Page 9

The morning of Nathaniel’s wedding unfurled like a muted breath: long, shallow, and without air. The sky pressed low over Ravensdale House, thick with grey clouds, as though the heavens themselves bore witness with quiet condemnation.

The chapel loomed beyond the hedges, its stone bones slick with moisture and its windows dull with the absence of sun.

Inside the antechamber, Nathaniel stood alone.

The chill in the air seeped into the flagstone floor and through the soles of his polished boots.

His cravat, a masterpiece of stark white linen and rigid folds, felt too tight.

Not physically, but in principle. Every line of his coat had been tailored to precision, each button a mark of formality so sharp it drew blood.

Captain Marsden sat in one of the carved chairs with his legs stretched out. He was the picture of indolent charm.

His gaze flicked towards Nathaniel every so often, but he said little. They had spoken the night before, in the quiet code of men who had once shared battlefield silences:

Are you all right? — It doesn’t matter.

Marsden understood better than most that duty did not consult feeling.

The door opened, and with it, the rustle of fine wool and the subtle spice of imported tobacco. The Earl of Ravensdale entered first, with his chin high and his lips tight with a satisfaction that stopped just short of smugness.

Behind him, Nathaniel’s father walked with deliberate pace. His cane was still more a formality than necessity, and his eyes were sharp despite the pallor in his skin.

Nathaniel bowed, mechanically.

“Everything is in order,” Ravensdale said, adjusting his cuffs. “The chapel is prepared. The guests are assembled. Eleanor will arrive shortly.”

Nathaniel nodded once. His voice stayed behind his teeth.

His father offered a long look, unreadable but probing. “You are ready?”

“Of course,” Nathaniel replied, quietly.

When have I not been?

They spoke of details after that, of timings, formalities, signatures, but it passed over Nathaniel like rain over a statue. He heard only fragments. The words clinked around him like cold silver.

This was not a celebration. It was an arrangement of names, titles, and holdings. The fulfilment of two fathers’ ambitions. A future written in the margins of ledgers.

There were also convenient absences, which were unusual for the occasion. Then again, everything was unusual for the occasion.

Nathaniel was afraid that his father would want the affair highly publicized, as was often the case with the sons of dukes, but he was glad to have his father agree with a small and hasty event.

Lady Ravensdale was apparently too unwell to attend. A mercy. Nathaniel found the woman’s tendency towards dramatics tedious at best, and he had no patience today for weeping mothers clinging to handkerchiefs as though their tears were offerings.

His own mother had already departed for Loxley. Lady Honoria did not make a habit of lingering. She disliked the Earl of Ravensdale and barely disguised her contempt for the house itself. More than that, she loathed the implication of sentiment. Her absence was not surprising. It was a method.

Nathaniel let out a long breath and glanced towards the chapel doors. The air held the scent of wax and wet stone. Outside, the garden was still, heavy with waiting.

He closed his eyes for the briefest moment and saw her again, standing in her drawing room, hands folded, face composed as he’d made his offer.

A marriage with an end. A kindness in disguise. And yet her eyes had unsettled him. Not for their beauty, though they were undeniably striking. But for their clarity. For the sense that she saw through the pageantry just as keenly as he did.

His hands, clasped behind his back, curled slightly. He did not want a wedding, but he did not regret the bride. That, perhaps, was the only mystery worth keeping.

Marsden stood. “Time,” he said.

Nathaniel nodded once, smoothed the line of his cuff, and turned to face the altar.

Just as he did so, the doors to the chapel swung open with a quiet groan, as if they, too, were protesting the union that was to take place.

Nathaniel’s gaze sharpened instinctively, though he did not expect the sight of her to stir him.

Still, it did.

She entered alone. There was no veil draped over her lovely features. There was no bouquet held before her like a fragile promise.

The simplicity of her ivory satin gown was the only thing that could’ve set her apart from the others. She moved with an elegance that spoke of restraint, with each step precalculated, almost as if she would have stumbled and fallen otherwise.

Nathaniel noticed her the moment she crossed the threshold, though she never looked at him. Her gaze remained forward, focused on the altar.

Even her breathing was steady and calm. But there was something about the way she held herself that suggested she was bracing for something.

Charlotte followed behind, handling the modest train with an air of practised efficiency. Her eyes were bright, but somehow, devoid of sentiment. She barely looked up, lost in the precision of her task.

As Eleanor reached Nathaniel’s side, he caught the faintest movement in her hands.

It was trembling, just enough to betray the composure she was holding so tightly.

He noticed. The barest flutter of uncertainty in the otherwise unflinching woman who had so expertly guarded her expression in every encounter they’d shared.

The tremor was like a whisper that only Nathaniel could hear, and for the briefest second, his pulse tightened, as though something sharp had pricked him from within.

She didn’t acknowledge it, of course. Her hands stilled immediately as they rested at her sides, and her gaze remained fixed ahead. Hastily enough, her features smoothed back into the mask she had perfected. But Nathaniel couldn’t quite ignore the tremor.

He found himself drawn to her, almost mesmerized by the way she stood beside him, unmoving, like a finely sculpted statue, like an object of quiet, untouchable grace.

The air around her seemed to shimmer with restraint, her presence commanding without effort. There was something about her, something that drew his gaze despite his better judgement.

It wasn’t just the elegance of her appearance, though that was undeniable. It was the quiet strength that emanated from her, an undercurrent of resolve that somehow made her seem both distant and near at once.

The officiant began the ceremony. He did it in a low and steady voice, punctuated only by the rhythmic intonations of prayers that felt like mechanical repetitions, never to be mistaken for reverence.

