“To wed on Monday? Won’t you mind shirking your hostess duties?”
“Elizabeth can step into the breach.” Claire breathed a happy sigh as they set off for the library. “It’ll be her job soon enough.”
Seventeen
Jonathan and Claire enjoyed a long, languid, and thoroughly delightful dîner à deux, spent chiefly in catching one another up on the past year and how they’d each frittered it away in pining for the other. They lingered over the final course, heedless of the poor footmen growing old at their posts, until a noise of distant revelry burst their private bubble.
When they quit the library, the sounds grew more distinct. Raucous laughter, clinking glassware, and off-key snatches of Hark the Herald wafted down the corridor, all emanating from the drawing room.
Somebody had left the door ajar, as though to set a trap. When the two lovers were so foolish as to peep inside, they found themselves immediately seized and beset by hearty handshakes, hugs, kisses, and congratulations. Then, before they could escape, they were furnished with eggnog and made to stay and have a wonderful time.
Caroling was followed by charades and then a call for snap-dragon, the unaccountably popular game of snatching raisins from a bowl of flaming brandy. While the others singed their fingers, Jonathan and Claire (protesting she came by more than enough burns in her workshop) sat down to a nice, safe round of whist with the Cainewoods. The two couples got on famously, and by the end of the set Jonathan was on Christian-name terms with Rachael and Griffin—who would soon be his siblings, he was elated to realize. All his life he’d wished for siblings.
But family relations were not always so easy, as Jonathan well knew. Though the engagement was toasted again and again, one Chase made a point of excluding herself, declaring she would withhold her felicitations until the marriage was actually accomplished. Though at first taking Elizabeth’s declaration in good humor, Jonathan could not but wonder—as the evening wore on and she remained stubbornly aloof—if her hostility toward him would fade, or if she might never accept him as a brother.
Noah, by contrast, seemed twice as thrilled as everyone else—even when, fortified by eggnog, Claire scolded him for hiding his correspondence with Jonathan.
“It was wrong of me, I know,” he admitted with a good grace. “I’m sorry for deceiving you, though at the time I imagined myself to be protecting you. I thought you needed space to heal, an interval to forget. Yet as time went by, and you both seemed more miserable, not less…”
She let him continue apologizing for a while, then brought Rachael in to heap on more abuse, before forgiving him at last.
But no sooner were Noah and Claire at peace than Rachael began to look troubled, even shedding a tear over the year Claire and Jonathan had lost. As Griffin led her away to calm down, her two siblings looked on in astonishment, then spent several minutes debating what had prompted such un-Rachael-like behavior.
Claire concluded she was feeling guilty for having gone off to Cainewood, leaving her hapless brother and sisters to muck about in their folly.
Noah concluded she was with child again.
Whatever the true cause, its effects were realized as the party began to break up. When Rachael embraced her sister and wished her brother-to-be a good night, her eyes grew damp again. “You two have been through so much,” she said tremulously, “and it’s all my fault! If I’d been here to manage things properly…” She sniffled. “But what’s done is done, as Griffin keeps telling me?—”
“To very little effect.” Griffin offered her a handkerchief.
“—and you’re together now; that’s the important thing.” Rachael blew her nose. “I hope you won’t waste any more time. Not a single day! You plan to marry soon?”
“Very soon,” Claire said soothingly. “We’ve already got a new special license?—”
“Have you, indeed? Then why not wed tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow!” Claire’s gaze flew to Jonathan’s. “I—well—I’ve no objection, but…”
“Nor have I!” Jonathan assured her. “Only I’m not sure it’s possible. The license is at Twineham Park, thirty miles away.”
“Unless it’s still on the road from Canterbury,” Claire reminded him. “And then there’s the problem of the vicar, who refused to marry us on Christmas Day last year—and it’s too late to find somebody else this time?—“
“Leave all that to me,” Rachael said, her spirits suddenly improved. “I can manage the vicar. And you”—turning to Jonathan—“send your coachman to fetch the license. If he leaves now for Twineham, he should easily return by morning.”
“That’s true.” Jonathan hesitated. “But even so…”
Griffin touched his wife’s hand. “Is it worth the trouble, my love? Whether they marry tomorrow or next week, what’s the difference?”
Rachael drew herself up. “Not—a—single—day!” she repeated emphatically, imperious eyes rounding on her husband. “Now accompany me upstairs, for I need to be sick.”
With dignified haste she withdrew, Griffin following in her wake.
Jonathan raised his brows at Claire. “Do you suppose Noah was right?”
She lifted her chin. “I’d say we both were. But don’t tell him yet, if you please. He’ll be insufferable.”
“Your wish is my command.”
