Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore
Chapter 10
The night before the wedding, her mother came to her bedchamber looking more harried and tight-lipped than Hattie had ever seen her. She carried a slim booklet, which she waved at Bailey, who was in the process of brushing out Hattie’s hair. “Leave us.” She proceeded to pace in a narrow circle next to the vanity table. “Bailey shall wake you at half past seven tomorrow.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“The gown and accessories are ready, the carriage is ready. Don’t tarry—we are leaving at half past nine sharp. The chapel is close, but traffic is thick at that time in the mornings.”
The wedding was scheduled for ten o’clock and would be witnessed by only her immediate family. The lunch would take place in her parents’ lunchroom, and they had strongly advised against Hattie inviting her friends. So she hadn’t. She felt like hiding from the whole world, in any case. Now her mother was fussing over the hopelessly old-fashioned wedding gown, which was draped over the mannequin at the foot of her bed; she aligned a ruffle here and straightened a capped sleeve there while muttering under her breath.
“Mama.”
“Hmm?”
“I know you have always wanted me to have a grand wedding in St. Paul’s,” she said softly. “And I’m sorry.”
A pause ensued, heavy with clashing emotions. Finally, her mother glanced her way. “I advise you to please your husband,” she said. “At least in the early days. It should make married life considerably easier on you.”
She placed the book on the vanity table next to the brush and left. Hattie waited until her mother’s footsteps had faded before she picked up the book.
Instruction and Advice for the Young Bride
by Ruth Smythers
Beloved wife of The Reverend L.D. Smythers
Ah. That sort of pleasing her husband. Though alone in her own room, she opened the first page with apprehension.
To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must “pay the piper,” so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of conjugal relations ….
She closed the book, her cheeks hot. She was sheltered but not clueless—she certainly had an idea about the mechanics involved in conjugal relations, though it was all rather blurred where the details were concerned. Judging by the stars in Annabelle’s eyes whenever her duke was near, she had assumed the experience wasn’t too harrowing. This was before she had known who her own husband would be, of course. Too late to run away now. It wasn’t just that someone was keeping watch outside her bedroom door at night since the day at the gallery. No guards were required to make her stay; her raging shame saw to it very effectively, for with shame came the fervent desire to undo her mistake, to make everything feel right again, no matter the cost.
She rang for Bailey and told her to please send her married sister to her room. Minutes later, Flossie swept in, with a robe tied loosely over her nightgown and chubby Michael on her hip. Normally, Hattie would have rushed to her baby nephew to kiss all the small fingers and toes peeking from his lacy hems, but tonight she barely raised her head.
“Nerves?” Flossie asked. “Cold feet? All quite normal, my dear. Especially under the circumstances.”
Of all her family members, her older sister had seemed the least overcome by recent developments, and Hattie had never been more grateful for her presence.
“Mama gave me this … book,” she said, and nudged it. “I find it very unhelpful.”
She kept her gaze on the wall as her sister stepped closer.
“Oh, that awful thing,” she heard Flossie say.
Hattie peered at her. “You know it?”
Her sister skimmed the first page while absently bouncing Michael on her hip. “Hmph,” she said. “It’s as dramatic as I remember it.” She shook her head and pulled one of the chairs from the wall closer to sit. “I was needlessly overwrought on my wedding day because Mama had left it on my bedside table,” she said. “I’m glad you called for me.”
“So am I.” Hattie shuddered with cautious relief. “But should we, erm, speak of this in front of Michael?”
“He’s ten months old,” Flossie said. “Babies are sweet creatures, but incapable of understanding a thing. Aren’t you,” she crooned down at her son in her lap and giggled when he waved a fat little fist at her face. “The truth is,” she said, “I cannot deny that it will be awkward at first, but I daresay you will soon find it rather funny.”
“Funny …”
“Perhaps pitiful is the better word,” Flossie allowed. “Men are very keen on it, and they become, how to put it … a bit silly in the process.”
Silly? She couldn’t envision a silly Lucian Blackstone. He was hard-muscled, steely-eyed intimidation.
“He will groan and pant,” Flossie said, “but with a few little tricks, you can hasten it along, reduce it to a few minutes, even.”
“Oh, good.”
“And never let what happens in the bedchamber ruin your esteem for him outside of it. I confess I still have trouble reconciling these two versions of my clever van der Waal: a cunning man of business during the day, a needy creature at night. Truly, Hattie, we can be grateful to be women and that by nature we aren’t afflicted by such urges.”
She couldn’t comment on this, since her urge to kiss an unsuitable man had put her into this situation in the first place. “How do I … hurry it along?” she brought herself to ask.
Now Flossie’s cheeks reddened. “Allow him to look at you.”
