The bride’s gifts were lavish: fine blackwork embroidery, silvery sugar boxes, cruses for vinegar, a handsome brass cistern to set flagons of beer, a coverlet of ‘stump-work’ embroidery, a marquetry striking clock, an almost endless collection of silver mugs and goblets, several silver teapots with hinged dunce-cap tops, a set of red Turkey cushions, and from the bride’s family a pair of handsome branched silver candlesticks (although Virginia, who had had a rather frightened look in her eyes ever since Carolina had told her the truth about Rye, had muttered to her sister that the bride of a former buccaneer captain would have no need of more plate - Spain had already provided that!).
The house too had been decorated for the wedding. All the spring flowers that could be found had been strategically placed, and a long garland of gilded holly now decorated the handsome carved banisters of the broad stairway.
Carolina had planned to wear a garland of gilt holly on her gleaming hair as well - for bridal veils had not yet come into fashion and the only veil worn currently at weddings was a bride’s own hair, loosed and combed down to float around her shoulders and her slim waist. ‘Wedding circlets’ were customarily worn around the head. But Rye had decreed that Carolina had no need of prickly holly, gilt or otherwise, and had presented her only this morning with a long rope of pearls from an island off South America, a rope which she and an astonished Virginia had fashioned into a gleaming circlet.
Aside from that, poor Virginia had been no help at all in getting Carolina ready for the ceremony. Spirited Letitia had decreed that her remaining marriageable daughter - for little Della and Flo were still too young for suitors - should not be ‘sober-sided’ for this great occasion and had dosed her with ‘High Spirited Pills’ which contained among other things ‘salt of steel’, castor, assafoetida, camphire and amber. Virginia had weakly protested that she was by nature quiet and that to be in noticeably high spirits might be considered unseemly - as if she wanted to be rid of Carolina. But her mother had scoffed at that and had said that half the time Virginia went around looking frightened (it was true enough but of course Letitia could have no inkling of the reason). So under Letitia’s stern gaze, Virginia had bravely gulped down the ‘High Spirited Pills’ - and ever since she had been walking slightly aslant with a glazed look in her dark blue eyes. For a bridal gift Virginia had given Carolina a beautiful red velvet-bound volume which contained not one but two racy novels, Wives’ Excuse, or Cuckolds Make Themselves and The Clandestine Marriage, bound together but upside down to each other as was the fashion, so that the book had to be reversed to read the second novel. The name of that second novel. The Clandestine Marriage, had given Carolina a momentary twinge - she had shot a quick glance at her mother, but her mother hadn’t remarked on either title so Carolina had relaxed.
‘Can we not get this accursed ceremony over with?’ Rye had muttered when on arrival he had discovered that the wedding would be several days away, there being so many days considered ‘unlucky’ for weddings.
Carolina had laughed. ‘Whatever Mother takes up, she does it with a vengeance! We’re lucky not to have an autumn wedding!’
Rye had snorted.
But her wedding day had come at last. She had found to her surprise that she was too excited to eat breakfast. She excused herself, and Rye found her standing on the lawn and looking about her as if she were viewing it all for the last time - as of course she might be, for once she had embarked on her new life far away in England, who knew if she would ever come back to the Tidewater?
‘Do you think I will ever see it again?’ she asked wistfully, looking down the wide river.
‘Of course,’ he said in a restless voice, for these past days of making time waiting for the ceremony - now that he was back with his pardon - had irked him. ‘You’ll come back for visits.’
Studying the old trees, the familiar landscape, Carolina wondered silently if Sandy Randolph would come to see her wed or whether he would remain at Tower Oaks listening to the endless screams of his mad wife who, it was reported, could scream for an hour at a time for no reason whatsoever. Thinking of what life must be like for him there, she shivered.
‘You cannot be cold,’ frowned Rye. ‘Indeed ’tis unseasonably warm.’ His restless fingers eased the lace at his throat.
‘Oh, I’m not cold,’ said Carolina instantly. ‘I was just thinking . . .’ She did not want to discuss her real father’s unhappy situation, not on her wedding day. ‘I wish Aunt Pet were here,’ she said plaintively. ‘She’s my favourite relative, outside of close family, and I do think she might have chosen some other time to journey to Philadelphia.’
