“Ah. I like it,” she told him. “I am glad you are not a Jones or a Brown or a Smith.”
“You would not have married me if I had been any one of those?” he asked, his eyebrows raised.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I have been waiting, you see, not for a good man, but for a good name.”
Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling, and...
“You have a petal on the side of your nose,” he told her.
She brushed at the wrong side and he removed the petal himself with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand.
“But did it come from Harry’s hoard,” he said, examining it, “or from the garden upon your head?”
“I almost canceled the wedding,” she told him. “Our cook caught me sneaking out of the house this morning to gather a few small blooms with which to decorate my straw bonnet. She shooed me back upstairs to eat breakfast and hide from you while she did the job herself in Mrs. Sullivan’s room. This is the result.”
“She ironed my coat so ferociously last night when I went to do it myself,” he told her, “that it could almost stand alone. And when I got up early this morning to polish my boots, I discovered that I could almost see my face in them. If any Frenchmen had seen them like that in battle, they would have stopped their charge to hold their sides while they doubled up in laughter. The wars might have been over far sooner than they were.”
She lifted her free hand to tap the button closest to his heart. “And someone polished your buttons and all the other metalwork too?” she said.
“It was certainly not my handiwork,” he assured her.
“She is a tyrant,” she said. “She is also a very good cook.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
She was looking into his face, her finger still lightly circling his button. “Do you ever smile, Gil?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, frowning.
“But not today?”
“It is a solemn occasion,” he said. “Today we were wed.”
“Yes,” she said, andshesmiled athim.
He dipped his head and kissed her.
Smiles did not come naturally to him. He must learn how to let out the ones that were sometimes there deep inside him. When he first saw her in church this morning, for example. When the vicar pronounced them man and wife. When they stepped out of church to cheers and applause and a shower of flower petals. Now, this moment.
“Tonight,” he said as he raised his head, but the carriage was drawing to a halt outside the house, and it remained an unexplained promise.
Tonight.
•••
Abigail might have been alerted to what was to come by the fact that the butler opened both front doors of the house with a stately flourish even before the carriage had come to a complete halt and stood to one side of the doorway, clad in a different uniform from the one he had been wearing when she left the house with Harry. This was a smarter, newer uniform, presumably one he reserved for special occasions.
But she was not alerted. She was too caught up in the euphoria of a wedding that had been far more... oh,splendidthan she had expected it to be. And that one word Gil had spoken before the carriage halted was ringing in her head.
Tonight.
The coachman opened the door of the carriage and put down the steps. Gil descended to the terrace and turned to hand her out. She smiled at Harry, who was standing at attention and had just saluted Gil again. Sometimes she forgot they were both military men, officers, Gil holding thesuperior rank. He kept hold of her hand as they went up the steps and past the butler into the hall—where they were met by two lines of servants, one on either side of the doorway, all smartly uniformed, all solemn and silently at attention. Even the grooms and gardeners were among them, as well as the steward and the foreman from the home farm and Harry’s valet.
They were silent until the butler stepped inside and nodded a signal that had them all suddenly smiling and applauding.
It was an extraordinary and touching moment in what even last night she had expected to be a very quiet, ordinary day in which she and Gil would slip down to the church to be married.
The butler gave a brief, stilted speech and Mrs. Sullivan an even shorter one. Then the steward called for three cheers, which were delivered self-consciously before everyone dissolved into laughter and covered it with another round of applause.