“How … could he not?”
“I mean in the nude, dear.”
She had fancied herself quite adventurous and open-minded. Now her instincts, rigorously schooled since girlhood to keep her hands gloved, her necklines high, and her legs covered down to her heels to protect her modesty, shrieked in dismay at the word nude.
“Don’t look so discouraged, Pom Pom,” Flossie said. “If your nerves are too shaky, you could try ether to ease you through the first encounter.”
Hattie’s eyes grew round. “You mean … ether?”
Flossie nodded. “I haven’t heard much about it in my circles in Amsterdam, but I understand here in London, doctors will sometimes prescribe it for nervous new brides. I feel as though I know someone who knows someone who employed it to great effect, though I can’t think of the name ….”
“But I would be unconscious!”
“Precisely. You would wake up a wife in all ways and not have felt a pinch.”
“Thanks,” she said, filled with horror at the thought of Blackstone laboring away over her incapacitated body.
“Whatever you do,” Flossie said, “do not imbibe too heavily. Before, I mean.”
“Why not?” A champagne haze sounded mightily more tempting than a dose of ether.
“Because the scientific community believes that children, when conceived while husband or wife is intoxicated, will become slovenly and mean-spirited adults.”
“Oh.” No drink for her, then.
“One last piece of advice,” Flossie said, and now she was covering Michael’s ears. “When you act as if his efforts please you, you mustn’t exaggerate it, or else he might think he married a wanton, and you do not wish to create that impression. And whenever you find it bothersome, keep in mind that you might get a darling baby from it by the end.” She planted kisses on top of Michael’s lace cap, and Hattie was accosted by the image of a robust toddler on her own knee. Her insides seemed to weigh a hundred stone. He will give her coarse-looking, disagreeable children!
“Before I forget,” Flossie said, “I meant to tell you—your friends have been writing to you.”
“What?”
Flossie nodded. “I assume they were your friends, from Oxford. They sent letters, and a telegram. Mama must have caught them all at early breakfast. She probably burned them.”
Hattie swayed from the shock. “Flossie. How could she?”
Her sister weighed her words carefully. “I suppose she thought it would save you distress. She is not cruel, dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, I’m glad you told me.” She had started and discarded half a dozen letters to the girls, only to decide that it would be much safer for their reputations to visit once everything had been put right in the chapel tomorrow …. Tomorrow. So soon. Her throat tightened.
Michael sensed her fraying nerves; his small face crumpled and he began making displeased hacking noises.
“Hattie,” Flossie said as she stood and rocked her fussy son. “Don’t fret so much. A gentleman knows what to do and shall treat you with the respect a wife can expect.”
“But he isn’t a gentleman.”
Flossie’s face fell. “Then hold him accountable with unwavering standards,” she said after a pause, and for the first time Hattie could remember, her sister sounded uncertain.
The next morning unfolded under a bell jar, with all shapes and sounds strangely distorted. Someone else seemed to be moving her limbs and speaking on her behalf. Someone laced her tightly into the wedding gown. Disembodied hands fixed the orange-blossom wreath to her hair while her reflection in the mirror was a white blotch. She would have been hard-pressed to recount the conversation during the carriage ride to the chapel. In the cramped interior of the coach, the strong mothball smell of her gown mixed with the sweetness of her stephanotis bouquet to terrible effect. Cold sweat coated her face by the time they reached the chapel.
“Harriet.” Her mother’s disapproving stare was on her left hand clutching the posy. She reflexively switched the bouquet to her right. After today, only Blackstone would be entitled to tell her in which hand she must carry her bouquet, she thought. And he probably wouldn’t care about such details. So at least there was that.
She had expected him to wear the black tailcoat and gray-striped trousers of upper-class grooms, but when she spotted him at the altar, he looked surprisingly approachable in a three-piece suit of a warm, sandy color. His eyes, however, held a penetrating intensity that made her feel shy. She chose to focus on the suit fabric when they stood facing each other. Finest Scotch herringbone tweed. Probably from the Isle of Harris. He had pinned a small bouquet in the colors of the Greenfield coat of arms over his heart as was the custom, but he had added a Scottish thistle. The purple hue went well with the blue and yellow colors of her house, and the spikes provided structure amid the soft petals of the blooms. Charming. It was something she would have liked to see on her groom. While she parroted her lines, her breath roared in her ears like a distant ocean. She stumbled over love, obey, and until death, for those were lies, or at least not the truth, and normally she’d never lie in a chapel. She watched, aloof, as Lucian Blackstone slid a heavy gold band onto her ring finger that marked her as his wife.