‘She had already departed before you arrived,’ he pointed out reasonably.
‘Yes, but we wrote to her and she should have come back.’
‘Perhaps she never got the letter.’
That was always possible but it upset Carolina that Aunt Pet with her twinkling eyes and her kindly affection should not be here to see her wed. Of all her mother’s relatives, Aunt Pet was far and away her favourite. She had always good-naturedly taken the Lightfoots into her Williamsburg house, no matter how they warred among themselves.
‘Perhaps she’ll get here before we leave,’ she said, sighing.
"Tis my intention to cut short the festivities as much as possible,’ he said quickly. ‘Now that I’ve my king’s pardon at last, I’m eager to be off to England and get on with our lives.’
‘Couldn’t you perhaps consider settling in the Colonies?’
Rye stared down at her, his dark face impenetrable. ‘I didn’t know you wanted to stay in the Colonies,’ he said slowly.
‘Well, I didn’t really think I did, but now - ’ Carolina looked around her at the familiar surroundings she would soon be losing, and sighed.
‘I thought you preferred Essex.’
‘Well . . .’ She had loved Essex. It was to Essex that her school friend Reba had taken her for the Christmas holidays, and it was in Essex, during those same Christmas holidays, that she had fallen in love with Rye. Essex was - romantic. But . . . Virginia was home. It would be hard to leave here.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said with finality. ‘I see your mother advancing upon us.’
Letitia Lightfoot was an imposing figure as she came up the garden walk towards them. She was already gowned in the lustrous lilac silk she would be wearing this afternoon for the ceremony and a broad-brimmed hat afloat with lilac plumes rode her imperious head. She glanced at her prospective son-in-law. ‘A pity you did not take my advice and wear white satin trimmed in gold braid,’ she murmured. ‘We could have postponed the wedding whilst it was made up by a tailor in Williamsburg.’
‘I am not the bride,’ pointed out Rye evenly, ‘but only the bridegroom.’
His irony was lost on Letitia, wrapped up as she was in making this wedding a memorable spectacle. ‘It would have been better.’ She frowned. ‘With Carolina in white, you would have matched.'
Carolina looked up at her tall bridegroom proudly. He was dressed handsomely in dove-grey satin trimmed richly in silver, and a ruby of price flashed in the burst of mechlin at his throat. He had such an affinity for grey that she had several times heard him called ‘the man in grey’ but she had never mentioned that to him because she thought it might make him stop wearing grey and it was a colour that well became his cold grey eyes and thick gleaming dark hair. ‘I like Rye in grey,’ she told her mother defensively.
Rye’s prospective mother-in-law sniffed. ‘Come along, Carolina,’ she said briskly. ‘You have barely time to bathe and dress now if you’re to look presentable for your wedding!’
With a wicked smile at Rye, who frowned after them, Carolina let herself be pulled along, to soak endlessly in a hot tub sudsy with scented French soap, and then to be pomaded and powdered and brushed and combed and dressed at last in the silver-latticed petticoat and the white satin wedding gown. The fashionable Cul-de-Paris bustle of the long trained skirt was held up by a large brooc
h of brilliants. (There was some doubt whether she could sit down in it but then, as Letitia had said sweepingly when she had approved it, why ever would Carolina wish to sit down in her wedding gown? A woman should have strength enough to stand upon her feet until she reached the bridal bed!)
Dressed at last, and surrounded by bridesmaids and her mother, Carolina gave the long train an experimental kick with her white satin slipper and studied the effect in the mirror in her bedroom. It glided dutifully just where it was supposed to, and her two little sisters, dressed in identical petal-pink silk dresses, applauded from their seat on her big square bed.
‘The train makes the gown heavy,’ commented Carolina.
Virginia, in her sky-blue gown, staggered forward to adjust one of Carolina’s panniers. ‘At least you don’t have to have someone in there with you,’ she said, giving Carolina a somewhat owlish look. ‘Like that poor French Princess Henrietta Maria, when she was married to King Charles I by proxy at Notre Dame. She had such a heavy train that not only did it take three ladies of the court to hold it up but a man had to crawl underneath and hold it up with his head and hands so she could walk!’
