by Sara Seale
“I haven’t one,” Harriet said tragically.
“God save us! You can’t go to the church with your head uncovered—the divil might fly away wid you before you could reach the altar,” Molly said, as dismayed as Harriet by such an omission, then her eyes brightened. “Wait now! You can wear me blue headscarf instead of carryin’ it and take it off as soon as the weddin’s done.” Harriet knotted the scarf under her chin, and gazed doubtfully into the mirror. The shiny artificial silk was a particularly vulgar shade of blue, and made her cheap dress look common, but it would have to do. She wouldn’t hurt Molly’s feelings by asking her if she had another, and she had none of her own.
“Thank you ... thank you, dear Molly, it will bring me double luck this way. Now, is it time for the car yet?”
“Cassidy’s been without this last half hour, not wishin’ to be late, but himself left a while ago so you should be startin’. You’d best take a coat, too, for the day’s cold, an’ that wheeshy jacket you’re wearin’ has no warmth to it.”
Harriet was reminded of Agnes’ contemptuous dismissal of her shrunken suit as cheap material with no give; her opinion of the ‘wheeshy’ jacket would doubtless be as disparaging.
“No!” said Harriet with sudden firmness, eyeing her old orphanage coat with acute disfavour. “I’d rather perish of cold than wear this to my wedding.”
Cassidy, a thin little man with the face of a sad monkey, who drove the car when needed and did odd jobs about the place, looked unfamiliar in his Sunday blacks and a large white chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. He ushered Harriet into the back of the car, politely rejecting her offer to sit beside him, saying it would not be proper for a bride, and drove off through the big iron gates which today had been left unlocked and open.
If Harriet had qualms now, she refused to pander to them, remembering her brash assurance of the night before, and whatever lay ahead could only spell good fortune compared with the drab prospects of Clapham and its figurative bread and scrape. As they reached the outskirts of the town and she had her first glimpse of the colour and noise and indescribable smells of an Irish market day, she forgot her more sober commitment at the church, and craned her neck this way and that to miss nothing of such novel entertainment.
They arrived at last at the church which fortunately was tucked away in a quiet alley, and Harriet scrambled out, hastily straightening Molly’s headscarf, aware that she must adjust herself quickly to the more serious business ahead. She had not, however, expected to find her bridegroom standing on the church steps, watching the street with a most discouraging expression; shouldn’t he have been at the altar, or were they to walk up the aisle together?
“You’re nearly half an hour late,” he rapped out. “Harriet, you look flushed. Have you caught a chill again? Why on earth didn’t you wear a coat?”
It was hardly the time, she thought, to explain about the coat, but she wanted to placate him, so said the first thing that came into her head.
“The market was so exciting—all those people—shouting and enjoying themselves like mad—I wanted to get out and shout too. You don’t see anything like that in England. Mr. Lonnegan—Duff, I mean—couldn’t we stop on the way back and watch, and perhaps visit the stalls? Will they still be there?”
His expression for a moment was an extraordinary mixture of exasperation and rather grim amusement, and she realised too late that the request must sound a little odd as a proposed conclusion to more solemn affairs.
“They’ll be there for the rest of the day and every Tuesday from now on, so forget your latest patch of woolgathering just for today, will you? Now, give me a moment to get back up the aisle, then follow. O’Rafferty is waiting for you in the porch,” he said, and turned on his heel and strode back into the church.
After that it was all a little unreal. The short service was over very quickly and nothing of it gave Harriet any feeling of sanctity. She did not know the man who was to give her away, or the horsy-looking, stocky individual standing by Duff at the chancel rails, presumably his best man. Only when the ring was slipped on her finger, feeling cold and unfamiliar against her flesh, did she know complete awareness, and she looked up with a swift, unspoken question at the dark stranger who was now her husband. But Duff was staring straight ahead and if he was conscious of the little movement beside him he did not look down. Just for a moment, however, his hand tightened on hers in reassurance, and she was comforted.
