Lady Duvalle had not been wrong. Quickly, as news of the upcoming marriage circulated, the tide of gossip turned away from Verity, and turned its full force instead against Mr Harlan, who recovered from his wound far more easily than Verity recovered from her night in the snow. Several other village girls decried him as a rake, and accused him of pressing his unwanted advances upon them. Events emerged from his past, of blackmail, of deception, perhaps true, perhaps not. The rumour mill took in Mr Harlan, and spat him back out a ruined man. He left Houglen in a cloud of ugly rumours, shortly before the New Year.
Verity knew little of the matter, except that he was gone, and that chapter of unpleasantness was over. She was kept in bed for weeks, recovering from a painful cough that had settled in her lungs, and had no attention or energy to spare on deliberating Harlan's downfall.
As she recovered her illness, she enjoyed a short and gentle, though never intimate, courtship. In February, the banns were read, and on a Wednesday morning in early March, she was married to Mr Armiger.
After they had signed the register, under the adoring gaze of thirty or forty people Verity hardly knew, and yet knew better than her husband, the new couple led their way in their ivory-painted carriage to Lady Duvalle's manor for the wedding breakfast.
Verity sat next to Armiger at her grandmother's largest table, and allowed people to talk around her, and at her, and smiled numbly at them without saying more than the barest civility in reply. She nibbled at food and sipped at champagne whenever her husband reminded her to do so, but for the most part sat with her hands clenched tightly in her lap, looking bewilderingly at everybody else, and then darting small, cautious glances at the man next to her.
After the first shock of her engagement had faded, she had begun to analyze the whys and wherefores of it all, with her cynical, practical mind. Lying ill in bed, she had little better to do. The realization had come to her, stained with shame and furtive relief, that, like Cinderella, she was no more to waste her life a serving maid, but be raised to princess, and live, if not happily ever after, certainly in circumstances far above the misery she had previously known. She had considered, even if she grew to despise Mr Armiger, even if he had been ugly, and stupid, and cruel, that there was no possible way for her misery as his wife to come close to her misery as Thomas Baker's daughter: she could never despise any man more poisonously than she despised her father, and certainly Mr Armiger was neither as ugly nor as stupid, though she allowed that he had a streak of cruelty, but not as deep a streak as she could not manage.
Had she been asked, again, every day of her life until the wedding if she wouldn't reconsider, she would have said no every time. She could not reconsider. Mr Armiger was her only hope. Not even of happily ever after â she did not believe in it â nor of love, or even fondness â she did not dare dream so high â but of any escape at all from a life of constant poverty and misery and fear.
But she did wonder, watching her husband's steady hands break his bread, what he hoped to gain from it all. He had first accepted the match in a fever of extreme guilt; the fever had passed, and yet, he approached their marriage with placid, smiling calmness. She had expected him to express second thoughts.
He noticed her watching him. "Is something wrong?"
"No. No, I'm fine."
"You are hardly eating. Please, you must eat something. We've a long way to go after."
After, they were taking their coach to Blackpool, and then a ship to Brest, where they were to stay with a friend of his for their honeymoon. Verity had never before, in her life, left the parish.
She nervously swallowed some champagne, growing flat. Surprisingly, his hand reached out and closed over her own, on the stem of the glass.
"That is not eating." Did she imagine the note of amusement in his tone?
She wrested her hand from his and attacked the chicken on her plate with a fork. She tweezed apart the strings of flesh, pressing and spearing and pulling until it was nothing more than an unappetizing mince on her plate.
Silently, he handed her a bread roll.
She tore it to quarters, threw three on her plate, and swallowed the forth without tasting it. Then she put her hands firmly back in her lap, and looked defiantly out at each one of the guests.
Her cousin, Maria, and her husband, George, laughing about something together. God knows they had never so much as smiled at Verity. Her fat, ugly aunt Anne, married to Lady Duvalle's eldest son, and so complacent about her title, but so peeved one of her daughters had not managed to snag Mr Armiger. The three eldest of her daughters, all looking pinched with jealousy, despite their plumpness. Mr Westin, a distant relation through marriage, a closer relation through his constant insinuation in her grandmother's affairs. Her grandmother, benevolently chuckling at him, not in the mood to be tired of his obsequiousness today, not with all her plans brought to fruition and Verity getting married. Mr Duvalle, an uncle, red-faced, too fond of champagne, but rather kindly anyway. And Clare, little Clare Abernathy, not knowing quite who to talk to or how to, but invited to the wedding breakfast as thanks for her being Verity's bridesmaid. It had been the one detail about her wedding Verity had insisted upon. More relatives continued down the table, on the other side of Clare, each more unpleasant than the last.
Verity turned away, back to her plate.
"Keep eating," her husband prompted.
She stuffed another lump of bread in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed suddenly as a thought occurred to her.
"Your family did not come to the wedding, Mr Armiger." She spoke undertone, leaning into his ear, so her unpleasant spectators would not hear, and gossip of it. But they were watching. She saw her jealous cousin Helen's face grow pale at the legal intimacy. Lady Anne scowled.
"No," Armiger said flatly, forking some ham onto her plate. "I have little of that."
