They stared at one another for a single, silent breath.
“Abra doesn’t have thumbs,” he said with a scratch to the center of his chin. “She’d never sign a damn thing properly.”
“Ah, well, you have me there,” Patricia said with a titter and a shake of her head, bringing her hot tea to her lips. “You are a better earl than the dog.”
“Thank you.” He sniffed, reaching for his own teacup. “I very damn well am.”
PART III
THE MIDNIGHT BANQUET
CHAPTER 13
She successfully survived until the wedding.
She’d done it, even if she knew it wasn’t the real goal anymore. It was still a victory.
She wore gold. It was a gown she’d had commissioned shortly after coming to Crooked Nook for the first time, some years ago. She thought of it as her Countess Gown, her coronation robe. It was not ostentatious, fashioned in soft satin with just a hint of shimmer. The modiste had told her that the fabric brought out the richness of her skin and hair and eyes, that it served as the setting for the gems of her natural features.
Gold, the modiste had said, was the color of enlightenment.
When Freddy saw her tonight, he would know that she was not the girl he’d once known. She was refined now. Enlightened. Not the naive romantic who’d married him in a mad dash of impulse and desire.
The impulse was still there. The desire certainly was. But Claire was not their slave anymore.
Gold, like a queen’s armor. Gold like a throne room door.
She looked very well in it, but it would not outshine the bride. She wouldn’t dream of doing something so selfish, especially given her history of harming brides she loved very much.
She chose only a lace ribbon for her throat and a pair of pearls at her ears. She wore her hair simply, caught in ringlets at the crown of her head, secured with invisible pins and no embellishment. She dabbed her lips with rose oil and her eyelids with rouge.
It was enough.
Claire herself was enough.
And then she saw to the others.
The men were all wearing the sashes Dom Raul had insisted upon, each in a shining royal blue that reflected his house colors. Little Oliver’s looked very fine on him, and he puffed up in pride every time he got to wear it. The color made his eyes glow with otherworldly enhancement, and Claire thought with a pang that one day, her little boy would break many hearts.
Just like his father had.
They had skipped dinner tonight in favor of the banquet that would follow the ceremony. The sun was already setting, sending an orange and pink glow over the grounds on its side of the lawn, with the creeping gleam of silver blue on the other.
Claire herself arrived at the church first, the little parish church on the end of Bourton-on-the-Water, which was the town that abutted Crooked Nook. Much of the village was already scattered around the cobbled paths around it, eager to seetheir dowager countess in her finery and the strange, foreign gentleman she was marrying.
“He’s a Spaniard, I think,” one woman said to her husband, who shook his head and replied, “I saw him. He’s a dark one, maybe even a Turk.”
Claire smiled to herself, wondering if yet another seed of legend was being planted in the Cotswolds tonight.
She greeted the people who approached her with the gracious warmth she’d learned from Patricia herself. This day had taken a fair amount of planning, and Claire always enjoyed being in front of the people of her county.
Tommy, who looked as though she had already been in the village for the bulk of the day, was sharing a drink with the vicar and his wife, laughing in her way at something they were saying.
Tommy was likely the village’s favorite Lady Bentley amongst the three of them. It wasn’t just the length of her tenure. She was a woman who preferred the common people to theton,and made it evident in her every word and hint of demeanor.
Claire would never be like Tommy, or even Patricia, who had been raised a noblewoman. She hoped she could become as well-loved here in Bourton, even so. To these people, Claire was still as new as a baby and as foreign as Dom Raul.
She’d also usurped her husband. She imagined that hadn’t fostered much ingratiation.
