by Sophia James
She had shifted sideways somehow, out of balance with her life as she had always known it.
The sheer wonderment of Simeon Morgan’s caresses was a part of everything, too, her body melting into warmth as she remembered that night. Was that unusual? Was it normal to feel so very heated when a man did those things?
She had no experience in such matters, no yardstick to measure anything by.
Oh, granted, Alex had kissed her a few times when they were younger and she had liked it, but the feelings she’d once had for him had paled and weakened. Now when she looked at him she saw a man who held no real place in the world and had no true understanding of it.
A surprising honesty, that, given how for years she had followed him about like a puppy dog, hoping and praying that he would give her his heart.
Everything was skewed. She was her family’s keeper now and if she failed at the responsibility…
When Alex suddenly reached out and pulled her to him and his lips came down across her own all she felt was shock. He was cold and his teeth hurt. He smelled of strong liquor, too, as he ground away at her mouth. A misguided intimacy. When his hand strayed to her breast she pushed it away and was glad when he let her go.
‘I’m sorry.’ His voice shook. ‘I thought…’
She smiled, trying for all she was worth to replace an ease back where only awkwardness now lingered.
‘It’s been a long day, Alexander, and I am tired.’
Tired to death, she almost said. Tired to death of making everything all right for everyone else. Tired of pretence and deceit and tired of hope, as well; the hope that all her problems would somehow resolve into a future that could be liveable.
Simeon Morgan’s caresses were there, too, the attention he had given her, casually, with barely a shred of importance. A thrown-off intimacy. A pity. An unconcerned insouciance that bordered on indifference.
She had been caught in a web of lies that had tethered themselves around her and would not let go.
‘You need to start thinking of yourself, Adelia. You have to understand that your family is pulling you down into mediocrity. You must leave them behind and begin a new life. You are getting older and life is beginning to play on your face in a way that is not attractive.’
Alexander’s words hurt, but she merely nodded and left, closing the door between them with a quietness belying her anger. She had no energy left to make him understand who she was now and what she had to do.
Outside she slipped into the shadows of trees, skirting around moonlight and listening to the night sounds as she walked. There was barely a wind and the rain held off. She felt the damp, skin-close, a front coming down across the northern hills, a ring of hazy silver around the moon.
Her place. Known and dear, the sounds, the smells, the feel of the earth under her feet and the vision of the wide-open sky above. The lump in her throat thickened, but she shook it away. Now was not the time for fear. She couldn’t afford it, for one thing, and, for another, if she started crying she wondered if she might ever stop.
Icy Adelia. Cold Adelia. Unfeeling Adelia.
The names others called her haunted her memory. Her father had made her such. But so had her mama with all her neediness and unworldliness, a woman of small opinions and anxious understanding.
Tonight she had seen the same lack of care in Alexander’s selfishness, too, his ego resting on a greed that had not been apparent to her before.
Alone.
Lonely.
Lost.
Pitiful.
That last word just would not leave her, even here in the dark quiet of night, and in a place where she had always found solace. In two weeks she would be married to a man who hated her, but because of that union Athelridge Hall would be hers for ever. For as long as she lived. For as long as her family needed shelter.
It was enough.
It simply had to be.
She bit down on terror and made for home.
CHAPTER FOUR
St John’s Chapel, Hyde Park Crescent
August 12th
Simeon Morgan was waiting. There was fury in the taut slant of his lips, though he turned only briefly to look at her before he stood ramrod straight again at the head of the aisle, a stillness in him that was worrying.
Like a snake about to strike.
There were so few people here and the dress Adelia wore felt suddenly and horribly out of place. A lacy white-silk affair with embossed flowers and seed pearls. Her mother had insisted on it even in their state of mourning. It had been her own when she had married and they had altered it so it was now a more fashionable style.
If it had been left to Adelia, she’d have gone to the altar in her black bombazine edged in scratchy crepe. A penance. A sacrament. The colour underlining all she now felt inside. Dead. Numb. Disbelieving.
Her small family sat bolt upright in the front left pew, Simeon Morgan’s two guests occupying the front right.
A man and a woman.
The man was tall and austere, the woman gowned in a deep green velvet, a colour that matched her wild red hair. Two large pale breasts were displayed prominently.
No one spoke.
She could hear light rain on the roof above them, the wind behind it in a rush. At the altar was a single bunch of white lilies in a vase dressed with greenery, the only part of the whole ceremony that was normal and expected. She wondered who had provided them. The minister’s wife, perhaps, or the ladies of the parish? Some gentle woman who had noticed the lack of ornamentation and remedied it?
She chanced a look at her reluctant groom. He appeared bigger today. He looked healthier, too, though the glint in his golden eyes was flat and indifferent. He could have been standing in line at the theatre or waiting to be served at the bar of some tavern so little emotion did he display.
