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‘So, you seriously mean to take your bride to Lesser Peeving, the moment you’ve signed the marriage lines?’
‘No. Not straight away. I am as keen to avenge Archie as either of you,’ he said, raising one hand to prevent either of them from interrupting. ‘But as Ulysses has already pointed out, once I bring Clement to justice, it is going to take my bride some time to forgive me. If she ever does. So I need a little time, before then, to…see to the matter of an heir.’
Both men looked into their glasses, rather than at him. Which was probably as well. He wasn’t sure he could have looked them square in the face. Not after outlining what sounded, even to his own ears, like a most dastardly way of treating any woman. Let alone a woman who deserved so much better.
‘Then we are in agreement,’ he said with determination. ‘I will marry Clare, and bed her before I take our investigation any further.’
Both men nodded, although Atlas was now looking at him as though he was some kind of monster.
He let it go. Because Atlas couldn’t possibly think any worse of him than he did of himself, right at that moment.
CHAPTER NINE
The church was packed with a lot of people Clare had never seen before and all of them there to witness Lady Harriet’s marriage to Lord Becconsall. It didn’t look as if any of them had any idea Lord Rawcliffe was getting married in the same ceremony, to judge from the curious stares people were giving her as she walked up the aisle on the arm of Lady Harriet’s father.
And oh, how glad she was now that he’d been thoughtful enough to make the suggestion.
‘Don’t seem right,’ he’d said as they’d all been gathering in the hall before setting off for St George’s, ‘for you to have to walk down the aisle on your own behind me and Harriet. Bad enough you’ve just lost your own father, without having your nose rubbed in it. And I have two arms,’ he’d finished gruffly. ‘You don’t mind sharing, do you, Harriet?’
Lady Harriet didn’t. But then she was so full of love for her groom, so happy to be marrying him, that Clare didn’t think anything would have dimmed her joy. Besides, Lady Harriet had a very generous disposition. It was entirely thanks to her that Clare was wearing the most beautiful gown she’d ever seen, let alone owned.
‘I have more clothes than I know what to do with,’ Lady Harriet had said airily when they’d started discussing the tricky question of what she ought to wear for her wedding, since she was in mourning. And to prove it, she’d flung open the lid of a trunk absolutely crammed with clothes. ‘And it will be much quicker to have something of mine altered to fit you than attempting to get a dressmaker to create something in the scant time his High and Mightiness has agreed you may have,’ she’d finished acidly, ‘before he screws his ring on to your finger.’
Which was true, since Clare was much shorter than Lady Harriet. It had been fairly straightforward to remove a couple of rows of flounces from the hem and put a few darts into the bodice of the one she’d chosen, and substitute a black sash for the green one. Black gloves and a black ribbon to tie up her posy would suffice, Lady Harriet had assured her, to satisfy conventions.
So that now Clare was walking up the aisle on the arm of Lady Harriet’s father, a belted earl no less, wearing a gown of shimmering white satin, embroidered here and there with a tasteful motif of ivy leaves, under a delicate overdress of black lace.
But instead of feeling like a glowing bride, the way people were craning their necks to stare and then whispering about her behind their prayer books made her very conscious it was a borrowed dress she was wearing and someone else’s father upon whose arm she was leaning. And that she was heading toward a groom who was marrying her for all the wrong reasons.
She kept her head held high, but she could feel her cheeks heating and knew they must be bright red. For nobody could be saying anything worse about her than what she was feeling about herself. She’d spent the last day or so keeping the kindly Lady Harriet at arm’s length by talking of nothing but clothes. Of speaking to her future husband of nothing but trivialities.
