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Chapter 1: The Wedding
This was not at allhow Diane Carter wanted her wedding to be.
The church was small, and even with the scarce amount of pews as it contained, the wedding party barely filled them. The windows were plain and fogged up with the morning mist, the floor cold, uninspired stone. It was a building due for renovations, likely the reason the venue had been easily secured for her wedding.
In her wedding dress, lace along her hems and collar, with the gauzy veil and bouquet of crocuses, she was the only thing that decorated the dusty church.
She hadn’t expected a particularly lavish wedding, but she'd hoped it would have at least looked like a cheery occasion. She'd asked her fiancé if he would indulge her a little, and have a few flowers decorate their early spring wedding, maybe some snowdrops and ribbonned bunting on the aisles. Something, anything at all so no one would mistake this milestone of her life for a regular service.
There weren't enough guests to justify the expense, Martin, her intended, had said.
In fact, Martin had spent so little on their wedding that Diane wondered why they even were bothering. Surely it would have been cheaper to travel a few miles to the Scottish border, where the marriage laws were lax, and simply elope.
Still, looking around at the church in all its undecorated, empty presentation, seemed a much less depressing prospect for fretting over than looking at her husband-to-be.
Every time Diane looked at Martin, she wished she found him handsome. He had, by all accounts, a nice face. But as she gazed at him across the altar, she wished there was even one thing she appreciated about it.
She supposed love meant that no matter how plain a person’s face was, you grew to like its features. Love softened them. Made them wondrous.
She looked at her intended a moment longer.
It wasn't a love match.
They were, however, perfectly suited to one another’s situations. After all, under Diane’s white veil, she was rather plain herself, and she had few connections to recommend her. Her father was a gentleman, and Martin Bartlett was a gentleman. They had not danced together at an assembly ball, but they had stood together against the wall during one and he had only tread on her toes once during the conversation.
“I haven’t received your wedding present yet,” her intended whispered beneath the priest’s droning, over his shoulder to his best man.
“It’s coming,” came the toneless, fathomlessly deep reply.
Diane’s eyes flicked to the best man, Liam Graves, easily the most beautiful man in the world.
Tall, broad, stoic. Ever present, ever watching. Liam was Martin's cousin, though the boys had been raised nearly as brothers. Every occasion of Diane and Martin’s courtship, Liam was usually somewhere nearby. Acting gargoyle, as Martin called it. Staring quietly over ballrooms, tea rooms, gardens, hardly uttering a word.
His hair was a dark golden mane, long and always just slightly mussed. Diane used to wonder, almost jealously, who could possibly be the one mussing it. That was until she’d noted how he would rake his hands through it in agitation when he paced the gardens.
Liam proved that a scarred face did not make one ugly. If anything, his scars drew attention to the sharpness of his jaw and made one wonder what ferocious thing he'd fought to receive them. The explanation changed every time another young lady was paired up with him at one of Martin’s dinner parties. He never gave any detail, just shrugged and named some clawed animal. Sometimes it was “Badgers.” Others it was “Dogs.” Once it was “Weasels.”
In some selfish truth, the fact that he had such scarring on the side of his face and still managed to be so beautiful had long comforted Diane. Perhaps the blemishes and scars from her picking at her acne in her awkward years might not offend all eyes the way it did whenever she looked in her vanity mirror.
Every time she saw him, it sent a thunderous jolt through her heart.
He was just too handsome to look at, and so Diane often made it a point not to, especially when they happened to talk.
At least, not directly. Sometimes she’d position herself across the room from him, preferably where he’d have his back to her, or when he was turned profile. Then she might regard him safely from the corner of her eye, or through reflections in any mirror or buffed surface. One dinner at Martin's estate she sat across from Liam, and learned every angle and plane of his face from the faint reflection in the polished wood.
Beneath thick, mantle-like brows, his dark brown eyes glinted with fire, catching her stare.
He was a constant reminder why she was marrying Martin.
Her heart wouldn’t be able to handle marrying someone she thought truly handsome, much less someone she loved.
She looked to the man that would be her husband again, who summoned no feelings in her whatsoever. No longing, no disgust, no heart palpitations of any kind.
It was good to look at him, to get her pulse to stop racing from the way it did when she looked at Mr. Graves. She’d already stared at Mr. Graves too long, and any longer would be too much. She could imagine her aunt chastising her for not being more mindful of her weak constitution.
What it must have been like to across the border to the old smithy, the first house in Scotland. To want to be bound to a person so desperately that the scandal of it all posed no obstacle? She could only imagine what such intense feelings would mean for her health.
Diane wouldn't have crossed a puddle for Martin. Unfortunately, there hadn't been any rain lately.
