Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”
Chapter 17
The wedding was set for the first Saturday in May, and the county arranged its calendar accordingly.
There was, in the five weeks between the garden and the wedding, a particular kind of weather to be weathered: the visitations. Mrs. Linden came to Marnfeld to inspect the house, and the Dowager Duchess received her in the drawing room with a perfect neutrality that both women understood to be a form of hostilities suspended; the chairs were examined, the ballroom schedule was set, and the two mothers found, to their shared astonishment, a common territory in the ordering of a great household’s rituals. “She is unbearable,” Mrs. Linden told Eleanor, “and she knows which forks are correct, and I find that I admire her.” “She is unbearable,” the Dowager told Marcus, “and her daughter is the only person you have ever chosen for yourself, and I find that I respect her.”
Eleanor chose her own dress.
It was not the great court dress the dressmakers of London had proposed, in white satin and pearls, with a train long enough to require its own geography. She chose, instead, a gown of pale blue silk, with a simple neckline and sleeves that fell over her hands, and she wrote to Marcus a note the evening before the wedding to tell him so, in terms that made him laugh until the footmen noticed.
He replied, at midnight, by a note delivered to the inn where she was staying:
The chairs have been reupholstered. I consulted no one. They are now the most comfortable chairs in England, and the Dowager has not spoken to me since Thursday, which I consider a triumph of domestic arrangement.
You will be the only blue thing in the church, and I will be the only thing beside you.
She read it three times, and folded it, and placed it carefully in the pocket of her blue dress, where she kept it through the following morning, through the carriage ride, through the porch of the church and the long aisle lined with county faces, all the way to the altar, where a man in a sober gray coat with earth-weather on his boots was waiting for her with a look of such open, unperformed attention that she
felt the whole of the aisle fall away behind her. The organ was playing something her mother had chosen; she could not hear it. The county was watching; she could not see them. There was only the man at the altar, and the pale morning light coming through the stained glass in colored rivers, and the small, absurd certainty that she had done the one brave thing she had ever been offered the chance to do.
She reached him. He took her hand.
“You came,” he said, very quietly, so that only she could hear.
“I am the one who was fetched,” she said. “The carriage did the work.”
“The carriage was in excellent spirits all the way. It has been looking forward to this.” He smiled, and there was a particular, unguarded quality to the smile that she had come to recognize, over the winter, as the rarest currency in England. “You are the only blue thing in the church,” he said.
“You are the only thing beside me,” she said.
Later, she would not remember the vows in order. She remembered the vicar’s voice, and the weight of her own hand in Marcus’s, and the way the sunlight came down on the two of them like something poured. She remembered holding his gaze through the whole of the ceremony, because she had practiced — alone, in the dark, where no one could see her practicing — the discipline of believing her own life.
The bishop of the diocese, an old family friend who had married the Dowager herself thirty-nine years before, preached a sermon that was considerably shorter than she had feared, and considerably more honest than anyone in the congregation expected. “I have married men,” he said, “who came to the altar carrying their fortunes like armor, and I have married men who came carrying nothing but themselves. I have watched a great many weddings in this county, and I will tell you the truth of my observation: the marriages that survive are not the ones with the largest settlements or the most distinguished guest lists. They are the ones in which each spouse has looked at the other and asked — not once, but daily, for fifty years — ‘Are you tired?’ and meant it as a question, not a courtesy.”
Marcus squeezed her hand.
He arranged this, she thought. He somehow arranged the bishop.
She did not know, then, that he had written to the bishop exactly one letter, containing exactly one request: that no one at his wedding be asked to perform. And the bishop, who had known Marcus’s father, and had watched the whole Marnfeld machine of display for three decades, had agreed with a relish that surprised even himself.
“Are you tired?” the bishop asked them, at the end of his sermon, and the congregation laughed in the particular way of a room that has been given permission to be kind.
“Extremely,” said Marcus, honestly, and the church laughed again, and Eleanor thought she had never heard such a sound made of such small coin.
The signing of the register took place in the vestry, with only the two of them and the two witnesses — the vicar of Brackley, who had become a friend, and old Mrs. Quill, who had come up from Marnfeld in a black dress with a lavender sprig and stood at the back of the vestry pretending not to cry.
“You have my blessing, child,” Mrs. Quill said, fiercely, to Eleanor. “You have had it since October. The rest of the world took its time.”