I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Lady Day
It rained on Lady Day.
The chapel on Heron Lane stood at the bottom of the lane, a small grey church with a bell the size of a bucket.
Its roof had been mended on the eighth of March by a firm of Drevoss slaters.
They refused to give the name of the man who paid them.
It still leaked in one place.
The drip fell on the second pew, onto the Dowager's black bonnet, and she looked up with her cane across her knee and said, in a voice that carried to the porch, "I did say."
"Move over, Aunt," said Calanthe, and moved her.
She had come in from the country on the morning coach with a trunk, a parasol, and a new, calm face.
She sat in the front row on the Duke's side of the aisle in a gown the blue of a spring sky.
Beside her sat Count Marenne, in a black coat, with his hat on his knee.
He did not look at the font where the wine for the sacrament stood.
Jorrin walked Odalys up the aisle.
He was nearly as tall as she was by now, in a coat that fit him.
His copper hair was for once flat, and his jaw was set against a quiver in his chin.
"Don't cry," she said under her breath.
"I'm not crying."
"You've been crying since the lych-gate."
"It's the rain," said her brother.
The Registrar was in the third pew with the fat merchant.
Behind them sat an untidy knot of the people who had stood on the Exchange steps that morning in November and clapped.
Odalys had not invited them.
They had come.
At the altar Caelan stood in plain black with his hands behind him, and the chaplain with a prayer book, and a single window behind them full of grey rain.
He turned, and he saw her, and the whole of his face changed.
She had thought she'd become used to it.
She had not.
The vows were short.
The chaplain read the words.
She said them after him, and then she said her own, which she had written on the back of a receipt.
"I, Odalys, take you, Caelan, with no price, no tally, and a very good lock on my front door."
There was a rustle of laughter, and the Dowager's cane thumped.
"I take you," Caelan said, in the same low steady voice that had told her his rules in the study, "and I'll give you the key to every door I own. I will never count anything of yours again. If I do, you may hit me with the poker."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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