He Chose the Wrong Sister novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Button in the Jewel Box

She takes the wolf button back from Hester's jewel box and marries Cade in the chapel. The doors open on the prince's herald, five days early.

I did not cry over the empty tin.

I sat on the bare floor with the lid in my hands and counted who had been in the house.

My father didn't know what a loose board was.

Rosalind had stayed in her room all evening, and she knew every board in the attic, because we had shared one when I first came here.

My stepmother had been at dinner, but she had a maid with a key to every door.

I waited until the house was dark.

Then I went down the back stairs in my stockings, past my father's snoring, to Hester's dressing room.

The door was unlocked.

On the table sat her jewel box, a lacquered box with a brass clasp.

I opened it and went through the rings, the pearls and the pins.

At the bottom, wrapped in a lace handkerchief, lay a silver wolf with its mouth open.

I closed my fist around it.

"Looking for something, darling?"

Hester was sitting in the dark armchair by the window, in her nightgown, with her hair in one long braid.

She had been there the whole time.

I stood up with the button in my hand.

"You took this out of my room."

"Of course I did." Her voice was gentle. "I found it when the maid was dusting. A silver thing like that, in the attic, with the thieves we've had. I put it somewhere safe."

"You put it in your jewel box, under your pearls."

"It was safe there, wasn't it?"

I waited for her to take it back.

She didn't.

"Keep it," she said. "A bride should have a keepsake from her old home. It's only a button. It isn't worth anything."

"My letters to my nurse were in that tin. They're gone."

"Burned, I'm afraid. A servant mistook them for waste paper." She sighed. "I'll scold her in the morning."

Nobody had ever scolded a servant in this house for anything.

She smiled at me across the dark room.

It was a mother's smile, and I knew exactly what it was worth.

"Go to bed, Imogen," she said. "You'll need your sleep. You marry in three days, and I want you to look well."

I went up with the button in my fist.

She hadn't stopped me, and I understood why.

A button proved nothing if she held every other detail from my letters.

Three days later the chapel smelled of beeswax and wet stone.

My father walked me up the aisle with his eyes on the floor.

The priest was an old man with a cold, and there were eleven guests.

Rosalind sat in the front pew in a chair they had brought for her, wrapped in a grey shawl, with her face pale and a cup of something warm in her hands.

She smiled at me when I passed.

I smiled back, and I felt my stepmother's hand squeeze mine from the pew behind.

Cade Garrow waited at the altar in a clean grey coat, with his hair wet from washing.

He looked at me once, from the veil to the shoes.

Then he looked at the priest and said nothing.

"We are gathered," the priest began, and sneezed.

I put the wolf button in the pocket of my sleeve, where my hand could find it.

"Do you take this woman?"

"I do," Cade said.

He said it plainly and loudly enough for the back pew.

"Do you take this man?"

"I do."

I heard how steady it came out.

I had said the same two words once before, in a palace chapel, to a man who was looking at the wrong sister.

This time my husband was looking at me.

He slid a plain gold ring on my left hand, and it was a little too big, so he closed my fingers over it with his own and held them there.

"I pronounce you husband and wife," the priest said.

"Done," said Cade, under his breath, and I almost laughed.

Then the chapel doors banged open.

A man in the blue and silver of the royal household stood in the doorway, mud to his knees, with a scroll in his fist.

"His Royal Highness, Prince Casimir," he called out. "Heir to the throne of Aurelmark. He asks the house of Tarrant to receive him within the hour."

My father stood up too fast and knocked over the hymn book.

"The prince's party was due in five days," he said.

"His Highness grew impatient, my lord."

Behind me, I heard my stepmother's chair scrape back.

When I turned around, Rosalind was on her feet, and she was no longer pale.

She had set down her cup, and she was looking at the doors with both eyes wide.

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