After he had finished reading he sat and stared into the fire for some time, sipping his drink. He didn’t know how long had passed when he heard a soft knock on the door; then, of course, he leaped to his feet and congratulated his wife on her triumph.
Throughout the first week of December both Lady Jane and the governess were closeted in the upstairs drawing room, planning for the wedding. Occasionally another person would stop in — Toto, who was back in London and rather pale, but couldn’t resist talk of a wedding — and all three of them would discuss invitations, dresses, food. (The one responsibility Frederick had retained for himself was the flowers.) It was all to happen in April.
“I always say that an April wedding is loveliest, you know,” Lenox could hear Toto saying one bright morning, “though Elizabeth Wallace was married on the first of the month, in Oxford, and as far as I can gather she would have done better to marry a mule, her husband—”
“Toto!” said Jane.
“It’s true, though.”
Miss Taylor was always the person who retrieved the conversation. “The point is that I cannot wear white. I’ve been too old for that since I was twenty-two.”
“What tosh,” said Toto. “You’ll look lovely — you have just the complexion for an ivory white.” Lenox, still eavesdropping, smiled to himself. “The only question is whether you ought to be married sooner.”
“Sooner?”
“Why wait, I say?”
“Toto,” said Jane, but she ought to have known her cousin was irrepressible.
“I think a Christmas wedding would be the finest thing I ever saw.”
“Toto, you scarcely know Miss Taylor.”
“How rude you are, Jane, really I think you are — here we are, three friends — aren’t I coming to Everley to see you wed, dear heart?”
The governess laughed happily. “I should like it very much if you would.”
“See? There. Now the great virtue of a Christmas wedding …”
So, after only ten hours or so of discussion, Miss Taylor was pushed toward a writing desk to ask Frederick whether they might be married sooner than he had anticipated. He wrote back by the next post: No haste was too great for him, and he knew just the holly tree he could cut from, the true
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
In the very early hours of Christmas that year, it snowed in Plumbley.
“What a pity,” said Lady Jane when they woke to see the world white and angelic, the trees fringed with powder, Everley’s long lanes unbroken by footprints.
“What can you mean?” asked Lenox.
“Snow is so messy. I warned Toto.”
“You’re not much of a romantic, my dear.”
They dressed and ate breakfast alone, Frederick having taken his breakfast in his room, while his soon-to-be wife was staying with Toto, her chief adviser now, in the dower house, McConnell, only partially back in her good graces, nearby at Everley. At nine o’clock Lenox and Jane stepped into one of the carriages that waited along the avenue. The horses that pulled them into town were strangers, hired for the day, but Lenox had gone to see Sadie in her stable the day before. He had tried to sneak her a carrot but she turned her nose up at it, having become very spoiled, now, and snorting until she received an apple each morning.
The village had rarely looked better. The town green was a smooth white. Steps away, on the porch of St. Stephen’s, there was a great mass of black coats and top hats, people speaking to each other between the merrily green-garlanded pillars of the church.
Everyone had turned out, it seemed. There was Fripp, who placed a proprietary hand on Lenox’s elbow and walked him around; Millington, the blacksmith and cricket captain; fat Mr. Kempe, red from the cold; and dozens besides, all full of “Happy Christmas” and sure that the snow was a sign of good luck.
Then, too, there was someone Lenox had particularly hoped to see, Dr. Eastwood, with his newly betrothed: Lucy, the niece of Emily Jasper and Lenox’s old Plumbley friend.
The news was fresh, and so was Lucy, who looked giddy with happiness. She had the feminine beauty — there is none like it in the world, not even in the loveliest eighteen year old — that comes to a woman who has thought her time was gone and past, who has resigned herself to a life alone, and then finds herself truly in love. It was a kind of radiance beyond radiance. She ducked her head and blushed when Lenox congratulated her, her lined eyes full of joy, and held tighter to Eastwood’s arm. For his part the doctor seemed so pleased as to be a new man.
“The great virtue of getting married today is that they shall have to see very little of me.” He looked at Lucy. “We shall get married on a Monday, too, perhaps.”
Lenox looked at him quizzically. “Why is that?”
“You remember, Charles,” said Lady Jane, “Marry on Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday the best day of all, Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, and Saturday for no luck at all.”
“What day did we get married, dear?”
“Can you have forgotten? It was a Saturday.”
“Then I think it a very stupid rhyme.”
“Perhaps it should be Saturday for the most luck of all,” said Lucy.
“I like that better.”
Besides the villagers, Lenox shook hands with a great many distant cousins, glad to exchange a word with them: Plans were made for suppers and luncheons in London, news of the old house in Devon was passed from mouth to mouth, and cousin Wendell, beatific and plump, said he had driven past Everley that morning when he arrived and it looked “capital, simply capital.”
Lenox felt a fondness for the man now. “When it is yours, will you keep the trees as Frederick has them?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t think of changing ’em — always liked a tree, myself, I think them a very companionable sort of person.”
Soon, by some mysterious common consent, they made their way into the church and filled the pews. Lenox and Lady Jane sat in the third row; already there was Dallington, who was staying at the King’s Arms. He had seemed slightly wan when the subject of Frederick and the governess arose in the past months, but he had always set his mouth firmly and said that he was, “Delighted for them — no, and I shall send them a cracking great hogshead of champagne for their wedding day.”
Rushing in at the last minute, having caught an early train apparently, was Edmund, accompanied by his wife, Molly, a cheery fuschia ribbon tying her hair up, and, to Lenox’s surprise and joy, their son, Teddy. He looked taller at fifteen than he had even six months earlier. He didn’t wear his midshipman’s uniform, but his bearing seemed, nevertheless, naval.
Lenox stood up, and in a church whisper, said, “My dear Teddy, you came! How long are you ashore?”
“Only two weeks. But have you heard I’m studying for lieutenant? And there’s so much to report from the
The opening chords of the organ hushed him, and they crowded into a row together. Frederick, looking unflustered and with a sprig of something wintry in his buttonhole, appeared at the altar — and then the bride came in.
It was uncommon indeed for a bride past the age of twenty to wear white — indeed that color was only consecrated as the ideal twenty-four years earlier, when Victoria had worn it to marry Albert — and no doubt when she married Eastwood, Lucy would opt for gray or blue. Yet with the light of a recent snow still falling gently through the windows, the world clear and soft, it looked beautiful, looked eternal. Lenox felt a fatherly sensation as he watched the governess walk down the aisle and then thought of Sophia — and realized, with gratitude, that the
