hem of my gown, hoisted the skirt up, and grabbed his arm again. As we mounted the crumbling stone steps, the organ music swelled once more into a joyous flood.
“A mite early for carols, isn’t it?” Jonas muttered. “Close on a month till Christmas.”
“The organist must have started taking requests,” I whispered as the cool mustiness of the entrance surrounded us. “Poor darling Ben: He’ll think I’ve changed my mind, that I’m not coming. Hurry, Jonas!”
“Damned lucky to be getting a rare girl like you,” came his muffled comment.
“Jonas, I will not have you swearing in church.” I kissed his weathered cheek. “Bless you for everything.”
Past the poor box and the pamphlet table, then through the archway, to the tune of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” The pews were lined with people. I was sure my nasty relatives, having betted heavily against this day, were chuckling at the possibility of a no-show. I wanted something to eat, nothing fattening you understand, just a low- cal cracker or two.
A schoolboy standing inside the nave looked, saw us, and ran backward a few paces down the aisle. Eyes raised heavenward, he jerked a thumbs-up sign toward the choir loft. The carol tapered away and “Oh Perfect Love” surged forth.
“I never really believed this day would come. Now I’m scared witless that even at this the eleventh hour something will happen to snatch Ben away.”
An elderly woman in a pink voile hat leaned out from the back pew and touched my arm. “Didn’t I know he was Mr. Right?”
I knew that voice… Mrs. Swabucher, owner of Eligibility Escorts, the woman who first introduced me to Ben.
With a whispered “Talk to you later,” I dragged Jonas past an unfamiliar female voice sighing ecstatically: “My word, don’t she look a picture. Love the veil. Real Victorian.”
A rumbling male voice replied, “I dunno. For all her money she’s not a patch on our Beryl.”
On my left, a tall woman in a fruit-laden hat jostled a grizzly baby against her hip.
Voices, faces-a moving haze swamped by the scent of centuries, incense, and freshly cut chrysanthemums. I hate chrysanthemums, but we had an abundance of them at Merlin’s Court and Ben had wanted to use them. He said they were jolly flowers. Jolly depressing, I called them.
A hand brushed my hip and I squinted round to see portly Uncle Maurice winking at me. Jerking on Jonas’s arm, I almost missed seeing lovely, loathsome cousin Vanessa stick out an alligator-shod foot. But I saw it just in time and trod down hard in passing. A small triumph but a foolish one.
My eyes adjusted to the dim light provided by the narrow stained-glass windows and the flickering candles upon the altar. The three men standing on the chancel steps looked like they had been embalmed. The one in the middle was the Reverend Rowland Foxworth and on his left stood the best man. Sid Fowler had grown up a few doors down the street from Ben’s family, and recently we had discovered that “Sidney,” the posh hairdressing salon on Market Street, was his place. But I had eyes for only one man. The one tapping his foot, arms akimbo. My husband-to-be.
That stance signified not so much impatience as pent-up fury. I could see his jaw muscles working as he ground his teeth. Poor darling Ben! Who could blame him for being angry?
Hitching up my gown and crushing my bouquet against my side, I ran the remaining few yards down the aisle, leaving Jonas completely behind.
“What peasantry!” Aunt Astrid’s voice bounced off the rafters and echoed through the church amid splutters of laughter. I didn’t care a farthing. Elbowing Sid off the steps, I whispered in my beloved’s ear.
“Darling, I’m sorry. You can’t imagine all the things that have gone wrong. I couldn’t reach your parents on the phone to beg them to change their minds. And those men who were supposed to come last week to move the harpsichord down from the attic-they arrived, but one of them sprained his back so we had to shove it in the boxroom; meaning we are stuck with records for the reception.” My voice was coming out in strangled gasps; I realised I was standing on my train.
Ben’s voice broke through his clenched teeth. “I thought you had stood me up, and for the devil of me I couldn’t think of a way to make it look as though I had jilted you. Fifty million pairs of gloating eyes pinned on one is not conducive to quick thinking.”
My dark handsome hero. I smiled worshipfully at him.
Sid fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and Rowland Foxworth turned a page of his little black book with a silvery rustle. Footsteps sounded behind us. Dorcas, wearing a brown velvet jockey cap and plaid cape, stepped forward and removed my bouquet.
“Sat on it, did you? Not to worry. I’ll tweak those petals right back to shape.”
Jonas, with an austere nod at Ben, muttered, “Treat her like a queen, boy, or I’ll wring your scrawny neck.” He stepped back to stand beside Dorcas.
Aunt Astrid’s voice rang out again. “Can you credit it? Those clodhopping boots all caked with mud. Only Giselle would have the gardener give her away.”
Ben’s hand closed over mine, and suddenly the world was blissful. The organ music washed to a ripple, then faded away.
“Shall we begin?” Rowland Foxworth smiled. A sense of timelessness assailed me, along with the smell of mildewed wood, polished brasses, dusty velvet kneelers, and chrysanthemums.
“Who giveth this woman to this man?”
“I do,” answered Jonas at his most gruff. “And make a note in yer hymnal, vicar, if the lad gives her a mite of trouble, I’m taking her back.”
Make haste, Rowland dear. Other women may wish these moments extended, every word savoured for cherishing in later years, but I couldn’t wait to feel that ring on my finger, to know that I was finally Mrs. Bentley Haskell.
“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today…”
I was drowning in the brilliance of Ben’s eyes, their shifting colors… such an incredible blue-green, flecked with amber… and those black lashes, long enough to rake leaves. How could I, a fat girl masquerading in a thin body, be so blessed?
“And so I caution all here present that if any of you know of any just cause or impediment why Bentley Thomas Haskell and Giselle Simons may not lawfully be joined together in the holy estate of matrimony you shall declare it now or forever after hold your peace.”
Pause.
“Yoo-hoo, I do! I have something to declare!”
Gasps. A commotion erupted at the back of the church. A baby bellowed. Exclamations of horror. Footsteps. Rowland, an expression of consternation on his kind, handsome face, tucked a finger into the book and let it fall shut with a thud. Ben dropped my hand and turned to stare at whoever was pounding down the aisle. I took one look and became immobilized.
This was monstrous. Whoever the woman was, she was off her rocker. A disappointed spinster who went from wedding to wedding, causing a ruckus at each one? Perhaps I should try to pity her. Might I not have ended up the same way myself?
“There now, Mumma’s little pudding cheeks. Say hello to Da-Da.”
A baby! The Just Cause and Impediment she held aloft was a baby. Ben’s baby. Jane Eyre’s tribulation was nothing to this; she only got lumbered with a mad wife.
Closing my eyes, I took slow deep breaths. I tried to bear in mind that Ben had never claimed to have kept himself untouched by human hand until I had happened along. Yes, a baby did indicate a certain closeness in the relationship, but I would have to try very hard not to be jealous and petty.
The woman identified herself: Mrs. Bentley T. Haskell, the First. She was screeching that the louse had bunked off without even the courtesy of a divorce.
Loud bawling from the baby.
“Pack of lies, the whole lot of it!” rapped out Dorcas. From the corner of my eye I saw her lift my crushed bouquet as if to pitch it in my predecessor’s face.
A sparkling laugh, which I recognised at once as cousin Vanessa’s.
A menacing yowl from dear Jonas.
Ben’s arm came around me. Wed, or almost wed, to a bigamist! I searched his profile and found it explosive.
