Page 44 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
As they sat together, the shared laughter lingering in the air, Emily felt a peculiar shift in her chest. For the past two days, she had been carrying the upcoming marriage like a leaden weight, a cold necessity that had left her feeling numb and drifting. But this simple connection with Euphemia had reached through the fog.
She realized, with a start, that she hadn't felt this sense of lightness since her last deep conversation with Yvette and Rose. They were the only true friends she had ever allowed herself, and now, against all odds and out of the wreckage of a scandal, she had found another. It felt like a hard-won accomplishment.
For the first time since the night in the library, the world didn't feel quite so narrow, and as she looked at Euphemia, Emily allowed herself to be happy for it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Don't fall, Emily. Don’t do it. Calm down. Breathe. It’s only a wedding.
That was the single, crystalline line of thought running through Emily's mind as she stepped through the doors of Saint George's Church in Hanover Square, her father's arm beneath her hand, the morning light coming through the high windows in long pale columns that illuminated everything with the particular, merciless clarity of a day that had decided to be beautiful regardless of what was happening inside it.
Do not fall. Do not trip. Do not do anything that will give anyone in this building something to talk about. You have given them enough already.
She had been preparing for this morning for days. She had told herself she was prepared. She had sat with Yvette and Rose the night before, drunk tea, said all the right things, gone to bed at areasonable hour, and lain there for four hours in the dark being entirely, completely unprepared.
The church was small by grand standards. Only the immediate family and closest friends attended, which was entirely customary. She could see them now in her peripheral vision as she walked, faces she knew and faces she did not, all of them turning as she passed, but she kept her eyes forward with the discipline of a woman who had been keeping her eyes forward her entire life.
Her gown was white muslin, simply cut, with a gauze overlay that caught the light as she moved. Flowers had been woven into her hair by Peggy's careful hands that morning, pale roses, their petals already beginning to soften in the warmth. She carried a small bouquet of the same, tied with white ribbon, and her gloves were long and immaculate. Her hands inside them were not entirely steady.
Theodore stood with military precision, his dark hair brushed back. He was wearing a deep navy superfine coat that hugged his broad shoulders perfectly, paired with a cream silk waistcoat and a cravat tied in a crisp, intricate mathematical knot.
Emily had seen Theodore Merrick in evening clothes. She had seen him in riding clothes and morning clothes and the comfortable dishevelment of a man at ease in his own conservatory. She had looked at him across dinner tables and ballrooms, and she had always... always been able to find something to be annoyed about.
She looked at him now and could not find it.
He looked, she thought, with a clarity that arrived entirely without her permission, extraordinarily good-looking.
She kept walking. For a man she had spent weeks bickering with, a man she had intentionally kept at a distance… he was devastatingly handsome.
She shook the thought away for the second time.
The guilt arrived somewhere around halfway down the aisle, settling alongside the nerves. She looked at him standing there, this man who had never wanted this, who had agreed to Julia's list as a performance and found himself here, and she wondered, not for the first time and not without some discomfort, whether she had asked too much. Whether any of this was fair to him. He had lived his entire life on his own terms, had moved through the world with a freedom that she had envied and found exasperating in equal measure, and now he was standing at an altar in his best coat because a scandal had closed around them both and he was too honorable to walk away from it.
She wanted Frederick safe. She wanted a powerful name and a household that could not be questioned and a future that Charles Pierce could not dismantle. She had gotten all of it. She was walking toward it right then.
It simply felt, in that moment, with the morning light falling across his face and his eyes steady on hers, less like a plan and more like something else entirely. Something she did not havea clean name for. Something she was not entirely sure she was ready to have.
She reached the altar.
Her father placed her hand in Theodore's.
Theodore's fingers closed around hers, and he looked at her, and she looked back at him. The clergyman opened the Book of Common Prayer, and the ceremony began. Emily Pierce stood at the altar and decided, with the finality of someone who had run out of time for anything else, that she was simply going to live in this moment.
Whatever it meant could wait.
The clergyman's voice was calming, filling the small church with the familiar words... words that had been spoken in this same order, in this same language, for longer than anyone in the building had been alive.
“Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
Theodore looked at her.
“I will,” he said.
He will?
His voice was even. Entirely certain. Emily had half expected him to stumble on it, or to say it with the slightly ironic quality he brought to most things he said, but he did neither. He simply said it, looking at her, and she thought that even performing, Theodore Merrick did things properly.
“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”
