Lady in Rags

Chapter Eight: Like Cinderella

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 – she did not believe in it – nor of love, or even fondness – she did not dare dream so high – 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?