She shook her head. She was smiling and she was not going to pretend otherwise. “I must say, I am in a hurry to return home now for I must see this for myself,” she said.
“Well, Your Grace, if that is the case, we shall do that.” he said. “We are going home.”
He kissed her, there on the side of the Brighton Road with the carriage horses shifting in their traces behind them.
When she finally pulled away, she looked at him and thought about the drawing room in Bloomsbury where he had first appeared on her doorstep with his outrageous proposition.
She thought about her father, who had known Gideon Blackwell well enough to ask him for a promise and had trusted him to keep it.
She thought he would have been very pleased, indeed.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
The church at Haslington had not seen this many people since Christmas, and the vicar, surveying his pews from the vestry doorway with an expression of quiet satisfaction, appeared to feel that this reflected well on everyone involved.
Mary had asked for a small wedding. She had been very clear about this on multiple occasions and with considerable firmness. She was forty-nine years old, she had been married before, she knew her own mind, and what her mind wanted was something simple and unpretentious with the people she loved and no fuss whatsoever.
She got the people she loved. The fuss had rather got away from her.
This was largely because the Langley sisters had been involved in the planning, and the Langley sisters collectively had a different understanding of the word small than Mary did. The church was full. The flowers were abundant. The Langley ladiesand their husbands were seated in the first few rows on the bride’s side while the grooms side was occupied by Sir Franklin’s relations from far and wide.
It was the first time Evelyn, Charlotte, Marianne, Frances and their husbands had been at Blackthorne together. They had visited each other’s country seats through the summer and overlapped in London through the season, but a proper house party — rooms prepared, trunks unpacked, children running through the corridors at hours that tested the patience of the staff — was something new. The house felt different for it. It felt the way Helena had always thought it could feel, from that first afternoon when she and Gideon had walked through its rooms together and condemned the decore.
Sir Franklin stood at the altar with his hands clasped and his expression that of a man trying very hard to maintain composure and not entirely succeeding.
Mary walked toward him with a bright smile and Helena’s heart soared as she watched her friend.
The vows were exchanged. The vicar, who had by now developed a comfortable familiarity with the complicated domestic arrangements of the Blackthorne household and its extended circle, conducted the proceedings with evident pleasure.
When it was done Mary kissed her husband first, before he had quite collected himself to kiss her, which produced a sound of warm approval from the pews and caused Sir Franklin tolaugh through his remaining tears in a way that endeared him thoroughly to everyone present.
Outside in the sunshine the children were released from their enforced good behavior and took full advantage. There were a considerable number of them, Lavinia toddling among her new friends with glee.
The wedding breakfast was on the south lawn at Blackthorne, tables set out in the afternoon light with Mrs. Baker’s pies arranged on a long table near the house. There was no wedding cake. Mary had been equally clear on this subject as she had been on the matter of fuss.
The sign at the center of the pie table read, in Helena’s handwriting:The Duke and Duchess’s Choice — Rhubarb Apple.
The Langley contingent claimed a table early and held it. Helena sat between Frances and Charlotte with Evelyn and Marianne across from her.
“I maintain,” Evelyn said, after a while, “that my path to matrimony was the most remarkable of all of ours.”
“There is no argument to be had,” Charlotte said. “You were married to an eighty-year-old man and then to his heir. Nothing any of the rest of us did comes close.”
“I think Helena is second,” Marianne said. “A matchmaker who became the match. That is genuinely extraordinary.”
“It was not quite like that,” Helena said.
“It was exactly like that,” Frances said.
“Second place for most extraordinary tale must be Helena’s,” Evelyn confirmed.
“We cannot rank the rest of us,” Charlotte said. “Third, fourth and fifth are too evenly contested. We should all share third and leave it there.”
“I think we can place Clara 4th. She will not mind. Her love story is rather boring, and I know she won’t mind my saying so,” Marianne said with a laugh.
“That is true,” Helena replied. Clara and Benjamin had wed the previous month and hadn’t returned yet from their journey to the continent.