“You’ve added a Scottish thistle to the buttonhole,” she said to him when the brief, perfunctory father-of-the-bride speech in her parents’ lunchroom was over. A string quartet was now playing, filling any stretches of awkward silence with a jaunty tune.
Lucian lowered his spoon and turned to her. “I have, yes.”
The strong column of his neck looked positively confined by the cravat and high collar.
“My father mentioned your family is from Argyll?” she asked.
He nodded. “Near Inveraray.”
“Which clan presides over that area?”
“Clan Campbell,” he said slowly. “But I’m a MacKenzie, from my grandfather’s side.”
“One of my dearest friends is a Campbell,” she said, relieved to hear of a connection even as tenuous as this. “Lady Catriona. Her father is the Earl of Wester Ross.”
His brows pulled together. “Unusual. The region used to belong to the MacDonalds. Sometimes to the MacKenzies.”
He must have a habit of pulling his brows together; two sharp, vertical lines were forever notched between them. His dark lashes, however, were lush like mink pelt, a precious touch of softness in his face. She would see this face every day now.
“I don’t know much about the clans, I’m afraid,” she said.
He gave a shrug. “The days of the clans are long gone anyway.”
“Because of the Clearances?”
He looked vaguely surprised. “You know of the Clearances?”
“Of course. The Greenfield dining table is a veritable well of political information.”
She couldn’t recall the context of the Clearances being discussed, but she knew the brutal practice of driving the Scots from the Highlands since the last Jacobite rebellion—she supposed the Jacobites would have called it a bid for freedom—which had been ongoing until recently. Officially, it was to make way for sheep pastoralism; unofficially, or so Flossie said, it was about accumulating land in the hands of a few. She would miss the Friday dinners. Seeing their faces, watching them quarrel. Everyone except Flossie was still acting distantly toward her; Zachary still refused to properly look her in the eye. It hurt. But she had done all she could to make it right. As of today, she lived in another house, and all that remained of her past was Bailey, who had heroically agreed to continue her position as a lady’s maid. Without warning, her nose stung with tears. She swallowed hard, to no avail—she was about to sob into her wedding soup.
A light touch on the small of her back made her stiffen, and she glanced up to find Lucian watching her intently. “Are you all right?”
She cast a nervous glance around. He seemed to mean well, but drawing attention to her fraying composure was impolite. Her siblings, her parents, several aunts, and a few cousins her mother had invited were chatting softly among one another, pretending not to notice that she was suffering a bout of nerves.
“I’m well, thank you,” she whispered.
He looked skeptical. “Say the word,” he said, “and we’ll go home.”
Home. He meant his house. Her face flushed. Once they were home, he would take off collar and cravat and they would kiss again. More than kiss. She was expected to allow this perfect stranger outrageous liberties tonight. As if the stroke of a pen on a formal piece of paper spirited away one’s sensibilities and compunctions like a magic wand … Lucian’s gaze sharpened, as if he had sensed the direction of her thoughts. As they stared into each other’s eyes, heat flickered along the peculiar bond between them. She hadn’t felt it since the kiss in the gallery, but there it was, still twitching.
Without breaking the connection, Lucian reached into the inside of his jacket and pulled out a small jewelry box. “I had meant to give this to you during our ride here.” His tone was wry, and her blush intensified. Her mother had climbed aboard their carriage with Mina in tow and might as well have announced to the world that she worried Blackstone would pounce on his new wife the moment he found himself alone with her.
He took her hand, turned it over, and placed the box into her palm. Well, it would take time to become used to such intimacies.
“May I open it now?” She did like surprise gifts.
“If you want.”
Holding the box low between them, she opened the lid. A silver pendant, perhaps half the length of her little finger, rested on a red velvet bed. She picked it up carefully.
“It’s a tiny spoon.” The handle was intricately fashioned in Celtic knots and finished in a heart-shaped loop.
“It’s a love spoon,” Lucian said.
She turned it back and forth. “I know of them.” Celtic men fashioned them for their sweethearts. It looked freshly polished, but the inner sides of the braided strands were blackened with time, and there was a weight to the piece as though it had a history.
Lucian’s expression was guarded. “My grandmother,” he said. “She gave it to me, for my future bride. My great-grandfather had once made it for his wife; he was a Welshman.” He glanced at it there in her palm. “I suppose we could set it with a diamond, if you want.”
Her fingers closed protectively over the small heirloom. “I find it most precious as it is.”
He looked at her oddly, then gave a grunt that could have been approval, and returned his attention to his soup.
She emptied her wineglass, the love spoon in her fist. How often had she daydreamed of being abducted by a handsome highwayman or a marauding privateer? She dared fate to be consistent and to prove that being ravished by such a man would be as pleasurable as in her fantasies.