“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.
“Just when there is so much to be done here,” she lamented, “and just as though our servants and the vicar cannot keep a stern enough eye upon Boris until after the wedding.”
“I will be back in time for the wedding, Millie,” Molenor said, patting her hand.
“That is not the point, Tom,” she complained. “There are all the things that will need doing between now and then.”
The dowager countess also scolded Anna for being from home this morning when Madame Lavalle arrived. The young footman had told her. Anastasia really must make herself available to all those whose task it was to get her ready for her wedding. A month might seem to be a long time, but it would fly by.
“It will definitely be the wedding of the Season,” she said. “And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that you are right, Louise, and only St. Paul’s Cathedral will do.”
Cousin Matilda wanted to know where Elizabeth was and hoped Anastasia had not been entertaining Cousin Avery alone.
“She went to a bookstore that has taken her fancy, Aunt,” Anna explained.
Riverdale was arriving with his mother, Avery could see. Within another minute or two everyone would be present and accounted for.
“I believe,” Lady Matilda was saying, “I ought to move in here for the next month to add proper respectability to the approach of the wedding. If you can spare me, that is, Mama.”
While Cousin Althea greeted everyone and hugged Anna and asked cheerfully how she was feeling on this first full day of her betrothal, Riverdale looked hard at Avery as though he were wondering if the events of the early morning had really happened. Avery inclined his head and fingered the snuffbox in his pocket. He was given no opportunity to withdraw it, however. Cousin Althea was hugging him and asking the same question she had just asked Anna.
“Never mind the betrothal, Althea,” his stepmother said. “It is the marriage preparations we must concern ourselves with, and Avery is dragging his feet. When I asked this morning, his secretary informed me that Avery had not yet approved the betrothal notice I had helped Mr. Goddard draw up last evening. And Avery was nowhere to be found. Then the secretary disappeared from his office. The notice ought to have been submitted today to appear in tomorrow’s papers. And we must decide where the banns are to be read so that arrangements can be made before Sunday. Then we must—”
“But you see,” Avery said, his eyes upon Anna, “I was busy this morning with matters related to my wedding. So was Edwin Goddard. So was Anna. We must all be forgiven for being unavailable to those who expected us all to be at home. We were together, the three of us, and Cousin Elizabeth before she remembered the bookshop and hurried off there with Edwin. By then, though, neither was needed any longer. By then they had duly witnessed my marriage to Anna and were tactful enough to make themselves scarce.”
There were a few moments of total silence while Anna gazed back at him, seemingly composed—just as she had been in the rose salon at Archer House a few weeks or an aeon ago—but with her right hand tensed as it clasped the left, hiding her wedding ring.
Jessica was the first to find her tongue.