by Mary Balogh
“Slight?” He laughed.
“Yes, slight,” she repeated. “It is obvious you are loved by your family despite the transgressions of your father. And calling yourself a bastard, you know, hurts them as much as it hurts you. Perhaps more.”
He stared at her with a mix of confusion and awe, and then said, “Yes, ma’am.” He then promptly drifted off to sleep again.
Alexander gazed at her as she spread a cloth soaked with the freshly brought water across his forehead. Family ties are too precious to be thrown away for such a slight cause. What the devil had happened to her family? He did not even know her childhood name, did he? Heyden was the name of the man her aunt had married. And Wren? Was it her baptismal name? Good God, he did not even know her name. In three days’ time they were going to be married, yet he was still plagued by one basic question.
Who the devil was this woman he was about to marry?
• • •
A letter arrived from Viola Kingsley, the former Countess of Riverdale, the following morning. She and her daughter were coming for the wedding. It was too late now to send the letter that had been written to tell her of the arrival of her son.
They arrived at Westcott House the following day to warm hugs and welcomes—and a tearful reunion with Captain Harry Westcott, who had come downstairs, against advice, when their carriage was heard. His fever had ebbed the night before and had not returned this morning, but he was weak and tired and complaining about the broths and jellies the cook was sending up to him.
Wren watched the three of them in a tight hug together in the main hall and blinked her eyes. The ladies had, of course, been taken completely by surprise and were not willing to let him go.
It was easy to see from where Harry had acquired his good looks. His mother was blond and elegant and still beautiful, and his younger sister was fair haired, dainty, and exquisitely pretty.
Miss Kingsley was the first to turn from the group. She approached them with a smile and eyes that were bright with unshed tears. “Althea,” she said to Mrs. Westcott, “you must think my manners have gone begging. How delightful it is to see you again, and how good it was of you to invite Abby and me to come here for a family wedding when I never feel sure we ought to lay claim to membership. And Elizabeth and Alexander! You are both looking well. Present me to your betrothed if you will, Alexander. I assume this is she.” She turned her attention upon Wren.
“Yes indeed,” the Earl of Riverdale said, drawing Wren’s hand through his arm. “Cousin Viola and Abigail, I have the pleasure of presenting my betrothed, Miss Wren Heyden.”
“I say, Mama,” Captain Westcott said, “Miss Heyden sat with me throughout the bout of fever I arrived home with. She bathed my face with cool cloths and listened to my ravings without once calling me an idiot. And this morning she sneaked me a piece of toast after I have been tortured with nothing but gruels in which there is not a single lump of meat or vegetables a man could get his teeth into.”
“Physician’s orders, Harry,” Elizabeth said, laughing. “And now that you have betrayed poor Wren I daresay she will be arrested and dragged off within the hour to sit in the stocks.”
“Miss Heyden.” The former countess extended her hand, her eyes roaming over Wren’s face. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I thank you for the note you included with Althea’s second letter and the personal invitation to your wedding. It tipped the scales in favor of our coming. Did it not, Abby? And now I find that I am even more deeply in your debt. You have been caring for my son and preventing him from devouring beefsteaks and ale when he was feverish, the foolish boy. I will forgive the toast this morning.”
Wren thought about how difficult it must have been for her to come to the wedding of the man who now bore the title that had been her son’s. And to come here to the house that had been hers. Yet now she was shaking the hand of the woman who tomorrow would assume the title that had been her own for longer than twenty years, and she was smiling graciously as though she felt no pang at all.
“I think it will soon be time for the beefsteaks and ale,” Wren said. “You must find your son looking dreadfully thin.”
“Ah but,” she said, her eyes brightening with more tears, “he is alive.”
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Heyden,” Abigail Westcott said, stepping away from her brother’s side in order to offer her hand to Wren. “My cousin Jessica wrote to me about you. She is enormously impressed that you are a businesswoman and a very successful one. I am impressed too. Thank you for looking after my brother.”
“Everyone else has done so too,” Wren told her. “Mrs. Westcott and Lizzie and I have taken turns sitting with him during the day, and Lord Riverdale sleeps in his dressing room at night. The Duke of Netherby has come each day to spend an hour or more with him.”
“And has looked at me through his quizzing glass every time I complain about the food,” the captain said indignantly, “and informed me I am getting to be a bore. He treats me as though I were a schoolboy again.”
“I cannot believe you are here and I am not merely dreaming, Harry,” Abigail said. “You are not going back to that horrid place, are you? Promise me you are not?”
“The Peninsula?” he said. “Of course I am going back. I am an officer, Abby. A captain, no less. I was promoted—just after I had almost got my arm sliced off, in fact. I have men counting on me out there and I am not going to let them down. I don’t want to let them down.”
“I know,” she said, tossing her glance at the ceiling. “It is all a great lark. Well, I am not going to quarrel with you, Harry. Not today, anyway.”
“Come upstairs to the drawing room,” Mrs. Westcott said. “You must be ready for refreshments.”
“I shall see Harry back to his room,” Lord Riverdale said. “Would you like to come too, Abigail?”
