But though she saw the scene around her, as though with a sharpened vision, it was upon one figure that Philippa’s eyesfocused. And they did not waver, even as his did not waver from her. She gazed at him when she and Devlin stopped walking and the music faded to silence. She removed her gaze only long enough to draw off her gloves and hand them, with the rosebud, to Stephanie.
She gazed at him again. Into those dark, sometimes green-flecked eyes. Steady, unsmiling eyes.
“Dearly beloved,” the clergyman said.
—
Lucas had suggested that he would bring his bride up to his grandfather’s room immediately after the wedding. They would sit with him awhile, and he would know that the first step had been taken to secure the succession. Then he could sleep again, relax, concentrate upon recovering his health.
“Balderdash,” the Duke of Wilby had said, as Lucas had known he would. He had said it, after all, or something similar, to everyone else who had tried to reason with him today. Lucas had been the last hope of his family.
By ten minutes to two His Grace was seated in his wing chair, a mere few feet from what would be the main action, looking like a pale, crotchety gnome, gripping the arms of his chair. Her Grace beside him looked regal in purple gown and turban.
Gerald had the rings. Plural.
“Nobody told me I was going to have to worry about droppingtworings and having to chase them as they roll on the floor,” he had complained. “Which one should I chase down first if they should roll in different directions, Luc?”
Lucas had ignored him.
Everyone came despite the shortness of the notice. Even Sylvester’s mother and her husband and his grandson and Sylvester’s brother and sister-in-law and their family came, though none ofthem were blood relations of the Ardens. The niece of a second cousin of Grandmama’s had been invited to come with her husband since they had called at Arden House a couple of weeks or so ago to pay their respects to their illustrious relative. They were here. The Ware siblings had come, of course, as well as the brother and sister of the late Stratton, with their spouses and children and the betrothed of one of them. The dowager countess’s brother had come.
It was almost like a normal wedding.
There was even music. Very superior music, as it turned out. Aunt Kitty had discovered from the dowager countess that the new Countess of Stratton was Welsh and therefore a good singer and therefore too an accomplished harpist—it seemed the three went hand in hand. She had won contests at festivals whose Welsh name Aunt Kitty could neither pronounce nor spell, but her dear Clarissa was going to ask the countess to volunteer her services at the wedding if a harp could be found. A harp had been found—Lucas had not asked where or how.
Perhaps it reallywasa normal wedding, he thought at approximately one minute after two as his bride joined him at the end of the white carpet and he forgot his discomfort at having his grandfather gazing fixedly upon him, just like the picture of an eagle Lucas had seen staring downward at its prey. Eagle, gnome—could one man look like both? He forgot the discomfort of having his own family and hers nodding benevolently his way as though they could sense the fact that his valet had tied his neckcloth as though he were fashioning a noose.
Itwasa normal wedding, he thought as the clergyman intoned those age-old words,Dearly beloved...and he found himself in the middle of his own wedding service, making vows, listening to vows, sliding two rings onto the slender finger of his bride, and becoming,before he could quite comprehend what was happening, a married man. A husband gazing at his wife. At Lady Philippa Arden, Marchioness of Roath. And realizing, quite unexpectedly, that itmattered, this ceremony. This marriage. He was not just a duke’s heir, allying himself to an eligible bridal candidate because his grandfather had decided it would be so. He was Lucas Arden, marrying Philippa Ware, who would be his wife until death parted them.
It mattered.
She had not smiled even once since she stepped onto the white carpet on her brother’s arm. But there was something in her eyes. Something in her expression. Some intensity. And he wondered if it mattered to her too, or if her resolve had merely crumbled last night in light of the dire condition of his grandfather’s health. She had been seated between him and Grandmama at Almack’s. She had beenlaughingwith him. The Duke of Wilby, who rarely laughed, had been laughing with the young woman he had set his heart upon his grandson marrying.
Lucas did not know if this marriage mattered to her. But it would. It must. It was the relationship in which she would remain for the rest of her life. She might have married almost any single man of her choice now present in London. He was not even sure if she was aware of her power to captivate male hearts with her loveliness, her smiles, her laughter, and her charm. But it was too late for her to discover it now if she had not already done so. She was his. He would see to it that their marriage mattered to her.
She was his indeed. The clergyman was saying so.
“Forasmuch as Lucas and Philippa have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company, and thereto have given and pledged their troth to each other, and have declared the same by giving and receiving of a ring,and by joining of hands: I pronounce that they be man and wife together in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
They gazed at each other while there was a faintly audible sigh from their gathered relatives.
The clergyman continued with prayers and a psalm. But the deed was done.
They were man and wife together.
And it mattered.
Chapter Twenty
The Duke of Wilby was still breathing. That was probably about the best he could say about his condition. But he had come down to the drawing room. Well, to be more accurate, he had allowed himself to be carried down by two burly footmen, who had made no eye contact with either him or each other during the process. But the result was the same. Here he sat on the only chair in the London home worth sitting upon. He had been present for Luc’s wedding. He had, by God, achieved the penultimate goal of his life, which had been devoted since the death of his own father when he himself was sixteen to the performance of his duty.
To achieve his ultimate goal, of course, he was going to have to keep on breathing for at least another nine months. He was perfectly well aware that babies did not get implanted just because a man was having marital relations with his wife. For reasons known only to some jokester of a deity it sometimes took a month or two or six of such marital encounters. Some women, apparently perfectly healthy specimens, continued barren. Some sufferedmiscarriage after miscarriage. Others produced girl after girl, with annual regularity. His Grace had nothing whatsoever against girls. His daughter and his granddaughters were among his favorite people. Not to mention his duchess, who was soul of his soul. But girls, damn it all, could not inherit dukedoms or entailed property. They could not carry forward one’s name and one’s legacy and all for which one had spent a lifetime of hard work.
And some women, bless their hearts, gave birth to healthy sons. Plural. The first of them nine months from the nights of their weddings.
One could only trust that Lucas’s bride was such a woman. The Duke of Wilby believed she was. He had a feeling about her. He had had it since he first set eyes upon her sitting on the far side of the round table in the breakfast parlor in this very house, directly across from Luc, who had been looking smitten. He had been looking smitten ever since, though he was too stubborn to admit it, even to himself, His Grace suspected. Lucas had given him more sleepless nights than anyone else since the death of poor Franklin. He was a good boy in almost every conceivable way, and his grandfather loved him to distraction. But there wassomethingthat had always blocked him from being the happy man he ought to be. That was why His Grace, with the full blessing of his duchess, had decided soon after their arrival in London that more important even than eligibility in their selection of a wife for his heir waslove.
His Grace did not dare contemplate what his own life might have been like without his May. It was as plain as the nose on his face that Lady Philippa Ware was to Lucas what May had been to him—after he had got over his irritation with her for being a whole head taller than he when he stood in his stockinged feet, that was.
