“Before I forget,” Flossie said, “I meant to tell you—your friends have been writing to you.”
“What?”
Flossie nodded. “I assume they were your friends, from Oxford. They sent letters, and a telegram. Mama must have caught them all at early breakfast. She probably burned them.”
Hattie swayed from the shock. “Flossie. How could she?”
Her sister weighed her words carefully. “I suppose she thought it would save you distress. She is not cruel, dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, I’m glad you told me.” She had started and discarded half a dozen letters to the girls, only to decide that it would be much safer for their reputations to visit once everything had been put right in the chapel tomorrow … Tomorrow. So soon. Her throat tightened.
Michael sensed her fraying nerves; his small face crumpled and he began making displeased hacking noises.
“Hattie,” Flossie said as she stood and rocked her fussy son. “Don’t fret so much. A gentleman knows what to do and shall treat you with the respect a wife can expect.”
“But he isn’t a gentleman.”
Flossie’s face fell. “Then hold him accountable with unwavering standards,” she said after a pause, and for the first time Hattie could remember, her sister sounded uncertain.
The next morning unfolded under a bell jar, with all shapes and sounds strangely distorted. Someone else seemed to be moving her limbs and speaking on her behalf. Someone laced her tightly into the wedding gown. Disembodied hands fixed the orange-blossom wreath to her hair while her reflection in the mirror was a white blotch. She would have been hard-pressed to recount the conversation during the carriage ride to the chapel. In the cramped interior of the coach, the strong mothball smell of her gown mixed with the sweetness of her stephanotis bouquet to terrible effect. Cold sweat coated her face by the time they reached the chapel.
“Harriet.” Her mother’s disapproving stare was on her left hand clutching the posy. She reflexively switched the bouquet to her right. After today, only Blackstone would be entitled to tell her in which hand she must carry her bouquet, she thought. And he probably wouldn’t care about such details. So at least there was that.
She had expected him to wear the black tailcoat and gray-striped trousers of upper-class grooms, but when she spotted him at the altar, he looked surprisingly approachable in a three-piece suit of a warm, sandy color. His eyes, however, held a penetrating intensity that made her feel shy. She chose to focus on the suit fabric when they stood facing each other. Finest Scotch herringbone tweed. Probably from the Isle of Harris. He had pinned a small bouquet in the colors of the Greenfield coat of arms over his heart as was the custom, but he had added a Scottish thistle. The purple hue went well with the blue and yellow colors of her house, and the spikes provided structure amid the soft petals of the blooms. Charming. It was something she would have liked to see on her groom. While she parroted her lines, her breath roared in her ears like a distant ocean. She stumbled over love, obey, and until death, for those were lies, or at least not the truth, and normally she’d never lie in a chapel. She watched, aloof, as Lucian Blackstone slid a heavy gold band onto her ring finger that marked her as his wife.
“You’ve added a Scottish thistle to the buttonhole,” she said to him when the brief, perfunctory father-of-the-bride speech in her parents’ lunchroom was over. A string quartet was now playing, filling any stretches of awkward silence with a jaunty tune.
Lucian lowered his spoon and turned to her. “I have, yes.”
The strong column of his neck looked positively confined by the cravat and high collar.
“My father mentioned your family is from Argyll?” she asked.
He nodded. “Near Inveraray.”
“Which clan presides over that area?”
“Clan Campbell,” he said slowly. “But I’m a MacKenzie, from my grandfather’s side.”
“One of my dearest friends is a Campbell,” she said, relieved to hear of a connection even as tenuous as this. “Lady Catriona. Her father is the Earl of Wester Ross.”
His brows pulled together. “Unusual. The region used to belong to the MacDonalds. Sometimes to the MacKenzies.”
He must have a habit of pulling his brows together; two sharp, vertical lines were forever notched between them. His dark lashes, however, were lush like mink pelt, a precious touch of softness in his face. She would see this face every day now.
“I don’t know much about the clans, I’m afraid,” she said.