She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 20

The wedding took place on a gray Thursday morning in a small church in Mayfair, and half of London came.

They came for reasons both good and bad. Some came because they wanted to see the Duke of Ravenmoor marry the woman he had rescued from a corner; some came because they wanted to see the scandal one last time, like a fire that has finally been put out and is still worth a look. Most came because they had heard what had happened at Halstead House, and had decided that the wind had changed, and wanted to be on the right side of it when it finished changing.

Rosalind did not care why they came.

She stood at the back of the church in the little stone porch, and Nell fastened the last of the pearls into her hair, and Cordelia stood beside her in a pale blue gown holding two bouquets because she could not decide which was better and had brought both.

The dress was ivory silk, high at the throat and simple at the waist, and it had been made in eleven days by a seamstress off the Strand who did not know her name and did not care to learn it, and who had said only, when she saw the cloth: good, yes, that will stand up to the light.

White roses, wrapped in ribbon, in her hands.

She had not worn black in nineteen days.

“You are shaking,” Cordelia said.

“I am not.”

“You are. Your hands are.”

“Yes,” Rosalind admitted. “I am shaking.”

“Are you frightened?”

Rosalind thought about it honestly, because she had made a rule for herself, after the Halstead ball, that she would never again give a quick answer to a real question.

“No,” she said. “I am not frightened. I am standing in a doorway in the last hour of a life I do not want, and I am about to walk out of it, and something in me does not entirely believe it is happening.”

The organ struck up inside, and Cordelia’s eyes widened, and Nell stepped back.

“Then go and believe it,” Cordelia said.

Rosalind Vane walked down the aisle of the church with the whole of London standing on either side of her, and she did not bow her head.

He was waiting at the altar. He had been told, twice, by his own colonel, that it was not customary for a groom to watch his bride walk toward him with the expression of a man watching a fire cross an open field, and he had ignored it entirely.

He watched her approach.

His face, when she reached him, held three things, and Rosalind saw all three clearly: fear, awe, and something she was not yet brave enough to name.

Then the church doors banged open behind them.

“Stop!” a woman’s voice cried. “I object! I forbid this marriage!”

Every head turned.

Seraphina Harrow stood in the doorway in a traveling cloak with her hair loose and her face white and wild, and it was clear at a glance that she had come a long way in a short time and had not slept.

“I object,” she cried. “He does not love her! He is marrying a lie to cover another lie! Ask him who he is really marrying! Ask him whose face he sees when he closes his eyes!”

The congregation stirred. The priest looked at the Duke.

And the Duke of Ravenmoor turned, entirely unruffled, and said in a voice that carried to the back of the church and out into the street:

“I choose Rosalind.”

Seraphina stopped.

“Not as a replacement,” he said. “Not as a consolation. Not as a way of putting a guard on my own grief.” He looked at the woman in the doorway, and then he looked at the woman beside him, and he said it slowly, so that nobody in that church could pretend afterward to have misheard. “I choose her as my equal, and as the person I intend to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve. That is the whole of it. There is no other face.”

The silence in the church was complete.

Then Colonel Blackwood, who was standing at the end of the second row, took Seraphina Harrow by the arm and walked her out of the building, and the doors closed behind her, and the organist — who had been frozen with his hands over the keys — struck up again, at the wrong place, and had to stop, and start again.

And Rosalind Vane laughed. Out loud, in a church, in front of the whole of London, she laughed — the first real laugh in three years.

They were married before noon.

At the wedding breakfast in the Ravenmoor townhouse, with two hundred people eating and drinking and watching, the Duke took her aside into the little morning room and closed the door.

“I love you,” he said. Simply. Without any of the cold formality he had used on the Serpentine.

Rosalind looked at him.

“I did not plan to,” he went on. “I told you I had no heart to offer. I meant it at the time. I have been wrong about very few things in my life and I am entirely pleased to be wrong about this one. I love you.”

She smiled, and her eyes were bright, and she said, “So do I.”

“That is a very short answer.”

“I have been saving it,” said Rosalind.