The two young girls seated on the blue and white coverlet in their matching pink dresses burst into such giggles that their mother gave them a reproving look and they subsided. The bridesmaids tittered and one of them - Sally Montrose - said pertly, ‘Maybe we should make your train heavier, Carolina!’
Suddenly Rye appeared at the open door. With a nod to the company he strode inside and held out his hand to Carolina.
‘I forgot to give you these earbobs,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want to wear them.’
Carolina turned and for a moment the tall buccaneer was dazzled by the winsome beauty of the girl before him. Carolina’s long fair hair hung like a glittering shawl of moonlight as it cascaded over her white satin shoulders. He caught his breath at the sight.
Letitia stepped forward. She lifted her head and fixed her prospective son-in-law with a look meant to quell him. ‘Carolina is wearing quite enough jewellery. Well’ - she was taken aback at the size of the great fiery green stones that glittered in a hand that reached out from a spill of mechlin at the wrist - ‘perhaps she should wear them after all.’ She snatched up the emeralds and gave them to Carolina, then turned back to Rye. ‘But you should not be talking to Carolina before the ceremony nor see her in her wedding gown - it’s bad luck.’
Rye shrugged. ‘I’ve had indifferent luck all my life. Why should it turn now for the worse?’
Letitia moved forward, shooing him out of the room, and accompanied him along the corridor, discussing exactly how it would all be done, for they had not rehearsed the actual ceremony - someone had suggested that too might be ‘bad luck’.
‘In any event you should remain downstairs,’ she told Rye firmly. ‘Do not try to see Carolina again before the ceremony. And’ - she looked down at his sword which had clattered against one of the balusters for they had now reached the head of the stairs - ‘you must not wear that. All the gentlemen will have removed their swords so they will not make an unseemly clatter during the ceremony!’
Rye hesitated. That sword had never left his side, save in bed, for so long that it had almost become a part of him. For a moment he was tempted to retort that he would be married sword at his side or not at all but - it was a small thing. And for a short time only. After the ceremony he would buckle it back on!
Silently he handed his basket-hilted sword in its scabbard to Letitia and went down the stairs to join the gentlemen below, where the eldest Whitley brother was making sure everyone knew he had been to London by loudly telling Sandy Randolph, who had got there after all and was leaning upon a handsome bronze-headed ebony walking stick and trying to hide his boredom, how he had been forced to pay ‘spur money’ to the choir boys when he had forgotten he was wearing spurred boots and ventured into the cathedral wearing spurs. Sandy’s silver eyes were glazing as the Whitley lad trumpeted that at places of the ‘lower sort’ in London, ale was so cheap one could get drunk for tuppence.
‘I could get drunk just looking at a lady,’ Sandy murmured - and his gaze was on Letitia, a lavender vision at the top of the stairs.
Nearby the Layton girls had begun laughing almost hysterically - not so much because they were amused at Whitley’s remarks but because their mother had thought them too dull and had fed them so many ‘High Spirited Pills’ that the least thing reduced them to helpless mirth. They continued giggling as Rye brushed by to speak to Sandy.
At the head of the stairs, Letitia hefted the heavy sword Rye had silently handed her and cast about for somewhere to put it. Her bedroom perhaps . . . But at that moment a voice called to her urgently from down the hall. Little Flo had hidden a plum tart in the pocket of her lace-trimmed apron and the plums had dribbled upon her pink dress - with the ceremony about to begin, what was to be done?
Confronted by this new emergency, Letitia hastily set Rye’s sword down at the top of the stairs, left it leaning against the banisters and hurried back to determine that the dress was ruined and that the wailing child must be dressed again - in yellow, there was nothing else for her; she had not another pink dress to her name!
The sword remained at the head of the stairs - forgotten.
