She Slapped England’s Most Feared Duke… Then He Refused to Let Her Go

Chapter 16

The wedding was planned for the first week of April, when the cherry trees in the Harrington gardens would be in full flower, and the world, at last, would be seen to agree.

Every head in London was invited — or, rather, the heads that mattered were, which was to say, everybody worth a fuss and a great many who were not. The Times had already written two paragraphs about the gown. The dressmakers had already wept over it. But of all the details that the papers rehearsed, one fact escaped them entirely: that Isabelle had insisted the ceremony be held at dawn, in the small church of St. Mary’s at Highgate, where her father’s funeral had been held — the only funeral, she had once told Dominic, that certain great men of the East India Company had not attended.

He had understood at once.

So it was that on the first Sunday of April, before the sun had done dyeing the sky, the church bells of Highgate began to ring.

A small crowd had gathered in the lane — neighbors, shopkeepers, the old gardener from Bloomsbury, a cluster of girls from the school where Isabelle had once taught for a winter, holding posies of wild garlic and daisies. Someone had tied white ribbons to the lych-gate. Someone else had hung a wreath of dried chrysanthemums — an old-fashioned thing, but unmistakable — over the porch, and Aunt Margaret had wept, delicately and continuously, since half past six.

Inside, candlelight. Inside, the smell of beeswax and old stone and lilies. Inside, the entire world that mattered, hushed and expectant: the Duke of Harrington in full ceremonial dress, Charles the minister, a peer of the realm with a kind face and a nervous hand; Lady Harrington in dove gray, holding a lace fan like a general holding a treaty; Charlotte — Charlotte in white, crowned with cherry blossom, clutching a basket of petals and vibrating with importance.

And Victoria.

Victoria Lennox had come, alone, and sat in the back row beneath a hat of deep green. She had married a diplomat in Lisbon the previous autumn, and she and Isabelle had exchanged exactly two letters since — the first formal, the second, from Lisbon, longer and warmer than either of them had expected. “You will be good for him,” she had written. “I knew it the night I saw you on that terrace. I was never in competition with you, Miss Fairmont. I was in competition with a life I had been taught to want.”

Isabelle had cried over that letter. Aunt Margaret had framed it.

The organ began.

And Isabelle Fairmont walked down the aisle of St. Mary’s on the arm of the Duke of Harrington — not her father, and she would always, always miss her father — but a man who had paid, in full and in public, for the silence of his house, and who had chosen, in the end, to be on the side of the pattern.

She walked past the candles. Past the whispers. Past the rows of faces that had once turned away from her in the street, now beaming and wet-eyed, because the world loves a story it can glance at and then look away from, but it adores a story it has to sit still for.

Charlotte scattered her petals with scientific gravity.

Aunt Margaret cried into a handkerchief embroidered with chrysanthemums.

And at the altar waited Dominic Karstair, in morning blue, his eyes fixed on her as though she were the only light in the church — as though the shape of her coming down the aisle to him were a proof he had been solving for years.

The minister’s voice rose and fell like the tide. The vows were said. The rings — two of them now; he had refused to keep the courting ring a gift, and had traded it, drawing room for church, at her insistence — were exchanged without a fumble.

“I, Isabelle Fairmont, take thee, Dominic Karstair…”

Her voice caught, and she felt the catch travel through the congregation like a held breath. Because she had practiced this sentence in her room for a week, in the mornings before the household woke, and it was only now, in the candlelight, in the silence, with her father’s church wrapped around her, that she understood what it meant.

Her father’s name, restored. Her father’s church, filled. Her father’s daughter, chosen.

“…to have and to hold, from this day forward.”

Dominic’s hand was steady under hers. His voice, when he repeated the words, was steady too. But his eyes were not steady. His eyes were shining, and he did not bother to hide it, and the entire congregation of St. Mary’s — from the Duke in the front pew to the schoolgirls behind the lych-gate — saw the Duke of Harrington’s brother weep softly, happily, in the middle of his own wedding.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

The kiss was chaste. And the entire church, packed with the great and the gossiping of London, erupted.

Bells. Ribbons. Rice thrown by girls who had never thrown rice before. The sun, which had been deliberating all morning, chose that precise moment to break through the clouds and flood the porch of St. Mary’s with gold, and Aunt Margaret declared — loudly, for posterity — that Thomas Fairmont had arranged it from heaven, and no one had the heart to argue.