Page 24 of Baron Bolt

“Tell them I feared she would think better of it.”

The room went silent. His mother stared at him with her handkerchief stopped halfway to her mouth. Lady Clarke made a muffled sound into her tea. In another woman it would have been a laugh.

“That is not amusing, Damian,” his mother said. Her voice wobbled. She wanted very badly to be told that it was.

“No,” he said, and turned back to the window. He regretted it at once. This was how it happened sometimes. A thing came out of the old Damian in the old voice, the living one, then sat there in the room while everyone stared at it. Edward would have laughed. That was the trouble with the whole morning. Every road in it led back to Edward.

Miss Clarke came down at a quarter to ten.

He had expected black. He had been wrong. She wore dove gray, plain almost to severity, with white gloves. Against all the black mourning in the hall, she looked like one lit window in a dark house. His mother saw her and ran through every feeling she possessed in the space of a stair. First came a cry of oh at the sight of a bride. Then a stricken look at the black hatband lying on the hall table. Then helpless delight spread across her face, wet-eyed and bright, and stayed there to her obvious embarrassment.

“My dear, you look …” his mother began.

“Sensible, I hope,” said Miss Clarke. “It seemed the only thing worth being this morning.”

They went to church in two carriages through the soft rain. Damian sat opposite his mother while she talked, and rehearsed the fight he was certain would come.

He had it all arranged in his head. His bride would stop at the porch. Any woman with sense would stop at the porch. He had his answers ready in a neat column. The settlements. Her situation. Edward’s express wish. The protection of his name against whatever the world might try. He had been a soldier. He knew what prepared ground was worth.

If she wept, he would … The column broke apart there. He had no idea what he would do if she wept over Edward while she married him. She had not shed a tear in his presence, not even at the grave. He was beginning to understand that this was not the same as not grieving. What it was instead, he could not say.

The church stood gray in the gray morning. The yews dripped. The path to the porch passed within ten feet of the new grave. No one had thought of that yesterday. There had been no way to think of everything. The mounded clay had gone dark and glistening in the rain. Ahead of him, Miss Clarke’s step did not so much as catch. She glanced at it. One full, level look, the searching glance a man gives an account before he signs. Then she faced the porch and kept walking. Damian followed with a new license in his breast pocket and understood that the fight he had marshaled his answers for was not going to arrive.

She reached the door before him. She turned beneath the dripping arch, rain beading on her bonnet, and said, “The rector will be waiting, my lord,” and went in.

He stood a moment in the rain with his prepared arguments drawn up around him like troops paraded for nobody. Then he followed Edward’s bride into the church.

It was cold inside. Damp stone. Beeswax. Old books. Their footsteps went up into the roof. Rev. Halford waited at the rail with his clerk. The mothers took the front pew, his own already weeping into a fresh handkerchief, Lady Clarke seated beside her like the last standing wall of a fortress. The rector read the exhortation in a voice pitched for a full church, so that it rolled about the empty one. Not by any to be enterprised lightly … So long as ye both shall live … If either of you know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together?

Damian did not say I died in June. To say so was to fail his brother, and so he did not say it.

He stood and let the argument fire through him in good order, the way it had fired every hour since he had given Edward his word. The man who might have stood here honestly, the man she could, in time, in some better-kept ledger of a world, have come to love, had been nine-and-twenty and whole. That man died at Waterloo, in the smoke. What had walked home wearing his name could give her the name. Could give her the roof, the settlements, the fortress of himself between her and everything the world does to an unprotected woman. Nothing more. An undead man has no right to a living wife. He had told himself so many times that the words had worn smooth, like a coin carried too long in a pocket. He passed the coin to himself once more, standing in the cold church. It rang as true as it always rang.

“Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, comfort her, honor, and keep her, in sickness and in health, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” Damian said. Both words were true. It was everything standing around them that was counterfeit.

Then it was read over her. The whole freight of it. Obey him, serve him, love, honor, and keep him.

He watched her while it was read, hunting for the flinch, the swallow, the clenched fist, any dispatch at all from whatever this was costing her, and got nothing. He had questioned prisoners with more results. She stood slight and straight in her dove gray with the rain sounding on the roof, her eyes on the rector, her face wearing as much expression as a bride ought to wear and not one smidge more.

When the question ended she said, “I will,” promptly, clearly, as if she were consenting to terms she had already read.

He could not make it out. He had turned it over half the night and he could not make it out. Grief he would have understood. Reluctance, distaste, a bargain swallowed with a stiff throat. He had braced for each of them and would have honored each of them.

That she gave him none of it was the one thing he had not prepared against. He could not say, Tell me what you are carrying and I will help you carry it, because her first question in return would be perfectly fair. And what are you carrying? His answer would be … a lunatic in a cellar.

Then hands. He stripped off his right glove, the only inch of him that would go bare today, or tomorrow, or this year, and took her hand. Her own glove was already gone, drawn off while he was still managing his. One move ahead of the service, as she had been one move ahead of everything all morning. Her fingers were cold. Not cool. Cold. Cold as marble in the cold church, colder than any hand ought to be on a mild wet morning in August. They lay in his without a tremor. It was the only intelligence she surrendered all day. Whatever this cost, it was being paid somewhere out of sight, in icy coin, and her beautiful face would never show it.

“For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,” Damian said. Till death us do part? Death had done its parting already, weeks since, in the smoke. Everything standing at this rail was afterward. He gave her the words anyway, because she required them said and he could say them. If there were perjury in it, it was perjury between him and God, if God still listened to a creature such as he.

She made her promises in the same clear voice. Love, cherish, and obey, and stumbled nowhere, not even at the places he had braced to catch her.

The ring was his grandmother’s. His mother had pressed it on him the night before, both her delicate hands wrapped around his one, unable to produce a single sentence about it that survived past three words. A thin old band of soft gold.

“With this ring I thee wed,” Damian said, and then came the clause he had been dreading since he first read the service through, two nights ago, in Edward’s study, with one candle and a bottle he never opened. “With my body I thee worship.”

He got it out. It cost more than all the rest of the liturgy together, that one clause, sworn over the one thing she must never see. The one vow he intended before God to break for as long as they both were wed. His body would never worship hers, this godless monstrosity would never corrupt her vitality for as long as she lived.