Immediately, the men fell silent.
“Sorry,” Birdie mumbled. It hadn’t been lit, so there was no harm done.
“Miss Burns. Er.” The man she’d married not an hour ago cleared his throat. Clearly, he did not know how to address his new wife. “Cecily?”
Birdie swallowed. “Birdie, please.” She squinted at him. The man had retreated into the shadows. Where were her glasses? She saw something glint on the table in front of her. There they were. Relieved, she pushed them up her nose. She still couldn’t see him any clearer, because he’d retreated even further into the shadows. There was not much light coming through the stained-glass windows from above.
“Birdie?”
“M–my friends call me that.” Now would’ve been an appropriate moment for her to confess that she’d swapped places with the real Cecily. Yet she felt oddly reluctant to do so. “Did someone mention wedding breakfast?” She looked around for Higgins, who was setting the table rather noisily, dropping the plates and cups randomly on the table.
“There is some porridge, Higgins says.” Her husband looked like he was about to flee. Was the man frightened of her? How curious.
Birdie pulled out a rickety chair from the table and sat down.
“Well? Aren’t you going to join me?” Birdie pointed to the place across from her. She caught Higgins’ hand just in time before he poured the tea right into the bowl of porridge instead of the teacup.
“Thank you, Higgins, I can take it from here.” Birdie took the teapot from his skeletal hand.
“You want beer?” He squinted at her. “For breakfast?”
Birdie choked back a laugh. “No. Tea is fine.” She shook her head, and Higgins shuffled away, mumbling, “Beer she wants. For her wedding breakfast. What has this world come to.”
Tea, tea, my kingdom for a cup of tea. At least it smelled properly strong. Birdie took a sip and nearly spat it out again. It was the strongest tea she’d ever had in her entire life, pitch black and so bitter it burned her tongue. She topped her cup up with milk and added four spoons of sugar.
Her husband approached cautiously and sat down at the farthest end of the table. At this distance, they couldn’t properly converse; they’d have to shout at each other.
Without much ado, Birdie picked up her cup and wandered down to the other side of the table and sat down closer to him.
He clearly didn’t feel comfortable with this and edged away from his seat.
He’s a creature of shadows, it crossed through her mind.
From here, the fire flickered over his face, and she could make out the wounded side of his face.
Now that she had the comfort of warm liquid in her stomach and had got over the excitement of her wedding, she could’ve kicked herself.
It was merely a very bad burn. Some scars were thick and bulky, others red and blue. It didn’t look pretty. Scars were scars. But it wasn’t as monstrous as she’d first thought. Where she’d initially thought he had a hole for an eye was a black eyepatch. In the church, she hadn’t seen the covering; it had looked like the gaping eyehole of a skull. He had a bit of a pirate-like look about him. It made him look quite dashing. He also wasn’t old at all. She guessed him to be in his mid-thirties, at the most.
Birdie sipped her tea thoughtfully.
“Haven’t you had your eyeful of me yet?” he ground out.
Birdie flushed. “I apologise if I’m being rude.” She looked away, but her eyes found their way back to his face again immediately. It was odd how she found it impossible to look away.
To distract herself, she got up, fetched two bowls of porridge, poured milk and sugar over them and placed one in front of him. A peace offering.
The porridge was lumpy and half cold, but it was better than nothing.
“Who is Arabella?”
She looked at him with enormous eyes. “Arabella?”
“You said, before you fainted, ‘If only Arabella knew.’”
She fiddled with her spectacles. Under no circumstances would she tell her new husband, a duke, the silly story of the wishing well.
“She is a childhood friend of mine, now the Duchess of Morley. For some reason, Arabella desired all her friends to marry dukes.” Birdie shrugged and played with her cup. “She herself is the daughter of a duke, so perhaps it was natural for her to think along those lines. I, myself, never really cared much about it.” That was a half-truth. She’d not particularly cared about dukes, but she did want to get married and have her own family, her very own home. She had dreamed about it for as long as she could remember.
