“They are all going to be terribly shocked,” Anna said.

“I just hope,” he said, “that John will not break the news to them as he escorts them up to the drawing room. He seems of the opinion that he must make conversation with your guests. Do you think you might impress upon him the importance of behaving like a regular footman for this occasion only, Anna? He appears to be quite unimpressed by my awful consequence.”

“He is so very thrilled,” she said, “to be a footman at a grand house in London and actually to be wearing livery. I will have a word with him. We certainly do not want him telling my grandmother and my aunts that we went out and got married this morning.”

She laughed, and he turned his head to regard her with lazy, smiling eyes.

“I will hope, my duchess,” he said softly, “to hear more of that in the days to come.” He raised her hand to his lips and held it there, his eyes holding hers.

Anna bit her lip.

“As soon as we are able to convince everyone that there is nothing else to plan for a while,” he said, “we will hint them on their way. I doubt Elizabeth will need any persuasion to return home with her mother and Riverdale. With the possible exception of Jessica, she is by far my favorite of your relatives, Anna, and she will know that three is definitely a crowd on a wedding night. And that is what tonight will be—our wedding night at Westcott House. Tomorrow we will leave for Wensbury.”

He settled their hands on the seat between them and laced their fingers.

. . . our wedding night.

Nineteen

Avery stood at the drawing room window. Behind him his stepmother complained and Jessica sulked. Anna was sitting quietly not far from the door, her hands clasped in her lap, the right over the left, he had noticed. She had changed into a light blue afternoon dress, which could not be more severe if it tried—up to the neck, down to the wrists and the ankles, not a bow or frill in sight. Bertha had redone her hair and had combed it back so ruthlessly from her face that her eyes almost slanted. Anna had mentioned over luncheon—of which she had consumed virtually none—that she wished she could just run and hide. He had been tempted to grant her wish, but there was, alas, family to be dealt with first.

His stepmother complained to Anna because she had not been at home this morning when Madame Lavalle arrived to discuss bride clothes. She complained to Avery because he had been gone from home all morning when there was so much to discuss with regard to the wedding that she scarcely knew where to start. Had he made arrangements to have the banns read on Sunday? But where? She wished to discuss the desirability of choosing St. Paul’s Cathedral. She complained that Edwin Goddard had disappeared from his office this morning before she could discuss the guest list with him and had not reappeared before she came here. It was very unlike him, and to do it today of all days was the outside of enough. She complained to Anna that if she would insist upon looking so much like a governess, she must not be surprised if Avery changed his mind.

She was clearly in a waspish mood—perhaps because of Jessica.

His half sister had not been pleased by the announcement he had made to her yesterday afternoon. She had been disbelieving, horrified, furious in quick succession. She had been about to throw one of the raging tantrums for which she had been famous until the advent of her current governess. But when he had raised his quizzing glass to his eye and regarded her in silent distaste, she had dissolved into tears instead and asked him between gasps and sobs how he could be so disloyal to Abby and Harry and Camille that he would actually betroth himself to that drab, ugly woman.

“Have a care, Jess,” he had said very softly, lowering his glass but not offering his arms for her comfort.

“I am being unfair, am I not?” she had said, her sobs abandoned, her expression rueful, her face blotched red, her eyes bloodshot. “It is Uncle Humphrey I should hate. But what would be the point? He is dead.”

“I shall expect you to treat my duchess with the proper courtesy, Jess,” he had told her, “if you do not want to be confined to the schoolroom until the age of eighty or until I marry you off to the first man who can be persuaded to take you off my hands.”

Her lips had quirked and she had given in to a hiccuping giggle.

“I shall,” she had promised. “But I do wish you had chosen someone else, Avery—anyone else. You will be bored with her within a fortnight. But I suppose that will not matter to you, will it? Gentlemen are able to have other interests while ladies have only their embroidery and their tatting.”

“Sometimes, Jess,” he had said, raising his quizzing glass halfway to his eye again, “I wonder about what your governess has been teaching you.”

He had sent word with his coachman earlier that Lady Jessica Archer was to accompany her mother to Westcott House this afternoon. And here she was, silent and sulking and punctiliously courteous.

Molenor and his wife were arriving, Avery could see, and right behind them came the old fossil of a carriage in which the Dowager Countess of Riverdale and her eldest daughter moved about town when they needed to. The four of them were shown into the drawing room together, and there was a flurry of greetings before the complaints resumed. Their eldest boy had just been rusticated from school for the rest of the term, Cousin Mildred reported, having been caught climbing through the window of his dormitory at four o’clock in the morning—climbing in, not out—his hair and clothes smelling quite unmistakably of a floral perfume. The news had come in a letter from the headmaster this morning, and Molenor had not even been to his club. He was, in fact, planning to set out for their home in the north of England early tomorrow morning.