Chapter Four
‘She is late.’ Fred checked his watch for what seemed like the hundredth time and glanced towards the closed front doors of the church and the empty pews that should have contained the bride’s family. Only the presence of his two oldest friends prevented him from leaving the chancel and hunting the woman down.
‘Only by five minutes,’ Oliver Gregory’s sympathetic smile flashed in the dimness of the church, seeming even brighter against the darkness of his skin.
The five minutes before a battle felt like a lifetime, as if the mind was trying to savour what might be the last moments of life. Perhaps the same was true today, as he bid farewell to his freedom.
Whether it was five minutes or five years, it did not make Georgiana Knight’s behaviour any less annoying. ‘She has had nineteen years to prepare for her wedding day. You would think she would be early. Punctuality is vital in any operation.’
‘Perhaps in the army,’ Jacob Huntington said, as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. The ducal ring of Westmoor, which had recently fallen to him, glinted in the light shining through the stained-glass windows of the chapel. He seemed to feel the weight of it and lowered his hand to twist it on his finger as if it gave him discomfort to wear it. Then he spoke. ‘You have sisters, do you not? You must have learned by now that women play hob with timetables.’
‘That does not mean I have to like it,’ Fred said gruffly. He did not have to like any of this. Not the wedding, nor the bride, nor the sudden upending of his life. Nor did he appreciate being forced to buy breakfast for people he took pains to avoid at any other time. He glanced at his own family, gathered on the other side of the church like storm clouds on the horizon.
It was a tiring proposition at the best of times to see them all together in the same place. The Challenger family motto was incautus futuri and they seemed to take pleasure in living up to it. Careless of the future and heedless of consequences, his parents and siblings were prone to excesses, affairs, and embarrassments in public, and arguments and grudges in private. Alone and in pairs, they were bad. En masse their bad judgement magnified to astounding proportions.
Perhaps it was good that the Knights had not yet arrived, so he might deal with a few of the problems unwitnessed. His sister-in-law, Caroline, was waving at him, the lace handkerchief in her hand fluttering like the wings of a trapped bird. Without so much as a smile he turned from her, offering the sort of deliberate cut that he had once given to the woman he was about to marry. Perhaps, some day, he could explain to Georgiana the reasons for his behaviour. But it would not be at the front of a church on his wedding day. Fred meant to treat the ceremony with the respect it deserved. If war broke out amongst the Challengers, the first shot would not be fired by the groom.
But it seemed his older brother had no such qualms. Since Fred had refused to come to their pew, Francis had abandoned his wife and was pushing past his friends to speak with him. Fred readied for the handshake he was about to receive and the words of filial advice that were in no way necessary.
Instead, Francis touched his sleeve in an importunate gesture that was all too familiar. ‘Will we be starting soon? There is an auction at Tattersall’s this afternoon and I do not want to miss it.’
‘I cannot marry until the bride arrives,’ Fred replied, unsure of who annoyed him most.
‘Perhaps she has decided to cry off,’ Francis said, ever the optimist. ‘I told you to book St. George’s for the ceremony. Girls want all of London to know that they are marrying. What is the point of bothering if the ceremony is in some out-of-the-way chapel that attracts no notice?’
If, as Fred suspected, Georgiana Knight was like all the other girls in London, she was in for a lifetime of marital disappointment. He had no intention of catering to her every whim. St. George’s was too large, too loud, and too expensive. It was also so popular that even more people would notice the nuptials and remark on the suddenness of them, which was the last thing he wanted.
But according to Francis and his wife, there was no point in doing anything if the world was not gawping in amazement at it. His brother was a true dandy, with a collar so high that he could hardly turn his head and breeches so tight that the world was left wondering how he managed to bend his knees to walk. Caroline dressed in kind. The gown she had chosen today was trimmed in so much lace that it appeared she meant to outshine the bride. When she saw his disapproving glance in her direction, her smile brightened and the waving began again, proving she was as eager for his attention as ever and just as obtuse of his opinion of her.
He made another deliberate turn away and replied to his brother, ‘Georgiana’s parents were married in this church.’ Then he remembered his desire for decorum. Losing his temper with the family only made them worse. He took a breath. ‘Georgiana chose the place herself. She has no reason to spite me over it.’ It was probably too much to hope that the girl had decided the whole thing was a bad idea and decided against it. But if he meant to carry through with this marriage, he must stop hoping, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, that there was a way out of it.
