After the Wedding

by Courtney Milan

  He held out his hand; she took the coin from him almost without thinking, and then looked up in him in incredulity. “But—Mr. Hunter, I can’t possibly take this.”

  “Yes, you can. In fact…” His mind was already racing ahead to the inn, to the evening, and how everything would have to play out. “In fact, you must. We haven’t any choice, not if we’re going to undo what just happened. I’ll explain everything over supper tonight, but you’ll need your own funds to pay for your dinner and a separate room. People will ask questions if I do it.”

  “But—”

  “Whatever you do, you mustn’t tell them we are married. We are not husband and wife, understand?”

  Her eyes widened. “I—do—you—” She looked flummoxed. “Are you the sort of man who cannot bear to be contradicted? Because I can understand not wanting to think about what just happened, except… You do realize we are married?”

  “Contradict me all you like,” Adrian told her. “But that ceremony just now? It doesn’t matter what words they said about us. We’re not husband and wife, not if we don’t want to be.”

  She licked her lips. “I don’t think that is how reality works. It doesn’t change because you wish it would. I should know; I’ve tried hard enough.”

  “They held a pistol on us, Miss Winters. They may have wanted us married; we don’t have to be.”

  “I…” She looked down and sighed. “As you say. It’s late. We haven’t eaten.”

  “We have to agree in order to be married,” he said. “Nobody else can agree on our behalf. I’m sure Lassiter and Miles think that we’ll continue to agree after the pistols are no longer pointed at us, but their plan has done us enough harm. We don’t have to continue.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Adrian said, “that when we are finished, I’m going to feel sorry for everyone who helped this happen.”

  * * *

  They arrived at the inn forty minutes later. It was late, but not so late that the place was unlit.

  Adrian opened the door to find an entry alcove. A little table, empty but for a bell and a book, stood in front of them. In the room beyond, firelight cast a flickering glow. The rumble of conversation from the other room was distant enough so as not to resolve into actual words.

  He set the valise down and gestured for Camilla to enter ahead of him. She did; he followed, and let the door shut behind them.

  He hadn’t had time to even ring the bell before the innkeeper came darting to the front.

  “Welcome!” She had a smile on her face, one that faltered—slightly—when she caught sight of Adrian. She glanced at him, then at Camilla, then back at Adrian.

  If this were America, she’d likely have thrown Adrian out in that first instant. Here in Britain, though, away from London, she probably saw black men seldom enough that she’d not had a chance yet to decide what to do if one threatened to do something so dastardly as to frequent her inn and give her money.

  Adrian was used to this dilemma; he made it easy on the woman by making up his mind on her behalf.

  “My good woman.” It took a bit of a conscious effort to attempt to mimic his mother, but no more than he’d made to copy the lower-class speech he’d been using up until now.

  He made a show of producing his wallet. It was made of fine leather, and he paused to let the innkeeper see the quality of it before withdrawing a coin slowly enough that she could also see that there was far more where that came from.

  He flicked the coin to the innkeeper. “For your trouble. I know it’s late to arrive, and we must have inconvenienced you and your staff.”

  “I—”

  “I will need a room for the night,” Adrian said. His mother would have said require, not will need, but haughtiness never worked for Adrian the way it did for a wealthy white woman.

  The innkeeper’s glance shifted to Camilla behind him. “Sir. I… I…” Her chin squared.

  Adrian intercepted that thought before the woman could start nattering on about the usual nonsense—respectable establishment and so on.

  “Ah, are you referring to Miss Winters? We met by chance on the road; she’s on her way to serve as a governess to the Smiths in Lower Mackford. She had been given ill directions to an inn for the evening after being let off in the wrong town entirely. We’ve only arrived together because I knew where to go and she needed some help with her valise. She’ll be getting her own room, I suppose.”

  Camilla’s eyes widened at this speech, but she jolted forward. “Yes, please, if you will. I’m sorry to be a bother.”