Now at last, amid excited little cries from her bridesmaids - and a final emotional hug from Virginia, who was weeping and dabbing at her eyes - Carolina stepped forth from the bedchamber into the corridor and let the girls arrange her long train for the showy walk down the stairs. Letitia hurried downstairs and the wedding party began to make their slow progress towards the company below. Carolina walked carefully down the corridor, practising her mincing steps, for the circlet of pearls sat rather uneasily upon her long fair hair that fell in a shining veil about her shoulders, and she was well aware of how shamed her mother would be if that circlet chose to fall off as she descended the stairs.
‘You must carry your head regally,’ had been Letitia’s final admonition to her daughter, and now Letitia waited downstairs with the crowd of wedding guests for Carolina to make her descent. (Your mother would have preferred a coronet, Sally Montrose had whispered as she adjusted the circlet on Carolina’s long fair hair.) And it was undoubtedly true, thought Carolina as she made her stately way to the head of the stairs.
Out of that sea of upturned faces in the great hall below she caught sight of Sandy Randolph in ice-green satin and carrying a walking stick. Her heart rejoiced. Her real father would see her properly wed at last even though it was Fielding Lightfoot who would give the bride away!
Fielding himself looked impressive in a new suit of cloudy-blue, laden with gold braid and gold buttons. Like his shiny boots the suit had been bought especially for the occasion (his tailor and his bootmaker would soon be dunning him). And beside him Letitia was a tall swaying flower in her enormously wide-skirted lilac silk embroidered here and there with silver violets. (Had it been winter, Virginia had muttered earlier, their mother would have been wearing purple velvet and it would have been hard to dissuade her from marking this triumph by trimming her gown in ermine!) As became, thought Carolina whimsically, the new queen of Tidewater society staging her first big wedding in her new Tidewater ‘palace’!
She herself, in gleaming white satin, was a princess of that society - a princess about to be wed to the prince of her choice.
Now, standing there at the head of the stairs, not yet married in the sight of the world, she looked down at Rye Evistock waiting below, tall and grave in elegant grey satin richly trimmed in silver - and saw him suddenly as he had been on the deck of the Sea Wolf, lithe and muscular and carrying himself with the effortless grace of the strong and all the confidence of the successful buccaneer captain he was. And through her memory at that moment, with the sun shining down upon the York, came the glitter of the moonlight on Cayona Bay . . . Through her mind drifted the sights and sounds of their own ‘buccaneer wedding’ held on board the Sea Wolf's swaying dec
k with all Tortuga cheering from shore and waving tankards and cutlasses . . . Here in a great plantation house far from the wild world of the Indies, she was about to make her mother’s dream come true - and her own dream as well, for now she would be legally his - forever! She took a graceful swaying step to descend that wide stairway that could accommodate eight abreast and smiled down into his eyes - those hard grey eyes that grew so soft at the sight of her - and above the music of the harpsichord being dutifully pounded by Mistress Bottomley, she seemed to hear all the churchbells of Tortuga ringing . . .
She had been afraid for so long - afraid something would go wrong, something would happen to mar their happiness. Now a sense of lightness and joy filled her. Rye was back, tanned and purposeful, he had won his pardon in Bermuda - though not without some delays - the old buccaneering life was behind them and nothing, nothing could go wrong now! And as if to prove that, she saw nearby Rye’s long sword in its scabbard leaning carelessly against the banisters - that sword that, God willing, he would never have to wield again!
There above that intent sea of faces she wondered, suddenly, what her mother would say if she were to learn that Carolina had already been wed to Rye in a buccaneer ceremony on a ship in Cayona Bay - and decided that at this point her elegant headlong mother would only shrug and cry, ‘On with the wedding!’
And now she must live up to her mother’s expectations. The first bride of Level Green took a deep breath and prepared to descend the stairs.
11
But as Carolina lifted her satin-covered foot to take that first step down the wide stairway, there was a commotion outside, the front door burst open and a dishevelled Aunt Pet, clad in rumpled grey travelling clothes and with her wig askew, burst into the room. She gave the assembled company a wild look, then her gaze found Carolina, resplendent in white satin, about to descend the stairs. ‘Oh, I am not too late!’ she cried almost tearfully. Letitia stepped forward, lavender skirts rustling. ‘Petula, we are delighted to see you,’ she chided. ‘But you are disrupting the ceremony!’
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