‘She will be here, momentarily,’ he said, with as much confidence as he could manage.
‘Excellent,’ Francis said, finally reaching out to shake his hand. ‘And, while I have your attention...’
‘How much?’ Fred said, before his brother could finish.
‘Twenty quid,’ Francis replied. ‘Just until my luck has turned.’
It was moments like this when Fred was glad he had already received his portion of the estate. The heir to their father’s title was likely to run through everything that he had and more. ‘Ten,’ Fred replied, relieved that the Knights would not see him emptying his purse for a brother who could not manage to stay away from the gaming tables.
As Francis returned to take his seat, Fred glanced past him at the rest of the family. At the moment, his mother was trying to rouse his dozing father by proclaiming with ever-increasing volume her own opinions of the impending marriage. ‘The influence of the Bowles family cannot be a good thing on the character of a formative girl. I hope Frederick keeps her well in hand or she will disgrace us all.’ The first part of the sentence was quite probably true, but the rest was painting it too brown.
His mother had no right to question the birth and upbringing of others. Francis was a wastrel and at one time Fred had been no better. But he’d eschewed his past wildness to set a good example for their younger siblings. His brother Christian was barely out of university, and dangerously high-spirited.
He had three sisters still in the schoolroom: Mariah, Sarah, and the unfortunately named Josephine. When she’d been born, Mother could not be bothered with the fact that they had been at war. No matter how she fancied the name, his youngest sister reminded everyone of the Empress of France. Of course, neither had she been bothered to find lovers that resembled Father. After his own birth, the family resemblance varied widely from child to child. Though Father had acknowledged them all, when the lot of them were lined up side by side, it was difficult to ignore the truth.
‘We have lost him, again.’ Jake was waving a hand in front of his face, trying to regain his attention.
‘He is distracted by things that concern him more than they do the rest of us,’ Oliver said, dismissing his family problems with a shake of his head. ‘Do not worry, my friend. We are here to stand by you, just as we always have been.’
‘I think, as best men, it is our duty to protect you from the family of the bride, should they ever arrive,’ Jake added.
‘Or to help you escape them and the bride as well,’ Oliver added. ‘There is a rumour that she was seen at the club last week.’
Fred could guess where the rumour had started. Now that he had been thwarted, Bowles meant to do what damage he could.
‘That is the last place I’d have expected to find a marriageable young lady,’ Oliver prodded gently.
‘Or a gentleman inclined to marry,’ added Jake. ‘Especially if that gentleman was you. We did not think, when you chose a bride, that we would read her name in The Times along with the rest of London.’
They were right to be hurt that he had not told them before posting the announcement. There had been no secrets between the three of them, since the day they’d met at Eton. But until the girl was properly married and safe from scandal, the truth of their meeting was not his to reveal. Fred did his best to manufacture a happy, bridegroom’s smile. ‘You have both complained that I lacked spirit for the festivities at the club. Now you know the reason. My heart was engaged.’ Though he had not meant to use it on his friends, the lie came surprisingly easy to him. Now that it was started, he could not seem to return to the truth. ‘As for her presence there? She meant to surprise me.’
But such behaviour made his intended sound less than virtuous. If he had been marrying in truth, would he have allowed his fiancée to take such a risk? He liked to think he would have resisted temptation until the wedding night. Instead, he was going to resist indefinitely. ‘She was a little idiot to be there at all,’ he added, not wanting to seem too approving of the visit.
‘All the more reason to marry her,’ Jake said drily.
‘I had to offer for her, after that,’ Fred added. But that made him sound desperate. Trapped. And he had just called the supposed light of his life an idiot.
Finally, he gave up and offered something surprisingly close to the truth. ‘If I hadn’t married her, she’d have ended up marrying Nash Bowles, as her family intended.’
‘A fate worse than death,’ Oliver agreed with a theatrical shudder.
‘Or you,’ Jake seconded.
From across the church, his mother’s voice echoed yet another unneeded opinion. ‘I do not see why he chose to marry this girl. A viscount’s daughter is no catch at all when there is a duke’s sister waiting single in his immediate set.’
Jake stiffened in shock. Then he relaxed again, choosing to ignore the gossip about his beloved Eleanor. Jake’s sister was a dark and quiet beauty, and the mother of a five-year-old girl. The family declared her a widow. But though her surname had changed there had been no mention of a husband by his friend, or even a man that his sister had courted long enough to explain the presence of the child.
