Page 23 of Bred By the Duke

We walk. The grass is soft and she's holding on to me too tightly and I keep the pace slow, and I look down the aisle to the front where the maid of honor is standing with an armful of dahlias.

Rochelle finds me over the top of the crowd and her face changes, opens, and she smiles at me.

I want this.

Not this. Not my sister's wedding, which I would like to survive. I want the lawn and the quartet and the hundred and sixty people, and I want to watch her walk down the aisle towards me in white. I want to know that when it's finished, she comes back into my house and doesn't leave it. I want her in my room permanently. I want her carrying my child, round and impossible and mine, and I want it soon, and the force of wanting it in the middle of somebody else's ceremony is enough to make me look at my shoes for a second and get myself under control.

Theo is crying already. Cassia squeezes my arm when the registrar asks whether or not I’m giving my sister away. I say I do, and step back to my seat in the front row.

The ceremony begins and I don’t take my eyes off Rochelle.

Epilogue

Rochelle

Barry and I clear the chairs in ten minutes to either side of the room as his men begin bringing the tables down from the house. Guests mingle on the lawn and terraces, drinking champagne and eating canapes from trays carried by the catering staff.

“That's the system,” he says, glowing when the first table arrives and we place it at the centre back of the marquee ready to dress for the bride and groom.

The linen goes on. The glassware comes out of the crates in the cold larder, and Elsie and two of the girls from the village work down the rows with cloths giving the silver one last polish before setting it out on the tables. The flowers come last, out of the buckets in the north passage and into the low bowls, dark red and rust and that strange dusty pink that looks like a tropical sunset.

I go around with the place cards at a jog, checking them against the plan, and that's when I notice what Vivienne has done.

Table four is hers. Her own name at the head of it, Honora beside her, Peregrine on her other side, which is a mercy for everybody. And then the Corvain’s. All three of them. Delphine, her mother, her father, absorbed onto the Dowager Duchess's table like it was always the arrangement, and to fill it out she has taken four of the groomsmen, the four loudest, the ones who have been doing something with a hip flask behind the yew hedge since eleven o'clock this morning.

I stand there with a place card in my hand and read it twice.

She never said a word to me about it. She has simply taken the entire Corvain family onto her own table, given them the best company in the room, and put them as far from her son as the plan allows.

My name is now beside Lucas’s, in her handwriting, and sharing with the other groomsmen and the bridesmaids who I only just met for the first time this morning because most of them are Theo’s relatives.

I’m still holding it when he walks into the marquee and he says my name.

“Ten minutes,” I tell him, without turning around. “I have flowers and I have the cake to check and your sister's flat shoes are still in the morning room.”

“I just need you for one.” His hand closes around my wrist. “Rochelle. One minute, please.”

There's something in his voice, so I put the card down and let him take me out through the gap where the canvas is laced, past the guy ropes and the pegs and the churned bit of grass where the truck has been, to the old sundial at the top of the slope. From here the marquee is a white shape with the sun coming through it and the noise of the terrace floats over from the other side of the house, thinned out by distance.

He puts his hand in his inside pocket, and then he kneels down in the dry grass in a suit that was tailored especially for today.

“You'll ruin your suit,” I say. My voice does something strange in the middle of it.

“I have others.”

He opens his hand. The ring is old, warm gold gone soft at the shank, and the diamond in it is cut in a way they don't do anymore, blunt and bright and slightly uneven.

“My mother came to my room at seven this morning,” he says. “She put this on the chest of drawers and she said she wore it for thirty-one years and she would rather see it on a bride than a widow.”

I press both hands to my face.

“I've had it in my pocket through the entire ceremony,” he says. “I stood at the front and gave my sister away with it against my ribs and I couldn’t hear a word the registrar said.” He looks up at me and he isn't controlled at all, not even remotely. “I've spent four years being sensible about you. I'm finished with it. Marry me. Live here, work here, fill this house with your lists and your dreadful highlighters, argue with my mother and aunt Honora, name the runt, have my children. I want the whole of it, Rochelle, and I want it soon, and I am not prepared to be reasonable for one more day.”

There's a wood pigeon cooing somewhere in the beeches. Down the hill the quartet has started up again for the drinks, and I can hear Peregrine's voice above them, telling somebody about Nester.

“Yes,” I say.

He shuts his eyes.