“You are marrying a good man,” he said, “even if he is half a cripple.”
“There is no one less crippled than Ben,” she said. “But thank you, John. I wept, you know, when I knew you were coming.”
“You did?”
“I did.” She smiled and looked beyond his shoulder.
Her grandfather had come to fetch her. He was beaming at her and then smiling genially at John.
“The bridegroom will have heart palpitations if we are late,” he said. “Bridegrooms always do. It is a hazardous thing to be.”
“I know.” John smiled at him and looked so much like their father that Samantha’s heart turned over. “I see enough of them. And I was one myself once.”
He turned back and took a step closer so that he could kiss Samantha’s cheek.
“Be happy,” he said. “Our father loved you very dearly, you know.”
“I do know,” she said softly. “Just as he loved you.”
He hurried away, and Samantha looked at her grandfather.
“Oh, dear God, girl,” he said, “but you look like my Esme. Except that I never saw her in white. It was a color she never wore. You are beautiful. And what an inadequate wordthatis. Come, let me help you on with your cloak, and we will go rescue the major from death by heart failure, shall we?”
“Oh, by all means, Grandpapa,” she said. “But I must not forget my muff.”
It was her wedding day, she thought, and felt a flutter of almost unbearable excitement in her stomach.
It had been decided at Christmastime that Ben would take three months during which to get married and enjoy a wedding trip and a stay with his fellow members of the Survivors’ Club. After that, as Mr. Bevan’s grandson-in-law rather than simply as his employee, he would gradually take over the running of the mines and ironworks while Bevan himself relaxed into a semi-retirement. The newly wedded couple would live at the cottage, though the invitation to take up their residence at Cartref was an open one. There would be homes in Swansea and the Rhondda Valley too.
All of which was satisfying, even exciting to consider, Ben thought as he sat beside his brother at the front of the church in Fisherman’s Bridge while his family and friends and Samantha’s murmured in soft conversation behind him. But in the meanwhile there was today.
His wedding day.
He had not really expected to be nervous. How could one feel any anxieties when one was so entirely happy? But he knew what Hugo had meant about his neckcloth. And he could not stop himself from fearing that he would drop the wedding ring just when he was about to slide it onto Samantha’s finger. Indeed, he had woken up more than once during the night with just that fear. He would have to let someone else crawl around on hands and knees to retrieve it, and then he would have to go through the ordeal all over again.
“You are in pain, Ben?” Calvin asked, his voice full of concern.
“No.” Ben looked at him in some surprise, but he realized he had been rubbing his hands over his upper thighs. “Make sure I have a good grip on the ring, Cal, before you let it go.”
His brother grinned at him. “No one ever does drop it,” he said.
Now he was in for it for sure.
And then the Reverend Jenkins, gorgeously clad in his clerical robes, was telling the congregation to stand and the pipe organ was striking a chord.
It seemed to take Ben forever to push himself to his feet with his canes, but when he had done so, she was only just coming into sight at the end of the nave, on the arm of a proudly beaming Bevan.
Oh, Lord God, Ben thought with reverence rather than blasphemy, had there ever been such beauty? Could she possibly be his? Hisbride?
And then she looked along the nave, and her eyes came to rest upon him, and she smiled. He was quite unaware of the slight little sigh that rippled through the congregation as he smiled back.
And then she was beside him, and they both turned toward Mr. Jenkins.
“Dearly beloved,” he said in his lovely Welsh accent.
And just like that, all within a few minutes, the world changed.
They were married.