Signing the register was a matter of moments, for there was no one present to offer more than conventional congratulations to the bridegroom, and no one at all to kiss the bride. Perhaps Duff sensed that for Harriet the proceedings had been a little bleak and disillusioning, for he quite suddenly stooped down and kissed her.
“Good luck, Mrs. Lonnegan—and thank you,” he said softly, then motioned her out of the vestry. Their progress down the aisle was scarcely like the slow, triumphal procession accompanied by the joyful strains of the Wedding March which she used to imagine for herself. It was true her bridegroom offered his arm, but he seemed in a hurry to get out of the church as quickly as possible and she had trouble keeping up with him. As they reached the doors a woman sitting in shadow in the last pew detached herself gracefully from the small knot of spectators and met them in the porch, holding out two elegantly gloved hands.
“Congratulations, Duff. Don’t you think you might have invited me to your wedding?” she said.
Harriet felt Duff’s arm stiffen under her fingers and he stopped dead.
“Good morning, Samantha,” he said then with grave courtesy. “How long have you been home?”
At the unfamiliar, beguiling name, Harriet turned to look at the stranger, and her heart missed a beat in a moment of superstitious dread, for this was the face in the portrait, older, perhaps, and infinitely more finished, but the same provocativeness was there in the full lips and slanting eyes, the same beauty of brow and finely moulded bones.
“I got back a week ago—as if you didn’t know!” she was replying in a husky voice that carried a faint intonation—Irish, or possibly transatlantic. “Your bride is looking as if she has seen a ghost. Won’t you introduce me?”
Duff’s eyes came back to his wife and narrowed for a moment as he observed her slightly open mouth and wide incredulous stare.
“Harriet, this is Mrs. Dwight, a cousin of my first wife,” he said, adding with a soft hint of mockery, “Your curiosity that evening led you to a wrong assumption, I think.”
Harriet shook hands, relief depriving her of speech for the moment. Sam ... Of course there had been no young lover in Dublin where the pining Kitty had left her heart, only the lovely cousin whose portrait she had begun to while away the lonely hours, and who had sent books and fripperies from time to time to bring her pleasure.
“You look cold, or is it just wedding-day nerves?” Mrs. Dwight was saying, and she suddenly slipped off her short mink jacket and flung it round Harriet’s shoulders.
“There, that’s more bridal-looking,” she said, and turned back to Duff. “You seem to be cradle-snatching this time, darling. Where did you find this charming child who seems to be quite tongue-tied, and do tell her to take off that hideous headscarf—it makes her look like one of the little girls from the bacon factory.”
Harriet’s first sense of relief gave way to discomfort. Samantha Dwight’s elegant clothes pointed a cruel contrast to her own, and the faint amusement in her eyes proved embarrassing rather than sympathetic.
“I hadn’t got a hat,” she said, snatching off the headscarf. “Molly, the nice little servant girl, lent me this.”
“Really? How odd not to have a hat at all.”
“Give Samantha back her coat and come along, Harriet,” Duff said a little curtly, but Samantha firmly buttoned the jacket under Harriet’s chin.
“No, no keep it on—in fact, keep it altogether as a wedding present. Duff, I can see, hasn’t got around yet to a husband’s privilege in the matter of clothes,” she said
, and smiled up at Duff. “Am I invited to the wedding breakfast since you were rude enough not to ask me to the ceremony, darling?”
He hesitated for the fraction of a second, then said a little stiffly:
“There’s no wedding breakfast as such, just cold food waiting at Clooney, and doubtless champagne if Jimsy has anything to do with it,” he replied, and they all three began walking down the church steps together.
“No shenanigans at the Knockferry Arms? What a shame! Your bride looks as if she could do with a bit of cheer in convivial company,” Samantha said, giving Harriet’s arm a friendly squeeze.
“Not on a market day with the pubs packed with a tipsy rabble, though the bride, in fact, did express the rather unusual wish to do the stalls on the way home—as a reward for standing up beside me in church, possibly.”
