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Did he grant James’s wish?

The carriage ground to a halt beneath him and a peculiar trepidation seized James, one that made him loath to peer out toward the world beyond the window.

Forcing himself toward a bravery he felt he had not earned, he leaned out to survey the weathered stones of the parish church and the adjacent churchyard. Though marred by the passage of years, it appeared as he had seen it last, upon the burial of his brother, Lionel.

“Poor Lionel,” he muttered, though his brother had been gone so long that he could hardly remember him. Strange that he was being honored with this memorial. Still, people did strange things for the aristocracy.

His relative calm surveying the churchyard shattered as his eyes fell upon a solitary figure all in black, standing before the parish church.

Upon nearing, the silhouette proved to be of a diminutive stature, a heavy mourning veil of midnight lace shielding her identity from his gaze.

For some reason he could not explain, James did not wish to see what was under the veil.

With a glance at the coachman, James slowly wended his way through the damp churchyard toward the figure, his boots sinking unevenly with each step.

As he neared, he was able to make out more details of the figure. Though a desperate hope still flickered within him that he might find Mariah, the evidence before his eyes served to extinguish that flame. The figure was garbed in the voluminous, opulent skirts that defined the London Season, a stark contrast to the modest, practical crinolines Mariah favored for navigating the school or the mills. While the ensemble remained a somber black, the gown was adorned with a surplus of lace and frivolous flounces, far removed from the elegant simplicity of the linens produced by Monahan’s mills.

The veil fluttered in the light breeze and James’s throat ran completely dry. How did he approach this figure? Was it Mariah? Could she explain all the strange things he had seen that day?

“Ah, my lord, you have finally arrived.” The presence of the vicar served to sever the thread of his thoughts, yet the man’s glacial reception did nothing to alleviate the disquiet blooming within James’s chest. On every previous encounter, the cleric had been solicitous, almost fawning in his eagerness to speak with James. Never had he greeted James with such averted eyes and a telltale moue of disdain.

The man’s expression morphed into a familiar fawning one as he turned to the figure in black. “My lady, what an honor it is for you to grace us with your presence.”

Before James could prepare himself, the figure drew back their veil.

She was….

Beautiful, he supposed.

But she was not Mariah.

James acknowledged that in his salad days, she might have been the kind of woman he thought he would marry. Her features had the distinction of what the English called “good breeding”. She was blond but not too pale or wan. Her cheeks had color and fullness but would never be considered overly round.

She was…fine. But the fact that she was not Mariah sent absolute panic ricocheting down his spine.

I wish I’d just married some high-kick heiress from London to save the estate.

Was this it? Had his selfish mutterings at a pub come true?

“Oh, Georgie, I cannot fathom why you insisted upon my return to this sooty, wretched town,” The woman flounced past him toward the vicar, her voice an airy mixture of ignorance and sophistication that was nasal enough to give one a headache.

“There are children in the streets outside of the mills,” James began, not knowing where he was going. Only he had never seen emaciated children on the streets of Barnsley before. Not since Monahan opened his mill when he was a lad. “But if Monahan did not have Mariah to strive for…” James said to himself more than anyone else.

“There are starving children in London, Georgie! Heaven knows what you wish me to do about it. Come, vicar, let us proceed with this wretched ceremony,” she chirped, her flaxen ringlets bobbing like frantic, golden jellyfish as she surveyed the hollow churchyard. “Naturally, no one would attend. Papa warned me against the shame of being seen here, yet I did have a prior engagement with an intimate acquaintance that I simply could not forsake.” She rolled her lips together in an expression of feigned distress, which James immediately interpreted as a pout. It took a moment before he surmised that the companion of whom she spoke was likely a lover. Yet as the seconds ticked by, the true weight of her callous words struck him like a physical blow.

“Shame?” he whispered.

Offering a look of deference to the lady, the vicar spared a glance of derision toward James. Rather than wending their way into the interior of the church, where one would naturally anticipate a memorial bearing Lionel’s name to reside, the cleric instead guided them toward the shadowed exterior of the north wall.

“The cook always referred to this as the Devil’s side,” her nasal voice twittered, as though she were merely debating the merits of a parlor’s color palette rather than navigating a bleak churchyard.

“Given the unfortunate circumstances…” The vicar’s disdain was again palpable as he directed their attention toward a plaque draped in somber black fabric. Yet James remained unable to surmise the reason for such hostility, particularly as the man had previously been so fawning. While Lionel had been no paragon, he was neither a wicked man nor a negligent peer.

“There is no shame in dying from cholera.”

James apparently voiced his inner thoughts aloud this time, for both the vicar and the woman claiming to be his wife rounded upon him with a sudden, sharp intensity.

“Cholera? What are you talking about Georgie?”