  The innkeeper took her in—those wide, luminous eyes, the old valise of cracked leather, the cheapness of her dress coupled with the niceness of her speech. Governess was the best Adrian had been able to come up with. The position wouldn’t command much respect, but it would hopefully command enough that she’d be treated as if she were a respectable woman.

  “Please,” Camilla said, her eyes fluttering shut, “please, I don’t wish anyone to know. If the…um, Smiths find out I was lost, they’ll wonder if I went astray on purpose, and…” She swallowed. “It’s very late out.”

  The innkeeper nodded in decision. “Of course, you poor child. Of course. Let’s get you in and warm you up. But if you don’t want word to get out, maybe eat in the kitchen?” She glanced at Adrian. “As for you, sir…”

  “Mr. Hunter.”

  The innkeeper bit her lip. “If I send either of you into the common room for dinner, there will be a bit of a ruckus.”

  “He can eat with me in the kitchen.” Camilla looked down. “I would have been lost without him. Nobody else would help me—they saw a woman alone, and…” She looked up. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it? If he can’t have a bite.”

  The innkeeper let out a sigh. “It doesn’t, does it? Well, I do suppose the Bible says something about kindness to Samaritans and foreigners.”

  Adrian did not point out that he had been born in England, or that in the Bible, it had been the Samaritan who was kind. Nobody ever liked facts in situations like this.

  “If you don’t mind eating in the kitchen, I’ll serve you there. Cook’s gone home for the evening, but we have soup and cold chicken and bread that she’s left. It’s open enough that there will be no worries for your reputation, Miss Winters, but it’s late enough that you’ll not be disturbed.”

  * * *

  It took half an hour to sit down to food. Camilla took her things up to the room the innkeeper provided for her—not large, she supposed, but anything was larger than the space she’d shared with Kitty and Cook for the last eighteen months.

  There was a chipped yellow pitcher of water, a sliver of sweet-smelling soap, a basin, and a clean cloth atop a small table. Camilla wanted nothing more than to wash the day off her skin, as if all her heartbreak, fear, and indignation could be scrubbed into nothingness. Maybe she’d awake in her bed back at the rectory to discover it had all been a nightmare.

  Instead, she soaked the cloth and set it against her face. The cold shock of water reminded her that she was very awake. Alas.

  Her life had turned upside down. No, upside down could not describe what had just happened. Her shoulders trembled still, the way they did when she worked for hours without ceasing. She felt rubbed raw. She couldn’t believe that it had been just this noon that she’d been sent up to change the bishop’s sheets. None of it made sense. They’d been lying, of course. They had to have been lying.

  But they’d all seemed so certain that she could not help but doubt her own mind. Maybe they were right. Maybe that legion of devils on her shoulder had pushed her to invent the whole thing with the sheets and the door, because she was the woman they feared, someone so brazen…

  So brazen that what? That she’d locked the door from clear across the room and forgotten that she had a key in her pocket?

  The entire affair was too painful to contemplate at the moment. She shook her head, abandoning the attempt, and finished her ablu
tions. Then she went down to dinner.

  Mr. Hunter was already there. He had a plate of chicken and potatoes—both cold—and a bowl of soup, still steaming.

  Camilla settled for just the soup and a bit of bread. He’d given her money, but who knew how long it would last?

  Her first spoonful was heaven. Carrot and celery in a broth made from some indeterminate meat should not have been so good, but oh, God, it was warm and it was food.

  “Ohhh.” She could not help but let the syllable loose.

  Mr. Hunter raised an eyebrow.

  “The soup,” she said. “It practically melts on one’s tongue.”

  He blinked. “It’s soup. It’s not melting. It’s already liquid.”

  She shut her eyes. Maybe the world would go away. Maybe there would be no ruin, no reputational damage, no husbands if she wished hard enough.

  Maybe there would just be soup.

  She opened her eyes to see him still watching her.

  “I’m sorry.” She had been apologizing to everyone the entire day; she felt as if she could not apologize enough. “But it’s very good soup.”

