After a few minutes he glanced down at his boots to make sure they had not acquired even a speck of mud in his progress along the church path. He checked the positioning of his sword at his side, adjusted his red sash, and glanced at the church door. He thought fancifully that perhaps it would never open again. But then he heard the approach of a carriage and was aware of it stopping at the church gate. He took his place before the front pew while the vicar, nowin his full vestments, lit the candles on the altar and made his way along the short aisle to the church door to greet the bride.
Gil was suddenly glad that Harry had played the autocratic family head and insisted upon formality even in so small a wedding. Gil had pictured the three of them walking to church and making their way together to the altar rail, where he would present his license and he and Abby would be married, sign the register, and walk back to the house, all within half an hour or so. It was the sort of wedding Abby had chosen and he had wanted. But every bride, he believed, and yes, perhaps every bridegroom too, needed some sort of ceremony, something to set their wedding day apart from all other days. Some sense that a momentous milestone had been reached and then passed.
His bride stepped inside the church with her brother and Gil felt his mouth turn dry.
•••
After Harry had decided last night that his sister was not just going to wander off to church in the morning to be married, but that she was, by thunder—hiswords—going to have awedding, guests or no guests, Abigail had abandoned her plan to wear her favorite blue day dress for the occasion. Instead she had hauled out from the back of her wardrobe the sprigged muslin dress that hung there a little separate from all the other garments so that it would not crease though it was seldom worn. She was not sure why she had even brought it with her from London. She had had it forever and a day, but she had worn it no more than half a dozen times. She had worn it first to Camille and Joel’s wedding in Bath—oh, goodness, five years ago. She had worn it last a few months ago to the large neighborhoodparty her mother had organized for the eightieth birthday of the Dowager Marchioness of Dorchester. It was delicate and pretty and always semifashionable because it had never been ultrafashionable. It was not quite formal enough to be an evening dress, but it was more than just a day dress. She had always loved it.
Now it would be her wedding dress.
It would have been far too fancy for a stroll into the village, but she would not be strolling anywhere on her wedding day, it seemed. Harry had insisted that she would travel to church in the carriage with him.Notwith Gil too. He would go ahead of them, because a bridegroom was not supposed to set eyes upon his bride on their wedding day until they met in church. But, absurdity upon absurdity, he had insisted that Gil go to church in the carriage too lest he muddy his boots, which was altogether possible after the rain of the last few days.
Now, early in the morning, Abigail had discovered that her straw bonnet, the one she most wanted to wear, was far too plain for this particular dress and for the occasion. After a few moments of near panic—whatwouldshe wear on her head?—she had the idea of decorating the brim with live flowers instead of the modest cluster of silk ones that adorned it now. She donned her dressing gown over her nightgown and ran down the back stairs in order to take a shortcut through the kitchen to the garden at the back where the flowers for the house were grown in neat, colorful rows alongside the vegetables.
She did not escape notice as she had hoped to do, however. Even before she reached the back door the cook had hailed her, and the two kitchen maids with her gawked. She should have gone around the outside of the house, Abigail thought, but then she would have felt obliged to get dressedfirst, and she might have risked being seen by her bridegroom and forever dooming her marriage to whatever ghastly fate lay in store for such unfortunate couples.
“I just need to cut a few flowers to trim my bonnet,” she explained, holding it up, though why she had brought it down with her she did not know, since she would need both hands to cut and carry the flowers. “I thought it would look prettier. For a wedding, that is.”
The cook was standing over a large earthenware bowl, almost up to her elbows in dough, but she clucked her tongue and gestured quite eloquently with her elbows.
“Are your hands clean, girl?” she asked one of the maids. “They are? Take that there bonnet from Miss Abigail, then, and bring it into Mrs. Sullivan’s room. Then go out and cut a nice lot of flowers. Take the basket with you.” She turned her attention to the other maid as the bonnet was whisked from Abigail’s hand without a request for permission. “Carry Miss Abigail’s breakfast tray up to her room and then come right back down to take over from me here. I will join Mrs. Sullivan as soon as I have scrubbed up. Between us we will have the best wedding bonnet ever seen on a bride’s head. Miss Abigail, you go back up to your room right now, and I do not want to see hide nor hair of you again until you come down to go to church with Mr. Harry—MajorHarry. Your bonnet will be brought up to you when it is ready.”
Abigail felt like a little girl having her hand slapped for trying to take a newly baked biscuit off the cooling tray and then finding herself seated at the table, swaddled in a napkin tucked beneath her chin, and two already-cooled biscuits on a plate before her.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I have made a nuisance of myself when I can see you are busy. I could very easily—”
“Are you planning to send roots down into the floor, girl?” the cook said to the maid who held the breakfast tray. “Off with you now. And, Miss Abigail, out of my kitchen. I have a wedding breakfast to prepare and a wedding bonnet to trim.”
And the thing was that Abigail went, as meekly as that child she used to be would have done.
Long before Harry came for her she was wearing her dress and the pearl necklace Marcel had given her for her twenty-first birthday.Realpearls, he had assured her with a grin, referring to the large, vulgar and very fake ones Mama had worn to their wedding. Apparently he had bought them for her as a sort of joke at a village fair the day they met. Abigail added her pearl earbobs after styling her hair in a simple knot and coaxing a few tendrils to wave over her ears and neck.
And then her bonnet arrived in the hands of one of the maids, who carried it rather as though it were a bowl full of some precious liquid in danger of spilling over. She was smiling broadly.
“It is that pretty, Miss Abigail,” she said. “Cook says it is her masterpiece, and Mrs. Sullivan says no one will mistake you for anything but a bride. She says I am to put it on for you so that none of the flowers get squashed and so that it sits just so. Oh, Miss Abigail, you look pretty, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Abigail had planned a discreet border of small flowers about the seam where the crown met the brim. Something delicately pretty and just a bit festive. This looked more like a lavish bowl of flowers—mostly varicolored sweet peas—in glorious bloom. The straw hat itself was almost invisible, except the top of the crown and the edge of the brim. The ribbons had been changed from pale blue to bright pink,and where they were attached to the bonnet they had been formed into elaborate rosettes.
“Well,” she said, swallowing her dismay, “let us see what it looks like on my head, shall we?”
Was it possible to postpone her wedding?Cancelit?
But after she had sat down on the bench in her dressing room, her back to the mirror, and the maid, anxious and frowning, had placed the bonnet on her head and repositioned it three separate times and then tied the ribbons close to her left ear and fluffed out the bow before standing back and smiling again—after all that Abigail turned half fearfully to look at her image in the mirror and...
“Oh,” she said, “itispretty.”
“I should dashed well say it is,” Harry said from the doorway. “Stand up and let me have a good look at you, Abby. I say, you look as fine as fivepence.”
The maid curtsied and disappeared, and Abigail took a good look at her brother. He had definitely put on some weight. Not a great deal, but enough that he had lost that gray, gaunt look he had had when he came home. He was tall and lean and handsome in his green regimentals, which were a bit shabby, perhaps, but perfectly clean and well pressed. He looked like a warrior who had seen battle, and that was exactly what he was.
“Do I?” she asked him. “I do not look a bit... ridiculous, considering the fact that there will be no guests?”
Not even Mama.
Or Camille.
For a moment her stomach threatened to turn bilious.