Fred shot a quelling glare in his mother’s direction which went unheeded, as usual. But the point was moot. Even if he’d wanted to marry Jake’s sister, he doubted his friend would have sanctioned the match. They knew far too much about each other to spoil a friendship by becoming family. And he had offered for her, just once, when he’d felt the family was in need of someone to claim the child and hush the rumours. He had been resoundingly refused and they had never spoken of it again.
No matter what the world thought of it, Eleanor gave no indication that she wished to be rescued from any kind of scandal and he had been faintly relieved not to have thrown his lot in with a woman he hardly knew.
Now he had done it anyway. Apparently, he grew no wiser with time. ‘Having a wife will not change my life so very much, I am sure,’ Fred said, trying to reassure himself. ‘Once the honeymoon is over, she will be retiring to my house in Surrey and I will be staying in London.’
His friends were staring at him as though he had gone mad in midsentence. Perhaps too much truth was not a good thing. ‘I will visit her on weekends, of course,’ he added, not wanting to sound unfeeling.
‘So you mean no alteration in lifestyle?’ It was hard to tell if Oliver was disappointed by this, or reassured. ‘I thought you claimed to have grown tired of the club since returning from Waterloo.’
‘Not tired, precisely,’ Frederick hedged. ‘We have been running the place since university. And I thought your responsibilities...’ He glanced to Jake.
His friend, whom he should now be calling Westmoor, passed a hand over his forehead as if it were so easy to wipe away the evidence of the previous night’s excess. He had been spending far too much time at Vitium et Virtus with both the ledger books and the brandy bottle. ‘I will mind my business and you mind yours.’
‘Or we shall both meddle in Fred’s life, just as we planned,’ Oliver said to distract the brooding Duke. Then he looked to Fred with a grin. ‘There is a new dancer at the club. She has ginger hair and a kiss like sweet cinnamon. If you change your mind, it is not too late for us to create a diversion...’
Were his true feelings so obvious, or was this another of Oliver’s attempts to cheer him? If the latter, it was not working. ‘You know damn well that I cannot run at this late stage without ruining both the girl and myself.’
‘Language,’ Jake chastised, his smile returning. ‘We are in a church, after all. And we know how you hate scandal.’
‘Which is why we should not have brought you this.’ Oliver reached into his pocket for a flask, passing it forward.
They were right. He loathed scandal. He should not have taken the sip of brandy that they were offering, but he needed a drink. He had not expected to have battlefield nerves over something as unimportant as his own wedding.
‘It is perfectly normal to be a bit on edge. We all are,’ Jake reminded him. ‘After all, you are the first of us to enter that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’
Fred looked at him in puzzlement.
‘Marriage,’ Oliver supplied.
‘I believe Hamlet was referring to death,’ Fred said, finally able to manage a smile.
‘One of us has likely taken that journey already,’ Jake said, looking more dour than usual.
‘We do not know that,’ Oliver said quickly. ‘Nicholas is missing. That does not mean he is dead.’
‘There was a prodigious amount of blood,’ Jake reminded him.
‘But if it were a robbery, surely the thief would have taken his ring.’ Oliver produced it from his pocket, holding it out. Usually it was kept in a gilded box in the club’s private suite and Fred was surprised to see it.
‘If Nick meant to leave his old life behind, for whatever reason, it makes perfect sense that he would have abandoned an identifying piece of jewellery.’
Fred stopped himself before snapping that it was in bad taste to bring a momento mori to a wedding. But it might be nothing of the kind. As Oliver had said, they could not be sure that their friend was dead.
The alternatives were almost worse. If the blood was not his, whose had it been? Had their friend disappeared to escape a hangman’s noose? Fred would have thought that, had it been anything less than murder, Nick would have come to his three best friends for help.
‘It is all we have left of him now,’ Jake said, staring at the ring. ‘We were together at the start. We should be together now, if only in spirit. He would have wanted to be here for you, standing at your side with the rest of us.’
To be honest, some small part of Fred had hoped that, once the announcement appeared in the paper, Nicholas Bartlett might show up in the church, as suddenly and unexpectedly as he had disappeared almost six years ago. Fred had been in Portugal when he’d got the news. One night, Nick had been at the club, just as always. The next morning, the only evidence of him they’d found was a puddle of blood in the alley behind the club and Nick’s signet trampled into the mud.
At the sight of the ring, Fred thought what he’d always thought, when Nick was remembered.
