Page 84 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Kenneth stood in the entrance hall and listened to all of it: the music, the children, his wife’s voice among them, the ordinary sounds of a household that had not existed six months ago and which he was not willing to release.

He straightened his cravat, which did not need straightening, then followed them in.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The seed pearl buttons began at the small of Rachel’s back and climbed in a line so fine that Alice’s fingers found each one by feel rather than by sight, the cool spheres catching the morning light from the casement window as she worked them through their loops, unhurried, precise, because this task would not come again.

The gown was cream silk, high-waisted in the fashion of twenty years ago, with sleeves that the maid had taken in the previous evening and a hem let down to accommodate Rachel’s height. It had lain at the bottom of a trunk that arrived at Bearmoor House in the weeks following Alice’s wedding, packed by someone at Peltbury House who had either not known what the tissue wrapping contained or had known and had not troubled to remove it.

It was their mother’s wedding gown.

Alice had kept it, for no reason she could have defended and for every reason she did not need to.

Now, she and Rachel stood in one of the guest rooms in Bearmoor Castle because both Alice and Kenneth thought it best for the wedding to take place out of London. And Rachel was finally marrying a man she loved.

“It fits,” Rachel said.

Her reflection in the mirror watched them both, her blue eyes wide, her hair pinned in a loose arrangement that was more practical than ornamental. It suited her, Alice thought, considerably better than the elaborate style she would have worn for a duke’s wedding.

“Nearly.” Alice smoothed the silk across her sister’s shoulders. The waist had required nothing. The swell of Rachel’s belly pressed against the fabric in a way their mother could not have foreseen and which Alice found, against all propriety, rather beautiful. “She was smaller in the shoulders than you. Or I imagine she was.”

“I was five when she died. You were four.” Rachel’s hand found the edge of the mirror frame. “I remember this gown. She wore it in the portrait Father moved to the attic.” A pause. “I wonder if he remembered it was there.”

“He remembered nothing he was not obliged to remember.”

Alice stepped back to study the full effect. Rachel, standing in the morning light in cream silk with her chin raised and her hands hanging at her sides, looked nothing like the woman who had arrived at Kenneth’s study before dawn in a borrowed dress with months of hiding scored into the hollows of her face. She looked like someone who had arrived somewhere.

“You look like her.”

Rachel’s composure held for two breaths. Then her mouth pressed flat, her eyes went very bright, and she turned from the mirror and put her arms around Alice. Alice held her and felt the swell of her belly and the tremors in her shoulders and the silence that preceded the admission no one wished to make.

“He is not coming,” Rachel whispered.

Alice had received the letter that morning. Three sentences in their father’s precise, economical hand. He wished Rachel well but could not attend. He did not explain, because explaining would have required admitting that his absence was a choice and that the choice had a reason and that the reason was smaller than the occasion.

“No,” Alice said. “He is not.”

“I told myself it would not matter.”

“I know.”

“It does matter.” The words came muffled against Alice’s shoulder. “I am furious with myself for wanting him here, and I want him here regardless. I cannot reconcile the two.”

Alice smoothed her sister’s hair with an instinct she could not have learned from the woman whose gown Rachel was wearing, because there had not been time, and yet the gesture arrived with the certainty of inheritance.

“You do not have to choose between them.” Alice tightened her arms around her. “You carry both, and you walk to the chapel. George will be standing there, the same George who slept on other people’s floors and took pupils for sixpence because you were worth more to him than comfort.” Her voice caught, propriety failing mid-thought as it always did when she forgot to watch it. “Kenneth and I will be there today and after. That is not sentiment. It is a fact.”

Rachel pulled back. Her face was blotchy, and her lashes were damp. She looked at Alice the way Alice had spent twenty-one years looking at her.

“When did you become like this?” she asked.

“I have always been like this.” Alice adjusted a pin at her temple that had slipped during the embrace. “You were too occupied being the exemplary one to notice.”

Rachel laughed, the sound uneven and damp, and Alice held it inside the small bright room for as long as it would stay.

A knock sounded at the door. Alice opened it.

Kenneth stood in the corridor in his dark coat, his cravat tied with the precise symmetry that meant he had done it himself rather than wait for his valet, his shoulders filling the doorframe.