Page 77 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Stirling stood at the altar rail. He was in a coat of dark blue, very plain; he had been shaved, Madeleine saw at the first glance, with great care, and he had been awake, she saw at the second glance, since perhaps four in the morning, for the traces of tiredness were clear to her, if not to anyone else. He looked at her as she came up the aisle, and he did not look at anyone else.

When she came to stand beside him at the rail he spoke softly, in a voice which was not quite the level voice of Lady Sefton’s drawing room, and was not quite the steady voice of her aunt’s parlour, but was something more.

“Madeleine.”

“Stirling.”

That was the whole of what they said to one another before Mr Hodgson began.

Mr Hodgson read the service in the measured, unhurried voice in which he had read the banns; and Madeleine made her responses in a voice which was, she discovered, not quite steady. Stirling made his in a voice that was not quite steady either, at the first response, but was steady at every one that followed.

When he took her hand in his and put the ring upon the fourth finger of it — a plain band of gold which had belonged, the Dowager Marchioness had told her on the Sunday, to his grandmother — Madeleine felt, through the thin glove which she had drawn off as she came up the aisle, and which Beatrice had taken from her at the foot of the chancel, that his hand was warm, and that it was, this morning, steadier than his voice had been.

Finally, they were pronounced man and wife. They signed the register in the vestry, with Mrs Frampton and Mr Lyttelton as witnesses; and they came out of the vestry into the body of the church to restrained civil applause of the persons in the pews; and Sophia, who could not, in the end, contain herself, ran the three paces from her pew to throw her arms about Madeleine’s waist before her mother could call her back, and Madeleine bent and kissed the top of her head, and said,

“Lady Sophia. You are out of your pew.”

“I know. I am sorry. Are you my sister now?”

“I am.”

“Then I am not sorry.”

There was the wedding breakfast, back at Grosvenor Square, in the long dining room with the eight windows giving onto the garden; there were toasts, of which Madeleine afterward remembered only that Mr Lyttelton had risen and said three quiet sentences which had made everyone in the room smile, and that her uncle had risen and said five sentences of which the last had been ‘to my brother’s youngest girl, who has done us all proud’. At that, her aunt from Bath had pressed her napkin to her eyes for perhaps four seconds and then put it down again.

There were the ordinary kindnesses of a family newly enlarging itself, and the ordinary stiffnesses of some family doing it for the first time; then at half past two the travelling carriage was at the door of Greyscarp House, with the bays in the traces, Coachman Burns upon the box and the small portmanteau already strapped on behind.

It was time to go.

Madeleine made her farewells. She kissed her aunt, who said only, ‘Be happy, my dear’, and stepped back; she kissed her sisters, Beatrice quickly and Georgiana with a small hard squeeze of the shoulders and the whispered ‘write to me’; she kissed her aunt Frampton, who pressed her hand once and let it go; she kissed Sophia, who clung for two seconds and then released her with the firm dignity of a child who has determined that she will not, on her new sister’s wedding day, be a nuisance; she made her curtsey to the Dowager Marchioness, who took her face very lightly between both gloved hands and looked at her for a long moment and said, ‘My dear. Welcome.’

And then Stirling handed her up into the carriage, got in after her, Burns gave the bays the word, and the carriage rolled out of Grosvenor Square in the heavy gold afternoon light of an August day in London.

They went out of London by way of Highgate, which was the road Madeleine had taken twice that summer with Sophia and once alone by the Bath coach in the other direction, and which she now took for the first time in a carriage of her own, with her husband beside her on the seat.

She had thought, in the last week, that she would not know what to say to him when they were at last alone. She had thought of it in the small hours of the Tuesday morning, lying in the bedroom at Doughty Street with the moon coming through the curtain, and she had thought of it standing at the altar rail, and she had thought of it in the carriage between Hanover Square and Grosvenor Square; and she had not, in any of those thinkings, found anything that she could put a sentence to.

She found that she did not need to.

He had taken her gloved hand in his as the carriage turned out of Grosvenor Square; he held it now, very lightly, on the seat between them, and he was looking out of the window at the houses of Oxford Street as they went past. He was not looking away, Madeleine saw with the detailed observation of a woman who had looked away from him a great many times in the last four months and was now permitted, at last, not to.

“Stirling.”

“Madeleine.”

“I am — I do not quite know what I am. I am very tired.”

“You have been awake since five.”

Madeleine regarded him with surprise, for he was correct – she had been awake at five.

“How do you know?”

“Because I have been awake since four, and your aunt’s house was alight at half past five, most likely. I rode by it at six.”

“You did not.”

“I did. I went twice round the square and came back. I beg your pardon. I could not, this morning, sit still in Grosvenor Square.”