“I will come in a short while, Harry,” his mother said.
“To tuck me in, I suppose,” he said with a grin.
“Well, I am your mama,” she reminded him. She walked beside Wren as they climbed the stairs. “I am so sorry, Miss Heyden. All the focus of attention ought to be upon you today. You are tomorrow’s bride.”
“I am perfectly contented that it be upon Captain Westcott,” Wren said. “The Duke of Netherby informed us that his captaincy was awarded for an act of extraordinary bravery. How he got that information out of your son, I do not know. He has said nothing to the rest of us. He is a modest young man and I like him exceedingly.”
“You have endeared yourself to a mother’s heart,” Miss Kingsley said. “Again.”
Word spread fast. The Duke of Netherby paid his accustomed call before the morning was out, bringing his stepmother and Lady Jessica with him. Miss Kingsley went up to the captain’s room not long after and Abigail came down. She and Lady Jessica met in the middle of the drawing room and hugged each other with exclamations and squeals of joy—the squeals were Lady Jessica’s. They sat on the window seat, their heads together as they chattered away, their facial expressions bright with animation.
Wren was not ignored. Quite the contrary. She was drawn into a group with Mrs. Westcott and Elizabeth and the dowager duchess, who plied her with questions about the wedding clothes for which she had shopped during the past week. Abigail came to sit beside her later, after her cousin had run upstairs to look in on the captain—“if I can get past Avery,” she said, pulling a face as she left the room. Abigail wanted to know about the wedding plans. Her mother made much of Wren for the rest of the day and told her how happy she was.
“Alexander has always been one of the nicest people I know even apart from those impossibly romantic good looks of his,” she said, “and I am delighted to know he is to be happily settled.”
Lord Riverdale himself stayed close to her all evening.
Belowstairs, all was apparently busy in preparation for tomorrow�
��s wedding breakfast.
It was a busy, pleasant wedding eve, Wren told herself all day, and indeed she enjoyed it. Yet she felt horribly lonely through it all. They were a close-knit family, the Westcotts, despite the ghastly upheavals of last year that had shaken them to the roots and threatened to break them asunder. She felt her aloneness, her lack of a family of her own, like a physical weight. Perhaps tomorrow she would feel differently. She would be a member of this family. She would be a Westcott. She would belong.
Or would she?
Even if she did, would her new family ever fill the empty space where her own family—the bride’s family—ought to be?
Fourteen
Alexander waited outside St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, his hands opening and closing at his sides. His was not to be the typical society wedding held here during the months of the Season. There were very few guests and no frills—no organ or choir, no incense or floral arrangements, no flower-bedecked carriage. No groom waiting at the front of the church for his bride to walk toward him along the nave on the arm of her father.
But it felt no less a momentous occasion to him. He had purchased the special license and made the arrangements, and now here he was, as nervous as if there were three hundred guests and three bishops gathered inside.
Instead there were the members of his family on both his mother’s and his father’s sides, with the exception of Cousin Mildred’s three boys and Camille and Joel Cunningham and their adopted children. Harry was here, looking thin and smart, if slightly shabby, in his military uniform, which had been ruthlessly brushed and cleaned.
The situation was very lopsided, of course, for there was no family on the bride’s side. Perhaps after all they should have stuck with the original plan of marrying even more quietly than this. He knew she was feeling the absence of her aunt and uncle quite acutely, but that was not to be helped. What about the rest of her family, though? Was there any? He strongly suspected there was. Surely, she would have told him, no matter how painful the telling, if they had all perished in some disaster when she was a child.
One of these days they were going to have a long talk about her past. And one of these days they must talk about a number of other things too. The week had sped by in such a whirl of activity that they had not even discussed a marriage contract. She had revealed no details of her fortune to him and had extracted no promise from him about how it would be managed and spent. She had once sworn she would not marry before she had protected her interests.
He was just beginning to wonder if she would be late when his carriage turned into the square. He had come earlier with Sidney, from Sid’s rooms, where he had spent the night again. He flexed his fingers once more and stepped forward as the carriage drew to a halt at the foot of the steps.
He helped his mother descend first. She took both his hands in hers and squeezed them tightly. “My dearest boy,” she said. “What a lovely day. Promise me you will be happy.”
“I promise, Mama.” He kissed her forehead and turned to help Elizabeth alight. They shared a wordless hug, and she went up the steps with their mother and disappeared inside the church while he was handing down his bride.
She was wearing an elegant, perfectly tailored, high-waisted dress in a vivid shade of pink that looked unexpectedly stunning with her dark hair, some of which was visible beneath a cream-colored bonnet with pink satin lining ruched on the underside of the brim and pink rosebuds and greenery in a cluster on one side of the crown. Wide pink satin ribbons held the confection in place and were tied with a large bow beneath her left ear. There was not a veil in sight. She set a hand in his and stepped down carefully.
“You look beautiful,” he told her.
“And so do you,” she said, smiling.
