“As dry as dust,” Marcel said, interrupting her. “You would have been having a coughing fit every time he moved, Elizabeth.”
“—but not as a man of any obvious attractions,” his wife continued with a speaking glance at him. “Now Lord Hodges! Well, my dear, I did not see that one coming from a million miles away.”
“I told you, Mama,” Abigail said with a smile and a hug for Elizabeth, “thatIdid. While Jessica and Estelle and I were admiring Lord Hodges for his good looks and his lovely smile, I was fully aware that he sought out Cousin Elizabeth’s company whenever he had the opportunity. And remember how gorgeous they looked when they were waltzing together on Boxing Day?”
“I believe your mother was too busy on that occasion noticing how gorgeous I looked waltzing withher, Abby,” Marcel said while Viola tossed her glance at the ceiling and ignored his grin.
“I am very pleased for you, Lady Overfield,” Estelle Lamarr said, offering Elizabeth her hand. “And I think it was very spiteful of the man to whom you were betrothed to embarrass you by accusing you in public of indecorous behavior. I cannot imagine anyone who is less capable of behaving indecorously.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, smiling at the girl.
“Congratulations, ma’am,” her brother, Bertrand, said as he shook Elizabeth’s hand.
“Do come up to the nursery,” Abigail said, slipping a hand through Elizabeth’s arm. “Camille and Joel are up there with the children. They may not have heard your carriage arriving. Did you know there is another child now in addition to Winifred and Sarah and Jacob? They have just recently adopted Robbie from the orphanage. He is four years old and was a dreadful behavior problem. But Joel refused to believe he was a hopeless case and then Camille refused to believe it and they are subduing him with love—with a great deal of help from Winifred, who keeps telling him that she willnotunder any circumstances call him a dreadfully naughty boy even if he keeps rolling his eyes at her forever and poking out his tongue as he pulls out the sides of his mouth.”
“Oh dear,” Elizabeth said.
“He is a sweet child, my newest grandson,” Viola said. “And they went ahead with his adoption last week even though Camille had just discovered that she is with child again. Whoever could have predicted all this for Camille of all people, Elizabeth?”
Lady Camille Westcott had been the most humorless of high sticklers before the discovery was made that her parents’ marriage had been bigamous and she was therefore illegitimate. Her world had been shattered, especially as it had included a broken engagement. But she had changed—by sheer grim grit, Elizabeth had always thought—until by last Christmas she had become a young matron with three children, two of them adopted, always a little disheveled in appearance, slightly overweight, totally in love with her family, especially her husband, Joel, and as happy as a spring day when the sun was shining.
And her mother, Viola…Her world of quiet, humorless dignity as the loyal wife of a blackguard whom everyone had despised, had changed too beyond recognition. Her household now, even though she had the excuse that they had only very recently all arrived in town, seemed noisy and a bit disorganized and brimming with family warmth and affection and happiness. Who could ever have predicted it just a few years ago? Andwhata family. It included Viola’s offspring and Marcel’s and adopted children as well as those born to one or other of the family members.
Even Viola’s younger daughter, Abby, seemed more cheerful that Elizabeth had seen her in the past three years.
Children came dashing and crawling toward them when they stepped into the nursery, all talking at once. But Elizabeth did notice one child at the far side of the room who was lying on his back and drumming his heels on the floor while Joel sat cross-legged beside him, talking to him with quiet unconcern. He waved cheerfully to Elizabeth.
What a wonderful way to spend her wedding eve, Elizabeth thought without any trace of irony, though it had become obvious that the dinner hour she had been quoted when she was invited had been a very rough estimate indeed.
She was spending it with family. Only a part of the whole, of course, but a very precious part all the same. And the rest of it had been busy for half the spring, it seemed, plotting and planning and scheming on her behalf because she was one of them.
“What have you heard of Harry?” she asked Viola.
“His regiment was sent off to America,” Viola said, “but he somehow missed going with them. I do not know how or why. I suspect he might have been wounded at Toulouse and has not told me about it, but Marcel keeps reminding me that even if he was, he is obviously not at death’s door. He is in Paris. Oh, Elizabeth, I do hope the wars are really and truly at an end. I hope these past wars were wars to end all wars. Do you think maybe they were? No other wars ever? No other mother or wife or daughter to have to go through what I and so many others have been going through? But enough of that. He is alive and in Paris. You ought not to have started me on that particular theme. Tell me about the courtship and the proposal. Was it on bended knee? With roses?”
“It was…lovely,” Elizabeth said.
But Sarah wanted to show her grandmama something and Winifred wanted to tell Elizabeth something else and Camille was coming toward them, the heel-drumming little boy astride one of her hips, scowling at Winifred, whose news was that she had a new brother whomshe would never stop loving no matter how hard he tried to make her do it.
“For family is more important thananything elsein the whole wide world, Cousin Elizabeth,” she said. “Is it not?”
“It is indeed,” Elizabeth said. She congratulated Winifred and smiled at Robbie and took the hand Joel was offering her.
Tomorrow was her wedding day, she thought. She could hardly wait to see Colin again.
To marry him.
•••
Elizabeth wore a new high-waisted cream-colored walking dress to her wedding. It was paired with a straw bonnet, the crown of which was trimmed with artificial primroses and tied beneath the chin with matching silk ribbons, and mustard-colored shoes and gloves. None of the garments were elaborate, and no one had influenced her choice, though Wren and her mother had tried when they went shopping with her. She had wanted to feel comfortable. She had wanted to feel likeherself, as she had not at her betrothal ball to Sir Geoffrey Codaire in the gorgeous gold and bronze gown, her hair dressed more elaborately than she liked it. Today she had had her maid brush her hair smooth and knot it simply at her neck so that her bonnet would fit easily over it.
She picked up her reticule, took one last look in the mirror, glanced at the clock—she was a little early, though not by much—and made her way downstairs.
It was her wedding day, she thought, as though realizing it for the first time.
Memory washed over her. Of Anna, in this very house not long after she had come from Bath, still new to her role as the very wealthy Lady Anastasia Westcott, newly betrothed to Avery, bewildered and dismayed as the family planned a grand society wedding for them at St. George’s. And of Avery arriving one morning while Elizabeth was sitting with Anna in the drawing room, and leaning over Anna’s chair to invite her to come with him right then to be married quietly by special license. His secretary would meet them at the church, he had explained, and Elizabeth was invited to go along as the second witness.
She wished for a moment that her wedding could be just like it. But it could not. They had a point to make. Besides, they owed it to her family not merely to slip off to marry privately.
