“Too peacefully, perhaps,” she fretted. “What if he doesn’t wake up? What if these are my final hours to—”
“My dear Lady Tabitha,” the physician interrupted gently. “I know you worry about your father, and with good reason. He is dying. But not today. My prognosis has not changed. He still has a few more weeks—”
“You said another month or two!”
“—which means his lordship will be more than able to attend today’s wedding ceremony… if you allow me and the others to perform our assigned duties.”
She let out a long sigh. “Of course you should do your duty. As should I. I don’t know what has got into me.”
“Don’t you? If it is not too impertinent for me to say so, might a small part of you prefer the safety of his sickbed to the uncertainty awaiting you?”
“Make that a large part of me,” she muttered.
But the truth was, it wasn’t marriage that frightened her. It was the specter of a future shackled to a self-centered libertine who neither respected nor particularly wanted her. It was her dowry he needed, in order to pay his gambling debts and continue his debauched lifestyle.
Marriage to the right man wouldn’t give her the least pause. If it was not Viscount Oldfield at the altar, but rather his man of business, Tabitha would have been coiffed and in her wedding dress since before dawn, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to dash down the aisle and into his open arms.
She forced herself up out of the chair on wooden limbs. “I suppose I should freshen up.”
The marquess let out a wracking cough. His eyes flew open, and slowly focused on his daughter.
“Tabitha,” he rasped. “Is it time?”
“For the wedding? Almost.”
A brief smile curved his pale lips. “You’re doing the right thing. I am proud to have a dutiful daughter.”
She kept her mouth closed to hide her clenched teeth and nodded tightly.
Was it too much to ask to want her father to be proud of her for any reason at all besides strict obedience to his whims? Could he not be proud that she was a good person, or an accomplished pianist, or a regular sight volunteering at the local hospital? Should he not allow the possibility of a love match? Ought a father not to care about his daughter’s happiness, or to consider the life in store for her if she married a gambler almost thrice her age, with a penchant for whoring and who already viewed his young bride as a barnacle to be treated with contempt and on a tight leash?
How she hated that this was the only way to make the marquess proud. That giving her body and her life to a man she despised was the only act that would prevent her father from dying disappointed in his only daughter.
But Papa had forced a promise from her lips. Maneuvered her into this situation before she was even born. Found his only daughter an aristocratic husband, who happened to be his best friend.
And now the time had come.
She dragged herself down the corridor to her bedchamber with leaden feet. Inside the dressing room, Mary Frances awaited her with curling tongs in hand and a bleary-eyed expression that looked as though she, too, had passed the night crying.
“I wish you didn’t have to do it,” Mary Frances whispered.
Not: I wish you wouldn’t do it.
But: I wish you didn’t have to.
In all of Tabitha’s twenty-two years, the only person who’d ever acted as though she ought to have a choice in the matter was… Hudson.
Who’d wanted her to choose him.
And, oh, how she wished she could!
Instead, she stood boneless as a rag doll as Mary Frances bathed and clothed her and dressed her hair.
“You look beautiful,” her maid whispered.
Tabitha gazed at the stranger in the mirror. She looked exactly as she had one week ago, when she’d set out for the chapel the first time. But today she felt like an entirely different person. She was no longer an ignorant ingénue. Now she knew better. Knew exactly what she was getting herself into. Knew exactly what she was giving up. Viscerally understood the sacrifice being asked of her.
Not asked.