It was not entirely true, and she knew it. She had looked him up, one night, in her grandmother's copy of Burke's Peerage. She knew he had an elder brother, heir to the title, and that his father was the Earl of Albroke. There had been a younger brother who died in childhood, and then a sister who was married and by now probably had children of her own; the publication was out of date. Cousins, yes, plenty of cousins, and aunts and uncles, and other â she looked calculatingly around the room â unpleasant things. He had family, certainly. But she was sure they had not been invited. Perhaps he had even ordered Lady Duvalle not to, because Verity knew her grandmother was pleased by the connection.
"Do they know?" she asked quietly, between bites of ham.
He was silent a moment. "I don't suppose so."
It would have disconcerted Lady Duvalle. It did not disconcert Verity, who had such tenuous relations with her own family. Rather, she caught the note of resigned sorrow in his tone, and thought she understood.
When the wedding breakfast was finally over, when all the relations had been kissed, all the dishes eaten, all the cake cut, all the congratulations given, and all the guests thanked for them, Verity and Armiger went to the hall to await their carriage, and all the guests went to see them off.
They milled around, with the wide front doors open to the grey afternoon. A gentle mizzle, the very British stage of weather between a mist and drizzle, had descended upon the country while they were eating, and Verity was rubbing her arms through the lace and satin sleeves of her gown, to ease the chill.
"A cloak for Mrs Armiger," Uncle George cried. "A cloak! A cloak!"
Mrs Armiger. Verity tasted it uneasily as Mr Armiger found her travelling cloak and helped her into it. She smiled her thanks to him, but was unable to meet his eyes.
"It should be sunny," Clare said disapprovingly, standing in the doorway and peering out with her lips pursed.
"It's only March," said Verity.
"That's not what I mean. It's so perfect, all of it, except the weather. Don't you think it's not fair that the weather's holding out on you?"
There was a murmur of assent from the guests.
"The perfect fairy tale wedding," Mr Westin gushed. "The perfect fairy tale bride, the perfect fairy tale groom, all you need is for your carriage to be a pumpkin, and your horses to be mice. And then I wouldn't be surprised if you sailed off into... into elf land."
"Elf land!" Cousin Maria repeated mockingly.
"But not in this weather, perhaps," Mr Westin agreed. "It's the one flaw in my vision. I should have been an artist. Perhaps I will hire an artist to paint the scene..."
But Verity wasn't listening to them. While stepping out on the threshold to check for the coach, she had caught sight of a figure lurching down the side of the house towards them. The figure had also caught sight of Verity â but he'd been coming to see her anyway. He stumbled closer, and began to yell.
"Veridy! Veridy, my love, whad're you doing? Where you going?"
Her father. Her veins turned to ice. The guests behind her heard the shouting, and crowded the doorway in time to see Mr Baker confusing his feet on the bottom of the manor steps, and landing on his hands and knees. With a curse, he began to crawl up them.
"Veridy, Veridy," he whined. "You can't leave me! You can't!"
"Oh Dear! He's drunk!"
"Couldn't they keep him out?"
Shuddering, Verity went to the top of the stairs. She heard some curious guests follow her out. Others, more sensitive, retreated inside to peer through the windows. Her anger fought a battle with her pride, and pride won out. He must be sent away, as quickly and quietly as possible.
"Father â Father, I'm glad you could make it," she said, in a low, controlled voice, her cheeks flushed red. "You're a little late but we saved you some cake."
"Cake! I don't want cake!" He stopped crawling, and sat on his heels to raise a plaintive face towards her. "Why're you going to leave me, Veridy? Why're you leaving me alone... just like your mother, abandoning me..."
Tears began to bubble in his eyes, and seep out down his cheeks.
"Quiet down." Verity turned with relief at her husband's placid voice. He went right down the steps to squat down in front of her father. "Quiet, Mr Baker. Let's not make a scene. How about we take you indoors and find you some supper?"
But that was enough for her father to start on Neil too. The drunk put his hands suppliantly on Mr Armiger's collar, and when Armiger stood up and backed away, her father came with him, clinging like a newborn to her husband's wedding shirt, toes dragging on the steps.
"Mr Armiger, Sir, why you gotta take my daughder away? Yer stealing 'er away... after all I did... I feel sick thinking about it. Give her back to me. Lemme take 'er back. I'm all alone."
"I'll come back, Father," Verity said. "I'm not abandoning you. I'm just getting married. Everyone's got to do that."
The coach had finally appeared, at a trot from the stables. The driver was leering goggle eyed at the scene before him. Somebody had called Lady Duvalle's butler, who was marching down the steps, a stout, iron-armed cook behind him.
"Now you come with me, Mr Baker," the butler said firmly, "And I'll fix you up some dinner in the hall. We've got plenty of ham left. White soup."
Mr Baker might have demurred, but the iron-armed cook took one arm, and the butler took the other, and listing off every item on the wedding breakfast menu, they frog-marched him up the steps and through the front door. After a moment, the guests who had fled indoors came peering out again.
"We're going to be quite late," Mr Armiger said mildly, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. "We'll have to say our goodbyes and be off."
"Oh yes. Please, let's go," Verity said faintly.
Then all the guests came out on the threshold, and clapped and waved as Mr Armiger took Verity's arm and led her to the carriage, and opened the door and helped her in. But it was subdued clapping, and relieved waving, as though they, too, couldn't wait to see the end of it.
"Smile and wave goodbye," he reminded her, at the bottom of the steps.
She managed to wave, but could not smile.
As soon as the coach door was shut, she put her head in her hands, and burst into tears.
This chapter marks the beginning of Part Two. There are about six parts to the story.