When the laughter settled Mrs. Fairleigh looked at Cori across the room. Not the warm general attention she had been giving everyone. The other thing. The quiet considered look that Cori had been feeling since they’d met but still could not completely read.
Then Mrs. Fairleigh turned to Cait and asked about the salt pans on the Turks and what they looked like at dawn, and the afternoon moved on as though the look had not happened at all.
Cori turned back to the window.
The moors were still there, grey and vast and patient. Two days until the wedding. A fortnight until guests would begin to leave and she would have to decide something.
Or perhaps he might decide something.
The thought arrived quietly and without warning, and wouldn’t be put away. She’d been so occupied with her own feelings that she hadn’t stopped to think about what his silence on the walk might mean. He’d grown quiet after they solved the drainage issue. He’d said she was very good at solving problems. And he’d stood beside her at the end and let her look out at the moors.
But he hadn’t said anything that mattered.
What if he had already decided something about her?
What if the answer was that he had no interest in her?
The fire crackled behind her in the hearth. The other women talked around her. Mrs. Fairleigh's voice was warm in the room, asking about life in Bermuda, listening to the answers with the focused attention she brought to everything.
Cori kept her focus on the moors in the distance.
Step Three
Chapter 8
St. Wilfrid’s Chapel
Acklan Castle
The family chapel was small enough that it held no secrets, something of which James had always been keenly aware.
Every sound carried. Footsteps on the flagstones. The silence of a congregation that had settled and gone still. The way a single cough from the back could travel the length of the nave and arrive at the altar with perfect clarity.
James had stood at this altar before, on a morning very like this one but also nothing like it at all, and he’d been aware of all the same things. The cold air that no amount of spring warmth ever quite dispelled. The smell of beeswax and old stone. The east window throwing pale light across the flags.
He had thought, then, that he’d have all the time in the world. He hadn’t, of course. Not in the end.
Daniel stood beside him now. His brother was serious in a way James hadn't seen before and suspected he might not see again, or at least not often. Not the solemnity the occasion demanded. Something quieter than that. A man who knew exactly what he was doing and had chosen it completely, standing very still in the weight of that.
James hadn’t expected to be moved by it, but he found that he was, and something lodged in his throat.
He looked at his brother's profile, at the set of his jaw, the way his hands were clasped in front of him with a stillness that was not Daniel at all, but was, today, entirely Daniel. He was here for the occasion. He was here for his bride.
The doors at the end of the chapel opened.
He heard Daniel draw a breath.
James didn’t look at the doors. He looked at his brother instead, because Daniel's face when Miss Beckett finally appeared at the end of the aisle was the kind of thing a man should witness if he had the opportunity. James had the opportunity, and he did not intend to waste it.
Daniel's face, in that moment, had nothing in it that was not completely his. No humor held in reserve. No deflection. Just Daniel, looking at his soon-to-be wife, with everything he had kept carefully managed for twenty-seven years suddenly visible at once. James finally looked away. Some things cost something to witness.
Thomas Fairleigh officiated with a unique warmth that was rare among clergymen and made the ceremony resonate even deeper, somehow. The words were the same words. James had heard them before, in this same chapel, in this same stone-smelling air. But they had meant one thing then, and they meant something else now, or perhaps the same thing but differently weighted.
“I, Daniel George Westham, take thee, Caitrin Moira Beckett.”
James kept his eyes forward while memories of Alice settled quietly over him.
Not with the weight he had carried for three years, the grief that sat in his chest like something solid and immovable. This was quieter. More like the memory of warmth than the absence of it. She’d stood where Miss Beckett stood now, in this light, with this same east window behind her, and she had looked at James with her steady eyes and said the same words, and he’d believed absolutely that he would grow old beside her.