He bowed over her hand, raised it to his lips, and drew it through his arm. They climbed the steps together and stepped inside the church. The few guests gathered at the front were swallowed up by the cold grandeur of their surroundings. The church smelled of candles and old incense and prayer books. In the absence of organ music, his bootheels rang on the stone floor as they made their way forward. He looked at his bride, whose hand rested in the crook of his arm, and felt all the momentous significance of the occasion.
This was his wedding day.
He was about to join himself to this woman for the rest of their lives. And it felt right. There had been no lengthy courtship, no grand romance, no declaration of love. But there was liking and respect on both sides. He was quite sure of that. There was admiration too on his side.
He looked ahead again to the clergyman, properly vested despite the quiet nature of the wedding. Sid, his best man, bearer of the ring, was facing them, a look of anxiety on his face. The others turned their heads, smiling, as they passed. And they came to a stop before the clergyman.
“Dearly beloved,” he said after a moment of silence, and this was it, Alexander thought. The most solemn, most momentous hour of his life.
And time swept on. Within moments, it seemed, the world as he knew it changed irrevocably with the exchange of vows and the placement of a ring and they were man and wife and moving off to the vestry to sign the register and then returning to greet their guests with handshakes and hugs and kisses. And then they were leading the way back along the nave and out onto the church steps, where Sid and Jessica and Abigail and Harry were awaiting them with handfuls of rose petals and a few curious onlookers, drawn no doubt by the fashionable carriages drawn up before the church.
The sun was shining.
There were more hugs and backslapping and congratulations somewhat louder and more hearty than those offered inside before Alexander handed his bride into his carriage for the drive back to South Audley Street. They were to ride alone. There were no old boots or pots and pans to clatter along behind them as they moved away from the church—at his insistence. And it was a closed carriage, when the weather was fine enough for an open barouche.
The trappings, the absence of those festive touches that usually drew attention to a bridal conveyance, did not matter. They were married.
He reached for her hand as the carriage rocked into motion. “Well, my lady,” he said.
“Do you regret not having a grander wedding?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Did you regret not having a quieter wedding?”
“No.”
He raised her hand to his lips. “I believe,” he said, “I will remember our wedding all my life as something perfect—just as it was.”
“So will I,” she said softly.
• • •
But there were times during the day when Wren wished they had kept to the original plan for a private wedding. She almost did not step into the carriage to go to church. It seemed like a physical impossibility. But of course she did. Going inside the church, which she was quite convinced during the journey she would not be able to do, was made easier by the fact that he was outside waiting for her and suddenly it was her wedding day and nothing else mattered. From the moment she set her hand in his to alight from the carriage, she saw only him and then the church and the clergyman awaiting them, and she felt only the solemn joy of the occasion. She was getting married. More than that, she was marrying the man with whom she had fallen deeply and unexpectedly—and secretly—in love. Oh, he was more right than he knew when he said in the carriage afterward that their wedding had been perfect. Even the ordeal after they came out of the vestry of facing the Westcott and Radley families en masse, some of whom she had not met before, could not quite mar the perfection. They had all been so very kind.
Joy remained with her during the carriage ride home. And her first sight of the dining room fairly took her breath away and really did bring tears to her eyes. The finest china, crystal, and silverware had been formally set out on a crisp white cloth. An elaborate epergne of summer flowers adorned the center of the table, and a pink rosebud stood in
individual crystal vases at each place beside an intricately folded linen napkin. Wall sconces were filled with flowers, leaves and ferns spilling over the sides. Candles in silver holders burned everywhere despite the sunlight beyond the windows. A two-tiered cake iced in white and decorated with pink rosebuds stood alone on a small side table, a silver knife with pink ribbon adorning its handle beside it.
The cause of Wren’s tears was the drinking glasses and individual vases. They were Heyden ware. The design was the last one Uncle Reggie had approved.
“Wherever—?” She whirled about to gaze at the Earl of Riverdale. He was smiling back at her, looking smugly pleased with himself.
“I was at one of the shops you visited with Lizzie and Jessica within hours of you leaving it,” he said. “Fortunately, the shop owner had a complete set of everything I needed. He did complain, though, that I had left him with almost nothing and it might take him weeks to get more.”
“Oh.” And he must have paid the full retail price for them when he might have got them . . . But no. She would not complete that thought, even within her own head.
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh, how inadequate words are. Thank you, Lord Riverdale.”
“Might that be Alexander now?” he said. “Or even Alex?”
“Yes.” But there was no time to say more. Their guests were arriving.
Sitting through the wedding breakfast with a large number of people, kind as they all were, was excruciatingly difficult for Wren. She had never done anything remotely like it before. Worse, she was very much on display as the bride and was expected to smile and converse without ceasing. None of them could have any idea what an ordeal it was for her. There were speeches and toasts, during which, inexplicably, everyone seemed to look and smile at her rather than at the speaker. And then, when it was all over, they removed to the drawing room and in many ways the situation was worse, for everyone circulated, as she remembered the neighbors doing it at that ghastly tea at Brambledean. But this time she did not have a veil to hide behind.