does it feel more like ninety some days?” he asked.
She laughed and nudged him with her elbow. “It seems like yesterday,” she said. “Bath Abbey. Was it not the most wonderful wedding ever?”
“I could point out a few couples in this very room who might disagree,” he said. “But yes, it was. Indisputably. And it is a good thing we have been married that long when you stop to count our children.”
“Are we not the most fortunate couple in the world?” She beamed at him.
“We are.” He smiled at her. “Here, Camille, let me fix your hair for you.”
Colin, Lord Hodges, tucked Elizabeth’s arm beneath his as she turned away from her mother. “You are happy?” he asked her.
“I am,” she said. “I was worried about Harry. We all were. He seemed so . . . lost after he came home from Paris. We would all have given the world to help him, but it is never quite enough, is it? It is sometimes so hard to help other people.”
“I think you all did—we all did—the only thing we could do,” he told her. “We gave him love and we gave him space.”
“Space,” she said. “Sometimes it is the hardest thing to give. Why are you so wise?”
He chuckled. “Perhaps because I am married to you and have caught it from you?” he suggested, provoking answering laughter from her.
Alexander and Wren were standing close to the orchestra dais so Alexander could hop up onto it as soon as Brown, Harry’s butler, appeared i
n the doorway to give the signal.
“Do you think Harry has finally and fully forgiven you for taking his title?” Wren asked.
“I think he has.” He smiled down at her. “I think he did it with his intellect a long time ago. I believe he has done it with his heart more recently. Just as I have forgiven him for loading my life down with such helpless guilt.”
“Oh, Alex,” she said. “I do love you.”
“Exactly as much as I love you,” he said.
Winifred, at her first ever ball, dressed all in white with her hair prettily styled by her mother’s maid, was wondering if she looked foolish or if it was just that she was feeling very, very self-conscious. She glanced gratefully at young Gordon Monteith, who had come to stand beside her and compliment her on her appearance before turning as red as a beetroot. She was grateful for his blushes and his freckles and the spots that had broken out on his chin. Bertrand Lamarr—the gorgeous Bertrand—had complimented her earlier with great kindness and courtliness of manner, and she had almost crumpled into a heap of stammers and terror.
Three plushly upholstered chairs with arms had been placed side by side along the far wall of the ballroom for the comfort of the Dowager Countess of Riverdale in the middle, and Mrs. Monteith and Mrs. Kingsley on either side of her.
“They look a bit like thrones,” Thomas, Lord Molenor, commented to his wife and her sisters.
“The queen and her princesses,” Charles, Viscount Dirkson, his brother-in-law, agreed.
“That is horribly disrespectful, Charles,” Matilda scolded before laughing.
“Well,” her husband said, “I was going to call the other two attendants, my love, but that seemed definitely disrespectful.”
“Mama does fancy herself as something of a queen,” Mildred said. “She was very hard on Mrs. Tavernor—on Lydia—just a few days ago. Is she here on sufferance tonight, do you think?”
“Mildred!” Louise said, all amazement. “Mama adores anyone who stands up to her.”
“As I know from personal experience,” Charles said with a grin.
“Yes.” Matilda heaved a heartfelt sigh and then smiled fondly at him.
Mrs. Kingsley was looking toward the doors. The three chairs had been placed with a direct view across to them. “Harry deserves happiness more than anyone else I know,” she said. “I am partial, of course, since he is my only grandson. Will he be happy with Lydia? I do hope so.”
The dowager’s tall pink and purple hair plumes nodded as she turned her head. “Happy?” she said. “He is over the moon. That was as clear as day this morning. So is she. And so they ought to be. It was extremely naughty of them to meet in that cottage when not a soul lives there with her unless you count that ball of fluff that calls itself a dog. Goodness knows what went on in there.”
“But we can guess, Eugenia,” her sister said. “Harry would have to be a dreadful slowtop for nothing to have gone on, and I do not believe he is a slowtop. Just as he was not this afternoon, I daresay.”
Mrs. Kingsley looked a mite shocked. The dowager countess merely nodded her head and her plumes slowly.
Abigail and Gil were strolling about the room, stopping to exchange words with some of the guests. But they were between groups at the moment, and he covered her hand on his arm with his own.
“Do you feel any regret,” he asked, moving his head closer to hers, “that we did not wait to do something like this four years ago?”
They had married in the village church and returned here for a wedding breakfast. But apart from Harry and the vicar and Mrs. Jenkins, there had been no guests. They had spent their wedding night here at the manor and then gone to London to convince a judge to release Katy from her grandparents’ care into theirs.
“This is a lovely wedding,” she said. “But it is Harry’s, Gil. And Lydia’s. Our wedding was ours. And it was perfect. I would not have had a single detail of it different.”
“Even though there was no mention of love?” he asked her.
