He did not hear Lucy’s voice in the chorus of replies, but no one was questioning her presence.
She was the bride.
And he was a fool, watching her ride away.
“I’m sorry,” Colin said quietly, as they watched the carriage disappear around the corner.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Gregory whispered.
Colin jumped down out of the tree and silently held out his hand to Gregory.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Gregory said again, too bewildered to do anything but let his brother help him down. “She wouldn’t do this. She loves me.”
He looked at Colin. His eyes were kind, but pitying.
“No,” Gregory said. “No. You don’t know her. She would not—No. You don’t know her.”
And Colin, whose only experience with Lady Lucinda Abernathy was the moment in which she had broken his brother’s heart, asked, “Do you know her?”
Gregory stepped back as if struck. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
Colin didn’t say anything, but his brows rose, as if to ask, Well, then?
Gregory turned, his eyes moving to the corner around which Lucy had so recently disappeared. For a moment he stood absolutely still, his only movement a deliberate, thoughtful blink of his eyes.
He turned back around, looked his brother in the face. “I know her,” he said. “I do.”
Colin’s lips drew together, as if trying to form a question, but Gregory had already turned away.
He was looking at that corner again.
And then he began to run.
Twenty-one
In which Our Hero risks everything.
“Are you ready?”
Lucy regarded the splendid interior of St. George’s—the bright stained glass, the elegant arches, the piles and piles of flowers brought in to celebrate her marriage.
She thought about Lord Haselby, standing with the priest at the altar.
She thought about the guests, all more-than-three-hundred of them, all waiting for her to enter on her brother’s arm.
And she thought about Gregory, who had surely seen her climb up into the bridal carriage, dressed in her wedding finery.
“Lucy,” Hermione repeated, “are you ready?”
Lucy wondered what Hermione might do if she said no.
Hermione was a romantic.
Impractical.
She would probably tell Lucy that she did not have to go through with it, that it did not matter that they were standing just outside the doors to the church sanctuary, or that the prime minister himself was seated inside.
Hermione would tell her that it did not matter that papers had been signed and banns had been read, in three different parishes. It did not matter that by fleeing the church Lucy would create the scandal of the decade. She would tell Lucy that she did not have to do it, that she should not settle for a marriage of convenience when she could have one of passion and love. She would say—