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Not a man breathed a word. Rev. Halford, wisely, kept going.

For remembrance.

Damian had to look hard at the yew tree for a while and wonder if his bride had loved his brother. It was only fitting if she had, only reasonable given his recent misfortune that he be tied to a wife who loved another.

Afterward the gentlemen filed past with their hats in their hands and their condolences in good order. Four of them in succession called him my lord. Each time some sluggish rear rank of his mind glanced about for Edward before it understood. Edward was dead. The only person he could have shared his burden with was gone, and now Damian stood in a graveyard pretending he was not an unholy creature raised from the dead.

He said what was required. It was the rest of speech that failed him.

God has forsaken me. I do not belong.

When the yard had emptied, she was still beside him. The displaced earth stood mounded by the grave with the sods stacked against it, raw yellow clay drying pale at the edges. Tomorrow morning he would walk past it into that church and marry her. He had no notion how she felt about it, but it was something he could do to honor his brother, and he would do it even if it further damned his soul to partake in ceremonies not intended for the undead.

He offered her his arm because there was no one else left to do it. She took it without ceremony, her fingers resting lightly above his wrist, and they left together through the stones. Neither of them said a word all the way to the gate. It was the easiest quarter hour he had spent since waking in the cellar. The realization frightened him to his toes.

* * *

It rained on his wedding day.

It was the rain he had followed from that cellar. Throughout his difficult journey home, he had held on to one thought. Soft gray English rain falling over Hartleigh without haste or temper. Rain greening the park and beading the glass.

Now it had come, exactly as promised, folding the morning in mist. He stood at the breakfast-room window in solid black, his stock tied up to the jaw, waiting to feel as though he had come home. Instead he felt like a stranger attending the wedding of someone who had.

His mother had not stopped talking.

“Only the cold ham and the fowl and the good Madeira. I told Cook, nothing that has the look of celebration, because it is not one. Well, it is one. That is the entire difficulty, is it not?”

Her hands rose and worked at the air. She was pale. An avalanche of weeping had left her face polished and tight.

“He wished it. Edward wished it. You know he did. He wanted them settled, and so it is right. It is entirely right and proper. And it is also the day after he was buried, Genevieve. The day after. What can we possibly say to people?”

“That it was Edward’s dying wish,” said Lady Clarke, buttering her toast. “Which has the convenience of being true.”

“His dying wish. Yes.”

His mother pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. When she lowered it, her eyes had gone somewhere else.

“And a wedding, after everything. A bride at Hartleigh again. Oh, when I think how nearly we had neither of, how nearly both my …”

She stopped with a hard jerk, horrified by the words she had almost let out. Then she hurried past them.

“The neighborhood will understand. They must be made to understand. And if any person presumes to suggest there is anything irregular in it …”

“No one will suggest it twice,” said Lady Clarke.

“Because it is what Edward wanted, and it secures the Archer line, and I am very happy.” His mother finished the sentence and burst into tears.

Damian sighed at the rain.

Silence had never done to his mother what people claimed silence did. It did not quiet her. It fed her. She wept, pulled herself together, begged Lady Clarke’s pardon, begged the ham’s pardon, and started again.

The flowers were wet through, the poor things. The rector’s breakfast … Whether the servants might be permitted one glass to drink the … No, no toasts. They could not have toasts … What Edward would have said … What people would say … What people must not be allowed to say.

“What can they say?” Damian asked.

Both women turned to him. He had not spoken since the kippers were laid.

“That the haste, that it has an appearance …” His mother’s hands built a scandal in the air between them.