She heard Charlotte draw in breath and sniff, the sound echoing around the holy room. She was getting yet another cough. Adelia wished the ceremony might begin as it was cold in here and all she wanted was for everything to be over.
Her mother sat beside Charlotte, her face drawn and a worried look in her eyes. The sum total of her family.
It had begun to pour now in earnest, the drizzle of the day finally deciding to mean something.
‘Miss Worthington?’ The query made her start, her attention regathered. The minister stood before her, smelling of wine and peppermints, his fingernails clean and long. ‘If you could come forward now with Mr Morgan, we are ready to begin.’
So this was it then. Four guests, each looking more bewildered than the next one. Certainly her mother was gesturing her over as though she wished to have a word, but Adelia simply shook her head and stepped forward to the altar to stand by her groom, a stranger with his long dark hair and eyes of burning golden amber.
It was done.
Finished.
This was the very best that she could manage to save her family and the only alternative that might work if she was lucky.
She didn’t look at Simeon Morgan because at that moment she wanted to believe that he was there as a protection. Against herself and all the secrets that lay hidden inside, stopping her from being whole.
The hand closest to her was balled into a fist, every knuckle white. He wore a single ring on his little finger, a ring of gold encrusted with stones of silver.
A ring?
She had not thought of providing one in all the chaos and uncertainty. She had not thought to procure a bauble that might signify for ever because she knew he would not want it. She wondered what had happened to the plain gold ring she had stuck on his finger after Cranston’s bullet had almost killed him.
The minister’s voice was deep and very clear.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with you…
‘Be with you…’
She found herself replying as he went on into the preface and then the declarations. Words of grace and hope and beauty. Words that she had long since given up on and thrown away, the empty and flat optimism holding no promise at all.
She knew her groom felt the same as he shuffled suddenly, his highly polished shoes reflecting the light under well-creased trousers. Two people standing in a charade that the Lord above must surely decry. When the rain became heavier again she wondered if it was not a sign of displeasure that fell from the heavens on to the little Anglican chapel of St John’s in Hyde Park Crescent on the afternoon of her twentieth birthday.
Stop this deception. Repent of your sins.
She could almost hear the voice of an omnipotent God, warning her, warning him.
But behind on the first pew Charlotte, who was normally more morose, was taking an interest. The ghost of her father was here, too, the bitterness Lionel Worthington harboured diminished somehow by the mellow religious overtones.
Her family would survive if she went through with this and might even flourish. The hope of it kept Adelia still as she listened to the curate. Words of sickness and health, words of honour and promise till death do us part. Words of permanence and grace and glory.
Then it was over. She was married. For better or for worse. She had thought Simeon Morgan might have choked on such promises, but he had said the words without faltering, a surprising strength in each declaration. In truth, he had managed the vows with more aplomb than she had.
Her ring was beautiful, fashioned from rose gold with stones of emerald. There was no show in it at all, none of the excess that was so apparent in his house. It was simply plain and tasteful.
He’d supplied his own ring himself, a thick gold band. Perhaps he’d had the bauble already and did not wish to procure another for it did not appear to be new, the burnished metal aged under light.
When he had placed the emerald ring on her finger his hands had been warm, but when she looked up at him he had not met her glance. It was as if, once the protocols had been observed, he had distanced himself. She could feel this in his stance and in the way he half-turned from the altar, the kiss that usually took place after the final troths refused summarily.
The two guests on his side of the church had come to stand next to him and both were looking her way.
Simeon Morgan’s demeanour changed as the beautiful red-haired woman took his arm, her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow in a manner that announced she knew him well.
Not a sister, but a lover, one of the mistresses he had told her of probably, thrust into her face during the very hour of their union.
‘You will have broken a thousand hearts, Sim, by going through with this. I hope you realise just how lucky you are, Miss Worthington?’
Adelia had no idea at all how to answer such a provocative statement and so she stayed silent, noting that the other woman had refused to address her by her married name.
* * *
Simeon felt Adelia’s displeasure at Theodora’s words. He should not have brought his mistress to his wedding ceremony, but he’d done it in a fit of pique. He made no attempt to remove Teddy’s arm from his either, allowing the contact to remain even under the frown of Tom Brady’s notice. The haughty distance of his new wife was something he well remembered from his past and he did not mean to bend to it on this occasion or any other.
She was cossetted, aristocratic, conceited. If he was honest with himself, though, she had also looked frightened today, her small thin paleness magnified against the white of her gown. At her throat the gold cross glinted and he saw how her fingers kept returning to it time after time, seeking guidance, perhaps, or praying for a miracle?
Her fingernails were neither painted nor long, the short clean shape of them appealing as she clutched her simple bouquet of cut white roses close. Her hair was swept upwards, tiny tendrils of differing shades of blonde escaping the strictures and curling about her face. He frowned at the dimples furrowing each cheek.
If she had looked beautiful all the other times he had seen her, then this occasion magnified even those. He’d noticed the surprise in Tom’s eyes as she had entered the chapel and also seen the short flare of jealousy in Teddy’s.
