Page 90 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #1)

The time had all run out, and here was Isabel Morris’s maid Sarah – who had a proprietorial attitude to the gown she had largely made – helping Aunt Schofield’s Minny to dress her for her wedding.

Nina stood in front of the large cheval glass, imported from Aunt Schofield’s room for the occasion, and watched the transformation with an almost academic interest. It didn’t look like her – it didn’t feel like her.

The whole thing was oddly dreamlike. Someone was being decked out for a wedding, but it couldn’t be the Nina Sanderton whose mind she lived in.

The gown was beautiful. It felt soft and delicate against her skin, and fell in graceful folds, the train moving when she moved.

It had been a surprise when Aunt Schofield brought out her mother’s wedding lace for her to wear.

‘Your mother asked me to keep it for you, for your wedding.’ It was rather yellowed, and careful repeated washing had only partly remedied the problem.

Luckily, the gown was ivory rather than white, so the discrepancy was not as obvious as it might have been.

And Nina would rather have worn her mother’s yellowed lace than anything new and perfect.

Along with her pearls, it was the only thing of her mother’s that she had.

She had assumed she would wear the pearls on the day – she had nothing else by way of ornament – but then, a week ago, Mr Cowling had called and, with a touching air of shyness, had given her a flat leather box that turned out to contain a diamond necklace.

She had been overwhelmed, and her first instinct was to refuse it.

She couldn’t imagine how much it had cost, but it was altogether too much.

Luckily Aunt Schofield had been present, and had read Nina’s expression correctly.

Before she could say more than ‘I can’t—’ she had intervened.

‘The groom’s gift to the bride,’ she had said firmly to her niece.

‘It’s traditional. Diamonds are very suitable.

You’ll wear them with your wedding-gown, Nina. ’

Mr Cowling had also been watching her face. ‘Not if she doesn’t like it,’ he said anxiously. ‘I can change it in a snap for something else.’

Nina looked up almost tearfully. ‘It’s beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned.’ It was like a string of raindrops. ‘Thank you.’

So now on her wedding day Sarah was fastening the diamonds round her neck, and she looked more than ever a stranger, glittering as well as white. ‘Are you going to swoon, miss?’ Sarah asked sharply.

‘Pinch her earlobe,’ said Minny. ‘That’ll fetch her back.’

‘I shan’t faint,’ Nina said hastily.

They brought Lepida – Lepida was to be her sole attendant – looking unusually pretty in a gown of harebell silk, which suited her colouring, and wearing round her neck the groom’s gift to the bridesmaid, a sapphire drop on a fine gold chain.

Lepida had been equally impressed, though not quite as overcome: she had not for an instant considered refusing.

And now it was time to go. Nina caught Lepida’s hand with her cold ones. ‘You’ll come and visit – afterwards?’

‘Of course,’ said Lepida. ‘Smile, Nina. It’s your wedding day. You’re not being burned at the stake.’

‘I am smiling,’ Nina said.

‘Well, smile more.’

Downstairs, Mawes was waiting to escort her, looking distinguished and unusually tidy in morning dress.

He made a soundless whistle as Nina appeared, and said, ‘Wish to God I had my sketch-pad with me. You look a picture, Nina. An absolute picture.’ He crooked his arm for her. ‘Your carriage awaits, Cinderella.’

It all passed in a blur – the ride to the church, the slow walk down the aisle between ranks of people she didn’t know (Aunt Schofield had invited shoals of her friends so that the bride’s side shouldn’t be too empty), the familiar words of the service which sounded odd and jarring being applied to her.

Mr Cowling was the most blurred of all – she couldn’t see his face, and was only aware that he had a white rosebud in his buttonhole because she puzzled all through the ceremony where he could have got it in December.

He briefly became real when he took her hand, and she felt the hardness of it, dry, and nearly as cold as her own, and was shocked into realising that she was marrying him – marrying!

– him! – right that moment. But immediately it became unreal again.

His supporter was Decius Blake, looking even more outrageously handsome in morning dress.

They had been seeing a lot of him while the wedding preparations were going on.

Aunt Schofield had approved of his quiet efficiency: he would ask one or two sensible questions and then the thing would be done.

