Now a Bride (Short Story) Read online

  “Yes,” she agreed. “There are no demons as far as I can see.”

  “It would seem a pity to let it fall into ruin,” he said, narrowing his eyes on the cottage. “It would make a good home for a gamekeeper or a gardener, would it not?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “One with a family. It is idyllic. You must give orders to have repairs made, Jocelyn.”

  He tucked her hand beneath his arm. “It is perhaps a mile to the house straight on,” he said. “Longer if we make a detour.”

  She looked at him with inquiring eyes.

  “To the top of the hill.” He pointed to their right. “There is a glorious view from the top. Ferdinand and Angeline and I held it against armies and pirates and cutthroat highwaymen all through our childhood. And I sat there in awed silence during my later boyhood.”

  “To the top of the hill, then,” she said.

  They were both breathless when they reached the top, having scrambled up a steep slope, dodging tree trunks and massive roots as they went. But a breeze they had not felt lower down fanned their cheeks as they gazed at the distant house and cultivated park before it and the kitchen gardens behind.

  Jocelyn felt something clutch at his heart. Nostalgia? Pride? Love? Hope? Perhaps there was a little of all those feelings.

  “Ah, Jocelyn,” she said. “I am so glad I am seeing it for the first time from up here. It looks … How can I explain it? It sounds foolish when I have never seen it before, but it looks like home.”

  “This is home,” he said, turning her against him and framing her face with his hands. “This is home, Jane, you and I together. But here is where we will make our nest and set up our nursery and live and love together. Here at Acton.” He touched his forehead to hers and closed his eyes. “I am home.”

  “Jocelyn,” she whispered to him, “how I love you.”

  They were surrounded by rippling waves of soft, fragrant grass and flowers, and by a sky of deep blue above their heads. Somewhere close by a bird was singing its heart out. Myriad invisible insects chirped and droned.

  It was a precious moment of homecoming. And happiness.

  “Jane,” he said after a while, “do you realize the odds there were against our meeting?”

  “Yes,” she said. “If I had not cried out when I did, Lord Oliver would doubtless have put his bullet through your heart and there would have been no point in my going closer to scold you.”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “His pistol hand was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.”

  He lowered his hands from her face and took one of her hands in one of his. He laced their fingers.

  “Come,” he said.

  They half ran down the upper slope in the direction of the house. Toward a future that would surely hold its share of troubles and heartache, as all futures must. But one that would also hold friendship and laughter and love and joy.

  And moments like the present one of total happiness. Brief, ephemeral moments, but ones that would illumine the whole of their lives like a beacon if they were only open to recognizing them and seizing them and living them to the fullest.

  Jane shrieked and then laughed helplessly as they ran faster and faster down the lower half of the slope. And, as he caught her at the bottom and swung her around in a complete circle before setting her feet back on the ground, Jocelyn laughed with her.

  WHEN I WROTE No Man’s Mistress, I made it a sort of matched pair with More than a Mistress—as far as the endings went, anyway. Lord Ferdinand Dudley, younger brother of Jocelyn, Duke of Tresham, marries Viola Thornhill quietly and privately at the end of the book rather than wait for the large, pomp-filled wedding that he knows his family will want for him. As in the other book, there is no actual wedding scene but only a surprise announcement at a grand ton event following it. And, as in More than a Mistress, there is no homecoming scene at the very end of the book, even though Viola and Ferdinand’s return to Pinewood Manor in Somersetshire is going to be a significant event. They quarrel over it through much of the book, after all, since they both claim ownership. And they left it in haste and misery, their dreams and their growing love for each other in shatters.

  Here are both scenes as they might have appeared in the book if I had included them.

  THE COUNTESS OF HEYWARD would wish to organize a grand wedding, Lord Ferdinand had told Viola. Viola herself would have liked a quiet wedding at Trellick, the village near Pinewood. They had compromised on a quiet wedding in London—very quiet. He would not tell his family for obvious reasons, and therefore she would not tell hers either. It would not have seemed fair. Besides, Viola’s Uncle Wesley would surely have tried to persuade them to wait for a slightly grander wedding with a breakfast afterward at the inn he owned.