His new bride had the power to divide people, he thought suddenly, for, like all beautiful women, he was certain she would know the strength of her assets and use them accordingly.
A book was brought forward, a register of marriages in the small chapel of St John’s, the religious traditions of hundreds of years imbued in its pages.
The newest entry looked like an impostor.
Her name was Adelia Hermione Josephine Bennett Worthington. It was her birthday today, he saw, and a small pang of guilt pierced his heart.
Her writing was well formed and carefully controlled, though her hand shook as she placed her name in the space provided. When she passed him the quill he saw she was careful not to touch his hand and for that he was grateful.
She smelt like a country garden. She smelt of sunshine. Around her head she had a garland of white floral jasmine, threaded with fragile greenery and thin ribbon. Her dress was plain but pretty. The stitches at her bodice gave the impression of a gown that had been refashioned. It certainly looked nothing like those the women of London’s society more normally wore.
He wondered what might happen if he simply reached out and grabbed her hand and commanded that there should be no more lies between them. Could taking such a risk glue all the cracks that had appeared so quickly?
Folly, he then thought, and stupidity. In this dress in front of her family and in a church that was so plainly not her own she was only pretending an innocence, a meekness she did not possess. There could be no other explanation.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
The passage from Matthew suddenly came to mind.
What was it to be meek? He knew many assumed the term to mean tame or deficient in courage, but the years he had lived with his uncle had whipped up a different understanding, for Jamie Morgan’s meekness had been that of power under control.
She lifted her head to look at him just as he did the same and the glance between them caught as flame. Not easy. Not expected either, but a burning, scorching, blistering blaze that reduced those all around them to mere ashen shadow.
His heartbeat quickened and the core of his body warmed. What the hell had just happened? Was Adelia Worthington a sorceress, a conjurer who might bewitch him if everything else she had tried should fail?
Not Worthington now, either, but Morgan. Mrs Adelia Morgan. The name rang in his mind like music and that worried him, too.
* * *
Blood rushed across her face in waves and Adelia tipped her head down, making much of reading the lines in the register before her, but she was really trying to regain a sense of normality. Mr Morgan had looked at her as if he might simply eat her up in one lustful bite, leaving nothing but bleached bones behind in a small discarded pile. And the ridiculous thing was she would have followed him anywhere he led her just to know that which she saw promised in his face.
Tonight?
That one word hovered around her. Would he stay with her? Would he demand his rights as a husband? Would he undress her under candlelight slowly and carefully and show her all the things he had started to in London when first she had visited him?
Her breasts tightened under the whiteness of the gown so that her nipples stood up proud against the thin silk. A sacrifice for her family. A ransom for her father’s sins. A wife who knew she would never hold any place at all in her new husband’s heart. A daughter who had seen things no daughter ever should.
That thought had her sucking in a breath and she looked at the stained-glass window above showing a picture of the crucified
Jesus. Not here, she thought, not here in this place of the eternal God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost.
The tall man who had come as Simeon Morgan’s guest signed the register as a witness and then her mother followed. Adelia was glad that the red-headed woman had returned to her seat, for there was something in her look that told Adelia much more than she wished to know.
The man whose name was Thomas Brady according to his signature smiled at her and she smiled back. A simple gesture of friendship in a landscape of hidden meanings and danger. She wished it was all over.
And then suddenly it was. There would be no wedding breakfast, no speeches, nothing more to cement the union. She watched as her new husband left, simply taking the arm of the handsome woman he had arrived with and walking back down the aisle. He was followed out by his tall friend.
Their carriage stood on the roadway and amid lively chatter they entered the conveyance and were gone, a rush of hooves, the cry of the driver, the rain swallowing them up before they had gone a hundred yards.
The minister observed her, uncertainty staining his expression and her mother frowned, thin hands turning a handkerchief this way and that as she spoke.
‘Is he gone? How are we to get home?’
Adelia turned to look at her sister staring at her.
‘There has been a misunderstanding, I am afraid.’ She screwed the emerald ring off her finger and held it out to the minister before her.
‘Could I ask you to lend me a few pounds under the surety of this ring, sir?’
The man of God looked rattled.
‘Just until I can come back to claim it and return your kindness.’ She bowed her head as he hesitated and lifted the gold cross from around her neck as an added inducement. ‘Our Lord in all his wisdom and grace would surely wish for you to help a family in need.’
‘Indeed, Mrs Morgan, indeed.’
He rifled through his generous pockets and produced three golden coins.
‘Will this be enough for your needs?’
‘It will,’ she replied, ‘and I thank you.’
Once outside Adelia walked in the rain across four busy wet roads to find a hackney in her thin white dress with the flowers in her hair. The bouquet she gifted to a washerwoman who offered her direction and if she felt eyes upon her as she hurried by, she ignored them.