And since Lepida had been exposed to him a good deal, Nina thought she had become a little more hardened to the impact of him.

When he handed the ring to Mr Cowling, he met Nina’s eyes for an instant and smiled encouragingly, and his beauty seemed only reassuring.

There was the short drive to the Palace Hotel on the Park where the wedding-breakfast was to be held – a grand place, with a multitude of liveried servants.

Nina had to stand with Mr Cowling to receive the guests, and though he, and Aunt Schofield on her other side, did their best to tell her whom she was greeting, it went in at one ear and out of the other.

Familiar faces emerged from the fog and retreated again – Miss Thornton, some of the girls she had come out with, academic friends of Aunt Schofield, gay bohemian friends of the Morrises. She began to feel very tired.

And then Kitty was before her – Kitty in old rose silk damask, with a cut velvet coat in grey and pink, and a grey velvet hat – Kitty smiling widely but with tears on her cheeks.

‘Oh, Nina! Dearest Nina!’ She laid her wet cheek against Nina’s for an instant. ‘I hope you’ll be very, very happy.’ Then she gave her hand to Mr Cowling and said, ‘Take care of our Nina for us.’

Suddenly Nina was out of the fog, into the real world, saw where she was, because there was Giles, tall, burning like fierce sunlight against the contrasting dullness of everyone else, his eyes boring into hers as though he was about to dive inside her through them.

Giles. He was going to touch her. He took her hand.

He leaned down and touched his lips to her cheek.

He didn’t speak. She knew he could not. Because she couldn’t either.

Her throat closed. The pain was terrible.

And it was worse when his hand parted from hers – she wanted to snatch it back and cry, ‘No!’ He had to go on and shake hands with Mr Cowling.

And she hated them both in that instant for being so different from each other, and for occupying the wrong places.

Mr Cowling – her husband – shook hands with Giles and said, ‘We’re honoured you came, my lord. I hope we’ll see you at Beechcroft House, our wives being the best of friends. Or maybe in Market Harborough – I’ve a nice house there for the hunting. You hunt, of course?’

Giles murmured something. Cowling let go of his hand.

It was time to move on and let someone else take his place.

But he looked once more at Nina, and she held the afterimage of that look for a long time.

She imagined someone drowning might look up through the water like that, as they sank for the last time.

Hearts don’t really break. If only they did, she thought, then it would all be over.

They weren’t going abroad. Indeed, there wasn’t to be a honeymoon of the sort Kitty had had because Mr Cowling had too much work on hand with only a few days to Christmas, and he couldn’t spare the time.

But he promised her a trip in the spring, if she cared for it.

‘Once I’ve got the new styles jigged, I can take two or three weeks.

We can go to France, or Italy, or whatever you want. ’

He said these things to Nina in the train going down to Northampton.

It was late and she was very tired, but he’d wanted to go.

‘I’d as soon not spend our first night in an hotel,’ he said.

‘Your own bed’s always the best, I say. They’re expecting us.

There’ll be a bit of supper laid out, if you’re hungry, and fires lit and hot bottles between the sheets.

We may not be grand, but we’re comfortable.

’ He looked at her when she didn’t answer, and said, ‘You’re tired.

I can see that. Why don’t you have a little nap till we get home?

Here, rest your head on my shoulder, that’s right. Just close your eyes and let go.’

His kindness pierced her. He was nicer to her than she was to him.

She didn’t sleep, but she dozed a little, caught in a strange place that was half real, half dream, where the sounds of the train became other things – a waterfall, a roaring animal – and the ticket collector sliding back the compartment door and saying, Tickets, please became a knight riding a horse too small for him, dragging the point of his lance along the ground and crying, Dragons! There be dragons!

‘I’ve got a little present for you,’ Cowling said, when she had been divested of her coat and hat. ‘Come into the drawing-room.’

A fire was lit in there, but it was a big room and none too warm for a girl in flimsy wedding clothes. Cowling in his suit and waistcoat was better equipped. ‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

Above the fireplace, in pride of place, was the portrait Mawes Morris had been painting of her.

It had come out very well, in Mawes’s opinion.

Nina, on a high stool, hands folded quietly in her lap, looked out of the window with a pensive expression, a diffused light brushing her face with soft shadows.