  He prodded the congealing film on top of his cooling bowl with a spoon. “It really isn’t.”

  She dipped her own spoon again. Objectively, there was too much broth, too little salt, and almost no meaty bits.

  “It’s only edible because we’re both famished,” he told her. “You should eat more than the soup.”

  She didn’t say anything. She took a bite of bread instead. It was excellent bread, delicious bread…

  Well, technically, it was both dry and chewy all at the same time, as if the loaf had been forgotten in the cellar for a week after being baked. The crumb was almost impossible to tear with her teeth, and the loaf itself was dense as a board.

  “Good thing I’m famished,” Camilla said with a little nod of her head. “Or I’d finish the meal far too hungry.”

  He shook his head. They ate for a few minutes longer. Every bite she took chipped away at her hunger, bit by bit, and made the food less palatable.

  She was still hungry when she gave up on the soup.

  He set his spoon on the table and prodded the potato with his fork. It promptly fell into bits, as if it had been boiled into mush. “My brother says I’m too trusting, but…” He shrugged. “I am who I am. It’s not changing. I could sit here and wonder whether I could tell you the truth. I could dance around the issue and keep silent, and you could wonder why I was behaving in a secretive and irrational manner. Or I could tell you everything all at once, hope for the best, and we could work together to get ourselves out of this situation.”

  Camilla felt her lips tilt up in a smile. “What an incredibly difficult decision you have before you. You could lock yourself in a cage of your own making. Or you could not. I suppose it’s up to you.”

  He stared at her for a moment before his face crinkled into a warm smile. “I like you.”

  Well, that made one person. It was one person more than the zero it had felt like an hour before. She took another sip of her soup. “Your voice sounds different.” She wasn’t sure when it had changed, or even how, the shift was so subtle.

  “That’s because I’m not trying to fit in with servants any longer. This is how I sound when I’m around family.”

  “Do you alter your speech much?”

  “All the time. Most white Englishmen are nervous enough around me. The more familiar I sound, the more comfortable they are, and the less likely they are to have the constables come after me on some pretext. It’s not even something I do on purpose most of the time. I’m just very good at fitting in, in every way that I can.”

  Camilla thought of her own speech. It, too, had shifted. Once, she’d had a governess who had drilled her on her vowels, slapping her palm with a ruler when Camilla spoke like—what had she called it? “Like a stable boy,” the woman had said. “Speech makes a lady.” Camilla had eaten it up, believing that if only her vowels were perfect enough, nothing bad could ever happen to her.

  But no. She wasn’t going to think of her family and the legacy she’d left behind. That version of Camilla was gone forever.

  “That makes sense,” she said instead.

  “Let me get right to it, then. My name is Adrian Hunter. My mother was born Elizabeth Laurel Denmore, the daughter of the Duke of Castleford.”

  Camilla blinked.

  “Which is why,” Mr. Hunter said, straightening in his seat, and shifting something about his face, something so subtle she couldn’t even identify it, “I can also talk like this. Do you see what I mean?”

  Like her governess. Like the lady Camilla had once thought she would be. She swallowed and looked up at him. “That’s…very good. Bravo!”

  “My mother met my father when she was twenty-five and a widow at a meeting of abolitionists.”

  She looked over at him. “Before slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire? That was a while ago.”

  “I’m the youngest of…” His smile flickered momentarily; he looked away. “Two. I suppose it doesn’t sound so impressive that way, does it? My father was a speaker for the abolitionist cause. Guess where he was born.”

  She swallowed. It felt rude to make assumptions, but he had asked. “Africa?”

  “Close. Maine, in the United States of America.”

  “I didn’t think the former colonies were close at all to Africa!”

  His smile flashed out at her. “Not that close, no. I was just trying to make you feel better.”

  The conversation felt like it had the first time they’d met. Despite everything that had happened that day, he was easy to talk to. She found herself smiling in response.