“Even though,” she said. “We grew into love. And oh, it was worth every moment of the journey.”
“Do you remember how angry you were with me the first time you saw me?” he asked her.
“Well,” she said, “you were shirtless and chopping wood and looking for all the world like a servant who was taking unpardonable liberties by being so close to the house. And then you allowed Beauty to come galloping around the corner from the stables to attack me, and I saw my life flashing before my eyes.”
“I should have called her Lamb,” he said, grinning at her.
“Yes, you ought,” she said, smiling back. “She is a bit of a lamb. She is all beauty, though. Gil, I loved our wedding day.”
“So did I,” he said.
They stopped to talk with Lydia’s brothers and Lawrence Hill.
Boris and Audrey were standing in a group with Peter and Ivan and Fanny Leeson.
“And this is the family you are going to marry into,” Ivan said, addressing his future sister-in-law. “Boris had no choice. Pete and I had no choice. We were born into it. You have made the free choice, Audrey. Are you mad?” He grinned cheekily at her.
“You can be quiet anytime you wish now, Ivan,” Boris informed him cheerfully.
“Or he will plant you a facer,” Peter said.
Fanny laughed.
“I cannot think of any family I would rather marry into,” Audrey said. “Unless it were the Wayne family, your father’s side.”
“Good answer, my love,” Boris said.
“And I really cannot wait for my own wedding day,” she added.
Ivan made a gargoyle face and clutched his neck with both hands, threatening ruin to his neckcloth.
“I cannot take him into decent company without him disgracing me,” Peter said, shaking his head.
“I am so glad we chose to come to London this year,” Jessica was saying to Gabriel. “I missed Abby’s wedding. Everyone did except Harry. I was never more vexed in my life. I would have hated to miss Harry’s too. When I was a girl, you know, I thought it was most unfair that one ought not to marry one’s first cousin. He was my absolute hero. I thought I would never meet anyone more handsome or more . . . dashing.”
“And now, Jessie,” Gabriel said, “you have squashed all my self-esteem.”
She laughed. “Oh, that was when I was a very young girl,” she said. “When I became a woman I met an insufferably arrogant man who informed me almost at our first meeting that he intended to marry me. Informed me. He did not bother to ask. But then I decided that I would marry him anyway because I discovered that he was . . . full of passion.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Self-esteem restored.”
She laughed again as Boris and Audrey came up to them and wanted to know what the joke was.
Avery, Duke of Netherby, was standing in what was always his favorite spot in any room—a corner. Gorgeously clad and sparkling with jewels on his fingers and in his elaborately tied neckcloth and embedded in the handle and about the rim of his quizzing glass, he gazed through the glass before lowering it. His posture was indolent, his eyes keen. He turned them upon Anna, who was beside him and sparkling, not so much with jewels as with bright animation.
“Happy, my love?” he asked with a soft fondness in his voice that might have surprised almost everyone else in the room, who saw only his public manner except upon very rare occasions.
Anna turned her eyes upon him, and they brightened with tears, though none spilled over.
“I still sometimes expect to wake up one of these days to find myself back in the classroom at the orphanage in Bath,” she said.
“Please do not,” he said. “I would miss you.”
“Would you?” She smiled softly at him—one of the few people ever to look at him so.
“You would take my heart with you,” he said
. “And my very life.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Not to mention my unborn child,” he added.
“I looked at you ten years ago,” she said, “and hated you on sight.”
“I know,” he said with a sigh. “And how could I resist the challenge? I could not—despite those shoes. I had to have you.”
His eyes gazed lazily into hers until something distracted him.
“Ah,” he said, nodding toward the ballroom doors. “I believe the bride and groom must be in the house.”
Anna turned her head to see Viola and Marcel slip from the room.
“I am happy,” she said. “You asked, Avery. The answer is yes.”
“I can see it in your eyes, my heart,” he said softly.
Viola had deliberately stayed close to the ballroom doors so the butler could give her the nod from beyond them when Harry arrived with Lydia.
“I want to be the first to see them and hug them,” she had told Marcel, who had waited with her. “I missed Abby’s wedding. I do not want to miss one moment of Harry’s.”
She did, however, beckon Lydia’s father before she left the room. He was talking with the Hills and Elizabeth and Colin.
“And so all your children are happily settled,” Marcel said, offering his arm to escort her downstairs. “Now you can relax at last.”
“They will be happy,” Viola said, smiling at him. “I liked Lydia the moment I met her. I knew she was right for Harry as soon as I learned she had refused his marriage offer.”
Marcel laughed. “The logic of women,” he said.
“And your two,” she said. “Estelle and Bertrand. Do you worry about them, Marcel?”
She knew he did, of course, for she knew he had never quite let go of his guilt over the way he had neglected them during their growing years, leaving them almost exclusively in the care of their aunt, his first wife’s sister, after his wife’s accidental death when the twins were still babies.