“With this ring,” the vicar prompted quietly.
William looked up. Refocused. “With this ring, I thee wed,” he said, and slid the band into place.
He felt her hand tighten slightly—barely, involuntarily—against his, and released it.
She looked down at the ring for one moment, then back up. Their eyes met for the first time since they had stood side by side, and something moved through him that he did not name.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
The words landed in the quiet of the church with the particular finality of things that could not be taken back once said.
The vicar looked at them both with the mild, patient expression of a man who had arrived at the customary moment and was waiting for the customary thing.
William had thought about this. In the carriage on the way here, he had thought about it with deliberate practicality. It was a formality. A social convention so thoroughly embedded in the ritual as to be functionally meaningless. People kissed people they could not stand across the desks of solicitors when a business arrangement was concluded. It meant nothing.
He looked at Cecily. She was looking up at him with an expression that was carefully arranged to show nothing in particular, which—he had been watching her face for three days, in drawing rooms and across negotiating tables and at an altar, and he was beginning to understand its vocabulary—meant rather a great deal was happening underneath it. There was color in her cheeks, faint and involuntary. Her lips were slightly parted.
She wasexpectingit.
He could see the small, almost imperceptible tilt of her head—not a request, she would not have called it that—but the slight unconscious adjustment of someone who had accepted what came next.
Something in his chest tightened.
He thought of his parents. Of what had begun, by all accounts, with precisely this—a church, vows, the ordinary hopeful architecture of a beginning—and what it had become by the end of it, and what it had done to everyone unfortunate enough to live inside it.
This is an arrangement. You decided. You were clear. You were right.
From the beginning, distance. Because beginnings become middles, and middles become the thing you cannot undo.
He straightened and stepped back.
But he had been standing close enough that he felt the small, nearly imperceptible stillness that moved through her, quiet and over in under a second, when she understood.
The church felt smaller than it had when he had entered it.
He offered her his arm again for the walk to the door, the same careful courtesy, and she took it with the same cool, light touch. They walked out into the grey London morning as the Duke and Duchess of Blackmoor, before the door swung shut behind them.
He looked straight ahead.
He told himself he had done the right thing.
CHAPTER 9
Ithought it would be larger.
That was her first thought when the carriage rolled through the gates of Blackmoor House and the estate opened before her.
Not that it was small, because it was not small at all, but after four days of calling itthe dukedom, she had somehow begun to imagine something the size of a small country. The reality, though handsome, was simply a house.
A house she now lived in.
I live here.This is where I live.
The carriage drew up to the front entrance, and a footman appeared before it had fully stopped moving, which suggested the staff had been watching for them, which suggested they had been told something, which meant the next few minutes weregoing to require a degree of performance she was not entirely certain she had in reserve after the morning she had just had.
She did not look at William. She had been managing the looking-at-William situation with moderate success since the church. Since the moment at the altar, when he had stepped back and she had understood, with a quiet and complete clarity that she had not permitted herself to examine in the carriage, exactly what the terms of this marriage were going to feel like in practice as distinct from theory.
She understood them now. She was fine with them. She had agreed to them herself.