But in this room, beneath the heavy shadows and the dim flicker of candlelight, it seemed to Nathaniel that everything was set in place for something far more substantial. Something he could not quite articulate.

The vows were exchanged with all the weight of formality, spoken in practised tones as if the words themselves were set into stone long before they left their mouths.

Nathaniel’s own vows came easily, though they felt more like a declaration of law than a personal promise. He had rehearsed them. In fact, he had known them by heart long before the day arrived.

There was no room for emotion, no space for anything but the cold, inevitable truth of his duty. The words fell from his lips like a matter of fact, each one a cog in the machinery of this marriage, a machinery that had been set into motion long before he had any say in the matter.

But when her vows came, they sounded different.

Clear. Cool. Measured with a restraint that was all too familiar.

She did not flinch, did not hesitate, but there was something about the way she spoke that set her apart from the rest of the room.

It wasn’t the coldness of her words; it was the certainty.

As the words “I now pronounce you husband and wife” reverberated through the chapel, the subtle murmur of polite approval swept through the gathered guests, as if in agreement that this was how it should be.

Their fathers nodded, pleased in their quiet way, and a ripple of reserved applause followed, no more than an acknowledgement of what had occurred.

Nathaniel’s hand lingered by his side, and then, with the slightest incline of his head, he offered his arm to Eleanor. A simple gesture, one meant to signify nothing more than the propriety of the moment.

He could feel the tension between them, that space of awkwardness where duty and civility must be upheld, even when there was no room for anything else.

Eleanor hesitated for just a moment, but her composure never faltered. Then, with practised grace, she placed her gloved hand upon his arm.

Her touch was light, almost too careful, as though she feared the weight of the moment would crush them both. It was a cool, polite gesture, and for a brief second, Nathaniel couldn’t help wondering if it was all she would ever offer him.

Behind them, he could feel the eyes of Charlotte and Captain Marsden on them.

A glance passed between the two, brief and inscrutable, as though they both recognized the underlying tension. It was a strange sort of silence that followed them as they began the procession towards the chapel doors.

The last of the guests descended the chapel steps, voices hushed with the kind of reverence reserved for ceremony and secrets. The spring wind tugged at lapels and veils alike, carrying the perfume of new blossoms and something heavier … expectation.

They reached the threshold of the chapel doors, shadow meeting sun. The guests moved beyond the garden gate, murmuring blessings and speculations as they disappeared into waiting carriages.

And then they were alone.

He should have let her go. Instead, he stopped. She turned to him, with a flicker of surprise in her pale eyes.

He reached for her. He didn’t think. He didn’t allow himself to. His hands found the narrow curve of her waist, the silk cool under his palms, and he drew her towards him.

Then, without warning, he kissed her.

It was not a wedding kiss. Not the practised touch of lips before an altar, offered for an audience. This was something completely different.

Her body went still beneath his. Not stiff with rejection, but surprise. Her breath caught. But she didn’t pull away.

For a moment, which seemed tormentingly bare, bracing, and eternal … she stayed.

The kiss was brief. No longer than a heartbeat. And yet it branded something into him.

He pulled back, his hands falling away as if they had committed a crime. He didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. He hadn’t done it to provoke, or to claim. There was no triumph in his chest. Only something fierce and wordless and quietly unravelling.

Eleanor stared at him.

Her cheeks were flushed, her lips parted, so utterly soft and stunned, as though she hadn’t expected to feel anything at all.

He wanted to speak. To tell her he hadn’t meant to. That he hadn’t planned it. That he wasn’t some brute who mistook ceremony for possession. But she looked at him like she might break if he did. So, he held still. He said nothing.

The silence lingered like smoke. Thin, clinging, difficult to breathe through. And yet, when they stepped into the sunlight outside the chapel, something between them had shifted. Nathaniel felt it.

He could not name it, but it was there, a tautness under the skin, a heat in the air that hadn’t existed before the kiss.

They headed for the waiting carriage that gleamed too brightly in the daylight, all polished wood and brass trim, absurdly grand for a wedding that had felt more like a quiet negotiation than a celebration. White ribbons fluttered at the corners, limp in the breeze.

Her luggage had already been stowed. Her life packed and boxed, prepared to be carried into his. It had been done efficiently, without ceremony, as if the union required no sentiment at all.

A footman opened the door. Eleanor did not wait for him. She climbed in with a grace that looked like defiance, the skirts of her gown sweeping behind her like smoke.

Nathaniel followed. Inside, the carriage was too fine, too upholstered, too close.

Eleanor sat straight, one gloved hand resting in her lap, the other curled loosely on the window ledge as she looked out. Her profile was calm … too calm. The quiet of a fortress with the gates drawn up.

He swallowed.

“It will be a long ride,” he said, at last, the words dry in his throat.

She nodded, eyes on the passing hedgerows. “Thank you for the warning.”

That was all. Not cruel, but cold. Precise. And in some strange, aching way, he respected her more for it.

He turned his gaze towards the opposite window, the sky wide and pale above fields just beginning to turn green. He thought of what lay ahead, of the house he had grown up in, vast and echoing and too full of portraits. Of what it would mean to bring a stranger into it.

A wife who had not chosen him. A wife whom he had not chosen.

Nathaniel watched her in the glass reflection. He watched the set of her mouth, the stillness of her hands.

Who might you have been, he thought, if the world had let you choose?

And then, bitterly: Who might I have been?

But he said nothing.

Outside, the chapel receded, lost behind a copse of trees. The carriage turned towards Loxley.

Inside, Nathaniel sat beside his new wife, his shoulder inches from hers, and had never felt more alone in his life.