mother came into her dressing room now, looking very elegant in deep blue—not quite royal and not quite navy but something of both. Ruth was placing Jessica’s new straw bonnet over the coiffure she had been working on for almost an hour, and then tying the wide pink ribbons to one side of her chin before taking a step back to look critically at her handiwork. She made one adjustment.
“You will do, my lady,” she said—a lengthy speech for Ruth.
“Oh, you will do very nicely indeed,” Jessica’s mother said, a bit teary eyed as she held her arms wide to hug her daughter. “I wish your father could see you now.”
Jessica had often wondered if her mother had loved her father. She rarely spoke of him. Yet she had never shown any interest in remarrying.
“I must not crush you,” she said after a brief, warm hug. “Jessica, you are doing the right thing, are you, dearest? You are not marrying Mr. Thorne just because he is the Earl of Lyndale? You do love him? Love is so important in marriage. I loved your father, you know. Very dearly. Even though he was a duke and I was an earl’s daughter and love ought not to have mattered. And he loved me.” She brushed at a tear that threatened to spill over onto her cheek.
Ah.
“I am doing the right thing, Mama,” Jessica assured her, and she felt that surely, surely she was speaking the truth. Liking could be love too, could it not? A certain kind of love?
“Well,” her mother said. “We must not keep Avery waiting. He is downstairs now. So are Anna and Josephine.”
The younger children were to remain at home. But Josephine had learned to sit still, even for an hour-long Sunday service.
Jessica suddenly felt a pang of regret that Abby would not be at the church. Or Camille. Or Harry. She had written a long letter to Abby, a shorter one to each of the other two. She did not know when she would see them again—a melancholy thought. But such was life, she supposed, when one grew up. Today, however, was not for melancholy. Today was for her and Gabriel. Today was their wedding day.
She pulled on her long white gloves, hesitated a moment, and then drew the single rose from the vase on her dressing table and dried it off with a napkin. It was yellow today, as it had been the morning after the garden party, where he had kissed her for the first time. She had worn primrose yellow on that occasion, and in the rose arbor she had stood for a few moments, cupping though not quite touching a yellow rose between her hands.
He had remembered, she thought. For today, their wedding day.
She took the rose with her, holding it by the long stem, careful not to touch the thorns.
Sixteen
They had chosen a small, insignificant church on a long, quiet London street—the very church, in fact, where Anna and Avery had married eight years ago.
This wedding was better attended than that had been. Indeed, this particular street had perhaps never seen so many grand carriages all at once, not just moving along it but also stopping, one behind another. They waited, all of them, after the passengers had alit, liveried coachmen and footmen polishing off the small stains of travel and tending the horses. Passersby, intent upon their daily business, stopped to gawk and, if they were in pairs or trios, to wonder and speculate. The flower-bedecked carriage that stood directly outside the church was an indisputable clue, however, that a wedding was taking place inside. Several people settled in to wait, any urgency they had felt when they set out on their various errands forgotten. It was not often there was any grand spectacle to behold in this part of London.
All the Westcotts then in town and those with family connections to them were there. So were Sir Trevor and Lady Vickers. And Albert Vickers, their son, of course, was Gabriel’s best man.
The pews, even in so small a church, were not filled, but there was a feeling of warm intimacy, something Gabriel found a bit intimidating as he awaited the arrival of his bride. All the guests must be wondering—except the very few who knew the truth—why Jessica was marrying a mere Mr. Thorne from America, who had been rather vague about the inherited property and fortune that had brought him home to England. Certainly all must wonder why the