Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 21 of 32

Chapter 21: The Harcourt Chapel

The Duke went to the palace at dawn and came back at nine.

"The charge stands," he said in the hall. "But no watchman lays a hand on a Harcourt bride in a Harcourt chapel."

"And after the chapel?" I said.

"After the chapel, you're my grandson's wife. Let them try."

The footman was locked in the wine cellar with a guard on the door.

The matron was in the magistrate's cells by seven, with the tannery women's names written down against her.

The guildmaster's book, the moulds and her ledger went into the Duke's strongroom behind two keys.

One key he kept. The other he gave to me.

At ten the widow came up the hill in her Sunday cloak with pins in her mouth.

The Duke had sent a carriage for her. She'd never been in one.

"Arms up," she said.

The dress had been the Duke's wife's. Cream silk, plain at the neck, a row of small pearl buttons all down the back.

I'd checked the pearls under my loupe before I'd let her start. Real, every one.

She took it in at the waist in an hour, standing on the hem, scolding me for breathing.

"Your hair," she said.

"I'll pin it."

"With what?"

I pinned it up with one pencil. She looked at it for a long moment, then sighed and let it stay.

At noon the Harcourt chapel was full.

Half the court had come up the hill to watch the Duke's disgraced grandson marry a cutter wanted for murder.

They sat in their furs and whispered behind their gloves.

The Duke had put Ralph and Honoria in the front pew.

"You'll stand where my heir stands," he'd told Ralph, in front of everyone in the porch. "And you'll wish your cousin joy."

Ralph stood there in black and gold with a smile.

Honoria stood beside him in gold silk with her hand on her belly.

As I came up the aisle on the Duke's arm, she leaned to the woman behind her.

"A shopgirl in a dead woman's dress," she said, not quietly.

I stopped walking.

The whole chapel heard me stop.

"A dead woman's real pearls, my lady," I said. "Yours are still paste. Second and fourth from the left."

Somebody in the third row laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

The Duke's arm shook under my hand. It took me a moment to understand he was laughing too.

The baby sat on the widow's knee in the second pew in her white dress.

She'd fought the sermon for the first half and lost to it.

By the time I reached the altar she was asleep with her mouth open and her fist against her chin.

Tristram stood at the altar in a dark green coat the Duke's tailor had altered in a night.

I'd restitched his side that morning on the Duke's own table. He held himself very straight over it.

He watched me come the whole length of the aisle.

He didn't look at the court once.

The chaplain read. I didn't hear most of it.

I heard Tristram's voice, steady, saying the words back.

I heard my own, a bit too loud.

Then the chaplain asked for the ring.

Tristram took his mother's ring off his little finger.

Gold band. A blue stone the size of a pea. Glass, all the way through.

Somebody behind us whispered the word paste.

He put it on my finger.

"It's worthless," he said, very low, just for me.

"I'll cut it a real stone," I said. "I've got good hands."

"I know you have."

He kissed me.

Not the way he'd kissed me in the doorway in the rain.

Slowly, in front of all of them.

In the front pew, Ralph's smile didn't move.

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