Harriet was startled by the bitter note in his voice, but Samantha clapped her hands like an excited child.
“Oh, do let’s!” she cried. “It’s years since I had a shy at the coconuts and poked the pigs and bought hideous, useless junk at those dirty stalls. Come on, Duff! Make amends for your churlishness in not inviting me to your wedding and ask me back to Clooney to drink your health for old times’ sake, and we’ll stop on the way and let your Harriet try her luck at the booths.”
“Oh, please,” Harriet said, as he still did not answer, and he gave her a rather odd look.
“Very well, if that will please you,” he said quite gently, “but we’ll leave the fun of the fair till another day if you don’t mind. Have you got a car here, Samantha? Good; well, you know your way. Incidentally, you’d better have your coat back.”
“Oh, no, that’s a present—it does something for her, too. I’ve got a stole in the car so I won’t be cold. Let’s get going.” Samantha moved towards a small red car parked behind Duff’s and he opened the door for her.
“I’m sorry, but Harriet can’t accept that sort of present from you,” he said pleasantly but quite firmly. “She can wear it back to the house, since you’re kind enough to lend it. Raff and Barry have gone on already, so they’ll give you a drink if you’re there before us—be seeing you.”
He did not speak at all as he and Harriet made slow progress through the crowded streets, his attention wholly occupied with the hazards to be met with on the way. Harriet beside him snuggled blissfully into Samantha’s coat, stroking the fur with reverent fingers because never before had she beheld mink, much less touched it, her eyes glued to the window for another look at the junketing going on outside.
She was grateful to Duff for having included Samantha in the little party, for she had been slightly apprehensive of sitting down to luncheon with his two unknown friends, neither of whom had shown much interest in her. The charming Mrs. Dwight would, she was sure, know exactly how to keep the conversation going, and another woman would be a comforting support should the talk become too dull and masculine.
“What does her husband do?” she asked, once they were out of the town and it seemed safe to chatter without being checked for proving a distraction.
“Her husband is occupied in pushing up the daisies,” he replied with, she thought, rather heartless levity.
“Oh, how sad for her. She’s young and so very lovely,” she said.
“Not as sad as you might think. They were already divorced.”
“Oh! Did she stay at Clooney much when your wife was alive? I found books and things signed ‘Sam’. I thought it was a young man who’d been in love with her.”
He did not reply for a moment, then said discouragingly:
“You came to a lot of improbable conclusions in Kitty’s sitting-room that day, didn’t you? It’s a dangerous habit weaving fantasies round people you’ve never met. It’s time you grew out of it, my dear.”
“Yes,” she said, “it was stupid of me. I—I wasn’t snooping on that occasion, Duff. I admit I looked at the books and the portrait, but I wasn’t to know there would be private things lying about, was I?”
“There was nothing private there—that wasn’t the point I was trying to make.”
“But you had the portrait taken away. As I’d imagined it was your wife, I naturally thought you were annoyed that I’d seen it, and—and didn’t want to be reminded any more.”
“Oh, Harriet, my poor deluded child, what romantic legends have you built up for me now!”
“Molly said—quoting Agnes, I think—that your heart was buried in the grave,” she said solemnly, then gave a nervous giggle as she recognised a familiar cliché from those sentimental stories of the past. But he misunderstood the giggle, evidently, for he said quite sharply:
“That’s another habit you’ll have to get out of—discussing your affairs with the servants. Our marriage may not strike them as being the romantic union of popular fiction, but at least they realise the expediency. We are not, as you English suppose, a head-in-the-air people with no thought to the morrow. The Irish, under all the charm and blarney, are hard-headed sons of the soil who would consider a bargain in marriage no different from a bargain in cattle. You’d better remember that.”
She fell silent at once, having nothing to reply to a rebuke she didn’t understand, though she did not much care for the comparison with a cow. They were travelling the south road now, so that conversation would have been difficult anyhow, and she felt relieved when the car turned at last through the castle gates into the courtyard and a small committee of welcome came out on to the porch to greet them.
