“I have absolutely no intention,” he said, “of getting married.”
“How fortunate,” she said pleasantly, “that no one has yet asked you to.”
“I’m serious.”
“You are twenty-five years old and deeply serious about nearly everything, which is in itself a recommendation for finding someone who isn’t.” She looked at him steadily. “You will meet someone, Harry. And when you do, I will be there. I give you my word on it.”
Harry was quiet for a moment. Then he made a sound that was somewhere between scorn and resignation and possibly something warmer than either.
“You are very certain about everything,” he said.
“I have wasted enough time being uncertain,” she replied. “I find I’ve lost the taste for it.”
He was quiet again. The street sounds drifted up through the window, and somewhere below them the house was settling into its evening stillness.
“All right,” he said at last. He reached out and took her hand, briefly, and then let go in the way of someone who was not yet entirely practiced at the gesture. “All right. I will hold you to that.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” she said.
* * *
The wedding wason Christmas day.
It was, as these things went when a duke’s sister married a marquess who was heir to a dukedom, somewhat inevitable that it would become a society event of some scale. Megan had tried,once, to suggest something smaller. She had observed Harry’s expression and Oliver’s expression and her mother’s expression and Dorothea’s expression, and she had not tried again. She was experienced enough in the navigation of unavoidable things to recognize one when she was surrounded by it. They wanted to put all rumors to rest and have her take her rightful place in society no matter how much of a fraud she felt.
The church was St. George’s in Hanover Square. The guest list was precisely as long as it needed to be and not a name longer, which had required Oliver to spend considerable time in negotiation with Harry’s social secretary. The flowers were white roses and lilies from the Duke’s heated winter orangery, filling the interior of the church with a sweetness that caught in Megan’s throat when she walked in on Harry’s arm and stopped being preparatory and became real.
She wore ivory silk, simply cut, in the style that the dressmaker had noted suited her best, though she was honest enough with herself to know she would not have cared very much what she wore as long as it did not hinder her walking to the front of that church to stand beside Oliver as her legs shook. She wore her mother’s pearls. She carried the ring Oliver had given her, transferred to her right hand for the ceremony, because she had told him she did not want to remove it and he had, without any particular fuss, arranged for it to stay.
She had thought, in the weeks of planning, that she might be frightened. She had spent so many years afraid of men, afraid of what compliance produced and what refusal cost, that she had constructed an expectation of fear as the appropriate response to any moment of significance in her life. She was not certain she knew how to move toward something rather than simply endure it.
She was not frightened.
She was aware, as she walked down the aisle on Harry’s arm, of the sheer implausibility of it. Of the congregation rising to itsfeet for a woman who had arrived in London a few weeks ago with a bullet wound and a dead earl and no public identity. Of the flowers and the light and the approving or merely curious faces arranged in their pews. Of her mother, in the front row, who had been crying quietly since the organ began and was making no attempt to stop. Of Dorothea, beside her, entirely dry-eyed and looking fiercely, precisely satisfied.
Of Oliver.
He was standing at the front of the church with Webb at his shoulder, which Megan gathered had required its own set of negotiations, and she could see from the top of the aisle that he was watching her with the same expression he had worn in the Welsh forest when he had first begun to look at her as something other than a complication to his plans. The expression she had catalogued before she had names for what it meant. She was rather better at reading him now.
Harry placed her hand on Oliver’s arm at the altar, and she felt the moment Oliver’s hand covered hers, steadying, certain, and she looked up at him and thought,here you are.Here we are. As we should be.
“Happy birthday,” he said, low enough for her alone.
“Thank you,” she said. And then, because she had learned in the past weeks that she was allowed the luxury of honesty with this man, she added, “I’m looking forward to receiving my present—you.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “As am I.”
The ceremony was conducted by a Bishop who was clearly delighted by the social eminence of the occasion and rather less clearly cognizant of the fact that the two people before him were not particularly attending to his observations on the sanctity of matrimony, being occupied with looking at each other in the way that people did who had arrived at something important by an improbable route.
Oliver’s voice, when he made his vows, was steady anddirect. It was how he always spoke when the thing he was saying mattered most. She had learned that about him, that he stripped away all decoration when he meant something absolutely.
She said her vows clearly, which surprised her, because she had half-expected her voice to fail at the last moment. It did not. The words came out steady, and she was glad of it, because they were words she had not said before and did not intend to say to anyone else, and they deserved to be heard.
The ring went on her finger.
The bishop said the necessary words.
Oliver kissed her, with rather more feeling than was perhaps strictly required, and behind them in the pews something that might generously be described as restrained applause broke out, which Megan suspected owed something to the Dowager Duchess’s evident approval of the scene.