If I had been here, it would not have happened. Whatever it was, I’d have stopped it.
He stared at the ring, which normally resided on the seat of Nick’s old chair. ‘I suppose, since you have brought this, it is time again?’
‘It seemed necessary,’ Jake said with difficulty. They were surprising words since, of the three of them, Jacob Huntington was the one of them most resistant to dredging up the past with what he deemed a silly ceremony. But he was probably right. If there was ever a day Fred needed all his friends, in body and spirit, it was this one.
‘Shall we begin?’ he asked.
The other two nodded, suddenly sombre.
‘In Vitium et Virtus,’ they said in unison.
Jake raised the flask he was holding. ‘To absent friends.’ He took a drink and passed it to Oliver.
‘Be he in heaven or hell—’ Oliver drank and passed the flask to Fred.
‘Or somewhere in between—’ Fred added, taking a drink.
‘Know that we wish you well,’ Jake finished, holding the ring out in his closed fist.
The pair of them reached out, covering his hand with their own. They stood for a moment in silence before parting, almost embarrassed by the display of feeling. Oliver cleared his throat and Jake slipped the signet back into his pocket.
‘Partaking of spirits in a church?’
Apparently, they had been too preoccupied with the past to notice that the bride and her family had finally arrived. Georgiana’s stepmother had caught them drinking and was staring at Fred as if he had just confirmed every horrible story she had heard about his family.
The bride, however, gave a longing look at the flask as it disappeared back into Jake’s pocket, as if wishing she could finish what was left.
He hardly blamed her. He had a good mind to request that Jake pass it back so he could share it with her. What were they doing? Even had they felt affection for each other, they had nothing in common. When he looked at her, young, untried, and fresh-faced in a primrose-yellow dress and a coronet of wildflowers, he felt a hundred years old. He was hardly that. He was not yet thirty. But he had seen too much and done too much to have anything at all in common with a green girl.
As she so often was, when he’d seen her in public, Georgiana Knight was pouting, frowning, and snapping at her stepmother, like the child she was. Lady Grinsted was frowning as well as she fluffed the sleeves of the bride’s gown and tried to adjust the flowers in her hair. Her father walked two steps behind the pair, purposely oblivious to the drama playing out under his nose.
‘Apologise to Major Challenger for our late arrival,’ Lady Grinsted said with a brittle smile and a jab of a pin in Georgiana’s blonde hair.
‘It is Mr Challenger,’ Georgiana corrected, staring at the uniform he had chosen for wedding clothes. ‘The war has been over for some time.’
‘Now is no time to argue semantics,’ her stepmother hissed. ‘Apologise to him.’
‘It is not as if he could start without me,’ Georgiana supplied, glaring at him as if daring him to say otherwise. ‘And you should be the one to apologise, Marietta. The delay was not my fault. If you would have allowed me to choose my own clothing unchallenged, we would have been here half an hour ago.’
‘A day dress that is months old—’
‘Barely worn,’ the girl interrupted. ‘And it favours me.’
‘You should have bought a new gown. And woodbine and speedwell for flowers?’ Marietta said with a sniff of disgust. ‘You look as though you picked them out of the garden.’
‘Because I did,’ the girl replied.
‘There were roses and orchids in the hothouse on the roof.’
‘Where they can stay,’ Georgiana finished. ‘Since you like them, I left them for you to enjoy, now that you are finally to be rid of me.’
Had the delay seriously been about something so trivial as the choice of flowers? She was lovely just as she was, the very picture of the bride he’d have wanted, had he wanted to marry at all. He failed to see what difference it made what she wore. He had promised to marry her and would have done so had she arrived wrapped in a grain sack.
Or in a sheer dress that barely covered her charms. Why, of all times, was he imagining how she had looked on the night he’d made the offer? The thoughts he’d been having before he’d learned her identity were not appropriate for a church.
Nor were they appropriate if he planned to leave his virgin bride untouched, as she had demanded. It should not matter, for he liked her no better than she did him. But he had never imagined that he would be denied the one clear advantage that one was supposed to gain by marrying. The whole thing was giving him a headache. Or perhaps it was the heavy scent of the Viscountess’s perfume, which was redolent of the flowers she had been forcing on her stepdaughter.
He turned to Georgiana, forcing a smile. ‘You look perfectly charming.’ If everything else was a lie, at least that was true. ‘If the guests will take their seats, let us get this over with.’