  Only Hannah, Viola’s former nurse, now her maid, and Ferdinand’s valet were to attend their wedding. They needed two witnesses, after all.

  Quiet was fine.

  Quiet was wonderful.

  She was getting married, Viola thought as she left the White Horse Inn with Hannah, and that was miracle enough. Six years ago she had forfeited any hope or expectation of ever being able to live the normal life of a married woman and mother.

  She was getting married, and the true miracle was that she was marrying Ferdinand. She loved him so dearly that really there were no words to describe her feelings adequately. And the truest of all miracles—oh, dear, miracle upon miracle—was that he loved her. So much, in fact, that he was willing to take the greatest risk of his life. For he might yet face ridicule and ostracism for marrying her. It was true that no less a couple than the Duke and Duchess of Tresham had taken her under their wing and were to give a lavish reception at Dudley House this evening to present her to the ton. And it was true that the Earl and Countess of Heyward, with no small power of their own, were also determined to bring her into fashion. But it was not at all certain that any of it would work. It was a bold move that might fail utterly. How, after all, could the ton be expected to accept into its midst a woman who had once been among the most celebrated courtesans in London?

  Ferdinand had great faith in his family. But it did not matter anyway, he had told her. With or without the support of the ton, all he really wanted to do with the rest of his life was live it with her and any children of their union at Pinewood Manor in far-off Somersetshire.

  It was all she wanted of life too.

  She did not yet dare quite believe in such happiness.

  “Lovey,” Hannah said from beside her, “if I am forced to move any farther at this pace, I am going to expire from lack of air and a stitch in my side and legs that are too short.”

  “Oh, Hannah.” Viola came to an abrupt halt on the pavement. “I am so sorry. Have I been striding along?”

  “That you have,” Hannah said. “And besides my discomfort, lovey, it would not do for you to arrive at the church before Lord Ferdinand. A bride ought never to appear overeager.”

  “Oh,” Viola asked, dismayed, “is that what I am?”

  Hannah patted her arm.

  “You are eager,” she said. “It is what you ought to be on your wedding day. But not what you ought to appear to be to any excess. At least, that is what wedding wisdom says. I think it is a lot of nonsense myself. What bridegroom wants to arrive at his wedding to be faced with a bride who looks reluctant and downright bored with life?”

  They both laughed. And Viola bit her lip.

  “Am I doing the right thing, Hannah?” she asked.

  “In slipping off to marry without telling anyone but me?” she said. “I have always been a romantic soul, Miss Vi, as you know. There is something very splendid about a grand wedding with five hundred guests. Not that I have ever seen any, it is true. But the idea is splendid. However, for sheer romance there is nothing like a quiet wedding, and they do not come any quieter than this one. Such a wedding is not for the splendor of the event itself but for the actual uniting of two people who cannot live without each other. I could not have wished for
a more romantic wedding for you than this, lovey, and you know I have always had a soft spot for the scamp of a gentleman you are marrying. Actually, he is not just a scamp. He is also the most determined, courageous, noble man it has ever been my privilege to know. You are doing absolutely the right thing—in marrying this way and in marrying him. For he is getting a wife who perfectly matches him in determination and courage and nobility. And there! We might as well have kept striding along. I am twice as breathless as I was.”

  “Oh, Hannah.” Viola fought back tears as she looked both ways. Fortunately there was no one in sight on the street for some distance in either direction. She caught up her maid in a tight hug. “I am so much in love and so happy. Dare I hope?”

  “Well,” Hannah said, her voice normal again as she brushed at her dress, “I think you dare hope to get to the church before Lord Ferdinand goes away again—if we start walking, that is. And once he has you in his sights, he is not going to let you go even if you should want to. Which you do not.”

