The Wedding: Flicka
Flicka von Hannover
This was how I’d always envisioned my wedding,
with Dieter Schwarz standing with me at the altar.
Flicka and Raphael were married in a small ceremony in a chapel near the sea with the windows open to the cool air. White and pale blue fresh flowers adorned the altar and the antique pews painted with many layers of glossy whiteenamel.
Between dress fittings that morning, Flicka had called several of the florists who had supplied flowers for hers and Wulfie’s weddings and had them arrange deliveries. A photographer and videographer had also been retained because she sure as heck was going to have evidence of this ceremony, just in case Pierre ever tried to say that it didn’t happen.
Sophie had told Flicka that shehad sent an email that morning with the details of the wedding, and Raphael’s sisters, their spouses, and Anaïs Mirabaud were sitting in the pews, looking awake.
Even Bastien, Flicka’s silver fox, was there, sitting next to his daughter and his wife, Lili. She had one eyebrow raised at the affair, but she was smiling.
Flicka missed Wulfie. In any other circumstances, she would have wanted Wulfram,Rae, and her friends to be there, and she wished Wulfie could have walked her down the aisle and given her away, for real this time.
Maybe she would throw a proper party for them someday, but she was getting a little tired of planning weddings.
Flicka’s ivory dress was a slim sheath made of layers of fine lace and tiny pearls over silk. Elie Saab Couture had outdone itself, as usual, outfittingher and Alina. She wore pearl jewelry she had borrowed from Sophie and Raphael’s alpine mountaineering Army badge.
Alina looked like a wee, white-clad fairy in a fluffy, tulle skirt. She walked solemnly down the aisle, carefully dropping white rose petals every few feet onto the dark blue carpet, and then flung herself intoGrand-mamanSophie’s arms for the rest of the short ceremony.
The ministerwelcomed them and said a bunch of something and such other to the assembled, intoning on and on about weddings and marriages and things.
When the minister told Flicka and Raphael to join their hands, she didn’t know what to do with her bouquet of a few white roses, jasmine, and myrtle tied with a pale blue ribbon, and she looked around for somewhere to lay it.
Sophie sent Alina up to the altar,so Flicka handed it to her. The toddler scampered back to hergrand-mamanholding the flowers in both hands.
Everyone laughed.
Flicka loved that people were laughing. Their joy rang in the small chapel’s white rafters.
The minister was Lutheran, Flicka was glad to see, and he spoke French nicely. It all felt right.
The fact that the wedding was a Lutheran service with a Lutheran minister didn’tmatter dynastically for Flicka, though. House of Hannover rules had dictated her whole life, and she knew every word of them. Raphael Mirabaud was a Catholic, as he was from a Swiss-French family. He had been baptized in the Catholic Church, as he had told her late one night when she had been trying to sleep in the Mirabaud mansion. Again, Flicka was marrying a Catholic man, which meant thatunder House of Hannover rules, their children would be excluded from the line of succession for the non-existent royal throne of the Kingdom of Hannover.
Good.It had never brought her and Wulfie anything but heartache. She wished it would go away.
Besides, she hadn’t received permission to form a dynastic marriage from either Wulfie, the head of the cadet House of Hannover, nor from Queen Elizabeththe Second, her great-great aunt or something, who was the sovereign head of the House of Welf.
Flicka was such a rebel sometimes.
There was still a chance—given that she felt stronger as she held Raphael’s hands, that she felt more like herself than she had for years, ever since she had accepted Pierre’s proposal and her world had closed in—that she might figure out a way to burn it all down.
Fire jumped up in her veins, a purposeful blaze that felt amazing.
Here, in this tiny church on a cliff overlooking the bright blue sea, while Raphael wore a slim, dark blue suit and she wore his alpine mountaineering badge pinned to the shoulder of her wedding dress, she felt like her life had veered back on track, like she had always been meant to be in this tiny chapel in Gibraltar, marryingDieter Schwarz, and that everything else had been a diversion and a mistake and a lie.
Raphael held her hands in his, his gray eyes reminiscent of calm seas and cool days. He smiled and said, “I, Raphael Valerian Dismas Mirabaud, take you, Friederike Marie Louise Victoria Caroline Amalie Alexandra Augusta,Prinzessin von Hannover und Cumberland,Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, Duchessof Brunswick-Lüneburg, etc.—”
She felt the grin growing on her face. “I can’t believe you remembered all of that.”
“Of course,Durchlauchtig.I know everything about you.”
“I keep thinking your middle name is Leo.”
He drew a breath to continue, and Flicka squeezed his hands, still grinning so hard that she thought her eyes might disappear entirely in the wedding pictures.
But she couldn’tstop smiling.
