‘That is what I was hoping for,’ Ellie said, in competition with the parrot’s mutterings.
‘Do you want to do away with your limp?’ Verity cast herself into a deep armchair and pulled the bell-cord. ‘Tea, please, Hopkins—and something indulgently sticky.’
‘I would if I could, but there is nothing to be done. One leg is shorter than the other,’ Ellie pointed out as the butler left the room.
‘But not by much. If you had your shoes made specially you would have more of a sway.’ Verity wafted one hand back and forth. ‘I know just the man. Now, then…’ She put her head on one side. ‘That hair.’
‘Not red,’ Ellie said hastily. ‘Blake said I ought to cut it short.’
‘Did he, indeed? What an intelligent man—I do congratulate you. Now—a list.’ She picked up a notebook from the litter of books next to her chair. ‘Hair, shoes, gown, all the ghastly details of surviving the ton… Who is going to give you away? I would offer to do it myself, but your poor Blake does not want the scandal of his bride being given away in marriage by her Sapphic friend. I know—Podge can do it.’
‘Who?’
‘Podge—Percival, my brother. He’s a terrible old bore, but he will rally round, and there’s nothing like a duke at a wedding to set the tone—unless it is a royal duke, in which case the tone goes downhill rapidly. There. Now, how long do we have?’
‘Six weeks,’ Ellie said, not sure whether she was excited or petrified. A duke to give her away, a transformation at the hands of one of the most eccentric women in London…
‘We will do your Blake proud. You are madly in love with him, I assume?’
‘I…’
In love with Blake? Am I?
She desired him, dreamt about him, liked him—most of the time. But love?
‘No. And it would be a very bad thing if I was,’ she said truthfully. Then, ‘Why am I doing this insane thing?’
‘Because you were on the verge of being poverty-stricken, stuck in a rain-soaked Lancashire farmhouse with drips coming through the ceiling and miles from a decent library?’ Verity suggested.
‘If it had been anyone but Blake who had asked I would have still said no,’ Ellie said, thinking it through. ‘I do not wish to take charity. But because it was Blake I thought maybe I could give something back to him. And I do think he needs something. Perhaps something I can give him. He has dozens of friends, a half-brother who adores him, and yet he has such darkness inside…’
Verity sat up sharply, sending the parrot off in squawking flight and making Hopkins start and almost drop the tea tray. He put it down with a reproachful look at his employer and left.
Ellie took a small, wicked-looking pastry and bit into it. ‘Oh, bliss—do try one.’
Verity waved the plate away. ‘Darkness? Ellie, darling, do be very certain that it is a dark space that you can bring light into and not a black emptiness that will suck you in too.’
*
Ellie was still brooding on Verity’s Gothic pronouncement five weeks later. She had not seen a great deal of Blake, other than during his punctilious calls to enquire after her heath, report on the progress of the preparations and to take her for drives in the park when it stopped raining.
She was still in mourning, so she was able to retreat into anonymous blacks and wear a veil, which meant that while London might be buzzing with the news that the eligible Earl of Hainford was betrothed to an unknown, no one could fault her for remaining quietly out of sight.
It did increase the speculation about exactly who she was, beyond the bland information offered by various genealogical reference books. The dreadful accident that had claimed her stepbrother’s life and its connection to what had been shocking goings-on at White’s might have been a problem, until even the most assiduous gossip had finally had to accept that Sir Francis Lytton had simply been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Verity, recounting all of this, had added that the general consensus was that the tragedy had brought the stepsister and Hainford together, and that, everyone agreed, was a good thing if he finally got around to marrying—especially after the scandal of his early betrothal. What a foolish, wicked girl that Felicity Broughton had been, the gossips said, happily dredging up the old scandal. To throw away wealth, position and ultimately her life—and all for a poet too.
Three days before the wedding Blake took Ellie driving at ten o’clock in the morning—much earlier than usual, at a time when the fashionable crowd was delicately sipping its hot chocolate or still slumbering behind tightly drawn curtains.
‘How are you?’ he asked, almost abruptly, as they turned through the gates into Green Park, leaving Blake’s tiger to perch on a bench and wait patiently for their return.
‘Well, thank you.’
Wishing you would find me ‘kissable’ again. Or is that just a thing that you say to all the girls you tumble in the long grass?
‘And you?’
‘Also well. Suffering from Jonathan’s efforts to create the perfect wedding, when he ought to know that no social occasion can ever be perfect. I have had to endure discussion about the precise shade of my neckcloth, the number of horses for the carriage, and which carriage, whether there can possibly be sufficient champagne for the number of guests and exactly how much to tip the bell-ringers.’ He negotiated a sharp turn and added, ‘And that was just this morning.’