  “To make a long story short, when my parents married, her father disowned her entirely. If you’ll believe it, my grandmother suggested she could take my father as a lover, but to marry him would be beyond the pall.”

  Camilla thought of her own uncle, shuffling her off to distant relations without a hint of embarrassment. “I’ll believe anything of the gentry, really.”

  “After tonight? I should say so. In any event, her brother, my uncle on my mother’s side, is the Bishop of Gainshire. He kept in contact with my mother. He’s always been…shall we say, not entirely opposed to the causes my family cares about? We’ve always held out hope that maybe he’d come around. He asked me for a favor, and I thought…” Mr. Hunter looked up and let out a sigh. “Never mind the reasons, really. I am explaining how I came to be impersonating a valet. My uncle believes that Bishop Lassiter has done something wrong, and he asked me to help determine what it was.”

  Camilla’s head hurt trying to follow this story. “I…see.” She might, in a day or so, after she’d slept. But even on this, the longest day of her life, when she wanted nothing more than to retire to bed for a week… It wasn’t the most believable story.

  “That brings me to you. You seem like a perfectly nice girl, but I don’t wish to be married to you.”

  That hurt not just her head, but somewhere just beneath her breastbone. Camilla bit her lip. It wasn’t that she wanted him to swear his undying love. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had. But it would have been nice if he’d been a little bit less blunt about not wanting her at all. It had been lovely earlier, when he had said he liked her.

  “Of course you do not,” she said instead.

  “I imagine you don’t wish to be married to me, either.”

  What was she to say to that? She wished the whole last day hadn’t happened. She knew what she was—desperate, grasping, wanting, so much that maybe she’d hoped that he’d confess over terrible soup that he’d developed an affection for her, something that could blossom into more if they tended it properly.

  What luck, that they’d married at gunpoint, she had perhaps hoped he would say.

  God, it sounded stupid even admitting it in her head. And his story—she still didn’t understand it. But of course he hadn’t fallen in love at first sight. That
didn’t happen, not except in stories, and Camilla knew she wasn’t any sort of heroine. There was nothing to do but pull her bravado about her like a cloak, and let none of her hurt show.

  “I do prefer husbands I’ve known longer than a week.”

  He nodded, as if this was the answer he’d wanted. Good. She’d made the right choice.

  “So, let us make a pact. I know a little bit about how annulments work.”

  “Annulments?”

  “Yes, annulments.” He leaned across the table to look at her. “You must consent to be married, and saying ‘I do’ at gunpoint is not consent.”

  Camilla swallowed. “But—the witnesses, our witnesses. One of them was a rector who knows me exceptionally well. The other was my particular friend.”

  She had used to hope Kitty was something like her friend, at any rate. After what she’d said? After the key ring that had appeared in her pocket as if by magic? Obviously, Camilla had been wrong again.

  “And we were married by a bishop. Who will believe our version of events?”

  “My uncle.” He sounded almost uncertain, but as she watched, his jaw set. “My uncle,” he repeated more definitely. “I told you I worked with my uncle, the Bishop of Gainshire? He cares for me and my family. I know it sounds ridiculous. I know you have no reason to believe that I would know a bishop on such intimate terms, but it is true. If I were lying, I’d come up with a better story. If I can swear to him truthfully that we qualify for an annulment, he will help us get one.”

  Camilla bit her lip. “So that’s it, then? We just ask your uncle?”

  What would happen to her after the marriage was annulled? She tried not to panic at the thought.

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s this thing called consent after the fact.”

  Camilla was tired. The day had been interminable. But that made no sense, no matter how she turned it over in her head. Either one consented or one didn’t. Her nose wrinkled. “That’s a thing?”

  “Law,” he said in commiserating tones, making a face similar to hers. “Ecclesiastical law. But it’s not that tricky. We must continue to show that we haven’t started to consent to the marriage until it’s properly annulled. That means we can’t tell other people we’re husband and wife.”