  Viola brushed at the folds of her own dress with hands that trembled slightly. The dress was the same muslin she had worn at the May Day celebrations in Trellick the first time she set eyes on Ferdinand, and her straw bonnet was the same as the one that had lain on a pew in the village church through most of that day. Her hair was coiled in a heavy braid at the nape of her neck below the bonnet.

  It was not a particularly smart or fashionable wedding outfit. Her mother and sisters would have been suspicious if she had left the inn dressed any more festively. But it was the way she liked to dress, the way she intended to dress when she was back at Pinewood. Besides, the clothes did not matter. Ferdinand loved her.

  How wonderful to be able to think those words and know they were true. He had sought out Daniel Kirby and in a deliberately public setting, he had pronounced himself her champion, and he had punished the man who had come very, very close to ruining her life for all time.

  Ferdinand was her public champion and her private lover.

  What more could she ask of life?

  “Come along, then,” she said. “I would not keep him waiting, Hannah. But he would wait, you know, just as I would—as I will if we are there before him.”

  The church was not nearly as grand as St. George’s on Hanover Square, the usual site for fashionable weddings, or as large. It was not even an attractive building. It did not matter. Viola scarcely noticed. For there was a curricle standing outside the church, a young groom holding the horses’ heads, and Ferdinand was standing on the pavement with another man, presumably his valet.

  He was not dressed as he had been on May Day. He was in a black tailed coat with silver knee breeches and white stockings and linen with lace at his throat and wrists. He must have presented quite a spectacle as he drove through the streets of London in the middle of the morning at the ribbons of a sporting curricle.

  He looked absolutely gorgeous—and even more so when he came striding toward her, one hand outstretched, and smiled.

  He looked as happy as Viola felt.

  Poor Angie was going to be horribly disappointed, Ferdinand thought. She had been deprived of the pleasure of organizing a grand wedding for Tresham and Jane four years ago when they had slipped away to be married quietly. Now she was going to lose her chance to organize something for him and Viola when they did the same thing. And he could not console himself or her with the suggestion that she save all her creativity for the weddings of her own children. After six years of marriage she and Heyward were still childless.

  Poor Angie.

  However, selfish as it might seem, he could not spare much sympathy for his sister today. Today was his wedding day, and he was happier than he had thought it possible to be. It had been a near run thing. Right up until the last moment at Tresh’s love nest last week he had not been sure she would say yes. But she had, and the world had suddenly burst into full bloom for him. He had felt strangely as if someone must have provided him with a new pair of eyes, ones that showed the world in sharper, brighter colors and bathed everything in sunshine even when there were clouds overhead—as there were now—and drizzle falling on his head.

  He might be a poet yet—ghastly thought!

  Those same new eyes watched her as she approached along the street with Hannah. Although he was dressed as if he was about to attend the most formal of receptions with the Prince Regent at Carlton House, he was glad that she had dressed simply. Although she was wearing a bonnet this morning and her hair was dressed up instead of swinging across her back in a long, dark-red braid, she looked like the wholesome lass who had been organizing a sack race on the village green at Trellick when he first saw her—and surely fell in love with her. Was there such a thing as love at first sight? There must be. He could not be sure, but he would not be at all surprised if the dress she was wearing now was the same one she had worn then.

  Happiness ran over as he strode toward her, his hand outstretched for hers. And only then did he let go of the little ball of anxiety that had been making his stomach queasy all morning, for one could never be sure with Viola. Her conscience might at the last moment have forbidden her to marry him after all, convinced her once again that she could only bring ruin upon him by marrying him. But here she was, and she was surely looking as happy as he felt even though her smile was more restrained than his. It merely lit her eyes and lifted the corners of her mouth.

  He knew, though, that the smile lit her through to the very soul. He knew her well already, but there was always more to know. They would have a lifetime in which to become as familiar with each other, body, mind, and soul, as they were with themselves.