Samantha Dwight was already there with a glass of champagne in each hand to do the honours, but she held them high above her head when Duff reached put a hand, saying roguishly: “Not before you’ve carried her over your threshold in traditional style.”
“But I’ve been over his threshold for days,” Harriet rashly protested, sensing Duff’s reluctance to conform to such a meaningless convention in the circumstances, and was jolted into alarmed silence by the roughness with which he suddenly picked her up and set her down in the hall.
The servants had retired quickly, having offered the correct congratulations, but Harriet caught Molly’s mesmerised gaze on the mink jacket and was sorry she would have to confess later that it had only been borrowed. They all made their way to the snug where champagne and a few hastily found assorted biscuits had been set out in readiness. The two dogs fawned upon Duff as if they hadn’t seen him for days, and although they merely afforded Harriet their customary aloof recognition, the delectable Mrs. Dwight, admiring and exclaiming in extravagant praise of their beauty, fared no better.
“Oh, well!” Samantha laughed, shrugging and turning away to a more appreciative audience. “I evidently make no impact on the canine race, but affection can’t be bought, they say—or can it, Duff, darling?”
The two male guests looked slightly uncomfortable, but Duff merely smiled politely and topped up her glass with champagne, and before Harriet had time to work out a meaning for that last remark, Samantha had swung round to toast her silently with an intimate little look of feminine conspiracy, and added with charming apology: “I hope you don’t mind me addressing your husband as darling, Harriet. We’ve known each other a long time, and are practically relations. Anyway, I call everybody darling. Here’s to your long life and happiness.”
Luncheon was an unexpectedly gay affair, thanks to Samantha’s gift for putting everybody at ease. Harriet was amused to see how Mr. Lynch ceased to present such a dull, phlegmatic front to the occasion and blossomed forth into clumsy compliments and even slightly risqué stories. Mr. O’Rafferty, on the other hand, although he too responded politely to Samantha’s brave efforts to keep the party going, seemed, in his quiet fashion, to realise that the bride was being a little left out.
“You must meet Judy, my wife,” he told her. “She, like you, was a little girl over from England when I married her. She could give you a few tips, I daresay, for this country’s strange to people from the other side. You remind me a little of Judy, you know.”
/> “Do I?” Harriet tried to remember what she had been told about their neighbours, for the name seemed vaguely familiar. “Oh! Are you Castle Slyne?” she asked, and felt like a child rewarded for intelligence when he answered;
“That’s right. We’re a guest-house now which keeps the old place going. You must come and dine with us one evening; Judy will be delighted to have someone young to laugh with.”
It would have been comforting, Harriet thought, if Duff could at least have made a pretence of acting like a happy bridegroom instead of sitting there far more silent than the others and watching Samantha with oddly ironical eyes. As if he had caught that small projection of thought, he suddenly smiled across at her and lifted his glass.”
“The appropriate toasts have been drunk, I know, but here’s my private one for you, Harriet. My grateful acknowledgements to Ogilvy Manor, and may the fruits thereof prosper,” he said, and she flushed with pleasure at the delightful sense of a secret shared with him.
The meal, tardy in starting, had lingered on into late afternoon. The two men took their departure with parting well-wishes and vague promises of hospitality in the near future, but Samantha stayed on, wandering through the rooms with the ease of long acquaintance and settling finally by the fire in the snug with the assurance of a well-established guest. She was, Harriet had to admit, far more at home at Clooney than she herself.
“And what,” Samantha was enquiring of Duff, “has happened to Rory, that he, too, hasn’t been bidden to the nuptials? I would have thought you would certainly have required his services as best man.”
“Would you, Samantha? As it happens, Rory went off on one of his unspecified theatrical engagements before I’d made my plans, so I doubt if he would have been available, even if I’d known where to find him,” Duff replied smoothly, avoiding Harriet’s suddenly anxious eye.
