"Well done, Reinhardt. " He said with the particular warmth of a man who is sincerely happy for people and does not bother to pretend otherwise. "Genuinely. " "Well done. " Lady Gwen was crying in the pleasant way, the moved kind, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve because she had no handkerchief, and Lord Cecil passed her his without comment. Mrs. Le Corbett sat very upright in the far chair, and looked at the scene before her with the expression of a woman who had spent 30 years arranging matches, and had just witnessed the one that would anchor the final chapter of her memoirs. She pressed her pen to her lips.
Then she wrote something down. The wedding took place in the spring. Not the distant, abstract spring of planning and postponement, but the real and immediate one, the April that came 6 weeks after the announcement, because Calder saw no reason to wait when the decision had been made, and Nora agreed that waiting was a thing people did when they were uncertain, and she was not uncertain. The dowager was decisive and joyful, and managed the arrangements with the same aggressive cheerfulness she had brought to the selection. Mr.
Aldous Pritt appeared and disappeared from Ashvale Manor so many times over the following weeks that he eventually took a room in the village and stopped commuting. Nora's mother, Mrs. Clara Vane, arrived at Ashvale Manor 12 days after receiving the letter, and sat in the entrance hall with her coat still on for 20 minutes before anyone realized she had arrived, because she was too overwhelmed to stand up and announce herself. Calder found her there on his way to the study, and sat down beside her, and talked to her quietly for half an hour about Ketmore and the East Field, and her husband's trust account, and what the resolution of all of it would look like. And by the time Nora came looking for her mother, she found her sitting upright with her coat off, drinking tea with the Duke of Ashvale, or looking like a woman who had arrived in a country she did not expect to recognize and found it felt like home.
The Edinburgh account was released. The debt was cleared. The Eastern Field boundary dispute was settled within 3 weeks, partly through legal resolution and partly because, as Percival noted dryly, land disputes tend to resolve with remarkable speed when one of the parties becomes engaged to a Duke. On the morning of the wedding, Tilda came to Nora's room before anyone else and sat on the edge of the bed while Nora's hair was being dressed and talked continuously about nothing in particular, which was her way of making sure Nora did not have space to be nervous. And it worked.
Delia appeared at the door 20 minutes before the ceremony and said nothing. She looked at Nora in the deep gold dress that had been properly altered now, taken in and let out and hemmed correctly, and then she straightened the small pearl button at Nora's wrist that had come slightly loose and stepped back and gave a short, precise nod. It was, Nora thought, the most Delia thing that had ever happened and she loved her cousin for it completely. Lady Farroww stood in the corridor outside the chapel and watched her niece walk past and said, quietly enough that only Nora heard, "Your mother would have been proud. " She did not embellish it. She did not need to.
Nora looked at her aunt for a moment. Then she touched her hand briefly, just once, and walked on. The chapel at Ashvale Manor was old and stone and smelled of beeswax and cold air and the particular quality of centuries of important moments. But the light came through the high windows in long clean bars that fell across the stone floor and the wooden pews and the faces of the people assembled there. Calder was standing at the front.
He turned when she came in. He looked at her the way he had looked at the corner of a room 7 weeks ago with the focused searching attention of a man who has found the specific thing he was looking for and is not looking anywhere else. But this time there was nothing searching about it. It was not looking for anything. It was simply looking openly and without reservation at the person walking toward him.