  “Viola,” he said, his hand closing about hers.

  “Ferdinand,” she said, her fingers curling around his.

  Eloquence indeed. But eloquence did not always necessitate words.

  He set her hand on his sleeve, smiled and nodded a greeting at Hannah, nodded to Bentley, his valet, and led his bride into the cold gloom of the church interior. But there was a large stained-glass window behind the altar. And the sun must have broken through the clouds outside just as they stepped in through the doors, for multicolored light suddenly cut through the gloom and made something magical—or, more appropriately, perhaps, something holy—of the place where the two of them would join their lives until death did them part.

  The clergyman was waiting for them. They approached him along the nave of the church, their two witnesses behind them, and the nuptial service proceeded without any fuss or bluster, all their voices soft and intimate as the world changed for one man and one woman.

  It was no strange fancy. The world did change. One minute, it seemed, he was Lord Ferdinand Dudley, bachelor, man-about-town, and she was Miss Viola Thornhill of Pinewood Manor in Somersetshire, and the next they were Lord and Lady Ferdinand Dudley, man and wife. They had just promised before God and man—and woman —that they would love and cherish each other always, no matter what, and the promises had collided with Ferdinand’s chest like a velvet fist, robbing him of breath and filling him with wonder.

  He would love her and cherish her forever.

  She would love and cherish him for just as long.

  The nuptial service was over, the register was signed and witnessed, and they were back outside the church a few minutes and a whole era after they had entered it.

  Bentley went to confer with the groom, both of them with their backs to the church. Hannah strolled a little way along the street and stood admiring a tree that in reality was no more admirable than any other tree on the street.

  “Shall I return with you to tell your mother and your sisters and uncle?” he asked, though they had already agreed that no announcement would be made until tonight, either after Tresham’s reception if it was proceeding disastrously for Viola, or during if all was going well. “And then take you to Jane and Tresh and to Angie and Heyward?”

  “No,” she said, and he could see that she was sliding her wedding ring off her finger—
just a few minutes after he had put it there—and was holding it out to him. “I would not have them all more anxious this evening than they already are, Ferdinand. And I need to do this alone tonight—to attend the reception, to meet the ton, to sink or swim without hiding behind anyone’s coattails. I need to do it as Viola Thornhill—for the last time.”

  She raised her eyes to his.

  “I love you,” she said, “so terribly much. My husband.”

  He put her ring safely inside a pocket and then took her right hand in both of his.

  “Until tonight, then,” he said, raising her hand to his lips. “My love. My wife.”

  And she smiled and turned to hurry down the street to join Hannah. Both of them walked on without looking back.

  He was alone again.

  But different.

  The world had changed.

  Tonight he would be with his wife—after he had allowed her to be Viola Thornhill one more time. And for the rest of their lives they would remain together.

  Man and wife.

  It was strange how the world could look so much the same and yet so very different within the space of half an hour.

  THEY HAD NOT really intended stopping in the village of Trellick. It had been a long journey, and they were eager to be at Pinewood. It felt like home even though Ferdinand had spent only a few weeks there in May, and all that time he had been feuding with Viola over which of them was the lawful owner. He had loved it from his first sight of it, though. And for her, of course, it had been home for longer than two years. It had been a gift from her father, the late Earl of Bamber, and with the gift he had rescued her from a life worse than hell and given her the chance of a wholly new life, a chance she had grasped and used to the fullest.

  They could scarcely wait to be home—together. To begin yet another phase of their lives—together.

  When the carriage left the main road and descended the hill to the village and skirted about the green before crossing the bridge onto Pinewood land, however, they could see that the Reverend Prewitt and his wife were standing at the end of the vicarage garden in conversation with the Misses Merrywether. All four of them, naturally enough, had turned to watch the carriage, and soon their faces were wreathed in smiles. Viola smiled back and waved from the window. Ferdinand leaned across her and waved too—and then impulsively rapped on the front panel for the coachman to stop.