The quarter hour sounded next, chiming against the thunder like a songbird answering a war horse.
“Hurry up,” Monica said. “She needs to be in the sanctuary by ten.”
“At the pulpit, on the gallows,” Libba intoned, pressing prayer hands over her chest. “Meeting her fate.”
“Stop that,” Ruby hissed. “You’re giving me shivers. Is your entire troupe attending today?”
“Of course,” said Libba with a tilt of her head. “You think that lot ever passes up an opportunity to dress up or eat free cake?”
“My seamstresses are coming too,” said Monica, shaking out the skirt one final time and watching with narrowed eyes to make sure it fluttered correctly in the air. “And Miss Boswell.”
“And the household staff,” Hattie said.
“And Mr. Harcourt,” Monica added in a soft, dreamy tone. “He’s going to wear the jacket I made him.”
“Ohh,” Libba and Ruby chanted, in mocking, simpering voices until Monica was as red as a berry.
Despite it all, they did manage to get Hattie dressed on time, and all of her hair into pins, which fell softly against her bare nape when she left the dressing room in her new, flame-born dress and dark-blue slippers.
“He has the rings?” she said, one last time to Libba, who rolled her eyes and nodded curtly, likely resisting the urge to shove her for good measure.
“Yes. You’re both bizarre enough to be well matched. He has them. For the love of God.”
“Libba!” Monica hissed, glancing nervously at an overly realistic depiction of Jesus, carved into wood and hanging over the vestry, whose expression seemed fairly offended by the outburst as well.
“Errol!” Ruby echoed in something that managed to both be a whisper and a shout. “The bouquet!”
“Right!” came Errol’s voice from seemingly the air.
He appeared a moment later with a bundle of bright-orange stargazer lilies, dotted throughout with bluebells, and proffered it to Hattie. “I wrapped them this morning,” he said. “You look beautiful. Good luck.”
And then they were all gone.
All of them.
And she was alone at the doors.
She swallowed, lifting the flowers to her nose and breathing them in as the thunder rumbled again outside.
It always storms in the summer, she thought. Flowers and sun, puddles and wind. They were all the things that made Brighton what it was, even beyond the shingles of the beach.
The flowers smelled like a duet to Hattie. Like pairs. Like two.
Like a wedding.
And then the music began.
She had expected an organ, deep and thrumming like a kitchen hearth, but to her surprise, the tune that spiraled out through the doors as they were pulled open on either side by Libba’s actors was in the tinkling, feather-light strains of a harp.
It seemed to touch her face and hair. Seemed to beckon her down the aisle in the voice of Joseph Haydn’s timeless composition.
Light glowed throughout the domed room, flashing in the windows as her steps were illuminated down the aisle toward her future.
Toward Elias.
And he turned to watch her arrive, a small, crooked smile sitting on his face, like the storm pleased him as well.
When she reached him, passing through the narrow route of all the people from her home, he held his hands out to her and helped her onto the altar, his eyes sliding over the details of her wedding gown.
