No Family, No Friends, No Mercy: The Paralyzed Duke Waited for a Bride Who Never Cried Off

Chapter 21

They went back to St. Bride’s on the twentieth of May, eighteen twenty-three, when Edmund was a year old and Adrian had been walking with a cane for two.

It was not the church’s idea. It was Lenora’s, and when she proposed it — over breakfast, in the conservatory, with the paper in front of her — Adrian put down his cup and said nothing for a long moment.

“Why?” he said at last.

“Because it is the same room,” she said, “and I would like to see it full.”

The invitations went out in March. Twelve of them went to the families who had not come to the dinner. Four went to Mr. Pryce, to Dr. Murray, to Lord Revelstoke, and to a milliner’s assistant in Cheapside with no fortune and no family and no reason on earth to be invited except that she had once put her father’s parcel in her pocket and walked into a house she was afraid of. One went to Lady Fenton, who replied within the hour, in person, by carriage, and sat in the drawing room for two hours talking about the decoration of the church and had to be gently reminded twice that she had not been asked to arrange it.

The old churchwarden read the invitations and said, dryly, that he had never in forty years seen a service announced in the Gazette, and Lenora said that she had never in her life seen a church that needed one more.

On the twentieth of May, at eleven o’clock in the morning, St. Bride’s was full.

Four hundred and thirty people in four hundred chairs, with latecomers standing at the back and along the north aisle, the same aisle she had walked down alone. The lilies were fresh that time — Lenora had arranged them herself, in the great brass vases, the way she arranged everything, by announcing it. The bell in the tower rang a full hour, so that the whole of the neighborhood would know something was happening in the church that had stood empty on that gray afternoon in eighteen eighteen and had not been empty at a wedding since.

They were not there for a wedding. It was a service of thanksgiving — for the child, for the harvest, for the safe return of Captain Ellsworth’s arm, and for whatever else anybody privately wanted to give thanks for. The rector, who was ten years older and four stone heavier, gave a sermon about mercy that ran rather long and was, Adrian noted privately, entirely about him.

But the moment everybody had come for came at the end.

When the service was over and the congregation stood, the Duke of Ravenwood came down the aisle on his own feet.

Not fast. There was a cane, and there was Bates three paces behind, and there was the slow, careful, deliberate walk of a man who had built every step of it over five years — one knee that still misbehaved in the cold, one foot that turned slightly inward, and the long, careful, ungainly certainty of a man who had once been told he would never stand again and had declined to accept the arithmetic.

Lenora waited for him at the altar steps with the child on her hip.

Four hundred people watched him walk toward his wife, and if some of them were crying — Lady Fenton loudly, the Dowager Duchess silently and with enormous irritation — well, that was what they had come for. And when he reached her, he stopped and stood, and took her hand, and looked down the length of the church at four hundred chairs, every one of them occupied, filled with people who had come when they were invited, and none of them — not one — wondering what an old duchess had called the arithmetic of the ton.

“Well,” Lenora said, under cover of the organ. “Here we are again.”

“Same church.”

“Same aisle. I checked the flagstone with the crack in it.”

“I am not going to carry you down it.”

“I should think not; you would fall and take the child with you.” She shifted Edmund onto her other hip and looked up at him, and her smile was neither the public one nor the private one, but a third thing, entirely her own — the smile of a woman who had come down this aisle four years earlier with four hundred chairs and no company, and had decided, with total composure, in the rain, to win. “Well, Your Grace. We survived.”

“We did.”

“Are you satisfied?”

Adrian Ellsworth looked out over the crowded church — at his brother, at his mother, at the servants and the solicitor and the general, at Lady Fenton weeping into a handkerchief, at the young woman from the milliner’s who was crying because she had never in her life been invited anywhere.

“No,” he said. “Not satisfied. Somewhere beyond it, I think. That was the plan.”

“Yes,” said Lenora. “That was the plan.”

Outside, the sun came out over the churchyard and threw the shadow of the bell tower across the gravel, and the linden trees moved, and the four hundred and thirty guests spilled out into the road, and the carriage came around, and the Duke of Ravenwood walked down the steps to it with his cane and his wife’s hand on his arm, without a ramp, without a chair, and without a single person in the crowd who had not come when they were called.

And somewhere behind him in that church, in the gallery over the north aisle, there was a dark empty place where once a man in a brown coat had stood watching a bride walk in alone — and there was nobody standing there now, and nobody watching, and nobody left in England who cared.

THE END